FRANK BERNHEISEL

FILM TO WATCH: INCOME EQUALITY

This link is to the movie Inequality for All (2013). It stars Robert Reich, the American economist, who was the United States Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 under Bill Clinton. Also, he is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, where he has been since January 2006.

Before that, he was a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and he served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. In 2008 he served as a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.

In addition, he has published 18 books and been a contributing editor of The New Republic, The American Prospect, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. I wonder where he finds the time.

Reich's political views, as one might guess, are liberal and focus on equality. He agrees with me in supporting a universal basic income (UBI). On the eve of a June 2016 popular vote in Switzerland on UBI, which failed to pass, he declared that countries will have to introduce the UBI sooner or later to solve the problems we have built into our economy.

Supporting this idea, Spain introduced UBI in May 2020 in order "to fight a spike in poverty due to the coronavirus pandemic". "The scheme [...] aims to guarantee an income of 462 euros ($546) per month for an adult living alone, while for families, there would be an additional 139 euros per person, whether adult or child, up to a monthly maximum of 1,015 euros per home. It is expected to cost state coffers three billion euros ($3.5 billion) a year."

Certainly a much neater and more efficient response to covid-19 than the kludge of conflicting and overlapping programs implemented and being implemented in the U.S.

As mentioned, the link is to the movie Inequality for All, a documentary film directed by Jacob Kornbluth. It is based on Reich's 2010 book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. It runs about an hour and a half and is worth the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvAFPHLFMa0