Take a look at the latest data on the working-age poor in America, care of the US Census Bureau:
What stands out is that 63% of the working-age poor did not work even one week in 2018. What’s up with that? I imagine some of these nonworking individuals were students or recent students taking a gap year, and some were disabled. But those groups wouldn’t count for even half the nonworking poor. Obviously, many are parents living with their children - but note how many of the poor live alone or with unrelated individuals. That means they weren’t living with their kids. Why aren’t those individuals working?
The following chart provides a clue:
Whatever keeps people from completing high school and getting at least some practical post-secondary education or training is keeping them from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Could be substance abuse, cognitive/learning issues, poor English skills, impulsive temperament, emotional dysfunction, family dysfunction, peer influence, and/or neighborhood effects. To name a few possibilities.
But causation is not destiny. Motivations and behaviors change in response to real-life outcomes and opportunities. A life of one failure after another undermines self-confidence and ambition, leading to more failure. A life of successive accomplishments builds self-confidence and ambition, leading to…social mobility. These accomplishments includes things like skills learned, courses completed, jobs well-done, and employers pleased. So how do people get on the path of social mobility when all they’ve known is failure?
One way is to make an offer that is hard to turn down: money tied to adult education and training. My specific proposal is something I’m calling the Adult Student Basic Income (ASBI). The ASBI would provide a basic income (say, $1,000/month) up to six years total (minimum one month at a time) for adults enrolled at least part-time in postsecondary training and education programs, from ESL classes to apprenticeships to graduate school - including online courses (a godsend for poor parents with young children). The ASBI benefit would be available to all working-age US citizens and legal residents (18-64) and not be means-tested, so recipients could work without jeopardizing their payments.
The ASBI would effectively combat poverty, income volatility, job instability, and lack of social mobility by subsidizing incomes while recipients increase their earning potential. Unlike many universal basic income proposals, the ASBI is time-limited and would not subsidize a permanent way of life. And while the ASBI is conditional, the required adult education and training is not so onerous as to preclude working at the same time. Plus, it’s affordable: most of its budget would come from elimination of some government programs (bye-bye Pell grants) and the reduction of others through attrition (e.g., lower enrollment in means-tested safety-net programs). Taxes would still have to be raised a bit, but not above Canadian levels.
This is doable. For more, see: The Adult Student Basic Income: Better than a Universal Basic Income: An Affordable Approach to Fixing the Same Problems.
Links:
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/266/tableB-1.xls
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pov/pov-01.html