Basic Income Beyond the Negative Income Tax (the 80s and 90s and a Bit Before)

American flirtation with a negative income tax ended with a turn toward the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income families. The post-war U.S. and European welfare systems provided inadequate benefits with bureaucratically administered work conditions that imposed high tax rates on earnings to discourage work and exit from welfare, even as issues around poverty, inequality, occupational polarization, precarious employment and European unemployment manifested. The concept of a universal basic income emerged as a means to assert citizens’ rights and reinvigorate labour by disconnecting income assistance from a potentially dehumanizing wage labour market, leading to the formation of the Basic Income Europe Network, although political success was limited to the introduction of a Dutch partial basic income plan and an Alaskan universal dividend from oil revenues.