Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Kenya, policymakers all over the world have become interested in basic income as an answer to poverty, unemployment and the bureaucratic behemoth of the modern welfare state.

No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.

Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure.

Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.

The minimum wage in Denmark is about twice that of the United States, and people who are totally out of the labor market or unable to care for themselves have a basic income guarantee of about $100 per day.

My mission is to eradicate poverty.

We will not rest until this war [on poverty] is won.

How will we deal with a world where leisure is abundant and there aren't enough good-paying jobs to go around? To meet this political and economic meta-challenge, the hot new idea is the universal basic income — using some of the wealth generated by all this new technology to guarantee everyone a baseline income, whether they are working or not.

Guaranteed income schemes can take various forms, but in the simplist the government sends every citizen an annual check in an amount sufficient to keep the worlf from the door when misfortune strikes, but not large enough to satisfy anyone's idea of a good life.

The most important thing is guaranteed livable income, which will take a while to bring in because it means all the provinces have to participate.

I'm a capitalist, and I believe that universal basic income is necessary for capitalism to continue.

A universal cash transfer in the form of a minimum guaranteed income would mean that automatically everyone has something to fall back on without having to deal with the vagaries of their local panchayat.

A universal basic income doesn't give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice.

Instead of a universal basic income, we could have a basic income guarantee. Or, as economists prefer to call it, a negative income tax.

While it won't solve all the world's ills - and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce - a basic income would work like venture capital for the people.

The claim that if people had a basic income they would become lazy is prejudiced and has been refuted many times in many places.

The Curse of poverty has no justification in our age...The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

we're focusing too much energy on the symptom rather than the disease: Our real enemy is poverty, not welfare.

We are living in the richest country in the history of the world, yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country and millions of people are struggling to put food on the table. It is my absolute conviction that everyone in this country deserves a minimum standard of living and we've got to go forward in the fight to make that happen.

If the economy is growing fast, there is call for a distributing income from the rich to the poor to to put in place social safety nets.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.