Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., on Wednesday said he supports a new type of welfare proposal that would entail the government paying people a basic salary once technological advancements put Americans out of work.
“I personally do think that the universal basic income — it has a lot of merit,” Ellison, the deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said during a panel discussion in Minneapolis. “As people are displaced, the truth is there’s still plenty of stuff for people to do. I don’t think that universal basic income means people sit around. I think it means they do other things that are necessary, like extra folks in the classroom to help out the teacher.
“There are things that are valuable and important that don’t necessarily have a market value, like in the 1930s, we paid artists to basically document the Depression. We went out and had writers document rural life in America that — who were enslaved, who were still living,” he added.
An audience member had asked Ellison how the U.S. government program should respond to the displacement of workers due to technological growth.
On Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden strongly criticized the idea of earning a paycheck for doing nothing and also making other taxpayers fund that initiative
“Every time someone would lose a job, my dad would say, ‘You know, Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about dignity, it’s about respect.’ It’s about your place in the community. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and saying, ‘Honey, it’s going to be OK.’ That’s what it’s about. Dignity,” Biden said. “Getting an annual wage, you sit home and do nothing. You strip people of their dignity.”
Last week, Ellison said he supports the idea of a “maximum wage.”
“If you were to say, ‘Look, if you make more than 20 times more than the people who actually make the products and do the services of your company,’ then we’re going to tax you more,” Ellison said. “But this idea that you can leave people in poverty as you are stacking up dead presidents like nobody’s business has got to come to an end,” Ellison continued. “I mean, the CEO of McDonald’s makes $9,000 an hour and they’re fighting people getting $15 an hour.”
