Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Here’s what Pope Francis said about the global economy that drew a ‘wow’ from a former presidential candidate
UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME UBI

Published: April 13, 2020 By Shawn Langlois MARKETWATCH

Pope Francis. CTV via Reuters

‘This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out. It would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights.’

That’s Pope Francis showing support for an idea many countries are at least temporarily experimenting with amid the economic disruption sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.

“I know that you have been excluded from the benefits of globalization. ... The ills that afflict everyone hit you twice as hard,” Pope Francis wrote in a letter. “Street vendors, recyclers, carnies, small farmers, construction workers, dressmakers, the different kinds of caregivers: you who are informal, working on your own or in the grassroots economy, you have no steady income to get you through this hard time... and the lockdowns are becoming unbearable.”

The letter drew praise on Twitter TWTR, +3.14% from Andrew Yang, who spent much of his failed campaign for the presidency pushing universal basic income:



Andrew Yang
✔@AndrewYang


Wow. Pope Francis today: “This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage.” Game-changing. .@pontifex https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/04/12/pope-just-proposed-universal-basic-income-united-states-ready-it …

The pope just proposed a universal basic income. Is the United States ready for it?

“This may be the time,” he said, “to consider a universal basic wage.” This points unmistakably to what is usually known as universal basic income—a regular, substantial cash payment to people just...americamagazine.org

9:30 AM - Apr 12, 2020

Yang ran on the idea echoed in the letter that free cash for everyone would go a long way toward helping to solve economic inequality by providing a financial safety net for all, including those, like stay-at-home moms and caregivers, who aren’t getting adequately compensated.

Beyond the call for considering a universal basic income, the pope also made the case for a lasting change in the global culture in a postpandemic world.

“Our civilization — so competitive, so individualistic, with its frenetic rhythms of production and consumption, its extravagant luxuries, its disproportionate profits for just a few — needs to downshift, take stock, and renew itself,” he wrote.

America magazine, a publication of the Jesuit order, from which the Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio is the first pontiff, traced the roots of the pope’s call to consider UBI to an 1891 encyclical in which Pope Leo XIII sought to address the Gilded Age’s widening economic inequality.

Pope Francis on Sunday also delivered a speech for evening mass held at a mostly empty St. Peter’s Basilica, with Italy still on lockdown due to the coronavirus, which has now infected more than 1.8 million people around the world, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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