"One obvious way to help fund a citizen's dividend or guaranteed income would be to levy a carbon tax, and therefore you'd be doing something very positive for the environment. ... I think there's a strong relationship between these two issues. On the one hand we have to take on these environmental challenges, on the other hand we've got this unfolding trend going on which is impacting people's income security and those two are directly related: as long as people perceive that they're not secure economically, they're worrying about paying their rent next month, or they're worried about putting food on the table, they're not gonna be able to focus on longer-term environmental issues. And that's one of the big problems we see with climate change: if you look at surveys of the American people, they acknowledge that climate change is an issue, but it's also absolutely at the bottom of their list of priorities, and the top of their list, of course, is jobs, it's incomes. So I really think that if we want to have meaningful progress on environmental issues like climate change we need to put this whole issue of income security and income inequality first-hand at the top."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Martin Ford, Video interview with Andrew Mazzone, Smart Talk video series, 23:50 (December 2014)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_income
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Basic income
94 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Basic income →
Related Quotes
"With a basic income, more people can choose for themselves whether to work full-time or part-time, making their own t…"
"The economic impact of the UBI together with the three tax changes in the US would be roughly as follows. First, bank…"
"Unless we abandon the work ethic of another era, ... lives may be wasted because of blind insistence that everyone mu…"
"The State ... should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should…"
""Jobs for every American" is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it …"
"'Suppose there were a man, a slave, a labourer, getting up before you and going to bed after you, willingly doing wha…"
"If you read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25, it says people have rights to adequate food…"
"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-econo…"
"I'm always concerned about, more than anything else, the waste of human potential. ... So much intelligence is wasted…"
"Basic income grants freedom and security without strings attached. It automatically supplements low wages without bur…"