Basic Income Action

More than 50% of work is not paid at all - mostly in household and care. This work receives no financial compensation. While women already earn 12% less than men when it comes to paid labor, if unpaid labor is factored in, the real pay gap widens dramatically: women earn 45% less than men. Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) would help immensely here.



https://wid.world/document/global-labour-hours-in-paid-and-unpaid-work-inequality-productivity-and-structural-transformation-1800-2100-world-inequality-lab-working-paper-2025-08/

https://basic-income.eu/

In 1797, Thomas Paine proposed a national fund to pay every person compensation for the natural inheritance lost when land became private property. That's basic income, two centuries before the term existed.

Fun Fact: Paine is honored by the Social Security Administration as an intellectual ancestor and moral precedent for the idea that economic security is a right the state should guarantee.

Paine's key insight: property comes in two kinds. Natural property (the earth, air, water) belongs equally to everyone by birth. Artificial property (what people build and invent) can be owned unequally. Basic income is our fair share of the first kind.

Once land became property, most people lost free access to what was rightfully theirs. Paine's answer: a national fund, paid to everyone, as compensation for that lost inheritance. That's the root argument for basic income today.

Basic income is our share of the capital we all helped build.

What good is a service you can't eat or sleep in? Scott Santens nails it below. Services decide for us. Basic income is trusting we know where our needs are.

Here’s something that comes up a lot when people talk about basic income: “Why would we pay CEOs and wealthy people UBI? They don’t need it.”

The answer is that leaving them out costs more than it saves. To exclude high earners from a program, you first have to verify everyone’s income. Pay stubs, audits, thresholds, ongoing reassessment. That process is means testing, and it’s exactly where the term welfare cliffs come from.

Say the cutoff is $30k a year. Someone earning $29k gets the full benefit. They take a raise to $31k and lose it entirely. They end up worse off than before the raise. The benefit doesn’t taper off gradually, it just disappears at the line. So the real incentive becomes staying under the line instead of earning more, which defeats the whole point of a program meant to help people get ahead.

This is what “Universal” in Universal Basic Income actually means. It skips drawing a line in the first place. No threshold, no cliff, no incentive to stay poor on paper. The wealthy person’s check gets taxed back anyway through normal income tax brackets, so nothing is actually lost by including them. What’s gained is a program with no gatekeeping cost and no trap for anyone trying to climb.

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Basic Income Action A movement to bring all advocates together

Every major universal basic income pilot, Finland, Kenya, Stockton, the Alaska dividend, shows employment holds steady or even rises slightly. People don't quit working when basic needs are covered. They leave exploitative jobs, or use the security to start businesses, retrain, or care for family.

UBI isn't a handout, it's your share. Land, resources, and shared wealth used to belong to everyone. A few people fenced it off, and the rest of us had to work just to access what was once ours. UBI is simply a way to return a piece of what was already yours.

We’re back and building again.

Basic Income Action is dedicated to raising awareness, understanding, and advocacy for universal basic income (UBI) globally, with an emphasis on strategy, education, and community collaboration.

Our goal is to provide a positive platform for sharing global data, learning from what is happening around the world, and giving people practical ways to help advance basic income.

If you’ve been involved with Basic Income Action before and still believe in this cause, we’d love to have you back.

If you’re new to BIA, welcome. There’s a lot of work to do, and we’re looking for people who want to do it in good faith.

Our community is already growing:

• 2,400+ people here on Facebook
• 18,800+ on Bluesky
• 2,400+ on X
• A growing presence on LinkedIn

Now it’s time to turn that community into action.

Show up. Speak up. Do the work.

Let’s build economic security for everyone.

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/basicincomeaction.org
X: https://x.com/BasicIncomeAct
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/basicincomeaction/
Website: https://basicincomeaction.org/

Basic Income Action Show up. Speak up. Build economic security for everyone — together.

In UBI philosophy, no institution, employer, market, or authority determines your inherent worth. The point of unconditionality is that your worth is assumed, not earned. A UBI is paid simply because you exist as a member of society.

Find more Sharables

Human Worth • Sharables UBI is income given unconditionally, based on your inherent human worth