A guaranteed income program in Boston, Massachusetts, which began in the summer of 2021, resulted in numerous positive outcomes for recipients, highlights a recently published study by the groups that organized the program.
Camp Harbor View and UpTogether, the organizations that dispersed the payments, privately funded the program from a group of 107 donors. Around $750,000 was raised in total, which was given out to 50 families around the Boston area.
The families who were chosen to receive funds didn’t already qualify for social safety net benefits, as the program was designed to help those who were “too rich to be poor and too poor to be rich.” Households qualified for payments for each adult who earned under $70,500, with each payment amounting to $583.
“The public safety net is riddled with restrictions, and the threat of the benefits cliff sometimes means additional income results in less support,” the report noted.
The program netted incredibly positive results — families were able to pay off debt, quit second jobs that they had to have in order to pay bills, and dedicate more money toward college savings accounts for children, the report found.
Families reported a 23 percent decline in psychological distress during the two years that the program existed, from the late summer of 2021 through early fall of 2023. By comparison, families from a control group that didn’t receive the same payments saw an 8 percent increase in distress during that same time.
Forty-five percent of families were also able to save enough money for a household emergency, the report noted; a separate study recently highlighted that more than half of families across the U.S. aren’t financially prepared for an emergency.
The report included testimonies from families that received the payments.
“Receiving $583 each month was a game changer for us,” said Sherene Blake, whose family was part of the program. “I was able to leave my second job to spend time with the kids. My husband had more time to search for a new job and he started one right away. We paid off our credit card bill. We bought a new car for me to get to work. It all added up to reduced stress and more family time for all of us.”
The report provides insights into how Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs could help people who are unable to qualify for existing government benefits but who are still struggling financially to afford basic needs.
For years, advocates have lauded UBI programs as a possible means to help people in difficult financial situations, particularly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Many advocates stressed that payments should have been implemented at the start of the pandemic (going beyond the one-time payments Americans received at various points during the economic downturn) and that they should have been permanent.
“Imagine the good feeling when you can pay your rent, or put gas in the car or buy food and after your needs are met, you calmly think about how to move on with life,” author Nicholas Powers wrote for Truthout in November 2020. “Imagine knowing your child will never have to go hungry, or your grandparent without medicine. Imagine another world is possible.”
Jack Delaney, a former disability policy analyst and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, wrote for Truthout in the summer of 2020 that a nationwide UBI program would be beneficial.
“A permanent, universal and unconditional basic income plan will help balance the inequities of yesterday, today and tomorrow,” Delaney said. “Ensuring workers a guaranteed income from the state is not just a temporary solution to the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic, but rather a long-term measure to counteract aspects of wealth concentration, stagnating wages, job flights overseas and increasing automation down the road.”
But others have warned that, while UBI programs can be helpful, they cannot be the sole or even primary method for ensuring that people’s lives improve. In some cases, they can even perpetuate harmful systems, wrote independent writer Sam Nakayama and Alexander Kolokotronis, founder of the group Student Organization for Democratic Alternatives.
“UBI advocates overlook one of the fundamental questions of power in political economy: Who controls the means of production?” the duo wrote for Truthout in 2017.
Instead of UBI programs, which “hold the potential to actually fit quite well into a neoliberal paradigm,” income inequality can be addressed through “a self-managed socialist job guarantee,” Nakayama and Kolokotronis said.
“With UBI — and the presumably unchanged state and capitalist control of credit — one’s status as a consumer is perpetuated while their status as a worker is tentative and subject to elimination,” the two warned.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy