Compton, California, Rolls Out 2-year Guaranteed Income Program

Compton, California, lies just south of Los Angeles. Its nearly 100,000 residents are 30% Black and 68% are Latino. With a poverty rate of 1 in 5 households—double that of the national average — and a 21.9% unemployment rate — an increasing number of its residents depend on free food from food pantries.

Compton Mayor Aja Brown plans to throw money at the problem. The mayor announced a landmark non-taxpayer funded “The Compton Pledge.” It is a “guaranteed income initiative” that will hand out direct and recurring cash relief to around 800 low-income residents beginning in late 2020.

The money is being raised privately in partnership with the Jain Family Institute and the Fund for Guaranteed Income, a public charity that promotes guaranteed income as “a path to racial justice.”

Targeted recipients will be a pre-verified group of low-income Compton residents. The city will notify the lucky citizens of their selection, and they will begin receiving the hundreds of dollars in cash transfers shortly. Eligibility also extends to ex-convicts and illegal immigrants.

Unlike most welfare programs, there are no strings attached to the Compton program. A “guiding principle” of the pact is that “providing direct cash preserves the agency of individuals by removing paternalistic conditions or requirements around the transfer.” Participation in the program will not affect the recipients existing welfare benefits, and beneficiaries can expect help in setting up online banking and direct deposit payments.

The Compton Pledge Fact Sheet cites evidence that cash transfers “are an effective anti-poverty measure with an array of welfare benefits.” The extra money, the fact sheet claims, is for groceries, household expenses and more opportunities for education, job training and child care.

Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Movement argues, that “guaranteed income is an urgent and necessary strategy for addressing the economic realities of racial injustice. I’m thrilled Mayor Brown and Compton are leading the way in this growing national movement.”

Other U.S. mayors, who in June organized the “Mayors for a Guaranteed Income,” like the idea. Their goal is for each city to do its own thing with funding streams from city budgets or through partnerships with public and private sources.

Social activists have, since LBJ’s War on Poverty, believed that welfare programs and assistance to needy families are merely temporary measures to get people through rough spots until they can get back on their feet. LBJ never foresaw the phenomenon of generational welfare and the unraveling of two-parent families in poor neighborhoods.

In 1996, Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform Bill recognized that LBJ’s war was lost and it was time to make a connection between job training, jobs, and ending welfare. Clinton’s program worked for a time, but was overwhelmed by economic circumstances and an ungovernable miasma of social programs that mostly sustained poverty.

So, The Compton Pledge with its ornate rhetoric looks good on paper. However, as the recent federal coronavirus stimulus payments have shown, free money from any source to a large group of people doesn’t go very far — nor last very long.


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7 thoughts on “Compton, California, Rolls Out 2-year Guaranteed Income Program”

  1. Come on folks this is NOT the way to do things. How do you think all the other residents who don’t get the money will feel. How are you going to pick these people who will be the recipient of this new found cash. Help everyone by helping the whole community so that ALL benefit. Don’t give the cash invest into the community with services that will help everyone. I thought ihis is what everyone wanted, services to make the communities better, not just a chosen few.. We all know what happens with cash, it is rarely used for the intended purpose.

  2. Buying VOTE NOW? Does this remind anyone what happened in 1968? When JOHNSON SAID HE got those black people for 200 years? Keeping black and Latino on the BOTTOM OF THE EMPLOYMENT LIST! By using another thing beside WELFARE!

  3. California officials alwayd create new idea,new law ,they are very smart but more they create the more people leaving their state,good luck to the creators.

  4. Another form of the Socialist agenda! California dictates their own laws and don’t abide by federal laws! It’s time illegal immigrants go if they don’t comply with citizenship laws of USA. Sanctuary cities are against the USA as well. USA taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund these people! Either do things the right way, like immigration was created, get your citizenship, and go to work! The middle class is tired of paying your bills illegals!

  5. Compton is in bankruptcy !!!
    This money would all go for ILLEGAL DRUGS !!!
    WHO would be stupid enough to donate to this lunacy ???
    LIFE doesn’t work like this !!! Just ask former USSR !!!

  6. Giving Money/cash will not help most of these people out of poverty, Education and Jobs will. Just look at the Billions this country has Given to African countries for the past 30/50 years. It has not changed the poverty in these places. Education /Training for jobs and sustainable jobs will in the long run help these people. In Africa and Egypt irrigation channels to make land usable for farming would help teaching them how to grow food and cattle would help them. Just giving rice/flour and such just makes them dependent on others. Remember the old saying, give a man a fish he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish he will never go hungry again. Giving should always be considered a short term solution, Education and Training are long term solutions. The USA is considered one of the world’s leading countries yet has not solved its poverty/homeless problems yet. This is because they really don’t want to. If all the foreign aid was used in this country the poverty and hunger problem could have been solved within a generation except for the few who just want handouts.

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