City official Andres Carrea urged migrants to travel to New York or Chicago
Denver has already allotted more than $100 million to provide food and shelter
The city is now offering to pay for asylum seekers' bus fare to other locations
I wonder how UBI would fit into the picture?
It is long past time to make Washington D.C. the nation's official sanctuary city, if for no other reason than ease of administration.
And from the MIT Press Reader:
While the concept stretches back centuries, it has garnered significant attention in recent decades.
Support for universal basic income (UBI) has
grown so rapidly over the past few years that people might think the
idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, the idea has roots going back
hundreds or even thousands of years, and activists have been floating
similar ideas with gradually increasing frequency for more than a
century.
Since 1900, the concept of a basic income guarantee (BIG)
has experienced three distinct waves of support, each larger than the
last. The first, from 1910 to 1940, was followed by a down period in the
1940s and 1950s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the
1960s and 1970s, followed by another lull in most countries through
about 2010. BIG’s third, most international, and by far largest wave of
support began to take off in the early 2010s, and it has increased every
year since then.
Before the First Wave
We
could trace the beginnings of UBI into prehistory, because many have
observed that “prehistoric” (in the sense of nonliterate) societies had
two ways of doing things that might be considered forms of unconditional
income.
First, nomadic, hunting and gathering societies of less than 60 people have often been observed to treat all land as commons,
meaning that everyone can forage on the land but no one can own it. A
similar right to use land has existed in many small-scale agrarian
communities right up to the enclosure movement, which was not complete
in Europe until the 20th century and is not complete around the world
today. The connection between common land and UBI is that both
institutions allow every individual to have access to the resources they
need to survive without conditions imposed by others.
Second,
most observed small-scale, nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies had strong
obligations to share what they had with others. If someone camping with
the group found more food than they and their immediate family could
eat in one meal, they had to share it with everyone in the camp,
including people who rarely or never brought back food for the
community. The food shared around camp could be seen as a “basic”
income.
Some trace
the beginning of UBI history to ancient Athens, which used revenue from a
city-owned mine to support a small cash income for Athenian citizens.
The
modern definition of UBI stipulates the grant must be in cash, and
because small-scale hunter-gatherer or agrarian communities do not have
cash economies, they do not have UBIs. But these practices show how the
values that motivate much of the modern UBI movement are not new to
politics but have been recognized and practiced for a very long time.
Some
writers trace the beginning of UBI history to ancient Athens, which
used revenue from a city-owned mine to support a small cash income for
Athenian citizens. This institution sounds like a UBI, except that the
meaning of citizen was very different in ancient Athens.
Citizens were a small, elite portion of the population. Noncitizens,
such as slaves, women, and free noncitizen males, were the bulk of the
population and virtually all of its labor force. A UBI for the elite is
no UBI at all.
Proposals that begin to fit the modern definition
of UBI begin in the 1790s with two writers, Thomas Paine and Thomas
Spence. Paine’s famous pamphlet “Agrarian Justice” argued that because
private ownership of the land had deprived people of the right to hunt,
gather, fish, or farm on their own accord, they were owed compensation
out of taxes on land rents. He suggested this compensation should be
paid in the form of a large cash grant at maturity plus a regular cash
pension at retirement age. That amounts to a stakeholder grant plus a
citizens pension: nearly, but not quite, a UBI.
From a similar
starting point, Spence carried the argument through to a full UBI,
calling for higher taxes on land and a regular, unconditional cash
income for everyone. If anyone can be said to be the “inventor” of UBI,
it is Thomas Spence, but his proposal remained obscure, and the idea had
to be reinvented many times before it became widely known.
Joseph
Charlier, a Belgian utopian socialist author, reinvented the idea of
UBI in 1848, suggesting the socialization of rent, with the proceeds to
be redistributed in the form of a UBI.
Henry George, a late
19th-century economist, set out to solve the problem of persistent
poverty despite economic progress. He proposed taxing land value at the
highest sustainable rate and using the proceeds for public purposes. At
one point, he suggested that part of the proceeds could be distributed
in cash to all citizens, but UBI was never a central part of his
proposal.
BIG proposals remained sparse until the early 1900s.
The First Wave
By
the early 20th century, enough people were discussing BIG to constitute
its first wave — or at least its first ripple — of support. The idea
was still new enough that most advocates had little knowledge of each
other, and they all tended to give their versions of the program a
different name.
In the United Kingdom, Bertrand Russell and
Virginia Woolf both praised the idea in their writings without naming
it. In 1918, Dennis and E. Mabel Milner started the short-lived State
Bonus League, which briefly attempted to get a conversation started with
pamphlets and other publications, including what was probably the first
full-length book on UBI: Dennis Milner’s 1920 publication “Higher
Production by a Bonus on National Output.”
Several economists and social policy analysts, especially in Britain, discussed UBI, often under the name social dividend,
in the 1930s and early 1940s. These included James Meade (economist and
later Nobel laureate), Juliet Rhys-Williams (writer and politician),
Abba Lerner (economist), Oskar Lange (economist), and G. D. H. Cole
(political theorist, economist, and historian). It was apparently Cole
who coined the term basic Income in 1935, although that term did not become standard for more than 50 years.
Major C. H. Douglas (a British engineer) included UBI under the name national dividend in a wider package of proposed reforms he called social credit.
His ideas were most prominent in Canada, where the Social Credit Party
held power in two western provinces on and off between 1935 and 1991,
but the party abandoned support for Douglas’s proposed dividend not long
after it first took power.
In 1934, Louisiana senator Huey Long
debuted a Basic Income plan he called Share Our Wealth. He seems to have
come up with the idea on his own; there is no evidence that he was
influenced by the ideas spreading around the United Kingdom in those
years. Long’s plan might have served as the basis for a presidential run
in 1936 had he not been assassinated in 1935.
Although some of
these early advocates were highly respected people, they were unable to
get any form of BIG onto the legislative agenda in this era. As World
War II drew to a close, most Western democracies built up their welfare
systems on a conditional model, typified by the British government’s
famous Beveridge Report, which recommended fighting poverty,
unemployment, and income inequality with a greatly expanded welfare
system based on the conditional model. Discussion of BIG largely fell
out of mainstream political discussion for nearly two decades.
