Guaranteed income is an idea whose time has come

For families struggling to pay the bills, for parents juggling multiple jobs to try to keep things afloat, small amounts of cash can make the difference between making it or not, between having some breathing space or being suffocated by the daily grind. Simply giving cash to families in need is very effective at improving economic and mental well-being.

That’s a key takeaway from the many experiments with cash programs – guaranteed income – that have been playing out all across the country (and here in Oregon) over the past few years.

In this episode of Policy for the People, we explore the policy known as guaranteed income, an idea whose time has come. First, we speak with Shafeka Hashash, Associate Director of Guaranteed Income at the Economic Security Project, about the experiments with guaranteed income that we’ve been seeing in communities across the country, and what they teach us. 

Then we take a look at a guaranteed income pilot program right here in Oregon. We speak with Brandi Tuck of Path Home, who says that cash programs have the power to lift families out of poverty for good.

Transcript

For families struggling to pay the bills, for parents juggling multiple jobs to try to keep things afloat, small amounts of cash can make the difference between making it or not, between having some breathing space or being suffocated by the daily grind. In short, cash works. Simply giving cash to families in need is very effective at improving economic and mental well-being. That’s a key takeaway from the many experiments with cash programs, guaranteed income, that have been playing out all across the country and here in Oregon over the past few years.

In this episode of Policy for the People, we explore the policy known as guaranteed income, an idea whose time has come. First, we speak with Shafeka Hashash, associate director of guaranteed income at the Economic Security Project, about the experiments with guaranteed income that we’ve been seeing in communities across the country and what they teach us. Then we take a look at a guaranteed income pilot program right here in Oregon. We speak with Brandi Tuck of Path Home, who says that cash programs have the power to lift families out of poverty for good.

Juan Carlos Ordonez (host): Shafeka, can you explain the mission of the Economic Security Project? 

Shafeka Hashash: At Economic Security Project, our ultimate goal is to build ideas that create economic power for all Americans. And so we do this in a way that’s called ideas advocacy, which means you go and you promote the ideas that we support around economic freedom and putting cash in people’s pockets in different spaces.

And we also do this through policy development and working with folks who are supporting different policies, like the child tax credit or portfolio called guaranteed income – that’s my specialty – that’s supporting families and folks just having the cash in their pockets and the choice to do with it what will best support their families. 

Juan Carlos: Can say a little bit more about this policy that you just mentioned, guaranteed income. Can you give us a sense of what it is, what it looks like? 

Shafeka: So guaranteed income has a couple of just really fundamental principles to it. It is the fact that everyone has a unique situation in a unique context and knows what’s best in their life. And so we should actually just give folks the money and cash to support making the decisions that work best for their families.

And we should do it without forcing them to jump through these big hurdles and burdens and things to get the cash support, and that they don’t have to report back to us the dollars they spent. Oh, I put gas in my car today. I sign my kids up for soccer or swimming. I bought better quality food. So that’s exactly what guaranteed income is.

Juan Carlos: The idea of guaranteed income has been around for a while. Martin Luther King advocated for a guaranteed income. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of this idea, and also why there’s been a surge of interest in guaranteed income in recent years? 

Shafeka: One clarification I’ll make is that it was actually a group of women who got Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.interested in guaranteed income. And, you know, the one really at the helm was this woman called Johnnie Tillmon. And it was these women who were busting their butts working day in and day out and still not able to make ends meet and take care of their children. And they were like, you know, we are just not being paid fairly. We are not being treated fairly, and the welfare system is not working for us. In fact, it’s making it actively harmful for us. And what would be better? It would be this idea of the guaranteed income. And, Doctor King was actually really wonderful because he listened and learned and adopted this policy and talked about it really widely. He wrote speeches with it in it and whatnot. 

But what happened in the last few years is that in 2017-18 people were just really struggling. And there were two pilots in Stockton, California, and Jackson, Mississippi, basically polar opposite parts of the country. And they were getting this idea of modern guaranteed income back up and running, one through a mayor and one through sort of private funding, where elected officials just weren’t going to allow this to happen with public dollars. And they got it up and running. 

And then about a year or so after we were put into a global pandemic, jobs had to close to save people’s lives. People were dying at these just massively high rates. It threw families into this economic turmoil I’d never seen before. And then what we had, during the Biden presidency were these rescue plan act funds. And everyone, again, had their own unique circumstance. Everyone is facing different challenges one way or another. And they were like, we just need to give families cash. And that is what is needed. And so guaranteed income pilots exploded. I think it’s 38 states in the country. And now in the year 2024, 160 plus pilots and counting.

But the majority flew off in 2020 through 2022. You know, the deepest sort of pandemic years. Why is that? It seemed so obvious – give folks cash, let them determine what it is that they need. Is it a new laptop? Is it homeschooling? Is it putting their kids back in school? Is it finding a different job? Is it food security? Is it rent security, whatever it is? And the pandemic really made that so just obvious in front of your face that you couldn’t ignore it. What happened also during the pandemic is that for six months, we had something called the expanded Child Tax Credit. Something like 92% of folks received it. Not everyone knows they received it because it was just happening automatically.

Direct deposit into families bank accounts for six months where the vast majority of parents were receiving monthly assistance for the expensive act of raising a child. And I like to consider that the nation’s biggest guaranteed income pilot. It was just six months long, sadly, but it was literally 90 plus percent of folks with kids for six months had this recurring payment in their bank account.

We didn’t have to go back and report what you did with it. And that was really incredible for people. And what did we see? We saw poverty get literally cut in half in six months, which is absurd. You know, everyone’s like, oh, these challenges 50 years, 100 years to figure it out. And in six months you cut it in half.

Juan Carlos: I’m wondering if you can say more about what we have learned about guaranteed income based on the results of these various pilot programs and policies, during the pandemic. What impact can guaranteed income have on the lives of families, kids, communities? 

Shafeka: This is a really timely question because a good bit of research just this year. If you’d asked me a year ago, I could speculate, I could tell you about 1 or 2 pilots. But now I can actually tell you about a bunch of ones that have had research come out so we can, dig. In a Los Angeles guaranteed income pilot for over 3,200 folks, domestic violence and family violence plummeted. And not just during the pilot. It stayed sustained after the pilot because folks, largely women, had 12 months of guaranteed income, of a sustained payment to leave family violence. You can’t just talk about the effect that this has in the sense of, oh, now people aren’t in violence. That’s good. No, we have to talk about the thousands of women whose kids now don’t grow up in an abusive household and have that much more stability, and then have those effects play out. You know, long term, these are effects that you can’t even measure right now. 

There was another really big study called Open Research. This got a lot of headlines because Sam Altman had been one of the backers, you know, way back in the day. It was sort of his foundation, you know, prior to OpenAI. It kills me because the headline that the media latched onto was, oh, look, work decreased, work decreased. Do you know that that’s actually factually false? There were two populations for whom work decreased: for people under 30 who went back to school, people who largely hadn’t had the opportunity to go to school or had to stop going to school, and single parents. For nobody else did work decrease. Nobody else. Not two parent households, not non-parents. There were just single parents who quote unquote worked a whole three hours less a week. And what did all of their qualitative interviews show? So that they could be with their kids a little bit more. They went to sports games for the first time, or they got to take a Saturday off and do something nice with their family. And that’s the big, horrible headline that got reported was people, quote unquote, worked less. But it’s just that these single parents busting their butts wanted to be with their kids a little bit more. And it skewed the study. 

And so what else did we find from Open Research? We found that there was a 10% increase in neighborhood mobility. And these are things you can measure literally from, like the census, someone moved their family to a statistically better neighborhood, with better schools, with better safety, with better opportunities – all of these things kind of that economists say is one of the biggest predictors to future success. And so it also had those facts. I mean, I could go on and on. 

Juan Carlos: These pilot programs have been local programs. We’ve seen some examples of guaranteed income at the federal level. I’m wondering where the efforts to establish a guaranteed income nationally, where does that stand. Are there efforts to do so nationally? 

Shafeka: There’s been legislation for a national guaranteed income pilot, but something else that I think is really super cool is that there have been places like Flint, Michigan, where they’ve sort of modified the TANF code. And so TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, that’s a national program, but it gets passed down to states, and states get to sort of decide how they’ll use the money. And every state does it a bit differently. They implemented a guaranteed income program for every single person who is pregnant in the city of Flint, Michigan. It’s being expanded to five new places in Michigan.

To me, that’s a fantastic way of using a federal program. Extra cash to support a healthy delivery and pregnancy is important. You know, that extra income boost, during that first year of a baby’s life, which is when every family, no matter what your economic status is, has their biggest backslide in their income and economic status.

And so it’s a guaranteed income for that first year to help prevent this backslide. And so that’s a really big way that federal programs are being looked at, in addition to the different legislative pieces that are federal pilot bills. They could be these gigantic pilots for 50,000 folks in all 50 states, you know, looking at different populations.

There’s a representative in Kentucky who wants to do one, specifically looking at youth, people in foster care, people aging out of different youth systems and such. There’s another representative. Her name is Bonnie Watson Coleman. She just wants to do kind of an all out guaranteed income pilot for some 40,000 folks across the nation. There’s been a few different, you know, bills proposed.

But for me, what’s equally exciting, in addition to a national pilot, is this usage of our systems to say, hey, here’s a way they could actually be better like this Flint, Michigan one coming into other states. 

Juan Carlos: Shafeka, I’m wondering if you have any final thoughts on guaranteed income, what it could mean for our nation, for our communities, for our families?

Shafeka: Absolutely. So something that I hear all the time, in my work is, well, is guaranteed income by itself going to fix the hardest things on its own? Is it a silver bullet and you don’t need to do anything else in the nation? No, it’s not true. But for me, it is the most dignified, person-first, gives-you-your-choice-of what-you-need economic multiplier. Doesn’t matter your circumstance. It is the one that gives you the choice to change your future. 

Juan Carlos: That was Shafeka Hashash, associate director of guaranteed income at the Economic Security Project, discussing the growing movement around guaranteed income that’s playing out all across the country. And now we bring our focus to Oregon. For several years now, the organization Path Home has been conducting a guaranteed income program in the Portland metro area. Brandi Tuck, executive director of Path Home, joins us to discuss what they’ve learned about the power of cash transfers to improve people’s lives. Here’s my conversation with Brandi Tuck. 

Juan Carlos: Brandi, what is the mission of Path Home? 

Brandi Tuck: Path Home is a nonprofit whose mission is to empower homeless families with children to get back into housing and stay there. 

Juan Carlos: My understanding is that one of the areas of work of Path Home is a cash program. What does this program do? 

Brandi: Yeah, we based our basic income cash transfer program on worldwide research that shows the fastest and the most efficient way to end poverty for people is by giving them money and allowing them to manage their own budgets. So Path Home has been doing this for a few years. We give $575 a month to families for two years. It ends up being $13,800 of cash investment that the families are allowed to use unconditionally, in whatever way they want to improve their home situations.

We see families making some pretty big improvements in the outcomes of their lives. They get new education, they start businesses, they buy cars, they start savings accounts for the first time in their lives. And it’s really a way to truly elevate people out of poverty. For good. 

Juan Carlos: How did the program come about? What prompted Path Home to initiate a cash program, a guaranteed income program, as some folks call it?

Brandi: Yeah, it’s kind of a wild story. I have known about cash transfer basic income guarantee work for over a decade. I heard about it from a mentor a long time ago, and I thought, oh my gosh, that sounds amazing. And so I’ve always had it in the back of my head that it would be something I’d love to do. And we had a new board member join our board a few years ago in 2020. He used to work at Google Philanthropy, which funds a lot of the worldwide GiveDirectly work, which is worldwide cash transfer work in places like Kenya where there’s really high poverty. They’ve been doing this kind of work for about 40 years to improve the financial outcomes for people who are living on very low incomes around the world.

So our new board member joined and said, hey, do you know about cash transfer work? And I said, yes, I do. It would be so cool to have that at Path Home one day. And then literally three weeks later, someone called our main Path Home phone number and said, hey, I’m a donor and I’d like to fund a cash transfer program.

And he left this message and I said to our team, I said, call this guy back. And kind of get rid of him. This is this is probably just a spam call. And they called and they said, no, Brandi, I think you’ve got to talk to this guy. So I called him and sure enough, he funded a very small pilot project for two years.

It was just six families that we gave $575 a month for two years of cash assistance. It was really just a serendipitous opportunity. We used that opportunity of receiving this individual funding from this individual to show that this program really works. So we were able to more than triple the amount of families that are in this cohort.

We are now serving 20 families in the cohort, and we’re hoping to add another 20 next year. And so it’s really kind of amazing how it all happened. 

Juan Carlos: You mentioned earlier a little bit about what you have found out so far from the program, but I wonder if you can expand on what the results have been of the program over the past few years?

Brandi: You know, one of the quotes that really strikes me is that one of the moms in the program said, I didn’t know how stressed out about money I was every single second of every single day until all of a sudden I wasn’t. And now she’s spending time doing homework with her kids, going to soccer games and making dinner.

And these families are folks that they all have experienced homelessness. They’ve been helped move back into housing. They have some level of income, but they’re making just around the federal poverty level in income, which is very low income, basically minimum wage earners. And so, these families are stressed, they’re living paycheck to paycheck and having a really hard time of it.

And so we are tracking things like housing stability. We’re tracking income to debt ratio. We’re tracking kind of the emotional states, like the family’s overall sense of wellness, the family’s overall sense of joy. We’re asking the family to report how much time they feel like they’re spending together. And overwhelmingly, the families both in our first cohort and in our current cohort, the families are seeing massive improvements.

We do follow up surveys every three months, to get data from the families. Even just after the first three months of this current cohort, one of the families was able to buy a car for the first time. They’ve never owned a vehicle. They’ve been using public transportation their whole lives. And they were able to buy a car to get to and from work, which gives them so much more capacity to spend time with their kids at night.

Two of the families were able to go back and start professional education, trades programs at the community college level so that they will be able to make a living wage job when they get out of it. One of the families took their kids to Disney over the summer. They had never gone on a vacation together, ever, and they were able to go take their kids on a special trip. Even just after the first three months, 60% of the families said they were able to move into a better living situation where they had more stability and more safety. All of the families are reporting that they are feeling joy together, and that they’re spending more time together as a family. One of the families started their very first ever savings account.

They’ve never been able to save money, and they’d never had a savings account until now. And they’re able to put just a little bit of money away. But for them, the thought of actually saving money was just something that they never considered would be something they could do. And so it’s really making some pretty big changes for the lives of the families.

Juan Carlos: You mentioned that most of these families, maybe all, are employed. They work, they have income. One of the critiques that you often hear about cash transfer programs is that they might disincentivize work. I’m wondering if you have seen anything in that regard from the program that you are managing. 

Brandi: That’s a great question. All of the families that are in this program are required to have an income from some sort of source. So all of them are making about federal poverty wages. We have not ever seen that in any of our years that we’ve been doing this program. All of the families have continued to be employed. None of them have stopped working. In fact, what happens more often than not is that they’re able to get better paying jobs.

They’re able to invest either in their education or they’re able to take a risk, like changing industries and trying to go get a new job, a higher paying role. And they feel like they have this financial flexibility to take those risks and try something new and make more money. So, no, none of the families have stopped working and are using this basic income, as you know, their only source of funding. It’s only $575 a month. And so it’s a huge amount for people that are living paycheck to paycheck, but it’s not enough to support you without other income. And the families that we’re working with, they really see this as an opportunity to change their lives and not an opportunity to just chill out for a couple of years.

Juan Carlos: So Path Home is an organization that works to end homelessness. What role do you think a cash program, a guaranteed income, can play in keeping families housed? 

Brandi: I think it can play a really huge role. At Path Home, we believe that the families that we serve, they know their lives better than we ever will, and so they know what their families need and what they need to be working on.

And I feel like it’s such an empowering and dignifying and trauma informed way to work with people. We follow the housing first philosophy, where you minimize the amount of time someone experiences homelessness and quickly move them back into housing, and then you work with them to address all of the different things going on in their lives that led to homelessness.

And I think a cash transfer program can be really effective in this housing first philosophy, where it can just help people make the changes in their lives that they need to make faster because they don’t have that constant level of stress in the back of their mind, where they’re worried about how they’re going to pay their bills. They’re able to have more freedom to think and dream and think about what’s possible to get out of the trauma brain, where they’re just so focused on survival. They’re able to get out of that and to start thinking differently about their future, or they can see other possibilities for what their lives might look like.

And I think it pairs really successfully with some of our kind of traditional homeless interventions. And does it in a way that gives the power, the choice, the control over their lives to the families themselves so that they really feel empowered, they feel this sense of ownership over their own destinies, which so many people don’t feel because they’re part of these big systems where they don’t have a lot of control.

So I feel like it’s just an evidence-based, data-driven solution that has worldwide data behind it to show that it works. And I think locally here in our community, it can make a huge difference. 

Juan Carlos: What do you think it would take to scale up a cash program here in Oregon? And I’m also wondering what role you think the legislature has to play in that regard.

Brandi: Yeah, the only way that I see us being able to scale up a cash transfer program in Oregon is with a public investment. I think the legislature here could make an appropriation, a statewide appropriation to do this work, whether it’s at the pilot level or it’s a large funded program. There are other communities, other cities and other states that have dedicated public resources to basic income guarantee cash transfer programs.

And the results over there are astounding. And I feel like what we need here in Oregon is for the legislature to dedicate some amount of money, several million dollars a year, so that we can do maybe at least 200 households at a time, if not a thousand households at a time, to be giving this, unconditional cash to. I think that’s how we scale it.

That’s how other communities have shown that it can scale. And I think it’s imperative that we move forward, at a statewide level to do this work. 

Juan Carlos: Brandi, any final thoughts you want to share with us regarding the benefits of cash transfer and the program that you’re running? 

Brandi: I think, you know, all around the country there have been basic income guarantee programs that are started. There’s a guaranteed income community of practice where there are hundreds of programs around the country. And I feel like what we really need to do is to all work together to influence all of our state legislatures to make a big investment in cash transfer, basic income guarantee work. This is the kind of program that is trauma informed.

It supports people in a way to get out of homelessness and out of poverty that’s very dignified. And that retains ownership for folks. We’ve seen for so many decades that this is the kind of intervention that truly changes people’s lives. And we’re focusing here on outcomes. I think so much of our homeless services and our anti-poverty work focuses on outputs, the number of shelter beds that we’re providing, the number of meals we’re providing, the number of hygiene stations that we offer in the community. But we’re not tracking the outcomes. We’re not tracking the changes that are made in the lives of the people that we serve. 

Our cash transfer program shows we have so much data to show that this truly changes the outcomes for families that are living in poverty, and for me, it’s a no-brainer that we need to dedicate policy solutions and funding to work in a way that that ends homelessness and ends poverty for people across the world.