Proposal of Solution Baby Bonds
Booker claims that baby bonds are the solution to solving economic inequality. He also said that it would give every child born in America a chance to be successful and not fall into the deep hole of poverty. Booker spent many years searching for a solution to economic inequality. Booker mentions that “Its real intent is to provide every young person with an asset that could enable them to actually build or accumulate wealth over the course of their adult lifetime" (Booker 2019). If implemented correctly, this will be a very effective way of solving the problem of economic inequality once and for all. In summary, Booker believes baby bonds will successfully shrink the gap between the rich and the poor (Ehrenreich).
Zewde claims that baby bonds will reduce the wealth inequality between white and non-white families. Giving a trust fund to every baby born in the United States would give every young adult a chance at thriving in this world instead of immediately falling into poverty. Zewde has had much experience with the topic of poverty as she has done various research on economic inequality as it relates to healthcare, especially medicaid. Zewde’s results showed just how much of a benefit baby bonds can be.
With universal baby bonds, each racial group would be better off (Figure 3). The overall median comes to nearly $75,000 (from $29,000). The racial disparity would persist, but the relative differential would be substantially diminished. The median White young adult household would hold approximately $79,000 versus the median Black American’s $58,000. Thus, the program would reduce the Black-White wealth disparity from a factor of 15.9 to 1.4 (Zewde).
In summary, proposing baby bonds as a solution will significantly lower the gap between the rich and the poor.
In order to properly solve the problem of economic inequality, instead of looking at the policy of baby bonds as race-neutral; race-specific might be the only way to properly close the gap between poverty and the rich. Christa Cassidy, Rachel Heydemann, Anne Price, Nathaniel Unah and William Darity Jr. (2019) have done extensive research and came to the conclusion.
Given the tremendous scale of the racial wealth gap, if Baby Bonds are a stepping stone to truly repairing multigenerational harms borne of white supremacy, the policy must be race-specific, not merely race-neutral or race conscious, to address the gap directly and build wealth for Black communities.
This means that baby bonds can be a possible solution if done right. And, although nothing is for certain, implementing baby bonds will give hope to the future generations.
The Conclusion
There are countless tribulations preventing the poor from attaining any wealth whatsoever, they deserve to be accepted and helped with the possibility of baby bonds to shrink the gap between the rich and the poor. Baby bonds need to be something talked about more as the gap will keep getting worse if no one is acting upon it. Baby just might be the only hope for future generations to stay out of poverty. Things like this should be talked about, not whispered.
Proposal of solution UBI
The US and other countries have had many consistent battles with issues regarding food insecurity, healthcare and poverty. UBC is a potential solution that will help lessen these issues. UBC can be described as, “direct cash payments to residents—without means testing, burdensome administrative requirements, or other spending restrictions—thereby acknowledging that families know how best to meet their own needs” (Universal Basic Income). By giving families these payments, they will be able to afford the amenities they need like food and healthcare. UBC is a program designed to solve issues that are not being fixed even with all the other government programs running currently. UBC also has many supporters that openly talk about wanting the program implanted into society. Pierre Omidyar is a big supporter of UBC he recently donated “$493,000 through his philanthropic organization, Omidyar Network, to an experiment in basic income taking place in Kenya later this year” (Weller). There are many other supporters like Elon Musk, Bill Gross, Chris Hughes and Nicola Sturgeon (Williams). In summary, UBC is program that will help combat economic inequality and reduce the amount of poverty in the world, with many supporters that help fund the research to help make this program possible in the future.
UBI has had a bit of history dating all the way back to the 1700s. For example, “Ancestors of UBI were discussed by the likes of Thomas Paine (1797) in the form of a lump sum granted to all citizens at adulthood” (What Is Ubi: Stanford Basic Income Lab). It has been occasionally put down by other perspectives and programs and has been defended on multiple occasions also. Over the years, Ubi has grown from being just a proposal to being legitimate policy that could potentially be used all around in the future (What Is Ubi: Stanford Basic Income Lab). There has been an increase in the number of experiments with the different techniques that can be used for UBI. For example, a certain population is given a set monthly income, these statistics are then evaluated to see if it was successful or not. In my opinion, I believe that UBI will be in the future considering its gain in popularity in the political area recently. I feel as though it will effectively improve the problems we currently have associated with economic inequality.
In conclusion, UBI is a program that aids in decreasing the economic in equality, it has been here for quite some time and has accumulated many opinions on whether it is a good solution to the problem. UBI gives a certain set income to people with lower incomes and are struggling to stay afloat. Many people that are famous have funded into the vast research of UBI in the hopes of helping the community. I hope to see UBI become more prominent in our future in order to lessen the amount of economic inequality in our world today.