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But is basic income a good policy?

It’s certainly a good policy politically because those who benefit from it will probably vote for you. It’s probably a good policy economically because the beneficiaries, still being relatively poor, will immediately spend the money and boost the economy.

And it may well be neutral fiscally, because the money doled out in various unemployment and welfare programs, plus the cost of administering all those programs, may be around the same as the cost of bringing the poorest fifth of the population up to the level of the slightly higher earners in the next fifth in a single, simple payment.

If it should turn out to cost a bit more, it would be a small price to pay for raising so many people out of desperation and giving their children better opportunities for the future.

This was the kind of thinking that motivated the people who had lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War to build welfare states in all the developed countries in the quarter-century after 1945. They wanted to improve the lives of their citizens, but they also wanted to head off the populist anger and nationalist demagoguery that had made the war possible.

Those things are on the rise again because the gap between the rich and the rest has widened steadily for the past 40 years in the developed countries. Fixing it will require a reshaping of the welfare state, and nothing will narrow the gap faster than raising the incomes of the poorest.

Making that kind of change in normal times is a Sisyphean task, but when the government must confine much of the population to their homes because of the pandemic and many of them lose their incomes as a result, it tends to broaden people’s minds about the possibilities.

A small wager: The Spanish government will be only the first of many to propose a basic income as a permanent part of the economy before the current crisis is over.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.