(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) Leftist governments have attacked the middle class with historic inflation in order to float a universal basic income as the solution, according to an Epoch Times commentary by Cory Morgan.
“When a government wants to make a radical or controversial policy shift, it rarely will dive right into it,” Morgan wrote. “It will test the waters of public support using legislative tools to float trial balloons while maintaining the illusion that it has a degree of separation from the proponent of the policy.
“The [Canadian] government is doing this right now as they try to lay the groundwork and build public support for a universal basic income (UBI) scheme,” he continued.
Morgan pointed to the Canadian Parliament’s Bill S-233, “An Act to develop a national framework for a guaranteed livable basic income,” which was introduced on Dec. 16.
The bill calls on the Minister of Finance to “develop a national framework for the implementation of a guaranteed livable basic income program throughout Canada for any person over the age of 17, including temporary workers, permanent residents and refugee claimants.”
The idea of a universal basic income was made famous in the United States during the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, when candidate Andrew Yang called for giving every American over the age of 18 a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 per month “regardless of income or employment status.”
At the time, Yang’s fear was that the U.S. was “experiencing the greatest economic and technological shift in human history,” and that the job market wouldn’t be able to keep up with advances in software, AI, and robots.
But in a New Yorker interview in January 2021, Yang lauded President Biden’s COVID-era stimulus checks as an example of “an idea whose time has come.”
“Pandemic assistance itself will not evolve into sustained basic-income programmes,” the Economist reported in March 2021. “But the world’s experience with covid-19 could still make their eventual adoption more likely.”
There can be no question that 8% inflation and skyrocketing gas prices will go a long way in preparing the public to depend entirely on government assistance, and it is difficult not to see Biden’s recent calls for a “central bank digital currency” in that light.
