Stimulus checks

[sukumvit boy]

"Who'd a thunk it !" How socialist, how unamerican, how wonderful.
I don't watch much television and get most of the news I care about from a few weekly magazines and journals, so imagine my surprise a few days ago when I noticed suspicious activity in my bank account.
I've been retired for a few years so I wasn't out of work or fired due to the pandemic and didn't think I was entitled . But there it was;"deposit from US Treasury $1,200.00"
And now Congress is talking of extending the program for up to a year.
Oh,Bernie Sanders with your crazy Socialist ,Un American talk of free health care ,free education and hints of a Universal Basic Income. I wish you had stayed in the presidential race...

[Stavros]

I was not sure about the Universal Basic Income which I think you thought might be worth exploring a year or so ago. It may now be something that should be reviewed if the rate of unemployment is going to remain high for some time to come, and paticularly if the definition of work changes. Ginni Rometty, Executive Chairman of IBM was on the BBC-2 Newsnight programme last night talking about how this current crisis may change working practices. She noted that whereas they were planning a conference to take place in one location with, I think 30,000 delegates, they shifted the conference online and had 100,000 attendees streaming in. She thinks more people will spend morre days of the week working from home, and that the first to suffer will be those layers of senior management who do not really do anything except delegate and are not involved in real work.

The point is that if AI and other modes of production reduce the amount of work and time a human is needed 'at' the workplace (wherever that is), but if there is not enough work to merit a wage as high as is needed for people to survive without a benefit, UBI may be a means of replacing unemployment benefit, while 'topping up' wages for those who have a job but not one that pays enough to survive.
Where will the money come from? If we continue to be high-consumption economies, the State will have to find the money from somewhere, which to me must mean a spread of taxes, with Corporations paying significantly more than they do now.

But I do think it needs more work -and imagination, and political will.