Michigan Just Did A Universal Basic Income For New Moms In Flint

Let's cut some child poverty, more, again!

Photo by saiid bel on Unsplash

Earlier this month, the city of Flint, Michigan, launched a first-of-its-kind program to help parents and alleviate early childhood poverty by instituting something of a UBI program for pregnant people.

Since January 10, mothers in the city have been able to register with RxKids, a program that will give them $7,500, no questions asked, not means tested — $1500 in the middle of their pregnancy and then $500 a month for the first year of the child’s life. This is about twice as much money as parents got with the expanded Child Tax Credit, which lifted almost four million children out of poverty until West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin decided (literally) that parents would use the money on drugs and ruined it for everyone. (BREAKING, which we can’t wait to get to soon: The Senate and the House budget chairs just agreed to another expanded child tax credit. CNN calls it “a longshot,” but this is absolutely joyous news.)

In 2015, the US Department of Agriculture determined that a child will cost the average two-parent household between $9,300 and $23,380 a year. $7,500 cuts into a fairly large chunk of that, making it far more financially manageable for people to start families and to ensure that children are getting what they need.

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The fact that it’s universal is particularly smart. Means-testing makes people feel good — it rids them of the terror of money going to the undeserving. Means-tested programs are very often more complicated and thus often actually more expensive than universal programs because they require so much more administrative work. Were this programs means-tested, you would need people to do the work of determining eligibility for the initial $1500 payout and then again every month for the whole first year of the child’s life. With 1200 new babies born in Flint every year and the vast majority of households making less than the local living wage for those with one child — and with almost 70 percent of kids in the city living in poverty — means-testing would make the program considerably more expensive and unwieldy.

A universal program is less expensive, is easier to implement and doesn’t require families who participate in the program to file paperwork every month or weigh whether or not they can afford to take better jobs or even accept raises. After all, the whole point of the program is to alleviate stress, not to cause it. The fact that it’s a lump sum of cash rather than coming in the form of vouchers is also good, because families have different needs, and parents are the ones best suited to decide how that money can best benefit their children. After all, conservatives love parents’ rights, don’t they?

Bridge Michigan reports that “critics say Michigan shouldn’t spend tax dollars without tracking how they’re spent,” but tracking how they are spent also means more administrative costs. If the big fear is that people are going to take that money and spend it on drugs while they starve their children to death — well, that’s child abuse and it is dealt with in a much different way and should be dealt with whether they are getting $500 a month or not.

It feels necessary to note that this is happening in a state in which abortion is legal, not in any of the states forcing people to have children against their will. Reproductive justice involves much more than just the ability to have an abortion — it’s also about the ability to have children if that is what one wants.

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Not to be base, but’s it’s also a really freaking smart move to make, electorally speaking, for Democrats in the swing state. Programs that directly impact people’s lives, that they don’t want taken away, are usually a pretty good way to get them to the polls — especially when Republicans want to take those things away.

As early nutrition can have lifelong impacts on physical and psychological health, as well as cognitive abilities, this is actually something we all benefit from, whether we have children or not. Not to be all “we live in a society!” but, you know, we do live in a society. We have to live with and rely on other people, so we should all want them to be as undamaged as humanly possible, especially in early childhood.

If this program works out well — it’s funded to last five years — it could spread into other parts of Michigan as well as other cities around the country — and if Congress does pass this bill expanding the child tax credit (this is a breaking news, we will get to it!!), those kids are going to get a pretty good start in life.