The Democrat leader of the Mayors for a Guaranteed Income wants the government to provide help in the form of cash payments to Americans.
Michael D. Tubbs claimed the nation is “unaffordable” for working families as guaranteed basic income programs have popped up in areas across the United States, Fox News reported Friday.
Tubbs, who was the mayor of Stockton, California, from 2017 until 2021, blamed the “affordability crisis” as the reason people were struggling to afford rent, childcare, and food. He believes the federal government should have programs to get cash into citizens’ hands.
“We have wars in Iran, regime change in Venezuela. We get it, the healthcare system and the big, ugly bill. So people are saying that social safety is being frayed,” he said. “That wealth is further being taken from the many and given to the few, and there has to be a government solution because this is a government-caused problem… inflation, unaffordability, this is all a direct result of government policy.”
In 2017, Stockton considered offering a basic income grant of $500 a month to poor people in the area, making it the first city in America to do so, Breitbart News reported at the time:
Mayor Michael Tubbs announced the program on Wednesday, according to Capital Public Radio. “This is not a handout, it’s a hand up,” he reportedly said. The program is to be privately funded by the Economic Security Project, which Capital Public Radio describes as “a network of researchers, elected leaders, and organizers” and which is run by Facebook co-founder and Barack Obama campaign veteran Chris Hughes.
Stockton declared bankruptcy in 2012, a result of high pension costs, economic stagnation, and “a 15-year spending binge.” Though the city and its finances have recovered somewhat, and the city emerged from bankruptcy in 2015, poverty remains a problem.
In 2024, the Foundation for Government Accountability published an article about why states should ban universal basic income, noting such programs discourage people from working and trap them in a state of dependency while also stifling the economy:
Unsurprisingly, universal basic income programs have been proposed by socialist politicians for decades, both in the United States and abroad. These programs disincentivize work and promote increased dependency on government handouts, at the expense of individual responsibility. There are currently more than 70 active pilot programs, costing taxpayers millions of dollars. A growing number of states are unwittingly playing host to these socialist experiments and should take immediate action and ban universal basic income.
President Donald Trump in December said Democrats were conning Americans with the term “affordability” after the price of goods went sky high due to inflation when former President Joe Biden was in office, per Breitbart News.
The outlet reported in January that auto insurance rates fell amid President Trump’s deportations.
“Under Trump’s low-migration policies, Americans’ wages are up, housing costs are down, inflation is declining, transport costs are shrinking, crime is dropping, and corporations are spending heavily to help Americans become more productive and earn more wages for each working hour,” the outlet said.
After the United States and Israel launched joint strikes against Iran’s Islamic regime on Saturday, Breitbart News’s John Carney warned Thursday about the economic costs of a prolonged war with the Middle East country.
“A short, bounded conflict can be absorbed. A prolonged one doesn’t just raise the odds of a recession. It can lower the economy’s speed limit by diverting real resources, depressing investment, and extending a politics of permanent emergency,” he wrote.
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