Guaranteed Income

OUR MOTIVATING CHALLENGE

The US spends upwards of $400 billion every year on an extensive infrastructure of anti-poverty programs. While these programs have lifted millions of families above the poverty line, there is tremendous potential to make the safety net more effective, accessible, and cohesive. Many benefits are administered as inefficient in-kind vouchers, require complex application procedures, and either conflict with other programs or interact in ways that risk sudden loss of access.

Guaranteed income – aid in the form of unconditional cash – offers a solution to many of the core problems of the safety net. Instead of cumbersome in-kind benefits, guaranteed income provides flexible cash that empowers recipients to meet their unique needs. It eliminates unnecessary hurdles to access and replaces fragmented programs with a unified, cohesive benefit that avoids disincentives to upward mobility. 

While the recent proliferation of pilots across cities and states has generated some momentum, a true guaranteed income policy at the federal or state level is highly limited by today’s political reality. Without diminishing the importance of research and advocacy over a long time horizon, there are incremental reforms, inspired by the underlying philosophy of guaranteed income, that can improve the quality of social support for low and moderate-income Americans in the short term. Without such a phased approach, we believe the energy and momentum behind unrestricted cash risks stalling.

JFI helped build the guaranteed income field from its infancy through a combination of pilot development, field research, and policy analysis. Our evolution of the Guaranteed Income portfolio recognizes that we are at an inflection point; rather than emphasizing foundational basic research on cash and guaranteed income, we aim to translate the principles of guaranteed income to an expanded set of possible complementary reforms to poverty relief and economic mobility programs.

Currently, the community of guaranteed income advocates, researchers, and policymakers have embraced certain forms of intermediate advancement—namely in the form of pilot cash demonstrations and the expanded child tax credit. These are important steps that set specific tractable and achievable targets. Our initiative aims to chart an expanded set of possible kindred policies informed by the core principles of guaranteed income.

WHAT WE DO

We pioneer research on high-impact policies to reduce poverty and facilitate upward mobility by applying the core principles of guaranteed income to improve the safety net: making more programs distribute cash, making programs more accessible, and better ensuring the plethora of individual programs create a cohesive whole. These core principles represent a continuum, not a dichotomy. Incremental reforms can move policy towards better approximating the flexibility, accessibility, and cohesiveness that guaranteed income envisions while still falling short of what staunch guaranteed income advocates would prefer. We embrace new programs to fill holes in the existing safety net, but we do not shy away from reforms of incumbent programs to make them more equitable and efficacious. Our work spans the entire continuum of policy development, from incubating novel ideas to partnering with policymakers and advocates around implementation details to turn ideas into reality. 

OUR GOALS

Our goal is to transform the US safety net to reduce poverty and facilitate upward mobility by making the safety net better resemble the core principles of guaranteed income. While our applied work to date has been mostly focused on reforming tax credit programs, our future work will span across an array of different programs, from housing vouchers to disability programs to disaster assistance. Our north star is not simply research for the purpose of intellectual edification, but actual policy change. And we hope to help shape the agenda of the broader guaranteed income community towards a wide range of policy targets beyond the child tax credit and pilot demonstrations.

OUR IMPACT

Our work on guaranteed income has spanned the continuum of policy development. On the foundational research and agenda-setting front, we authored an influential series on how guaranteed income fits within the existing safety net, providing valuable conceptual clarity at a time public understanding of guaranteed income was in its infancy. We led the evaluation of one of the earliest, largest, and most rigorous randomized control trial of basic income in the US–the Compton Pledge, providing unique evidence on different designs for cash disbursement. Internationally, we evaluated one of the largest permanent Guaranteed Income programs in the world in Maricá, Brazil. And we helped popularize state level refundable child tax credits when progress on the federal credit expansion stalled, placing a pair of articles in the New York Times news and opinion section. 

On the applied policy analysis side, we have provided a compendium of research on the expanded child tax credit. Our work helped clarify the debate around the extension of the expanded credit, showing what potential compromise options would retain a significant anti-poverty impact and which would mostly serve to support middle and high-income parents. At the state-level, we have provided in-depth analytical support to several successful CTC expansions. For instance, we partnered with policymakers and state-level advocates in Colorado on reforms to their child tax credit program to ensure it included all low-income children–including the design of the credit, cost estimates, and implementation concerns. The bill we helped design passed with bipartisan support, increasing benefits for over 70,000 low-income children every year. And we have helped pioneer the idea of turning housing vouchers into a more flexible cash benefit–providing detailed policy advice to the federal government and working with partners on a pilot demonstration–the housing pledge.

PARTNER WITH US

While JFI continues to share design and strategy expertise with pilots, we are increasingly focused on policy design: how cash transfers can make our social safety net work better for the working and middle classes, and what financing mechanisms can help sustain them. To that end, we provide policymakers (mayors, state legislators, economic development teams, etc.) and advocates with policy analysis, including microsimulations of proposed legislation and studies of interactions among existing programs. We are eager to partner with individuals or institutions to extend this work internationally – and to expand our field of study beyond traditional guaranteed income / UBI into other social programs (e.g. housing, healthcare) where the principles of unconditional cash may be beneficial.

PARTNERS

• THE FUND FOR GUARANTEED INCOME

• POLICYENGINE

• ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE

• Maricá Basic income evaluation

• The Freiburg Institute for Guaranteed Income Studies

• ABC COALITION

• INCOME MOVEMENT

• URBAN INSTITUTE