America’s Disposable People: Would Universal Basic Income Help?
By J. Simpson
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV
In 1776, future President of the United States Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It’s one of the most fundamental attitudes of the United States, setting into stone the meritocratic belief that anyone can move to the United States, work hard, and build a better life for themselves and their families.
Unfortunately for everyone living in the United States for the last 50 years, these beliefs have been greatly overstated. To paraphrase another great thinker, George Orwell, all men may be created equal, but some men are more equal than others. While Orwell may have been critiquing Communism when Animal Farm was published in 1945, that critique has become even more relevant to Capitalism.
Who’s Disposable In America?
Sarah Jones’ book Disposable uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens to spotlight the increasing inequality in the United States. Beginning with the emotional story of Richard Proia, an accountant who lost his job following the Great Recession of 2008, from which he never recovered.
Like far too many Americans, Proia slipped from the Middle Class into poverty, directly contributing to his early – and most likely preventable – death due to COVID-19. As Jones notes,
Shutdowns and mandates generated pain for everyone, including workers who lost pay and health insurance; the ruling class, as usual, suffered the least.
Jones continues, “Public health measures did not look like lifesaving measures to them but rather infringements, which erected borders around their customary liberties. The same liberties were not available to the underclass, to the disposable. Some were trapped in frontline jobs, where they could not avoid coworkers or the public. Still more lived in congregate settings, often in crumbling conditions, which inevitably exposed them to the virus. When COVID struck, people like Richard Proia had few choices and no chance.”
Brian Gladstone’s book There Is No Place For Us focuses on a different, but no less serious, social issue. Following a handful of families in and around the Atlanta area facing homelessness or precarious housing. Tellingly, none of the families featured in Gladstone’s book were unemployed, with most working multiple jobs just to make ends meet. None of these families qualify to be counted in official tallies of people experiencing homelessness, which reached 770,000 in 2024 according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR), Part 1 – an 18% increase from 2023. Gladstone notes that these struggling working-class families, suffering from a combination of skyrocketing rents, low wages, and inadequate tenant eviction laws, are the new face of homelessness in America.
As both Gladstone and Jones observe, there are racial, gendered, and age-related aspects to these intersecting crises, but they’re far from the only criteria indicating someone will suffer from increasing inequality. Mass layoffs have become an inescapable reality in the 21st Century, as Louis Uchitelle noted in his seminal The Disposable American back in 2006. According to recent statistics collated from the website USAFacts.org, drawing upon numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, 1.8 million Americans were laid off or discharged in December 2024 alone, bringing the total to 20.2 million layoffs in 2024. This is not an anomaly. There were more than 20 million layoffs each year from 2001 to 2019.
Notably, these vanishing jobs are in no way restricted to low-wage or unskilled labor. As The Tech Layoff Tracker reports, there have been 208 layoffs at tech companies so far in 2025, affecting 42,301 tech workers to date. That comes out to 470 people every day. There were 1,115 tech layoffs in 2024, resulting in 238,461 lost jobs, impacting 653 people a day.
What might seem like an anomaly quickly becomes just business as usual, an acceptable cost of maintaining our standard of living. This is what Jones refers to as “social murder,” adopting the phrase from political theorist Friedrich Engels, which is defined as an unnatural death that is believed to occur due to social, political, or economic oppression, instead of direct violence. To put it succinctly, social murder is when society – or some percentage of it – decides it’s okay for someone to die as long as it serves the shareholders.
The short answer to “who’s disposable in America” is nearly everybody. Teachers are being forced to live in their cars, unable to keep up with the rising cost of living. So are nurses. Even doctors are struggling to make ends meet.
For the last 75 years, homelessness and poverty have been seen as a kind of moral failing. If someone isn’t able to afford a place to live, they’re simply not working hard enough. Soaring layoffs and skyrocketing economic anxiety indicate that an increasing number of Americans are worried they could be next. People were willing to turn a blind eye when it was “just” manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas. Now, with the looming shadow of AI creating an existential threat to corporate jobs, these fears are becoming harder to ignore.
Can America claim to be the greatest nation on Earth when we’re so willing to let children and the elderly, the sick and the down-on-their-luck, sleep in parks and on pavement?
How Universal Basic Income Could Help Solve Disposability
According to recent research reported by the American Collectors Association, over 65% of Americans are currently living paycheck-to-paycheck. 78% of Americans had at least one bill increase in 2024. Meanwhile, the real gross cost of rent has outpaced the median home value for the first time in 10 years. Together, these signs suggest that the poor, working class, mentally ill, and marginalized are far from the only ones at risk of losing everything.
Considering these trends, it’s not a matter of if income inequality is going to affect somebody in the United States, but when. We need to consider solutions to the rising cost of everything. At the moment, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is leading the pack for popular solutions to income inequality and precarity.
As NYU American Public Policy Review writes in “The Inevitable Need for a Universal Basic Income,”
Income inequality, or how unevenly distributed wealth is in a country, is one of the most severe but under-addressed problems that American society faces.
“While our day-to-day lives progress as normal, our current hyper-capitalistic system is eroding social cohesion, leading to increased political polarization and, ultimately, lower economic growth. In recent decades, America has seen a dramatic increase in income inequality rates. It is clear that something drastic needs to be done to combat inequality. While there has been a wide range of policy proposals, from tax relief to strengthening unions, a universal basic income will more evenly distribute wealth among the American population.”
According to a report issued by the Urban Institute in 2022, “Guaranteed Income as a Mechanism for Promoting Housing Stability,” UBI is preferable for helping to alleviate housing insecurity over programs like vouchers for numerous reasons. It’s far more flexible, for one thing, as it’s notoriously difficult to find landlords who will accept tenants belonging to programs like Section 8. It will also help to decrease bias and prejudice, as the tenant will be dealing with cash just like any other renter. This is bound to have a positive effect on the tenant’s mental health, as well, helping to restore their sense of dignity and agency.
While high-quality longitudinal studies are still needed to say just how much poor mental health impacts an individual’s economic success over a lifetime, the World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety alone contribute to more than $1 trillion in lost revenue across the globe each year. Even without empirical data to back it up, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to suggest that individuals who feel more capable, confident, and competent will feel better equipped to make positive changes in the world. Better mental health makes better citizens.
Although not a silver bullet solution, preliminary research on UBI suggests that it has a positive impact on employment, as well. A study from Stockton, California shows that UBI gave individuals more time to apply for full-time jobs rather than having to work multiple part-time jobs just to make ends meet. Another study from Hudson, New York, found that implementing UBI raised overall employment from 29% to 63%.
As we have seen, the trends of income inequality and the increasing unaffordability and insecurity of modern living aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. If anything, they’re getting much worse, much more quickly than we’re able to deal with. Every day, American cities see scenes like something straight out of the Great Depression. It seems light years away from “the Greatest Nation on Earth.” Considering historical trends, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to say that if we don’t deal with the inequality and insecurity of living in America, soon we won’t have any America at all. Something needs to be done, and UBI seems the best solution we’ve tried so far. Let’s try it out and take real steps towards actually restoring the United States to its former glory.
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST!
