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发帖数: 1 | 1 这是2017年的旧闻
By Dylan Matthews on September 12, 2017 5:00 pm
希拉里·克林顿（Hillary Clinton）在竞选回忆录《发生了什么》（What Happened）
中最令人震惊的一段话中，揭示了她与员工共同制定但从未实际发布的竞选建议：由碳
和金融交易税资助的美国人的普遍基本收入。
她在接受Vox的埃兹拉·克莱因（Ezra Klein）采访时说：“我非常想传达一个承诺，
试图找出增加收入的方法。” “阿拉斯加模型每年都会根据有关石油和天然气收入的
公式向每一个阿拉斯加人写一张支票，这对我来说真的很有趣。”
这是本书的相关段落，第239页：
在竞选总统之前，我读过一本书，作者是彼得·巴恩斯（Peter Barnes）着的《为所有
人带来自由和红利：如何在工作不足时挽救我们的中产阶级》一书，探讨了创建一个新
基金的想法，该基金将利用共享国家资源以向每个公民派发红利，就像阿拉斯加常设基
金每年如何分配该州的石油使用费一样。共享的国家资源包括从公共土地中提取的石油
和天然气以及广播公司和移动电话公司使用的公共无线电波，但这只能使您走得更远。
如果您将国家的金融系统视为共享资源，则可以开始通过金融交易税等方式筹集真实资
金。与我们呼吸的空气和碳定价相同。
将资金资本化后，您可以每年为每个美国人提供适度的基本收入（重点是Vox的信息）
。除了可以掏腰包，还可以使每个美国人感到与我们的国家和彼此之间的联系更加紧密
，这比我们自己更大。我和我的丈夫一样对这个想法着迷，我们花了数周的时间与政策
小组合作，看它是否足以纳入竞选活动。我们将其称为“美国阿拉斯加”。不幸的是，
我们无法使数字发挥作用。为了每年为每个公民提供有意义的红利，您必须筹集大量资
金，这要么意味着要征收新税，要么就意味着蚕食其他重要计划。我们认为这很令人兴
奋，但并不现实，因此将其留在架子上。那是负责任的决定。我现在想知道我们是否应
该谨慎对待，并将“美国阿拉斯加”作为一个长期目标，并在以后弄清细节
Hillary Clinton almost ran for president on a universal basic income
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t make the numbers work.”
By Dylan Matthews on September 12, 2017 5:00 pm
In perhaps the single most astounding passage of her campaign memoir What
Happened, Hillary Clinton reveals a campaign proposal she formulated with
staffers but never actually released: a universal basic income for Americans
, funded by carbon and financial transaction taxes.
"I wanted very much to convey a commitment to trying to figure ways to raise
incomes," she said in an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein. "The Alaska model
where they write a check to every single Alaskan every year based on a
formula about the oil and gas revenues was really intriguing to me.”
Here’s the relevant passage of the book, on page 239:
Before I ran for President, I read a book called With Liberty and Dividends
for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough, by Peter
Barnes, which explored the idea of creating a new fund that would use
revenue from shared national resources to pay a dividend to every citizen,
much like how the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes the state’s oil
royalties every year. Shared national resources include oil and gas
extracted from public lands and the public airwaves used by broadcasters and
mobile phone companies, but that gets you only so far. If you view the
nation’s financial system as a shared resource, then you can start raising
real money from things like a financial transactions tax. Same with the air
we breathe and carbon pricing.
Once you capitalize the fund, you can provide every American with a modest
basic income every year [emphasis Vox’s]. Besides cash in people’s pockets
, it would also be a way of making every American feel more connected to our
country and to one another—part of something bigger than ourselves. I was
fascinated by this idea, as was my husband, and we spent weeks working with
our policy team to see if it could be viable enough to include in my
campaign. We would call it “Alaska for America.” Unfortunately, we couldn
’t make the numbers work. To provide a meaningful dividend each year to
every citizen, you’d have to raise enormous sums of money, and that would
either mean a lot of new taxes or cannibalizing other important programs. We
decided it was exciting but not realistic, and left it on the shelf. That
was the responsible decision. I wonder now whether we should have thrown
caution to the wind and embraced “Alaska for America” as a long-term goal
and figured out the details later.
Let’s be clear: “Alaska for America” would mean, just like the actual
Alaska Permanent Fund, establishing a universal basic income. And Clinton
understands this, even calling the benefit a “basic income.”
The Alaska Permanent Fund is a state-owned investment fund established using
oil revenues. It has, since 1982, paid out an annual dividend to every man,
woman, and child living in Alaska. In 2015, with oil prices high, the
dividend totaled $2,072 per person, or $8,288 for a family of four. In 2016
it was cut down to $1,022 due to money being diverted to other purposes, and
in cheaper gas years it can dip into the $800 to $900 range. But regardless
, it is the only program in the US — and one of the few in the developed
world — offering cash to every citizen, no strings attached.
And it works. It’s tremendously popular, supported by Republican and
Democratic governors alike (Sarah Palin was a big fan during her time in
office), and research by University of Chicago economist Damon Jones and
University of Pennsylvania economist Ioana Marinescu has found that the
dividend doesn't discourage work. It appears to cause a small increase in
the share of people working part time, but Jones and Marinescu conclude it
has no overall effect on the share of the population working. Indeed, the
part-time work boost could come from people entering the workforce anew.
This is a less politically appealing comparison than Alaska, but Iran has a
similar program. While winding down the country’s extensive oil subsidies
for citizens, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad implemented a flat cash dividend
, paid out to every man, woman, and child in the country. It's been dialed
back a bit since, but it also has shown few negative effects. A study
examining the Iranian basic income’s effect on work concluded that “the
program did not affect labor supply in any appreciable way.” That’s
especially astounding given the size of the benefit: In 2011, when it was
introduced, it provided about 29 percent of the median household income on
average. In the US, that would mean paying out $16,390 to the average family.
And in both the Alaskan and Iranian cases, the benefits are provided with no
increase in household taxes, making the program particularly attractive.
Taxing energy is a pretty efficient source of funds.
Peter Barnes, the entrepreneur and environmentalist from whom Clinton
borrowed the idea, has actively pushed for a similar model of funding basic
income in the US as a whole (he prefers the term “base income,” to reflect
that the amount of money being transferred wouldn’t be enough for someone
to live on). In his variation, instead of using oil revenues, you’d tax
pollution and financial speculation, which he argues is similarly efficient
and also reflects a sense that the climate and the financial system are
shared resources.
“It is an answer — perhaps the answer — to long-term economic stagnation,
a trickle-up form of Keynesianism that would stimulate our economy through
increased household spending,” Barnes writes in the Boston Review. “
Moreover, if funded by fees on unproductive activities such as pollution and
speculation, it would help solve two other deep problems of twenty-first-
century capitalism: climate change and financial instability.”
So why didn’t it happen? From Clinton's telling, the proposal was abandoned
due to one of the recurring sticking points with basic income plans: They
cost a lot of money. Clinton wanted to provide a "meaningful" dividend, and
didn't think she could do it with a realistic set of new taxes.
"We dug deep, tried to explain it to some people, and it just was hard for
people to grasp what we were talking about because most Americans in the
Lower 48 didn’t have any idea about what was going on in Alaska," she
elaborated to Vox’s Ezra Klein.
This is an understandable conclusion. A basic, or even just “base,” income
was too far out there for Bernie Sanders to endorse during the 2016 primary
; even the leftmost candidate in the race thought it was either undesirable
or too hard to explain and pitch to Americans.
But the fact that a major-party presidential nominee seriously considered
basic income as a proposal is nonetheless a huge sign of the idea’s
progress and increasing influence.
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