A California city is launching the first US experiment in basic income — and residents will get $6,000 a year

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October 18, 2017 11:21 PM

Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs said that by August 2018 he hopes to enroll some of the city's 315,000 residents in a basic income program.

Stockton, California is expected to become the first US city to launch an experiment in universal basic income.
For a period of three years, a select group of residents will receive $500 a month, no strings attached.
Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs has studied basic income and believes it can be the solution to the lingering poverty in his city.

Stockton, California is expected to become the first US city to launch an experiment in universal basic income, a system of wealth distribution in which people receive a set amount of money just for being alive.

Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs said that by August 2018 he hopes to enroll an undisclosed number of Stockton's 315,000 residents in the program. Tubbs said the experiment — which is set would ideally last for a period of three years.

A radical system gets government approval

Stockton is a unique candidate for basic income, which has gained traction over the past few years as a solution to poverty and a safeguard against the looming threat of robot automation.

Tubbs is 27 years old. When he was elected last year at 26, he became the youngest US mayor in a city of more than 100,000 people. The city he oversees — technically an exurb, about 50 miles east of Berkeley — became the first in the country to file bankruptcy, in 2012. It is still very much in recovery.

Tubbs credits his rough-and-tumble upbringing as part of the inspiration for pursuing a creative, if radical, solution to poverty. "When things came up unexpectedly it would cause a lot of hardships," Tubbs told Vox.

That background was mixed with Tubbs' admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who himself had proposed a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens in 1967. King advocated for basic income "so we can bring to the attention of our nation this need ... which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negroes' economic problem and the economic problem many other poor people confront in our nation."

Planting a SEED

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