The Case for Basic Income: Freedom, Security, Justice by Jamie Swift & Elaine Power

Author:Jamie Swift & Elaine Power [Swift, Jamie & Power, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Social Services & Welfare, Social Policy, Social Science, Political Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity
ISBN: 9781771135481
Google: gs1KEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57526692
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2021-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Lance Dingman’s feelings about public support hadn’t changed that much. As with the old social assistance system, he still felt a pressing need. “I want to work off of BI,” he explained after he had been on Basic Income for some nine months. “I think that’s the main purpose of BI, to get as many people off it as possible. It’s a system that works if you can make it work.”6

THE LIMITATIONS OF CHARITY

Corporate-sponsored food bank appeals regularly refer to “tackling hunger”—an appeal that may have traction in a football-mad town like Hamilton. With respect to the food banks scattered across Hamilton’s charity landscape, however, Dingman was clear about his feelings. Adamant about maintaining his autonomy, he declared, “I never, ever go there. I didn’t feel I needed to. I wouldn’t do it. Because I took people to food banks. I’m a peer support coach.”

Dingman is far from alone among people whose incomes limit their grocery store purchases but are food bank refuseniks.7 It’s partly about the limited food bank selections on offer in a consumer society that screams “choice” at every turn. It’s partly about pride, with people like Dingman not wanting to be the objects of anyone’s charity. And it is also about the understanding that food banks do nothing to address the deeply embedded cycles of poverty.

According to a 2020 report from the PROOF research group, headed by prominent food insecurity researcher Valerie Tarasuk of the University of Toronto, there is “a four-fold difference between the number of people living in food-insecure households and the number receiving assistance from food banks. Further, there is no evidence that food charity is able to move households out of food insecurity.”8 Food insecurity is the jargon term that academics and Statistics Canada use when people don’t have enough money for food, or they are worried about where the next meal is going to come from.

Someone once defined insanity as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The observation is often erroneously attributed to Albert Einstein, but it does not take a genius to understand the importance of poverty in determining the poor health of so many. Most poor people cannot afford healthy diets. If they had enough money, they could. Evelyn Forget has pointed out a basic truth of health economics: “Poverty relentlessly drives up the cost of delivering health care.” As food insecurity, a sensitive marker of deprivation, worsens, health care costs increase. Adults who are the most food-insecure have health care costs that are almost 2.4 times those who are food-secure, especially with respect to medications.9

Insanity comes in with the dominant tin-in-a-bin approach. It may make individual donors who toss the canned tuna into the food bank bin feel good, offering the illusion that they’ve done something important. But the food bank experiment has been stubbornly repeated for some four decades with no apparent improvement in the food security of low-income Canadians. Insanity?

“It’s a systems problem,” said Dingman. “If we can’t make that revolving door stop, that’s a hell of a problem.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.