An Alternative to UBI?

Over the long term, progressives can and should try to slowly shift the culture to persuade people that UBI is both ethically desirable and practically feasible. But we can’t wait to address economic insecurity. What we need is a UBI-like policy that successfully enhances economic security without putting the majority of voters’ noses too far out of joint.

Here is a realistic solution: free groceries for all.

All citizens would be provided with a relatively small amount of money unconditionally, say, $50 per month ($600 per year) for adults and $25 per month ($300 per year) for children. The money would be automatically transferred to a Grocery Electronic Card registered to each adult or parent (as is the practice for food stamps in the United States). These cards could only be used in registered establishments for the purchase of groceries and nothing else.

If enacted in the United States, the total cost of the program would be approximately $177 billion, or 0.6 percent of GDP. (In Canada, CAD$700 of free groceries would cost CAD$24 billion, or 1 percent of GDP, and in the UK it would cost £24 billion, or 0.9 percent of GDP, for £400 of groceries).

These are real and significant costs, no doubt about it, but they are not extreme. $177 billion is about 15 percent of what the US government currently spends on the military.

A program of this size could be paid for by raising taxes on the total income of the richest 10 percent of Americans by approximately 2.86 percent. Or alternatively, it could be paid for by instituting a wealth tax on the richest 1 percent at a rate of 0.41 percent (slightly more given the likelihood of some tax evasion). Since rich families would pay more in taxes than they would receive in free groceries, overall the program would act to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

Free groceries for all avoids the major objections that are often raised against UBI: the money cannot be spent on drugs or alcohol; hardly anyone would quit their job for this amount of money; and conservative politicians would find it extremely difficult to whip up moral outrage about $600 for free food, especially for children.

Most important, the survey data shows clearly that regular people here and now would be keen on this type of program.

The Populus survey on UBI is the closest example that I am aware of directly asking people to state their preferences for free money versus free food. The survey asked 2,070 British adults their opinion on the following statement: “Rather than cash, the state should provide citizens with basic food supplies and social housing to meet their needs.” In response, 43 percent agreed, and 27 percent disagreed (20 percent were neutral, and 9 percent didn’t know).

Additional evidence comes from the fact that although many Americans are staunchly opposed to “welfare,” they tend to be much more supportive of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, colloquially known as “food stamps”), which provides poor people with money to buy food, and only food. While large numbers of Americans believe that “government aid to the poor does more harm than good by making people too dependent on government,” surveys simultaneously find that 61 percent of people oppose reducing funding for SNAP.

Another study found that while 54 percent of Americans believe that too many people are dependent on the government for financial aid, only 36 percent are critical of food stamps. Interestingly, when Americans are presented with the objective facts of how much money for groceries SNAP recipients truly receive (an average of about $5.70 per family member per day), 66 percent of registered voters say that it should be increased, and only 4 percent say it should be decreased.

Strikingly, even 53 percent of Republicans believe that SNAP benefits should be increased. There is thus a broad bipartisan appeal to free food for the poor, even in a highly polarized political climate. (The Trump administration recently suspended payment of SNAP benefits for over two weeks, provoking an angry backlash).

This belief in the importance of food security for all is widely shared. In Canada, a recent survey found that 85 percent agreed that the government should ensure that no child in Canada goes hungry, and 82 percent agreed with the statement that “people going hungry in Canada goes against our values.”

Taken together, this evidence suggests that many people have very different moral intuitions about the government providing free cash versus free food. Whereas free cash is widely perceived as an undeserved luxury, free food is not; it is more often seen as a basic human right. Providing free cash strikes many as morally questionable, but providing free food is just basic human decency. The upshot is that free groceries has potential for wide cross-party appeal in a way that a conventional UBI does not.

Free Groceries for All

We know that a policy like this is perfectly technically feasible, since there is already a working example in the SNAP program. Originally set up in 1974, SNAP is now a tried-and-true program, benefiting 41.2 million people via an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card. Most groceries are eligible, but alcohol, tobacco, gasoline, and other such things are not. Grocery stores must register with the government before they can accept EBT payment, but it is quick and easy to do so (the process is free and online), and almost all are registered, including most convenience stores and all the major chains.

SNAP proves the viability of a policy like free groceries for all. We know how to provide people with electronic cards; we know how to register grocery stores; most important, we know that when people get extra money for food, it helps their lives and improves their health.

Of course, $600 will not dramatically change anyone’s life. Nevertheless, millions and millions of people will receive it, appreciating the help from the government and their neighbors. Life will become a bit easier and a little less scary. And when life feels safer, the trans person or immigrant down the way will also seem less threatening. A large body of research bears this out: when economic insecurity worsens, support for right-wing populism typically increases, and when economic security improves, support for right-wing populism tends to decrease.

One final, vital point: studying the evidence of welfare states over the last century, social scientists have discovered that once universal entitlements are established, they typically grow over time and are only very rarely abolished. Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as the “stickiness of universal programs.”

A striking example is the case of pensions (known as Social Security in the United States). Once reviled as a socialist abomination in the 1930s, they are now extremely popular and taken for granted as a basic American right. Their stickiness is such that even after forty years of neoliberalism, conservatives have had very little success in reducing pension generosity. Of course, this is not an unbreakable law of nature. But it is an important tendency: once democratic majorities achieve universal policies that benefit them, and once they become accustomed to them, they will be highly resistant to losing them.

Getting a universal policy on the books in the first place is the most difficult part. But if this can be accomplished, then there are good reasons for thinking that, over time, the populace will enjoy the benefit, take it for granted, push for it to be expanded, and refuse to tolerate reductions.

I first started thinking about free groceries for all for my home context of Canada, but the policy would work well for many countries. The United States is the one place where things are trickier, because a different kind of program already exists in the form of SNAP (SNAP provides more money than the policy discussed here, but to only a small fraction of the population). The fact that SNAP recipients are a relatively small pool of poor and disproportionately non-white people means that SNAP is stigmatized and lacks the political muscle to fight for its expansion in the way that a more universal program would. So in the US case, the goal should be to slowly expand SNAP, making it more and more universal.

At the end of the day, $600 of free groceries per year is not enough to remedy the titanic insecurity that currently exists. But as a first step, it has a lot of potential. The social scientific evidence regarding the tendency of existing universal social programs to ratchet upward implies that it is strategically smart for the Left to start small in order to get such a program on the books in the first place. As a universal policy, truly huge numbers of people would receive the benefit — roughly 330 million Americans, 38 million Canadians, or 68 million British citizens. These enormous numbers mean that once instituted, free groceries for all would quickly become normal, familiar, and completely unstigmatized.

And once it’s seen as normal, it will quickly become normative: seen as good and natural, with the result that any attempt to remove it will be fiercely resisted. Once millions of people are tangibly enjoying the benefit, it is likely that it will expand over time. In this way, free groceries for all may well serve as a practical stepping stone toward the achievement of a more robust and radical UBI down the road.