A Billion(aire’s) Reasons for Demanding a Basic Income: Mitigating the Consequences of Rising Inequality

Although the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aims to redress social inequities and income disparities to end poverty, eliminate hunger, and ensure that ‘no one is left behind’, relatively less attention is paid to the top end of the income distribution and the few who have accumulated vastly more than the majority. Social justice frameworks typically seek to mobilize the most disadvantaged in social change efforts and often overlook those with wealth and privilege. The last few years have seen an inequitable surge of wealth creation for corporations and those at the top of the income distribution. Given the unfettered expansion of billionaire wealth and compounding polycrisis we now face, this conceptual paper argues that support for greater income security must shift to not only involve those among the lower- and middle-income rungs but also those at the highest echelons of capital accumulation. The paper reframes the conversation on basic income to not only consider the consequences of not addressing poverty and income inequality for broader society, but to pay specific attention to the implications of the failure to do so the failure to do so for people in the highest income quintiles. Concomitant with growing capital accumulation in fewer hands, symptoms such as the potential for greater crime, declining health and wellbeing, the erosion of trust and challenges to democracy, reduced prosperity and hindered social mobility may thrive. An unconditional basic income, funded through increased taxation on the ultra-wealthy, could play a significant role in mediating the deep destabilization caused by growing capital accumulation and wealth disparities.