Our local progressives are obsessed with a bizarre thought: if only they can come up a way to transfer wealth from working people to the lower classes, who are mainly people of color, then all will be well: they will have fulfilled their revolutionary mission.
The problem is that all such methods of wealth transference are fiercely resisted by actual working people, who naturally resent it when government seizes the money they worked so hard to earn and gives it to people who didn’t earn it. This is the stumbling block progressives routinely run into, and always will: their plan is contrary to human nature.
This is the problem with the progressives’ “universal basic income” plan. There are politicians in Oakland—you know who they are—that insist on taking your money and giving it to others. This isn’t right, it isn’t fair, it doesn’t help anyone, and it ought to be illegal, but it’s not, which is why the City Council keeps trying to foist universal basic income schemes on us. The idea has been around for years, but it didn’t really gain traction until 2021, when the Oakland Resilient Families program was hatched by Libby Schaaf. ORF gave three hundred East Oakland families a monthly check for $600 to spend on whatever they wanted, no strings attached. The program was to last for 18 months. The motivation was pure sympathy: in the words of one lucky recipient, ORF “has helped me pay off some bills, I’m building my credit, and I’ve also been able to put some money away for my grandson’s college fund.”
When ORF’s 18 months were over, the city came up with a “Universal Basic Mobility” program, which gave 1,000 West Oaklanders prepaid debit cards worth $320 for use on public transit. That program is ongoing under Sheng Thao and remains under evaluation. It was based on an earlier mobility program in East Oakland, which ended in 2021. The project was evaluated in 2022, with mixed findings: it’s still not clear that it had any impact, beyond costing Oaklanders $243,000 and perhaps temporarily increasing the number of people of color who took BART, AC Transit and other forms of transit.
While the idea of universal basic income seems to have died down lately, the victim of the city’s disastrous budget deficit, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors has picked up the torch. The Board recently met to consider “whether structural social inequities can be reversed through solutions, such as Universal Basic Income,” according to East Bay Insiders. The BOS based its hearing on the notion, supported by healthcare agencies, that universal basic income results in “upticks on any of the health outcomes you see today,” according to the Alameda County Public Health Department.
The main criticism of such programs is essentially a moral one: They’re all based on race. When West Oakland, for instance, is chosen as the focus for various guaranteed income schemes, it’s because the population there is heavily Black. Universal basic income thus becomes just a new-fangled form of welfare. The underlying assumption of universal income supporters is that White people have some kind of built-in privilege while people of color suffer from racism. This is the bedrock belief of all progressive and woke politics, and in this blog I’ve repeatedly pointed out its intellectual dishonesty. If you believe that people of color are the victims of ongoing structural racism, then any amount of money you transfer to them won’t help, because the racism will be ongoing. There’s also zero evidence that universal basic income, of the type that Oakland and Alameda County propose, has worked, or can work. Instead, universal basic income is just one of those abstract socialist ideas that progressives love to promote, because it makes them feel better about themselves. That’s called virtue signaling, and we really have to reject it.
Steve Heimoff