Dr. Margaret Flowers of the Green Party is racing for an open Senate seat in the State of Maryland. She’ll be on the ballot this November but has been blocked from participating in debates (as has been typical treatment of third parties for decades). So we gave her a chance to share why Maryland should vote her into the US Senate this November. This was her response when I asked her about Universal Basic Income.

Dr. Margaret Flowers: Even if we gave everybody access to healthcare, we would not improve our health outcomes because wealth inequality is one of the one of the biggest drivers of poor health outcomes, and we have a strong trend of increasing wealth inequality in this country. So a Basic Guaranteed Income basically says that every adult receives a check every month, of enough money to meet their basic food and housing, those types of basic things.

The reason I support it is it because this would immediately eliminate poverty, it would eliminate the need for poverty programs, and it would immediately stimulate the economy from the bottom up. You now have 50% of people in this country that only have 1% of our countries debt, and the lower 25% are in debt, so people are unable to pay for the food they need, the medicine they need…basic supplies…This is just really strangling out economy.

There’s a lot of reasons. Another one is…ultimately because of technology we probably won’t have a full employment economy. What we need to realize is we’re already subsidizing corporations in this country tremendously, through direct subsidies, tax loopholes, allowing them to offshore really literally trillions of dollars. So it’s not a matter of money, it’s a matter of priority.