No one's life should be tied to a job. Just as this crisis has shown that healthcare should never be tied to employment, neither should food and rent be tied to employment. Survival income is a right, not something for politicians to argue over.
Income should *NEVER* fall to $0.
Income should *NEVER* fall to $0.
We should have had UBI decades ago. Pretend we did. What does right now look like with a $1200/mo UBI? Maybe the $600/wk unemployment boost would have been $300/wk and Congress would be arguing over whether to boost people from $1200 to $2400 instead of from $0 to $2400.
With everyone starting each month with $1200 instead of $0, how many more people would have been able to pay their rent/mortgage each month on time for the past four months, instead of one third of the population being unable to? Would we be looking at an eviction crisis at all?
Our ability to feed our families every day, and not be living on the streets, should not rely on legislators having their shit together. Our Congress is full of people who only care about their donors. They do not care about us, and they should not be able to create homelessness.
We need unconditional basic income. We needed it a long time ago, and we definitely need it during a pandemic and when 34 million people are jobless. However, we also have to fix our government. We must make systemic reforms that permanently improve who represents us.
Our government is broken because we have let our democracy be eroded away as we also let inequality grow. We need ranked-choice voting and proportional representation. We need to end gerrymandering. We need donation dollars for all to flood out the influence of big money donors.
We just can't go on like this anymore with these shitty people in positions of great power. We need to make it so that shitty people find it extremely difficult to win elections & also have strong incentives to work cross-party in OUR interests, not only the interests of the 1%.
It's up to as as citizens to look beyond Team Red and Team Blue to make sure that we improve the entire system. Voting by mail shouldn't even be a debate because we already should all be able to vote from home anyway.
We must restore, grow, improve, and expand democracy itself.
We must restore, grow, improve, and expand democracy itself.
If we are to have a strong democracy, we must make it so that as many people as possible can truly participate in democracy. UBI is one of the biggest tools of all to help make that a reality, as are the changes recommended by @fairvote and @representus.
