Gar Alperovitz— A guaranteed income for veterans

Around the world today there is a growing discourse about a guaranteed annual income, but the idea is hardly new. The concept of a basic income — whether as an unconditional payment or a guarantee that would top off whatever is earned to a level adequate to meet basic human needs — has enjoyed surprising support from both ends of the political spectrum. The free-market evangelists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both endorsed it, as did Martin Luther King Jr. and liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1976, Hayek wrote, “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income.”

In his final book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” King wrote that “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” Galbraith argued in the mid-1960s that we can easily afford an income floor and pointed out that this was “not so much more than we will spend during the next fiscal year to restore freedom, democracy and religious liberty, as these are defined by the experts, in Vietnam.” 

Seeing veterans struggle to keep themselves and their families housed and fed in the wealthiest country in the history of the world is a tragic reminder of our failure of will and of compassion.

Veterans are an obvious place to begin for other reasons as well: The veterans’ pension already guarantees a modest minimum income to returning servicemen and servicewomen unable to work because of disability or age. To qualify, a veteran must have served on active duty (including at least one day during wartime), be older than 65 or disabled and have an income of less than approximately $13,000 (for a single veteran without dependents). The road to a guaranteed income would begin by revamping this system. Simply removing the age and disability requirements from the existing pension system could guarantee a minimum income that would bring all the veterans of recent wars above the poverty line, at a maximum cost of roughly $5.5 billion a year.…

If some are uncomfortable paying veterans for “doing nothing,” an alternative proposal for a sensible contemporary safety net would be to implement a job guarantee, with unemployed and underemployed veterans paid living wages by a federal government willing to act as an employer of last resort. Cash-strapped municipal governments or local nonprofits could easily find ways to put the labor of hundreds of thousands of otherwise unemployed veterans to use rebuilding America’s communities.

Al Jazzera

A guaranteed income for veterans
Gar Alperovitz | Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy, University of Maryland