Universal Basic Income Has Been Tested Repeatedly. It Works. Will America Ever Embrace It? [View all]

In January 2019, Zohna Everett was sitting in an airport when her phone rang. On the other end of the line, a voice informed her that she had been randomly chosen to receive $500 a month as part of something called the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration.

When Everett had first heard about SEED a few weeks earlier, she’d wondered if it might be a scam, as things that sound too good to be true often are. Her pastor assured her that it was real — that 125 residents of poor neighborhoods in Stockton, Calif., would receive money as part of a groundbreaking experiment. When she got the call, Everett thought she was receiving a one-time payment, which was thrilling enough. Then the woman on the phone told her she’d receive $500 every month for a year and a half, with no strings attached. She nearly collapsed from joy right there in the airport.

Suddenly, Everett — who in 2018 had lost her job as a Department of Defense logistics specialist, had subsequently tried to make ends meet by driving for DoorDash, then had taken out significant unsubsidized loans to attend college online in a bid to improve her employment prospects — saw a path back to stability. She would be able to cover her car payments and the rent, to keep her phone on without giving up her monthly tithe to her church.

For Mayor Michael Tubbs, that was exactly the point. Since childhood, Tubbs had watched his mom and his friends struggle with everyday expenses while receiving only minimal help from the government in Stockton, one of the poorest cities in the country, which sits in California’s Central Valley. He theorized that a relatively small guaranteed income — just $6,000 a year per recipient, enough to cover the occasional emergency expense or supplement a minimum-wage salary — would single-handedly eliminate the insecurity that governed the lives of many poor Stockton residents. And so, with funds and guidance from the nonprofit Economic Security Project, he created a pilot program — one of the first of its kind in the country. His goal was as simple as it was ambitious: to run a demonstration project so successful that national politicians would have no choice but to consider adopting guaranteed income as national policy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/24/universal-basic-income/