boost: Learning from MLK and the NWRO on Guaranteed Income

Kevin Gotkin’s Crip News shows up in my mailbox on Mondays. His principal focus is on English-speaking crip art and artists (like himself), but he inevitably encounters disability policy issues. Today I appreciated:

MLK, Guaranteed Income, & Disability

Guaranteed income (GI) programs offer monthly direct cash transfers to people who need help. And when organizers talk about this work (like Michael Tubbs on NPR in 2021), they often cite MLK’s 1967 “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech.

MLK named disability in his case for GI. Black single mothers of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) helped him understand that expanding access to employment was an incomplete approach. For “those at the lowest economic level,” including “the aged and chronically ill,” he said, “we must create incomes.”

But today’s GI movement, which has swelled since 2020, has abandoned the radical legacy MLK helped popularize. The NWRO proposed a Guaranteed Adequate Income. Not a cash supplement. An income that can actually support a family. Most programs across the U.S. today offer several hundred dollars per month (rarely over $1000) for only a short period of time.

This doesn’t just leave disabled people behind - it causes harm. Most often, GI programs force people enrolled in existing public benefit programs, like SNAP and SSI, to choose between accepting the cash payments and experiencing a double cliff (the cash reduces or eliminates other benefits and then disappears itself). Some programs even specifically exclude anyone who receives SSI. And people like Andrew Yang are hijacking the framework to imagine cash transfers as a consolidation or wholesale replacement of public benefit programs.

https://cripnews.substack.com/p/mlk-guaranteed-income-and-disability