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By David Futrelle
Amber A’Lee Frost — a Chapo Trap House semi-regular and the coiner of the phrase “dirtbag left” — thinks she’s found the perfect rebuttal to Andew Yang’s thousand-dollar-a-month Universal Basic Income proposal in the pages of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. She’s wrong, as she usually is.
In a piece for Jacobin, Frost takes on what she sees as the “failson” army that is the Yang Gang by attacking their favorite part of Yangism — the thousand bucks a month he proposes the government pay each and every adult American, a lot of money for the basement-dwelling, video-game playing ne-er-do-wells that Frost sees as the backbone of Yang’s support.
Frost — one of those semi-leftist “skidmarxists” who combine progressive rhetoric with some weirdly reactionary politics — briefly runs through some of the standard arguments against Yang’s pie-in-the-sky proposal, the most compelling being the fact that Yang would combine his payment plan with deep cuts in other social programs. Yang giveth, but he also taketh away.
Frost also suggests that a thousand bucks a month is “a pittance,” which suggest she’s more than a little out of touch with the ordinary people that she as an ostensible socialist should be supporting; for those living on the poverty line, a thousand bucks a month would literally double their income.
But Frost only devotes a few lines to what she calls the “practical” case against Yang’s proposals. She quickly moves on to what she sees as her ace in the hole: That housewives in the 1950s received the equivalent of a Universal Basic income, and all it did was make them sad.
Citing The Feminine Mystique, that famous expose of suburban discontent, as her source of evidence, Frost declares that the housewives that Friedan wrote about, living
in their comfortable homes with their comfortable allowances, with all of that marvelous free time, were the biggest experiment in UBI the world has ever seen, and they were desperately, wretchedly unhappy, to the point of mental illness. Because that is what being paid off and discarded does to a person.
Frost’s weird argument has already generated some fierce pushback online.
The idle, existentially miserable 1950s housewives that Frost sees as the face of UBI were even at the time a small minority of women. Most housewives worked the equivalent of a 40-hour-a-week job, either in the home (as @eileanorr notes) or outside of it (even in the 1950s roughly a third of all women had jobs).
I’m not quite sure how a middle- or upper-middle-class housewife’s allowance counts as “Universal Basic Income” in that, among other things, it isn’t universal, or really an income, given that the husband likely controlled the purse strings for most of a household’s costs outside of food and clothing and the like. It’s not like most housewives on an “allowance” could spend that money on whatever they wanted.
Most of the housewifely discontent of the 1950s wasn’t the result of “failson”-style idleness; it was the result of educated women essentially being forced into menial, isolating work in the home — and not even earning a paycheck of their own to show for it.
Frost’s attempts to hand-wave away the issue of household patriarchy are disingenuous at best. Instead of frankly acknowledging the degree of control husbands had over their wives back in the 1950s, and still have today, she offers her own autobiography as proof that getting a paycheck for nothing from the state is somehow worse than getting an “allowance” from a husband.
[A]s someone who has been both a housewife and on the dole, I assure you that housewives have far more political and economic leverage than welfare recipients.
A capitalist state that holds the purse strings is far less accountable to its dependents than a husband. If he annoyed me or didn’t give me enough money, I had immediate recourse due to both the value of my labor and my proximity to him. Such is not the case with the distant and opaque bureaucracy of the welfare office — you cannot berate them when you are unhappy, you cannot go on strike by refusing to do their laundry or clean, and you certainly can’t poison their dinner. These are not tactics I am willing to forswear (a girl has to have options).
Setting aside that final bit about poisoning — wow, so hilarious! — what if you “go on strike” and your husband responds with threats and/or physical abuse? This was not that unlikely a possibility back in the 1950s. And without money of their own — an “allowance” to do the grocery shopping doesn’t count — these wives couldn’t simply leave. That’s why being economically dependent on a spouse can be a trap.
Housewives in the 1950s didn’t suffer because their husbands gave them allowances. They suffered because they didn’t have control over their own lives, nor did they have much in the way of options to make new lives for themselves.
While Yang’s particular plan is rather shitty — one hand takes what the other gives — there’s nothing inherently wrong with Universal Basic Income besides its current political impossibility. Instead of pretending that UBI and “full employment” (Frost’s favorite panacea) are fundamentally opposed to one another, why not support both?
Fighting for more jobs, better jobs, and a stronger social safety net underpinned by a UBI. That sounds like a decent progressive platform for any number of candidates other than Andrew Yang.
These skidmarxists need to shut up. I hope none of the them get elected to anything.
“Full employment”
what the hell is it with the ‘dirtbag left’/leftists who bitch about “identity politics” and forgetting that disabled people who literally do not have the ability, energy, or skills to be employed for profit, exist.
(Plenty of us are capable of working, but not everyone is, and barring the eugenic elimination of all “non-productive” disability, that will always be the case. That, along with the fact that some jobs could be automated if not for people losing the incomes that they can only get from working b/c capitalism, is one of the big problems with capitalism as an economic system IMHO.)
I wish my income was high enough for an extra $1000 to double it.
We had a brief flirtation with a form of UBI here. It was called Enterprise Allowance. It paid a modest amount of money and was limited to 12 months. Supposedly it started off a number of successful businesses. We did get some good bands out of it.
It was actually introduced by the Thatcher government. That might not be a paradoxical as it seems as UBI makes sense even from a purely capitalist financial aspect. Here’s Ed Milliband to explain why…
Give-with-one-hand-and-take-with-the-other Yang, touchy-feely-gropey-no-Medicare Biden … who let these Republicans into the Democratic primary?
Betty Friedan’s ‘problem without a name’ was the result of highly educated women forced to stay home and find purpose by directing the maid and the nanny.
Growing up in a milieu much different from Friedan’s, a lot of mothers, including my own, did not work outside the home. Many of them were miserable. But many of the ones that did have jobs were still miserable because in that particular time and place men could do pretty much whatever they wanted, short of murder, to their wives and daughters.
It’s the patriarchy, stupid.
the ignorant right-wing only has two arguments… “Everybody knows…” and “Nuh-UH!”
On the topic of Yang being shitty:
https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-yang-ex-employee-claims-fired-for-getting-married-2019-9
So, a crypto-Republican DINO is a misogynist? There’s a shock. Good catch, by the way. All of this stuff should be documented somewhere.
Now how to make it come to primary voters’ attention in February?
Look how high Biden continues to poll, even after all of the following got exposed:
* His groping.
* His opposition to integrating schools back in the 1970s.
* His confusion on a number of historical topics.
* His failure to oppose the Iraq war.
… etc.
And apparently despite his past opposition to integration of schools much of his support is coming from African-Americans, even when he’s been sharing debate stages with two candidates who are African-American, one of whom called Biden on the desegregation thing and the other of whom is an anti-war veteran lacking the first one’s baggage as a past agent of the carceral state.
The only way that makes sense is if they (and Dem primary voters more broadly) think Biden is the likelier bet for unseating Trump, even though Biden is far from the top of the list when it comes to “ability to excite, and presumably to turn out, the Democratic base” and it’s turning out the base to vote in sufficient numbers, not chasing the increasingly ephemeral “moderate swing voter”, that most reliably gives Dems national election victories.
I may never understand American voters. And I’m not sure I want to …
Wasn’t one of the effects noticed in the various pilot studies of UBI over the years a slight increase in divorce rates (likely because people could finally afford to get out of bad marriages)?
That article sounds very MRAish to me. Since they always claim that homemakers are paid to do nothing but eat bonbons and watch soaps all day.
I was glad at first when Yang got in the race even though I had no intention of supporting him (no experience in government) because I wanted UBI to make it into the public consciousness. But he hasn’t done a good job of selling it in the debates and his desire to become a cult figure among Reddit brocialists and libertarians is extremely annoying. Now I just wish he’d go away. He’s probably hurt the political case for UBI more than he’s helped it.
Re: Biden
Biden and Yang are both shitty. I’ve been trying to talk sense into some generally liberal friends about Biden, but for some reason they all seem to like him. Not quite sure why, as he keeps digging his hole deeper and deeper. The more I see of him, the more he reminds me of Trump, and he’s just giving Republicans new ways to attack the Democrats with his constant attacks on Medicare for all.
I keep hearing a line of thought from moderate Democrats that Warren “isn’t electable.” This line of argument just leads back to another old white man and is rather misogynistic in and of itself. I’m tired of it.
@WWTH
The other problem with Yang is that he seems to think this is all a a joke. Like when he announced his giveaway on stage. He doesn’t seem to realize that running for President isn’t the same as whatever he did before, and we need a serious candidate. He’s too low in the polls to really be that big of an issue though. I worry more about Biden.
$1000 per month a pittance? I could live like a king on $1000 per month! That’s ten times what I get now! Only reason I’m not homeless and starving is because I am at university. Even then, I’m certain I’m going to crash and burn eventually. I look forward to my death.
If I had to find fault with UBI, it would be on the matter of inflation. By definition, it’s going to inject money into the economy without a way to remove it afterwards, and there would need to be measures to compensate for that. There’s also the matter of who’s paying for it- the people who are in the best position to fund it via taxation are also the ones most likely to dodge said taxes- and how it would be able to account for varying degrees of need for different people. A flat rate might not take into account the needs of children, the elderly, or people in areas with high costs of living; variable rates could work there, but that brings problems of its own.
More worryingly, I’ve seen quite a few unlikely faces (e.g. Charles Murray and Milton Friedman) championing UBI with the condition that all other welfare programs be repealed, their “logic” being that the recipients will cease seeing themselves as victims and would subsequently pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Add a lot of CEOs who also like that combination, and you have a recipe for what should be a progressive advance being subverted into justification for de facto serfdom of the poor.
At least for the time being, it would likely be more viable to focus on improving the minimum wage and increase support for programs that aid gaining employment.
In Argentina we do have a Universal Allowance per Child, which is actually an expansion of the “Family Salary” established by Peronism back in the 1940s and was an amount of money paid by he State to workers… but of course, only to registered workers. The Universal Allowance extended the program to all families, most of them not even unemployed, but unregistered workers.
We also have a “housewife retirement” allowance (we call it that because women working at their homes are the main beneficiaries) that’s actually a sort of universal retirement, because it allows anyone with not enough working years or retirement contributions to access the benefit. It’s actually called a “moratory” because it (accurately) assumes they were either unable to get a job, working unregistered or doing unpaid work at home, therefore they fell behind on their retirement contributions.
We might well be on our way to a UBI, if a new Peronist government assumes this December (extremely likely but yet to be seen). It will still be an uphill battle, considering what horrible things they said about the UApC, and more specifically about its beneficiaries.
PS: Also, considering the near-hyperinflation in our current economy and the subsequent devaluation of the peso, I wouldn’t mind 1000 U$D. Please send me moneyz.
UBI has had a couple of attempts in Canada. There was the Mincome project in Manitoba in the 1970s, which ran over budget (the original budget was very much a guess) and got abandoned by the next governments; to the annoyance of a lot of people, the study data collected was basically thrown in a back room and ignored.
Two years ago, the Liberal government of Ontario started a new Basic Income pilot project. Despite promises that they would keep it, Doug Ford’s government killed it half way through the pilot, meaning there was little useful data to collect. There was some suspicion that it was killed because data would have showed it was working. Officially it was killed because the government’s ‘first priority’ was getting people employed and off welfare; the fact that most of the original recipients were employed and still below the poverty line was ignored.
It shouldn’t be impossible to fund UBI through taxation. For one, you start taxing almost immediately above the UBI payment – so almost everyone’s first pound/dollar of earned income is taxed (at a reasonable rate) – this also reduces some of the inflationary pressure of the UBI. And yes, you do stop almost all other benefits. One of the benefits of UBI is that it has an efficiency gain from reduced administration costs.
The unfortunate fact of the history of labour is that there have always been working poor and people who are willing and people who are compelled to sell their labour below poverty line rates. For a time, in the US and Western industrialised nations, most white men could sell semi-skilled labour and ‘support a family’. But that was a blip in the wider history of labour. There was probably a blip like that just after the plague in Europe, too.
If we want to stop in-work poverty and ensure people aren’t caught in a benefits trap, UBI is probably the way to go. There will still be zero hours contracts and full time wage payments below the poverty line, but people will be cushioned against the impact. For someone like me, who has a professional (though not terribly well paid job) it probably would and probably should have a neutral effect.
My relatives are mostly ex-republicans, and most of them favor Biden or Klobuchar. I just want someone who can beat Trump. The thing is, I have a proven track record going back some four decades of being almost always wrong about predicting who would be a strong general election candidate.
@Surplus… Observer… I would agree that Biden is a poor choice, and that rallying the base will likely be more important than winning over moderates. But, given my track record, you might prefer I didn’t agree with you analysis.
@ Surplus –
You’ve got it exactly right. The reason African-Americans support Biden despite his own poor showing on race and the fact there are African-Americans on the stage with him is because right now, at least by the numbers, he’s the best bet to beat Trump. While all of the Democratic front-runners beat him, he’s the one who’s up over 50% and beating Trump by double digits.
I imagine the thinking goes like this: “We elected a black man and that sent white people into a berserk rage that still hasn’t died down. We tried to elect a woman, and because the USA is misogynist AF, we got Trump. Now we’re getting the shit kicked out of us by his racist regime and the emboldened racists in the general public. We don’t want to take ANY chances. If it takes a conservative old white man that doesn’t excite anybody but doesn’t scare anybody away either to win in America today, then that’s who we support.”
@ Naglfar –
“Isn’t electable” means one of two things, both of which boil down to “woman”:
1) “I would love to have a woman president, but we ran the most qualified person in a generation against a stupid thug who did everything wrong and the stupid thug won. The USA is misogynistic AF even in comparison to countries we deride as misogynistic. There are large sectors even on the Left that can’t bear the thought of a girl being the boss of them. Considering the terrible consequences of a Trump second term, we don’t dare risk it.”
2) “Ain’t no woman gonna be the boss of me.”
Regarding UBI in America as proposed by Yang, the math doesn’t work. Given that it would cost between 1.4 and 3.6 trillion dollars per year, which is between about 1/4 and 3/4 of the entire US budget for 2019, you’d have to eradicate the most holy military budget and completely cut discretionary spending to just barely cover the low end of that estimate.
UBI is an interesting concept, but the devil in these particular details is pretty fucking huge.
I’m not typically one to use the words that the cool kids do such as “Oof!” or “Yikes!” but Amber Frost is a walking “Oof!Yikes!” I think I can decipher what it is she’s getting at, but as the other Mammotheers have pointed out (as well as those on Twitter), she’s not only overlooking those with mobility needs or medical needs who are unable to engage in the kind of labour she supposedly champions, but she’s putting the NEETs (who she clearly views with contempt by calling them “failsons”) ahead of them, saying “Only my specific prescription for a society built on labour will keep NEETs from giving in to despair.”
This is what class reductionism combined with being very online and a hyperfocus on labour does to an ostensible leftist. It’s not only very patronizing to NEETs, but it basically takes the subset of them that are Yang Trolls and elevates them above people who you should be standing in solidarity with, folks who are often on the margins of society. If you’re interested in an open and inclusive left, starting with the group who have enough of a support structure to be online trolling all day is probably not the best way to go.
But worse than that, Amber seems completely incapable of understanding not only that housewives in the 50s had their own alienation from their labour given the patriarchal attitudes of the time (which she dismisses), but also that it’s possible to be fulfilled without necessarily working in the labour relationship she envisions as beneficial.
Seriously, I would looooove to devote myself full time to writing and art. My liver ailment already leaves me with not exactly a lot of energy to begin with and using the bulk of it five days a week in a job that while certainly far from thankless is not exactly what I want to be doing with a significant chunk of the only life I have. I’d love to be able to take time to go to some actual classes, learn some new techniques, be able to devote myself to the intense practice necessary to draw more quickly than I do. And it’s certainly something I kept up with in my brief NEET period in 2009. The Yang Gangers clearly have the capacity to get online and troll people. They need to channel that in a more creative and less destructive way.
I want to know what the marvelous free time she thinks housewives and stay at home mothers have. An hour maybe to read a book or take a bath? What does she think these housewives would be doing even if they have a lot of free time. They probably don’t have a car. They didn’t have access to money. If husband said no you can’t go shopping with Susan or even over to Susan’s home to have a cup of coffee they couldn’t go. None of that sounds like a good deal. It sounds like an incredibly boring life if all your husband wants to do is keep you in the house and he his servant instead of being an active member of the world with friends and little luxuries
My grandmother was a house wife with 11 children. One car and what my grandfather said was basically law. I have her journal and let me tell you there are a few very angry ans frustrated entries about being borded to tears and Tom saying no to little things that would have made it better. One I remember very clearly was her writing down how angry she was that he wouldn’t take her to the movies because he wanted to sit at home ans sleep in the chair.
Advocates for “full employment” always seem to be bad folks. Probably because “full employment” means forced labor for disabled folks like me who are incapable of working full time, and disregarding that requires a callous attitude.
There’s a lot more wrong with the idea than that, but that’s certainly one big problem with it.