Quotes & Sayings About Basic Income

Most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics. Yet they do not hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is called 'income distribution'. — Thomas Sowell

Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance. — Matthew Desmond

While no amount of financial wealth can guarantee an experience of prosperity, it is possible to experience prosperity at almost any level of income, except when we are unable to meet our basic physical needs. — Shakti Gawain

Step 1: Secure your basic needs: food, clothing and shelter. Step 2: Create a $1,000 emergency fund. Step 3: Pay off all debts as fast as possible, other than your home. Step 4: Increase your emergency fund until it reaches 6 to 10 months of your basic needs. Step 5: Begin saving 15 percent of your income for retirement. Step 6: If so desired, save for your child's college education. Step 7: Pay off your mortgage early. Step 8: Express your values with your money. Tactics That Bring Your Strategies to Life Live by a zero-balance budget, created at — Erik Wecks

In order for our land contribution model to be complete, we have to consider two more aspects of affordable housing. First, we have to minimise the inequality between tenants and landowners, and second, we have to provide the homeless with guaranteed access to land.

Because higher rents are a byproduct of increasing community affluence, tenants get priced out (gentrification). The option of rent control results in a shortage of housing and lower quality housing.

What's required is a new mechanism by which higher rents are equally shared with all residents - a Universal Basic Income, financed entirely by community land contributions.

The homeless should receive free public housing with the cost deducted from their Universal Basic Income. — Martin Adams

Really living like Christ will not mean reward, social recognition, and an assured income, but difficulties, discrimination, solitude, anxiety. Here, too, the basic experience of the cross applies: the wider we open our hearts to others, the more audibly we intervene against the injustice that rules over us, the more difficult our lives in the rich unjust society will become. — Dorothee Solle

The basic issue of an American society which is fair, which is providing opportunity for all, is nowadays being replaced by the correct perception that we're living in a rigged economy - where it doesn't matter how hard you worked, the result will be all the income goes to the people at the very top. It's leading to a lot of frustration and anger, and people want some fundamental changes to the way we do economics and growth. — Bernie Sanders

But beyond a basic minimum, the relationship between income and happiness is slight. Research bears out Maslow's analysis that the higher needs are love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. The most significant determinants of happiness are strong and rewarding personal relationships, a sense of belonging to a community, being valued by others and living a meaningful life. These are precisely the things in which religion specialises: sanctifying marriage, etching family life with the charisma of holiness, creating and sustaining strong communities in which people are valued for what they are, not for what they earn or own, and providing a framework within which our lives take on meaning, purpose, even blessedness. — Jonathan Sacks

The Social Security program is a pact between workers and their employers that they will contribute to a common fund to ensure that those who are no longer part of the work force will have a basic income on which to live. It represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute. — Jimmy Carter

Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I'm talking about welfare for all. Without it, you're going to have warfare for all. — Jerry Brown

Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure. — Henry Hazlitt

Look back over the last hundred years and you'll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income - as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 - the nation as a whole grew faster, and median wages surged. The basic bargain ensured that the pay of American workers coincided with their output. In effect, the vast middle class received an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth. We created that virtuous cycle in which an ever-growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats. On the other hand, during periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion - as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day - growth slowed, median wages stagnated, and we suffered giant downturns. — Robert B. Reich

Henceforth, federal, state, and local governments shall make no law nor establish any program that transfers general tax revenues to some citizens and not to others, whether those transfers consist of money or in-kind benefits. All programs currently providing such benefits are to be terminated. The funds formerly allocated to them are to be used instead to provide every citizen with a Universal Basic Income beginning at age twenty-one and continuing until death. The maximum annual value of the grant at the program's outset is to be $13,000, of which $3,000 must be devoted to catastrophic health insurance. — Charles Murray

The minimum wage in Denmark is about twice that of the United States, and people who are totally out of the labor market or unable to care for themselves have a basic income guarantee of about $100 per day. — Bernie Sanders

Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey. — Jeremy Rifkin

The opportunities, income, schools facilities, the basic income support that the government provides or any of these things .. public transport arrangements we have.. all these are part of the way our lives and freedoms are effected. — Amartya Sen

Many of us believe that if we only had more money, we would be happier. Yet--excluding those who live below the poverty line and cannot meet their basic needs for food, shleter, safety, or medical care--greater wealth generally does not lead to substantially greater well-being. One explanation for why more money does not bring lasting happiness is that people become accustomed to their higher standard of living and desire even more money to maintain their happiness. In addition, when people become wealthier, they tend to compare themselves to other wealthy people, rather than to their peers at their previous income levels. — Ted Cascio

Whenever judges of the highest state courts have actually examined the details of the "savage inequalities" that continue to be imposed on most low-income and minority students in the United States, they have virtually unanimously held that these conditions deny students the opportunity to be educated at the basic levels that are needed to function well in contemporary society. — Michael A. Rebell

Similarly, though the United States is one of the world's richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn't cost much, but showing off does. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

I didn't grasp the basic principle of being a promoter, which was: Put on music but also generate an income. I was on the dole most of the time. — Alex Kapranos

The average family earning minimum wage spends 141 percent of their income struggling to meet basic needs - food, shelter, clothing. — Sherrod Brown

It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men's theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother's influence. Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children's needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is mother's influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child's basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother's loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother's influence and teaching in the home - and how apparent when neglected! — Ezra Taft Benson

The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state - you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax - but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned them. — Dennis Prager

As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we're going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production - year after year after year - some of that needs to be reinvested in society. — Edward Snowden

The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world's population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest went from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995.3 The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services, and basic education to every person on the planet.4 — John Perkins

I had these Whitman coin boards with slots for the coins. I said to Don, 'It looks to me like we could take these coin boards and use them as molds for casting slugs.' "Danly was the brains of the operation. And so, sure enough, he learned how to pour these molds for casting slugs, and I supplied the coin boards. We would try to use the slugs for vending machines for soda pop and things like that. Our basic formula was to have our income in currency and our outgo in slugs. — Alice Schroeder

Personnel and their capacity for work on their exact jobs is the basic key to income and success. — L. Ron Hubbard

It seems even more worrisome that the world has become even more integrated to the extent that a country that fails to produce its own basic consumables will end up consuming its whole income in outsourcing them. — Tony Osborg