 Thanks for coming. I am Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute. I'm delighted to be here today for this event, which is co-sponsored by the Center for Community Change and the Economic Security Project. So, we're really delighted to have you. We think today this will be a provocative and informative discussion today. And we're looking forward to to your questions as well as to our our guests. And we think this this is a good moment to have a progressive debate over bold policy initiatives that it seems like the country is ready to have a conversation that's a little bit deeper and bolder than what we've had in the past, where we've been kind of too timid and tweaking around the edges. And so in the spirit of that, EPI is very happy to host this conversation and this discussion around Chris Hughes's proposal and new book Fair Shot, which is all about guaranteed incomes. And EPI, as you all know, I think, has been deeply engaged in this debate around all these questions around full employment, around workers' bargaining power, the role of unions, new rules for global engagement, and good jobs. And the proposals that are out that are floating around right now, it seems to us very healthy in this current debate around guaranteed income or universal basic income or federal jobs guarantee. These are all sort of elements of things that we should be having a friendly and constructive discussion about the merits and the advantages and the disadvantages of all these kinds of policies. So that we can weigh the pros and cons and be ready for change in power structure in this country, which we think is coming. So I'm really happy to have these two speakers today. We have Chris Hughes, who's the director of the Economic Security Project, and the author of Fair Shot, which is for sale out in front, in case you happen to miss it on your way in. And we're delighted to have Dorian Warren, the president, I had it somewhere, but the vice president of the Center for Community Change and the chairman of the Center for Community Change Action and also a co-chair of the Economic Security Project with Chris Hughes. So these are two tremendously talented and interesting and speakers that we have to join us for today. And what we're going to do is have a conversation. We're going to talk amongst ourselves for about 30 minutes, and then we will open it up to your questions. So I ask anybody to silence your cell phones out of courtesy to your other friends in the audience. And then we look forward to your questions. And I wanted to start, of course, by just giving Chris a chance to lay out your views and your vision for a guaranteed income plan. But I also wanted to know, what have you learned? You've been out on the lecture circuit since the book came out a few months ago. And has the proposal evolved at all during that time? Because I'm sure you've been in a lot of audiences like this one with people throwing questions at you and suggestions and so on. So please. Well, first off, thank you, Thea. And thanks to EPI for hosting the event this afternoon. It's a very kind of view. And thank you all for coming out. I think we'll probably talk a lot about policy over lunch today. So before going straight to the center of that, I'd love to just give some context on who I am and why I wrote the book and why I work on the guaranteed income and economic insecurity every day. So as those of you who may have read the book might know, I grew up in a little town in North Carolina. It's called Hickory, North Carolina. It's at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. And my dad was a traveling paper salesman. Mom was a public school teacher. Both of their parents, both of my parents, parents had been mill workers. So we had a very middle class kind of existence. We went to church every Sunday. It was very bucolic. It was everything you might imagine, small town, southern life in 1980s to be like. My life took a pretty big change though when I went away to a fancy boarding school. I got a scholarship to go to Phillip's Andover. And then I got another scholarship after that to go to Harvard. And while there became acquaintances with Mark Zuckerberg, my freshman year, we ended up rooming together. Sophomore year, we started Facebook in February of 2004. And as I like to say, the rocket ship took off. And I will assume that most people have at least seen the movie, if not read endless pieces about the history of Facebook and watched some of Mark's congressional testimony a few weeks ago where we were all reminded of the infamous dorm room. I was played by this guy, Patrick Maple, which if you've never heard of him, that's probably right. I had like four lines. In the movie, it was not a prominent role. He did a fine job. But anyway, the rocket ship of Facebook did take off. And my life took a very sharp turn. And as I make the case in the book, I did work that I'm proud of at Facebook for those first three years on the product and communications and marketing teams. But for three years worth of work, I made nearly half a billion dollars. And that is not the American dream that people want to dress it up to be, which is often how people have described my story, this idea of coming from where I came from and then making bank. What that is, I think, is a lucky break. And I think we should call it what it is because it's indicative of something that is not just happening to me, but to a small number of people consistently. The 1% is taking advantage of rules of the road that have been very carefully laid here in Washington over the course of a few decades and capturing effectively all of the economic growth that our country is creating. I think that's, I think that's shameful. I think that's not where the American economy was for a very long time. And I think probably most importantly, we've got to stop acting like this is a feta cumple. We keep talking about the economy as if it's just like this massive living creature that we just live atop of. And we just get, you know, the winds move in one direction or the other direction, but we don't have any control. And in reality, we have quite a lot of control and we can change the way the rules are configured to level playing field and to provide opportunity to everyone. So the reason that I work specifically on modernizing the earned income tax credit to transform it into a guaranteed income for working people is because in my own philanthropic work, I have come to truly believe that there is no more efficient and effective solution to provide economic opportunity than cash. I'm not up here to say that it is silver bullet because it's not. We need better healthcare policy, better housing policy, certainly smart climate policy. All of these things are intertwined. Nor am I up here to say that the robots are taking all the jobs. Jobs are changing in America. We should and can talk about that a little bit today. But economic injustice, I believe, is the reason why we need to create an income floor for working people and we have the structure to do it. So in the book, I make the case for a meaningful expansion and modernization of the existing earned income tax credit to make it simpler for people to understand, to extend it to more people, to recognize alternative kinds of work like childcare, elder care, and education, and also to simplify it so that the end result is a bargain with working people in America to say, if you're working to do something for yourself, your family, your community, even if it's untraditional work and you make less than $50,000, you shouldn't live in poverty. And what's more, you should have the stability of $500 a month coming into your bank account to give you a kind of cost of living boost, if you will. A boost in your bottom line to help you keep up with the rising cost of healthcare, education, childcare. The list is long. But if we do that, then I think we place the autonomy and agency where it should be in the hands of working people who we know from evidence make the right decision more often than not and in the process we can massively reduce the poverty rate and provide economic opportunity to much of the unstable lower middle class. So I answered the second half of your question, Theo, on what I've learned over the past couple months in talking about this. I think the political winds are at our back and one of your comments up front was that we live in a new moment, particularly on the left, there's an openness to big ideas and it's really inspiring. I mean, to me at least, it's everything from rethinking housing policy to single-payer options to a job guarantee to a guaranteed income for working people. The window I feel is growing, the set of options are growing larger. The biggest thing I've learned, though, is that we need to roll up our sleeves and have a conversation in America about fundamentally what we owe to one another as part of the social contract. And I tend to get very bogged down in policy questions about what's the right level, what's the right amount, why $500, why $50,000, what counts as work, what doesn't count as work. And sometimes I miss, and I think even in the early days of talking about the book, miss the forest for the trees. And the fact of the matter is that when Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about a guaranteed income 50 years ago, 40 million Americans lived in poverty. Today, 40 million Americans live in poverty. And I think we've gotten so used to it that we forget that it's a moral outrage. And so one of the things that I've learned in conversations on the book tour and in our work is that we should and must talk about policy, but let's also not forget to name the problem and the immoral nature of poverty in order to remind ourselves why we do what we do and to inspire other people to action. Dorian, how do you see this proposal fitting into a broader progressive economic agenda? There's a lot of ideas out there. I listed off some of them around the federal jobs guarantee, but even around existing policies like welfare reform and so on. So how does this proposal fit and what are the advantages or disadvantages? So thank you, Thea, and it's great to see you at the helm of EPI. So we should all be supporting her leadership. And just to add, so my roommate in college, he found it my space, and it didn't work out as well for me. So I get the hard question, really. So Chris actually said it, right? I think I would also agree that the idea of a guaranteed income is not a magic bullet. And in fact, 50 years ago, there was a live debate about a guaranteed income in the United States. That was part of the public consciousness. And it was simultaneously happening with the debate around guaranteed jobs and a range of other policies. I'm looking at Bill Arnone in the audience who was a supporter and staff to Senator Robert Kennedy who made poverty a centerpiece of his presidential campaign 50 years ago. And so there was a live conversation about poverty and we were having a full robust debate. There wasn't one magic bullet policy people were pushing then and I think that should not be the case now. And in fact, where I come to this idea is actually from the black experience and from black politics. So if you look at the Black Panther Party 10-point platform, they demand a guaranteed job or guaranteed income. And as Chris pointed out, if you look at some of Dr. King's last writings, he talks about both guaranteed income and guaranteed jobs, which raises a question in this debate. Which Dr. King will you choose to identify with? Because he was actually advancing both of those ideas and many more, right? So in that sense, I think that this idea, particularly of a guaranteed income and Chris's proposal in particular forces us to have a deeper conversation. There's the policy of expanding the earned income tax credit, the $500 number, some people think it should be more, some people think it should be less. So there are those policy questions, but it actually forces us to have a bigger conversation and redefine the debate in the way the right has done the last 50 years. What is the purpose of work in this country? How should we think about that? What is the purpose of leisure in this country? We used to have a labor movement that fought for a right, eight hours of work, eight hours of play, and eight hours of sleep. We forgot the leisure part, right? So we've become so focused on work, work, work, work. And what is the role of policy to, and I'm thinking about the fight some of us are in now in terms of work requirements around Medicaid, why aren't we pushing back on that even harder in terms of the coercive nature of policy to force people to work in really crappy jobs, right? We should be having a different conversation of how do we raise job quality? How do we provide income support to people so no one should live in poverty in the richest country? I think in the last part of your book you say this is the richest country in the history of the world at this particular- At the richest moment in time. At the richest moment in time. And if we can't have a debate about big ideas, and the Chris's point, what does the entire social contract for the 21st century look like? What are our obligations to each other in this country? And so guaranteed income is a part of that. I think thinking about, right, unionization is another part of that. What are the labor law reforms we should be talking about in this moment? So I look at this as a family, part of a family of policies to reconstruct our economy and to fundamentally rewrite the rules and it's not going to be just one thing. Again, it's a family of policies to help us rewrite the rules of the economy that create mobility which we don't have, that create opportunity which we don't have, and that create a billion times more Chris Huses. Great. And I think you both have made that point really well, which is that this isn't supposed to be a substitute for every other good thing that we need to do. It is a compliment. And I think that's important because in the book, Chris, you talk about Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King Jr. And there's a real difference which is that for people like Milton Friedman and some of the libertarians that like this idea, what they like is to replace social security and Medicare and every other kind of income support is social safety net and that's not at all your view. Your view is that this is complementary. I wanted to ask a different question and this is for both of you, which is about luck versus power. You talk a lot, Chris, in a really eloquent way about your luck, the good luck that you had in terms of your college roommate and the rise of Facebook and so on. There's inequity that comes about through luck in this economy, but there's also a lot of the long-term trends of wage inequality and wage stagnation have a lot to do with power, with bargaining power and leverage. And Dorian, you talked about unions and of course that's my background. I come out of the AFL-CIO for 20 years. And so I think a lot about bargaining power for workers at the workplace. And I guess one possible criticism of your proposal is that in some ways it's taking the pressure off the workplace and even off of low-wage employers, like giving them a bit of a subsidy to keep on being low-wage employers. And you talk about dignity and I think that's really important. I think we all believe, everybody in this room, I'm sure believes in the dignity of work that comes with that. But I guess one question for me, and I like the historical sweep of the book too, where you talk about sort of all the different things that have happened to create this situation of wage inequality and wage stagnation, but a lot of them have in common. They have a common thread which is that they were a concerted effort by employers to take power away from workers and take voice away from workers. And how will employers face this or how does the proposal help workers build their own bargaining power for both of you? Well, so my approach to this is very much anchored in what a lot of people call the changing nature of work. So my view on this is that work in America, jobs in America in particular are coming apart. You know, by the CATS study coming out of Princeton, all the jobs, 94% of the jobs in the past decade have been part-time, contract, temporary, or seasonal. So effectively all the jobs that we've been creating are unstable. And many of them are not paid hourly and so aren't subject to the hourly wage regulations. Now first off, we need to have a debate about whether or not that's appropriate because in many cases it very well may not be. That's an important debate to have. At the same time as we're having that, we also need to realize that increasingly as jobs are coming apart, what we hear in our conversations is that people need stability. A job used to mean 40 hours' benefits, a sick leave, if you were lucky, of retirement savings. I mean, that's the job my parents had. And both of them in that 1980s small town North Carolina context had that stability and my mom wouldn't have it now given that she was a public school teacher and Carolina's recent leadership has torn apart many of the things that she would rely on. My dad's division was shut down a couple years after he retired. So my point is that we should think more about raising wages and making sure that much of the work that isn't subject to that is governed by hourly wages. But we should also remember that even hourly wages can be very unstable. Not just a gig economy worker, like a Lyft driver and Uber driver, but a Starbucks employee who gets 25 hours one week, five the next, and 40 the next. You know, we hear, I heard in sort of round table conversations in Ohio, people say, yeah, I've got a job, I've got work. I don't show up in the unemployment statistics. I don't know if I can make rent this month. And it was partially because they weren't paying enough, but it was also because they didn't know how many hours they were going to get next week. They didn't have that kind of fundamental stability. So the argument for a guaranteed income, particularly if something around a $500 level, is as a supplement, is as a kind of foundation that you know that you can predict, you know that you can rely on each month that goes by. And I think it will be most powerful when implemented alongside a higher minimum wage and, you know, regulation of flexible scheduling practices and these kinds of things. I just want to say one other thing about dignity since you brought that up too. I believe in the dignity of work. I also don't believe that there is anything particularly dignified about asking a mom of young kids two or three to leave her kids at home and go work at Burger King to earn the earned income tax credit, which is currently what we do. We recognize certain kinds of work in the formal economy that are paid as part of, and we don't recognize child care. We don't recognize elder care. We don't recognize education, and there are other things. We don't recognize much of participation in the arts, et cetera. So as much as I believe that there is a dignity in work, I also am a little suspicious of how that phrase is often used because it tends to conjure up, you know, the like assemblyman, manufacturer, the kind of person who's in the formal economy and then as opposed to like a mythological someone on the dole who's just hanging out. And I do not believe that mythology of, you know, of the welfare queen, if you will, exists. And so I don't use that term rhetorically often because I feel like it puts us in a frame which is out of date and over the long term not as productive as one would hope. Actually, just to follow up on that point, because I think it's a really interesting one. I mean, your proposal sort of expands the definition of work to include child care, elder care, and people in school. But what about people who can't work? I mean, so in some ways like compared to maybe a negative income tax which wouldn't be tied to the workplace at all, you know, what's the thinking there? Because I agree with you, not everybody can or should work. Well, that's part of my contention that this should be complementary to the safety net. So people who can't work, we should be ensuring that they can eat, make ends meet, have a house over their heads, you know, certainly have all of their basic needs met. And that is what the safety net is for. It's been slowly taken apart over time, and it needs to be reinforced and even expanded. But I believe that that is specifically what's for. And that's why I don't favor caching in any of those programs to fund a guaranteed income. I see these things like many other government programs and benefits as having overlapping functions. And by the way, I think that another question is like, well, if you're expanding definition to include all these other things, I mean, isn't everybody, isn't I just going to like cover everybody? Like, isn't that like a back door? And I'm like, yeah. I think Americans are working. And there are some who can't, but this idea that there's a huge swath of people who are just hanging out is a rhetorical device that I think is eucynically like with the work requirements with Medicaid today and not in line with what we actually see in the country. So I'll just make two quick points because you mentioned the word power, which I fully believe in in the sense that we can talk about guaranteed income, guaranteed jobs, reimagining the social safety net, social contract. If we don't have the organizational power and the mobilizational power to win any of those, it doesn't matter. And so we also need our, what are the strategies to build power to win labor law reform, to win a guaranteed income, to win guaranteed jobs. So we have to pair that with the idea's conversation first off. Second, just to mention something that Chris writes about briefly in his book that he didn't mention that I think is a fascinating hypothesis. And that is the idea that a guaranteed income could function as a universal strike fund. A universal strike fund. So if you got $500 a month and you're a fast food worker and you want to go out on strike, how much more security would you have to be able to take that huge risk to walk off the job? As opposed to the way it works now, it's a huge risk to walk off the job. You don't have any way to earn income besides that job. And by the way, you could be fired for walking off the job. So what would it mean? So it's an untested hypothesis, right? So this is the idea of experimenting around this proposal in some places. Would it actually empower workers to take more collective risk if they knew that they had some security of $500 a month in this case coming in where they could pay their rent, their heat, and buy food, would they be more likely to take that risk to walk off the job? So that's a fascinating part of the proposal, actually. And to the right, it's a universal strike fund if everyone has a guaranteed income. So it's untested, but it's a fascinating hypothesis to me. Yeah, and I think that's a great point. And I think what it goes to is the idea that I think the people have raised with both federal job guarantee or a guaranteed income, which is that this is one way of giving workers bargaining power across the board so that they don't have to be so fearful of losing their job, and employers know that there's a limit below which they cannot go, that you can't just reduce wages so far that people can't pay for their transportation, their childcare, and everything else because workers have an alternative. I mean, that's, I think, part of EPI's thinking we talk a lot about full employment, which is, I think, all these things, as you all, we've all agreed, are complementary in the sense that we really had a truthful employment economy for a protracted period of time. That is part of what gives workers the security to say, I can leave this job because I know it's pretty clear that I'll be able to find another job. So I think those all sort of go to the same point, which is what gives workers more stability, more bargaining power, more ability to challenge their employers. I have one more, another question about public goods. And we've talked a lot about complementarity. We want to have all the social safety not in place and we want to have all those different things, but I think the reality is, at least in the world that we're living in now, that there's always going to be competition for every dollar of revenue. Whether we tax the wealthy to pay for it or have a financial transactions tax, whatever the revenue source is, there's going to be a lot of competition for that. So this goes to the question about giving people cash, which is a great thing to do, and of course wages are cash too. So if we can figure out how to increase workers' power with stronger unions and more bargaining power, they'll also have that ability to have that money. But when you think about things that only the government can fund, the national government can fund, whether it's infrastructure and a universal educational system and national parks and clean air and so on, how do you parse that a little bit? Like when you talk about the priority of giving people $500 a month versus some of these other national priorities? I mean, I think that the need for public goods is unquestionable. That is what government does. I think at the end of the day, it's our system of pooling our resources to make sure everybody can enjoy the public park or an education system, et cetera. I also think that I'm a very empirically minded donor. So after Facebook went public, my husband and I made a commitment to give away the vast majority of our wealth in our lifetime. And the first couple of years, as I talk a little bit about in the book, were pretty overwhelming because if you just run thought experiment, say you get a boatload of money and you want to give it all away and then you're like, well, there's eight million people knocking down your door. You probably care about multiple issues at once. You have a theory of change for one thing or something else, but it's been more or less conceptual or ethereal. I mean, you think about it, but when you got to start deploying investments, it's a lot to think through. And so what I found is my own guiding light is specifically on economic opportunity and mobility, which was what I was interested in, given my own experience. What are the most powerful interventions? And it turns out that the earned income tax credit and similar cash transfer programs like the Dividend we have in Alaska or a Dividend that the Cherokee get in North Carolina are some of the best studied interventions out there. And dollar for dollar, they increase educational outcomes, improve health outcomes. People are happier. So my view is that not that the EITC or cash is better than parks or is better than education. I do think it can be a benchmark to measure the effectiveness of other programs at times, but I think that we constantly think about the structural solutions to all these problems. Sometimes we overlook the fact that the best solution can be the simplest. And it conjures up all kinds of really complex questions around trust and who's deserving and who's not. And I think that's honestly the biggest, if you would ask me, the biggest barrier or the biggest problem right now on this issue, I think it's that. But I think that we have the political will to do these things in tandem. Another thing, though, that I have to say that I don't know if it was a premise of the question or not, there is a lot that we can do to restructure the economy which won't cost us a dollar. And specifically, I'm talking about antitrust policy. I mean, the concentration of corporate power in the United States, as probably many of you know, is at a historic level, small business starts, the rates of entrepreneurship haven't been this low since the mid-70s. So that more effective oversight of big companies and the power they've been able to, that most people are already on, I mean, sure we should fund the FTC better, but my point is there is power in that which I think need to rediscover and begin to think much more carefully about because that can help working people, it can help put more money in their pockets and isn't another public outlet. So hopefully that can be part of the conversation too. And that should be part of the conversation just to jump in on one piece of that which is that in some ways that's the mirror image of strengthening worker power, like also allowing workers to organize unions without being beat up or fired or disadvantaged doesn't cost a lot of money, that's labor law reform. And if you think about the two pictures of it, that you have the growth in both wealth and political power and economic power of large corporations, that's the antitrust piece that you're talking about, and the other hand you have the attacks on workers' power on unions. And so those two things have been particularly disadvantageous and so I think they're both a piece of rebalancing the countervailing power within the economy and giving workers more voice. I would just add one other thing just in terms of thinking about public goods and revenue and what the national government can do. And I don't normally do this, I mean, I'm like setting you up for your own ideas. So Chris actually has this idea about a new source of tax revenue that I think you should talk about. Well, you can talk about it first if you'd like. All right, here, I'll frame it this way. So I was struck, maybe most of you knew this, but so I watched Netflix actually to sell Bill in a new Netflix documentary about Bobby Kennedy which I would highly recommend called, Body Kennedy for President. I know, I'm like everybody's Asian. Everybody's self-promoting all of us. I'm everybody's Asian here. And so what I didn't realize is that the largest source of Netflix's revenue doesn't come from subscription fees. It comes from selling our data. The data they collect on everything we watch. Same with Amazon, same with most, same with Facebook, same with most tech companies. They make money from selling our data and so it raises questions, who owns your data and should we consider data as a public good? Political consultants make millions of dollars buying and selling data to candidates. Your data collected from Netflix and others. So what can we imagine a different way to benefit from giving up our own data individually like we do every single day? Is there some way we can think differently about how to tax some of that data back? So that's my punt to you. I mean, I think it's worth exploration. I think there are more questions here than answers. But you know, up in Alaska, they capitalized a sovereign wealth fund that provides a dividend to every single citizen of $1,500 a year. It's capitalized by royalties on oil and natural gas. Republican governor started it 40, 50 years ago and it's one of the biggest contributors to the lack of income inequality in Alaska. Alaska is 50 out of 50 for income inequality. And so, you know, 50 years later, data is not really the new oil because it's a common wealth, if you will. It's something that we all create and its value is derived. No single person's data here and its isolation is particularly valuable. But the collection of our data as Dorian was outlining is very valuable. And we're seeing that, I mean, in the historic corporate profits, particularly in the tech sector. So is it possible to have a data tax and create a data dividend? So in conjunction with other privacy regulations, in conjunction with a data privacy bill of rights and other changes, I don't think it would, on its own, it would be problematic because it would sort of be, I think, a justification of the business model and sort of like apology money. So I don't think that that is viable. But I do think in tandem with our privacy regulation, it could ensure that everybody shares in some of the upside that our data is creating and that people want it to opt out. Anyway, there are many questions to ask here and this is very much a fresh new frontier. So if you guys are interested in studying it, I'd love to, we'd love to talk more about it, but it feels like it should be a conversation we're having. Great. Why don't we open it up to your questions and comments? And I think there are some microphones out there and if you would identify yourself and if you're with an organization, say what that is and then make a nice, concise question. Yeah, over here. Thanks. Greetings. I'm Renee Rice-Leport. I'm a consultant here in D.C. I'm actually working with Capital Area Asset Builders, which is interested in demonstrating basic income here in the D.C. area. My question is, I spend a lot of time when I'm not working for Capital Area Asset Builders out with organizations well beyond here. I was in Birmingham, Alabama last week working with folks in Oklahoma, Southern Pennsylvania. You come from a small town in North Carolina. When I talk to folks in those areas and I start talking about basic income, it's either I start blazing or they start bringing up socialism, whatever. From the history that both Dorian and Athea were talking about, the folks that are there are people who would largely benefit from this and yet it's really hard to get through that initial conversation. Can you talk to me about how you talk to folks back home about this proposal? This is... I think there's so many questions that are loaded into that that is absolutely one of the most important and challenging questions out there. I think when you talk about a universal basic income, I use my parents. It really is a proxy. My parents are both pretty smart, savvy people, but when I first started explaining what I was working on, they were like, what are you talking about? Is this money? What am I getting it for? How long is this going to last? And who is paying for it? Money does not come from nowhere. The idea that I'm just going to get some money for being alive, they're like, what are you... And we've tested that quite a bit in empirical public opinion research and I've had lots of personal anecdotal conversations. I've had many people on our team and Dorian, you should speak to some of yours as well. And it's very clear that money for nothing does not square. It's also very clear that people cannot keep up with the rising cost of living in the United States, that as we know median wages are flat and the cost of living is up by about 30% over the past couple of decades. So if you move out of that frame and instead say, do you think that every working family should get a tax credit every single month of $500 to help them make ends meet? Boom, 80%, 4 out of 5 of people are like, yeah, I'm working hard. I haven't gotten a raise in a very long time and that's a reasonable thing. So that's why when we talk about a modernized earned income tax credit or working family's tax credit, it's because that really resonates with people in a way that some of the other language doesn't. Now I think we have to do a bit of a two-step here. Because the guaranteed income idea, it's an old idea, but in many ways it's new. I don't think that we should just throw it overboard and use a pretty technical language. I think we have to do both, but it is possible, I think, for people to not only just understand it, but really get excited about it and organize behind it if we use a language that intuitively makes sense. Back there. Two questions. We talked about, we haven't mentioned national pension plan. Social security now is just run by FICA payments that are made today. There really is no social security thing. Shouldn't we have a national pension plan that depends upon both corporate and income taxes and do away with the present social security plan? And just the second thing is, we talk about raising wages, but when you raise wages, you already help people in a particular company, a particular industry, and of course you lower company profits unless they raise prices. So if you lower prices and equivalent lowering corporate profits, you help all of the economy, including lower income people. So shouldn't the drive be to really lower prices rather than raise wages? Because it's an additional benefit. It makes the particular product more beneficial for export. So 30. You want to take this? I'll start with the prices. That's fascinating. So one is if you're a firm, you have to be at a certain scale to be able to lower prices to an extent and still be profitable. But having said that, I think it's interesting that for the biggest private employer in this country that had spent decades lowering prices, they decided to raise wages recently. And that's Walmart. Because lowering prices actually isn't enough. And Walmart knew both from its own employees and how low they paid them, as well as from their core customer base, that you hit bottom at some point when you don't pay people living wage. And so they understood, especially during the recession, that no matter how much they lowered prices, their bottom line wasn't going up. In fact, their earnings every quarter were becoming thinner and thinner because cost of living was going up in other realms, and people's dollar making low wages was going to healthcare, education, housing, rent. Things that Walmart couldn't control in terms of prices. So Walmart made the decision for two reasons. One, they understood it would actually be better for their bottom line to increase their own wages because many of their employees buy things in their stores before they go home after their shift. And two, there was some pressure. There was some organized pressure by workers, Walmart workers to say, 7.25 is not enough. We need to get to 10. And so not only Walmart as the industry leader, but Target followed along, Marshall, some other retailers all understood that you can have a triple bottom line if you actually raise wages. It also, in Walmart's case, prevents unionization. So there's that flip side of it. But it's not that those two things are mutually exclusive. Yes, you can lower prices to an extent, but actually I think many companies are finding if you raise wages, they benefit directly often from raising wages for their own employees. Yeah, and I'll just leap in on that quickly, which is that, you know, it's obviously two sides of the same coin, but it's also true that the U.S. economy is 70% powered by consumption. So cutting wages, cutting wages, cutting wages, at some point you're cutting the income of the people who are your customers. And so it's not always a good strategy. And just in terms of social security, we don't need to go into it now, but I would say that absolutely the social security system is strong. If anything, we should be expanding and strengthening social security, not doing away with it and replacing with another system. It's actually a very efficient way of taking care of our elderly. So I wouldn't agree with your premise there. So let's take another question. Oh, there's a lot of hands. Yeah. Good afternoon. And why don't we take about three questions so that we can get more of your questions in. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming here. Chris, I've not had the opportunity to read your book, but I do have a copy. So I very much like a signature. Halfway. And then I can read it and get full comment, but I would like to respond to some of the things that you said today. The one thing you said when you introduced your ideology and your premise from your book is that it's not a silver bullet. It's not a pancia. And I truly appreciate this because it is such a complex issue. I have a question for the panel with regard to income equality, income inequality. How do you come up and challenge the narratives, the narratives that have been told to the public for so long that they believe them, even though they are lies. And that is that if you work and if you get lower money or if you get free money, then somehow or another you are doing something wrong. This ideology changed from the new deal from the great society ideology, and all of a sudden within 30 or 40 years, the entire country's thought processes towards fairness shifted. And it's because of an excellent propaganda machine that was pushed by those with a lot of money and a lot of power which expanded income inequality. Until we deal with that, I'd like to know how you would address resolving it. Okay, great question. Can I remind folks to identify themselves just so we have a sense of who you are? My name is Arthuretta Martin. I work with several non-profit organizations to address issues like this. Thank you, Arthuretta. Up here. Hi, I'm Maria Chicoana and I work with the Center for Community Change as a hunger fellow. I spent some time in Chicago last year doing research around work requirements, especially as I relate to the SNAP population. And one thing that I found was that the majority of the people that were in the program just didn't have sufficient educational attainment by the time that they were adults to find good employment and more stable employment. So I'm curious to know what we can do not just at individuals like later life to support them but more so earlier on when they're in kindergarten in elementary school and so forth to make sure they actually have the power to later on not just have to depend on a guaranteed income but actually fight for themselves and actually have that dignity afforded to them not just by the government or by funders but just out of their own volition. Thank you. Just up here. And then we'll let the panel take. I'm Stephen Schafferman with the Basic Income Earth Network and the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network. Not mentioned yet is the fact that there's a fellow named Andrew Yang who's already announced that he's running for the Democratic presidential nomination on a Basic Income platform and one of the points that he makes and that the Roosevelt Institute has studied and I think is especially important for Economic Policy Institute is that Basic Income is going to boost economic growth perhaps significantly because it will fund demand and I'd just like to hear from all three of you on the question of economic growth and boosting demand and how important that is. Okay. Okay. Lots of stuff to dig into. On the first, I think that there was a seminal report done by the Roosevelt Institute last year that modeled out using sophisticated economic modeling. What would happen if you provided a guaranteed income of $500 a month to every American? And believe it or not, the kind of modeling had not been done before. So, you know, economists were able to say well, I don't really know what the macroeconomic effects might be. And I think the paper is a starting point. I don't think it is the only data point to look at but it showed that GDP growth over the next eight years would increase by about 7%. And it's based on that. And it's intuitive as Theo was saying. If 60%, 70% of the American economy is boosted by consumer spending, if you give $100 to someone who's poor or lower middle class, they're going to spend most of that money on urgent needs, childcare, housing, healthcare, education. Do you give me $100? I'm going to put it in the back. I mean, it's not going to, if you give the wealthy that money, in the long run. So, there's really good evidence to see that. I think the other so many good questions, the first set of questions I think are the hardest and I would in many ways, maybe Dorian has some other ideas but turn it back on this crowd and ask the question back to you. So, the work that we do at the Economic Security Project is to try to move the idea of a guaranteed income from the fringes into the mainstream but one of those big questions is the cultural one. How do we change a culture that has gotten so far away from the ideals of the New Deal period and we cannot do that single-handedly and only in coalition and in partnership and we have one piece of the puzzle to work on but I do think we need a robust broad-based cultural change. We do have some ideas for instance we're supporting the mayor of Stockton, California who's a phenomenal leader if you don't know him, his name is Michael Tubbs he's 28 years old he is, he grew up in poverty and he has an incredible story and they're running a guaranteed income demonstration in Stockton, city that declared bankruptcy a few years ago we're underwriting a major piece of that and the idea is yes to figure out what do people do with it, sort of the empirical research but also to amplify the stories of the people who receive the money. I do think that is such a key part of the cultural change is not only the important think tanks and policy papers but the stories on the local news in Stockton and we're already seeing those come out. There's a on CBS, the national CBS last week there was a story they interviewed a crossing guard who was talking about what she would do if she had an extra $500 a month and she was saying it would help her live one step back from the brink she would be able to know she could make rent but she also might be able to take her kids to the movies which is just such a, like seeing that piece on the video which is such a, I mean she just wants to take her kids to the movies and it's a reminder of when you don't have any money to spare even the most basic of opportunities are taken. So I think amplifying her stories is an important piece of making that change but it's a long term, very much a long term project. So I would just add quickly, Chris Tussin a little bit about this the question of challenging the dominant narratives. This goes back to Renee's question to an extent too. So I think it's useful to remind all of us that there was this book that the sociologist wrote once called The Protestant Work Ethic this notion of a work ethic is really recent in human history and we assume it's always been the case forever. It's only like 200, 250 years old and it came about as right a dominant narrative to what end who's interested at serve to create this notion of a particular work ethic and the value of work and especially as it developed in this country when the first 25 decades was a system of free and unfree labor. So it's a recent invention this notion of having a work ethic much like it's a recent invention this notion of who's deserving and who's undeserving and so we can't assume it's always been like that. Yeah, did we had feudalism and we had slavery and we had different systems beforehand but this this very recent notion of who is deserving of the benefits of a social contract and who is not which is tied up in race and gender it's really recent which means in terms of the sweep of human history. So it makes me hopeful that we can offer alternative narratives that are broader and more inclusive and that enlarge in the circle of who belongs and so we have to be serious about a cultural or narrative strategy to challenge dominant assumptions and narratives in addition to the policy imagination right we can come up with good policy we're really good at that but we're not so good at changing the broader cultural narratives in the conversation so we have to have a strategy for that too and I would just add quickly on your question because I'm from Chicago from the south side I'm very proud of it I think in some ways Chris's proposal in the book goes a little bit to your question because what we know from the cognitive sciences and child development is zero to five are the crucial years right in terms of brain development and imagine we've valued women's work or incentivized men thinking I don't know is it sweeten what Scandinavian country where it's mandatory for men and women right to take leave parental leave so imagine we had a different system where we value people taking leave parents taking leave and paid them for it what that would mean for child development outcomes we can't even have that conversation starting to have that conversation on the margins in this country but what would be the bold big demand of saying everyone is entitled to that and it's not again as we've been saying it's not a magic bullet but it would go really really far along with five or ten other major policy reforms and I'm just going to jump in a little bit because I think those are both really great answers and these questions in some ways are all related to each other the question you asked Steven is about basically redistribution redistribution is economically good and that's one of the reasons why the recent Republican tax bill is such a majesty and such an outrage which is that you know at this moment in time the thing that we really want to do is give more money back to rich people and corporations and gut social programs that's you know it's the opposite of where we need to go but I think it also fits into your question on a thread about you know a narrative and you know these great answers to and but the idea is that I mean it's not just part of it is about the role of government and you know and shouldn't the role of government be to help smooth out some of the ups and downs that we all have whether you're a farmer or a person you know a mom or anybody else you're going to lose your job you might have a health crisis you might have something else happen to you and is that your fault it's never going to be your fault are you going to raise your kids you know that all those different things are things that are part of the cycle of life when you're young you're going to need help when you're old you're going to need help and the role of government rather than each of us being expected to have you know an enormous bank account to to smooth those things over that that can be and should be the role of government and you know in terms of investing in skills and this country you know we're we're in the global economy in the year 2018 and yet we have ridiculously under invested in skills and in infrastructure how do we expect to be successful in a global economy if we're not going to even fix our bridges and our roads let alone invest in a smart electrical grid or broadband or other things so those are the things that we need and and I think some of the narrative and I think this is where Dorian's point is exactly right the narrative around you know who's deserving and who's undeserving is racial in the sense that the idea that the government is kind of taking away your money and giving it to somebody you don't like is something that the right wing has explicitly put forward and it's our job to counter that and to rebuild a different narrative and I think you know Chris's proposal is definitely in that spirit so let's take a few more questions oh gosh we've got a lot here just thank you for your presentation also this is doable and identify yourself I'm Jan Chastain I'm the umbrella lady I needed a pie chart and I sit down at the White House complaining about how much he spent in certain areas but I don't have to explain it you know a pie chart shows it so anyway this is a book that was written about Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Iceland and they did it this is doable and one of the things we need is to shine some light on the big bomb that's lowering itself on us right now it has to do with the genetic impairment of people who live in poverty and stress mmm this is real yeah with the increasing amount of poverty rolling down the road towards Medicaid, Medicare single payer, private industry health insurance we've got a real problem interesting and it's the poverty that you're talking about in ways to address it the research has shown that actually stress and poverty genetically modify a person's body and it makes them more susceptible to Z's as they go down the road thank you let's take a couple more back there thanks you mentioned identify yourself I'm sorry I'm Bill Burks I've written some articles on public investment for Washington Monthly you mentioned how important the data is and being a philosopher of science I'm very concerned about making sure that putting this $500 would not simply be substituted by the employers paying $500 less and I'm wondering what the data is on the existing earned income tax credit and on experiments that have been done around the world on this issue because selling it is a matter of saying no the unintended consequences we've already checked this out this has already happened it works and that's part of the story I think needs to be told and I'm interested if you can tell us some of it Hi I'm Amanda Rossi I'm a policy analyst at the National Women's Law Center I was really interested in some of the stuff you were saying early on about recognizing different kinds of work or work that's been undervalued and I was curious if you had a gender sort of lens that you were looking at this in your book I was thinking specifically about how this $500 a month might help close the gender pay gap over the personal women's life or close the women's wealth gap which are two projects that I'm working on currently at the law center so I'm wondering if you thought specifically about how this might impact women's lives especially since women are disproportionately employed in like elder care and child care the kinds of work that you were talking about Thanks let's take sorry up here Thanks I'm rewarding we'll sit up front Hello my name is and I'm a retired worker from EPA My question has to do with the arts $500 a month is not enough to live on I think it's very a torturing amount and if I were a young artist it would do me nothing absolutely nothing the tax rules are such that if you don't show within five years of something that you've published something or sold a painting or whatever you're nothing we're not going to talk about the commoditization of art it's too big a subject for this but clearly there's no room for creative work unless somebody else $500 is not enough if you are going to support the arts Okay let me let Chris and Dorian take on some of Let me try to jump in on the last one and there's no question $500 a month whether you're an artist or I mean I mean anybody is not enough to live on there's no nobody who thinks that in fact a lot of the people in the UBI community make the case for $1,000 a month which is not enough to live on I mean it is more but so my view is that this amount of money is supplemental to other earnings or other government benefits I think that the tricky thing with this is finding enough money that's meaningful to people and $500 in the research in the conversations that we have with people is a very meaningful amount of money when it's in your bank account every single month if you're thinking of your median income or if you're thinking of a family that has two people on a minimum wage job or two adults they're making $34,000 a year so this would be an additional $12,000 a year you know that's it's still not enough but that's a boost to your income of a third so it is meaningful but at the same time it's also for a macro sense it's a big costly number I think the modeling shows that it costs just shy of $300 billion which is a very meaningful amount of money it's but it's on the order of magnitude of Trump tax cuts so don't let anybody tell you it's not doable, yes it's ambitious no question but if we can give tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest then I think we can create an income floor for working people so anyway I think $500 is a place to begin you could begin smaller you could begin bigger we've thought a lot about where the right level is and I don't think there's anything magical about the amount but I do think it is a sweet spot a place where you balance a lot of competing priorities one other thing I wanted to share on the first common question I think that the impact of scarcity on the lives of working people is vastly underestimated for anybody who's interested in this question here I am going to be promoting another book at a book event there's a book called Scarcity by Eldersphere and Cyndal Muinthain which documents how living on the brink actually affects the physiological and cognitive performance of working people and there's all kinds of studies I reference some of them in the book if you tell about them here but it's very real and there is another study that was just announced where they're providing mothers with $333 a month and watching how the children develop and even doing brain scans three years in to understand if the kids who grow up with a little bit more financial stability these developmental differences that many neuroscientists believe that they might so there's important work happening on this front I would just say on the question of gender and feminism in a UBI there is a robust debate that has taken place among many feminist philosophers and writers about unpaid work reproductive labor what's the role of a UBI to structure it is it a form of reparations for women so there is actually a very exciting lively debate that we've done a little bit of engaging with not enough I've actually been more toiling in the racial justice aspects of universal basic income or guaranteed income but there is a very lively debate especially among feminist philosophers right now that's I would say in the last five years that's really really interesting and we can follow up with you around who some of those players are and either of you have an answer for Bill about would employers just pay $500 less there's you know those of you who are familiar with the EITC you do see some leakage you see some some loss to to employers and it is an area of real concern it is even so less than many other government benefit programs and I continue to believe that there is nothing as powerful as cash in its fungibility to respect the dignity of the individual to decide what to do with with with the money so that is a risk is what I'm saying I think that it is a risk that can be managed and isn't enough to make the case against it because at the end of the day I would prefer to provide people cash rather than you know creating more government complexity more rules that poor people have to spend more time navigating to qualify for a certain kind of benefit I do really believe that cash is empowering in that way and even though structured in this fashion just as an EITC does have some of these downsides is still worth the trade off I have to tell you one question really for both of you about negative income tax which is another way of structuring this which is even simpler in some ways because you don't need to think about the work requirement and you can actually put in a child tax a child allowance which really does help and I think you could almost think about UBI for children as being something that would be very politically saleable that would be another piece of it and the negative income tax I think would have been acting as a subsidy to low wage employers but have you sort of compared that or thought about it I think it's very exciting I think this was the Nixon proposal in many ways back in the 70's that died and I think a negative income tax is a really exciting way to structure it I don't think we have any kind of you know I think there are many ways to do this a universal dividend, a negative income tax there are still others the issue, the reason that I have, the questions I've always had around a negative income tax are around the complexity and exactly who gets the money how much they get and the lack of understanding around it even at the congressional and federal level in the 70's was one of the things that Daniel Patrick Mornahan wrote in the book was a key lesson coming out of that debate it was because unless you can define and define the idea it's constantly like who's getting how much and when and how and it was almost it was too little for many it was too much for others and so it got lost but I don't think I think we could use a lot more research and exploration around it conceptually and just on the previous question our colleague Adam Rubin reminds me if you have a $15 minimum wage nationally do you have to trade off what employers pay less because if that's the floor that's the floor so that's why again why to go back to the theme it's not a magic bullet right what are the family of policies that will transform the economy and actually end poverty and create security and opportunity for working people great I think we have time for three quick more questions so I'm sorry we can take a few of them yeah Jim come ask him I'm planning a plan that you all examine the economic experiments of places like Norway, Finland Singapore Qatar where we have sort of wage that is one of the next living for all the citizens in those countries how about up here we thought about the center for community change I stacked the crowd there was an article in The Times just a few days ago about Finland and saying that its guaranteed income program was a failure but it didn't give any information does anybody have any information about that okay and then in the back somewhere just being geographically diverse yeah Joanne Kim one of you brought up the Protestant ethnic book and it made me think what are your thoughts about the role, the contributions that our churches have done into this whole economic mess that we're in oh okay and I'll let Dorian handle the last one since he brought up a favor yeah we've thought a little bit about the Scandinavian countries would love to think more so perhaps we can connect after you know they do not have a kind of income floor but by the time you combine so many of their social services it functions in a similar there's a very solid foundation so there is a common misperception that like Norway collects a lot of money from oil and then distributes it as a dividend they don't they do collect a lot of money from oil and provide what seemed like great social services to me but so I think there's a lot a lot to learn but but it is a distinct model the Finland reporting it was mind-blowingly inaccurate I mean it was so in Finland they had been providing a cash stipend in addition to unemployment benefits for a two-year program first off that's not really a guaranteed income that specifically if it's a really a kind of boost to unemployment insurance unemployment insurance is cash and this was a kind of boost to it and it was a two-year pilot they announced which was ending in December the Finns announced that it would end as planned and the conservatives in the government said we don't have any interest in extending the pilot and it was reported that a basic income pilot was being cut short which none of the things in that sentence is true it was not a basic income pilot it wasn't cut short it was not extended which was anticipated so at the same moment that that was happening the folks in Ontario have begun already the cash is moving the largest pilot of this idea in history 100 million American dollars going to thousands of people in Ontario there's a great piece on the U.S. news hour about it which you should all just google it and you can learn more meanwhile we have the demonstration in Stockton another group has announced why Combinator has announced another another pilot in the United States there's a big demonstration a 12-year demonstration happening in Kenya the Indian government is thinking about this this is percolating and gaining steam internationally so I think that let's not let the misreporting around what's actually happening globally so I'll respond quickly to two of the questions one was the question around social experiments in other countries so I think we already talked about Finland if you think of Norway or Sweden or Qatar or other places the big challenge and what we know from social science the big challenge in the U.S. and what makes us exceptional is actually the race question because what's different about those other countries that we've mentioned is that they're all racially and mostly religiously homogenous and what we know is countries that are generous with a social safety net or welfare state or redistribution everyone tends to look like everybody else how does that happen so there is this right there is this endemic challenge in this country of how we have divided the population on the basis of race in particular we are always in the business of creating others who don't belong and those who do and that affects everything from our policies to public opinion at the individual level when you ask people what they think about the government should it provide resources or a safety net lots of Americans say no and tend to be more conservative but if you ask them about specific programs like SNAP they say yes because they think they benefit from a different set of attitudes especially white Americans hold when you look at the public opinion polls around who they imagine benefits and who belongs and who deserve who's deserving versus the usually racial other in this case other countries it's religious or other or ethnicity so that is the one challenge that we have but we've always had that challenge in this country that's been different from especially western Europe Scandinavian countries that are frankly much more generous in social protections and economic security on the church question ooh so let me just say thanks a lot let me just say quickly actually at the center for community change and especially in the organizing work we do in black communities we're thinking a lot about this question so one thing to keep in mind is that Christianity in this case or even Islam or other religions Judaism they're not monoliths right there are multiple competing traditions and even if I were to just look at the black church tradition there are multiple competing traditions we just lost a giant yesterday or the funeral yesterday of James Cohn who was the inventor of essentially black liberation theology and the concept of liberation theology which is a pretty and was a mentor to Dr. King by the way which is a pretty radical tradition invented in the history of Christianity right and in Latin America and other places and so there are and so part of when I said earlier we have to think about things to your question what's the cultural narrative how do we disrupt the dominant narratives of who belongs and who doesn't or who's deserving and who's undeserving we have to reclaim our faith traditions too that advance justice that's what Reverend Barber is doing with this poor people's movement in this moment that is what Dr. King was trying to do 50 years ago in terms of reclaiming the radical liberatory promise of in this case Christianity towards justice and so we have to that's not exactly where I choose my fights but lots of our folks are choosing to have that battle and to reclaim the moral narrative Chris started off by talking about the moral imperatives in poverty when we talk about poverty most of the time we never talk about it in moral terms it's about how much will it cost or the policy how do we reclaim the moral narrative and faith based narratives are a part of reclaiming that moral narrative they actually do a great job of reminding us why these are moral issues for those of us that might be less religious we give up that that narrative power that many of the most liberatory radical church traditions offer us so that's yet another I would just say that's another fight to be waged and to remind us I was sitting here during this panel thinking you know a hundred years ago it was the height of Jim Crow there was women didn't have the right to vote we didn't have a minimum wage yet workers didn't have the right to organize there was no social security or old age insurance we can go down the list and here we are a hundred years later having accomplished all those things and at first when people had those ideas they were seen as absurd right but here we are trying to protect and defend what's left of those 20th century visions and our challenge in this moment is to have some strategic imagination about what's possible for this century how do we big dream how do we dream in a big way what are our north star ideas that we actually want to fight for that are aspirational and then what does it take to build the power to go out and win and that's a great note to end on I'd like to thank all of you for coming I'd like to thank you for your great questions I'd like to thank EPI staff for putting the event together and for all their hard work but mostly I want to thank and I want you to join me in thanking Dorian and Chris for their applause go ahead and buy the book if you haven't already done so and I'm pretty sure Chris is willing to sign by the way all the proceeds from the book go to the economic security project work so just in case you're thinking about it it's not necessary I didn't want anybody being like wait a second here