In September, Silicon Valley congressperson Ro Khanna introduced a bill calling for a $1.4 trillion expansion of the earned income tax credit, which would effectively create a small basic income for low-income working people via tax credits. In her new book, What Happened, Hillary Clinton writes that she considered rolling out a basic income policy during her 2016 campaign. What then? In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, which some have attributed to this very tension, questions about how to support the so-called working class have only grown. If robots and offshoring take all the jobs, or at the very least displace the low-skilled ones, the thinking goes, there may come a time when there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around. Lately, however, tech leaders, including Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Y Combinator president Sam Altman, have begun pushing the concept as a potential solution to the economic anxiety brought on by automation and globalization-anxiety the tech industry has played its own role in creating. The idea is not exactly new-Thomas Paine proposed a form of basic income back in 1797-but in this country, aside from Social Security and Medicare, most government payouts are based on individual need rather than simply citizenship.
