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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.
@rugbyyogi:
Also as I understand it, part of the idea is that if *everyone’s* getting a UBI payment, there’s no “ew, you’re on welfare/disability” stigma. Of course the UBI payment has to be high enough that no one ends up poorer than they would have been on welfare/disability, but those payments are so low that ought to be an easy bar to clear, plus welfare and disability usually come with a clawback of any money the person does earn from a part-time job, which would not happen with UBI.
@Katamount
At present, they remind me of the Bernie Bros, but with different views. Like the Bernie Bros, I think they’ve rather damaged the case for their candidate’s policies. Now, whenever anyone thinks of UBI in America they’ll think of Andrew Yang and his supporters.
*sigh*
@Betrayer
I get the feeling that Amber and friends don’t care much about disabled people. The dirtbag left is generally pretty ableist, almost as much so as the right.
“Full employment” is another phrase typically used by the right. It’s almost like these people aren’t actually leftist but are actually right wing provocateurs…
Biggest selling point of universal income for me : it’s a lot simpler administratively. That free up money to spend on, you know, the income instead of the administrative machinery made to see if people are allowed to get help.
It also dodge the problem of people too proud to ask for help, which is a real problem at least in France.
If memory serve well, there’s experiments on the topic in France, but they aren’t terribly pushed to the limelight.
Things like this make me glad I don’t listen to Chapo Trap House.
“…they were desperately, wretchedly unhappy, to the point of mental illness. Because that is what being paid off and discarded does to a person”
Yes but, sweetie, supposing it comes down to being paid off and discarded versus being discarded without being paid off first (or ever, or at all)? What if it comes down to being shoved out of a fourth-floor window and bouncing off the thin mat at the bottom or being pushed out and landing on the stony-cold ground? Which plan do you like better? Which alternative would you pick? Please decide. No hurry, though — I promise I’ll be here, waiting patiently in my corner for you to make up your mind. You can count on it.
A thousand extra dollars a month for each adult in our household would not be a pittance, it would be a fucking miracle. That would literally be the equivalent of what I earn in a year.
For what it was worth, the source I was looking at regarding the taxation cost suggested it would require at least a 45% flat tax, possibly one as high as 65%. (http://www.bien2012.de/sites/default/files/paper_253_en.pdf)
Granted, this was for Ireland in 2012 but I get the impression it won’t be much better elsewhere. (Of course this implies it would be funded by a flat tax; a different type of taxation might be better but good luck trying to push that through Congress now.)
Also, a fully universal basic income (as opposed to a targeted one) would by definition “help” the rich just as much as the poor, which seems like it would defeat the purpose of providing it in the first place.
This talk of justifying UBI by cutting other benefits terrifies me, frankly. I’m a disabled dialysis patient, and switching out my benefits for $1000 a month would result in me dying a slow, painful death from kidney failure.
It’s bad enough that conservatives have been trying to kill me and those like me for years. I really don’t need supposed progressives doing it as well.
@Anonymous:
a fully universal basic income (as opposed to a targeted one) would by definition “help” the rich just as much as the poor,
Not if you look at it as a percentage of their income— to a rich person, an extra thou a month is like finding a quarter on the sidewalk; to a poor one it could be the difference between keeping a roof over their head or not.
@Allendrel: Yeah that’s where I think the UBI would have to (a) exist alongside full, universal health coverage rather than as a substitute for it, and (b) actually be enough per month that if you have no other income, you can still get by on it (i.e more than $1000/month).
@Allandrel
That also explains my trepidation about basic income being implemented anytime soon. If it ever sees the light of day, it’s just going to act as that de facto servitude I mentioned because none of the conservative types would possibly allow it through without cutting all other forms of welfare in the process. And come to think of it, what’s going to stop basic income from being gutted as well afterwards?
Like I said, a higher minimum wage supplemented by greater employment supports will be a safer alternative approach at least for the short term.
@Moon Custafer
I acknowledge your point about the income percentages, but regardless I still feel basic income should be more carefully targeted so its benefits are greatest for those who need it most.
@Anonymous : what would prevent thoses sames conservative to gut employement support and minimum wage ?
Universal income attraction is partly about simplifying social help. While it’s *also* to increase them, I can’t stress enough how annoying and time consuming it can be. French exemple, the list of social funds I have heard of :
* unemployement benefit (one of the worse one because you need to justify that you seek employement, and they are super strict)
* RSA (a monthly allowance added to your income if it’s low enough)
* housing help (not sure of the small print, but my mother used a lot of time to set up that when I was a student, including strategic element in declaration)
* large family help (if you have 3+ – or maybe 2+ – children, you have some monthly help for you)
* return to class bounty (a lump sum of money to outfit your childs for school)
There are probably other too, since I actually never depended on social helps too much. And all of that is already a lot of time and energy to invest, especially energy.
Universal income do mean less tailored help, which inevitably will mean there will be losers and winner. But it also mean less money invested in pure administrative work, and that’s alway great in my book.
UBI would not benefit the very rich, though (which would clearly be ridiculous) as it would presumably go hand-in-hand with appropriately tapered progressive taxation; the highest tax bands for the very top tiers of the obscenely wealthy could go as high as society deems appropriate.
And there needs to be a wealth tax and land tax as well as income tax – not on a person’s home that they actually live in, but, again, for the obscenely wealthy such as rentiers who own very large numbers of properties (such as the Duke of Westminster, or multi-millionaire rachmanite landlords Fergus and Judith Wilson who have about a thousand rental properties).
@opposablethumbs
IIRC they are the ones who refused to accept tenants fleeing domestic violence or tenants who weren’t white.
The key reason I support UBI is because things like intellectual property law has gotten out of hand, to cheat consumers into accepting intellectual property they probably don’t want. I’m hoping UBI would reduce the problems piracy pose and try to engender a less capitalistic culture.
@opposablethumbs : capitalism have among their prerequesite a confiscating taxes on inheritance, just so that you cannot inherit being a rentier.
Which is something that is almost alway silenced by all thoses neoliberals types. Rarely they will find some ad hoc excuse to why they are against that.
The elimination of bureaucratic hoops to jump through is one of the main reasons I’d be for a UBI. Means testing makes it so hard to get benefits that a lot of people who need help don’t it because they can’t navigate the bureaucracy. The amount of paperwork my family has to file to keep my brother on disability is ridiculous. He has to prove he’s still autistic sometimes. Even though there’s no cure for autism, so how’s that going to change? He’s lucky he has family who is capable of doing the paperwork for him. Not all disabled adults have assistance.
I’m fine with upper class people getting the benefit too if it means that people who are poor, disabled etc don’t have to fall through the cracks because they failed to file paperwork correctly. But people are correct in saying $1000 may not be enough for those who have no means other than government assistance, so that needs to be accounted for. And healthcare needs to be seperate, but also universal.
In fact, I don’t understand why I don’t see Warren, Sanders and other pro Medicare for all politicians sell the time saving aspect of universal health care more. My whole job is helping people understand and access their health and pension benefits through their employer. That shouldn’t have to be a job. People should be able to have the necessities of life without consulting experts and spending hours trying to figure out benefits.
Implementing a UBI would improve the lives for a lot of people, no doubt about that. However, implementing it in place of all other security nets and supports would be very, very bad for two reasons.
One, it is often significantly more expensive to be disabled than it is to be abled, and the minimum basic income is unlikely to provide for all the needs of some of our most vulnerable people.
Two, it’s basically “putting all of our eggs in one basket”, and the next Trumpish administration would only need to make cuts to/eliminate one system in order to devaste huge portions of the population. If a regressive government kills UBI, then they’re sure as hell not going to implement a replacement system that is even as good as the previous security nets in place before UBI.
Also, it would serve to continue to prop up the flawed capitalistic system, though that’s more of a personal gripe of mine and not a reason to not improve people’s lives.
@WWTH
I agree. Joe Biden’s non-universal healthcare option seems extremely complex, with how he describes it auto enrolling, and it is very flawed.
I’ve always regarded CTH with a certain amount of sideeye. Now I see I was right to do so.
@Catalpa : the second argument is one I often hear but don’t make much sense to me. If anything, it’s easier to defend the universal income than one of the tens or hundred individual help.
As for the first, I guess socialized healthcare is the way to go. There’s probably non-health related reason for life to be more expensive, but as far as I can tell they are rare enough that it’s not too hard to have specifical helps for thoses.
@Citerior Motive
CTH is home to a level of bigotry that you’d usually only see on the right. I honestly don’t know how anyone who is actually left of center can agree with it.
CTH is an embarrassment. The central “justification” for why they engage in casual bigotry is “that’s how you appeal to the working class,” which is itself a classist attitude towards working class people.
@Betrayer
Plus, it normalizes bigotry by saying it’s an acceptable part of the working class. They’re doing a disservice to the left, minorities, and the working class.
I’m a poverty law attorney. All of my clients live at less than 125% of federal poverty guidelines, or a bit more than 1k a month. Most of my clients have incomes between $750 and $1000 per month. Yang’s UBI proposal would be devastating for my clients. Anyone making $750 a month (probably because they are permanently and totally disabled with little prior work experience and therefore receiving SSI) basically can’t survive on that income without food stamps, Medicaid, the electric/fuel assistance programs, and/or subsidized housing. I think 80-90% of my clients are people with debilitating physical or mental health problems – often undiagnosed developmental disabilities – or are seniors who have no retirement savings/ran out of savings.
The most insidious part of his proposal is that many of the people trapped in poverty will not realize the monetary benefit of the programs they would be required to give up to get the shiny and exciting $1000 cash.