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When Americans stop to commemorate Dr. Matin Luther King, Jr. each year, we tend to do a great disservice to the man's legacy by glossing over his final act as an anti-poverty crusader. In the weeks leading to his assassination, King had been hard at work organizing a new march on Washington known as the "Poor People's Campaign." The goal was to erect a tent city on the National Mall that, as Mark Engler described it for The Nation in 2010, would "dramatize the reality of joblessness and deprivation by bringing those excluded from the economy to the doorstep of the nation's leaders." The great civil rights leader was killed before he could see the effort through.

So what, exactly, was the reverend's economic dream? In short, King wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income—an idea that, while light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today, had actually come into vogue by the late 1960s.

To be crystal clear, a guaranteed income—or a universal basic income, as the concept is sometimes called today—is not the same as a higher minimum wage. Rather, the idea is to make sure each household has a certain concrete sum of money to spend each year. One modern version of the policy would give every adult a tax credit that would essentially become a cash payment for families that don't pay much tax. Conservative thinker Charles Murray has advocated replacing the whole welfare state by handing every grown American a full $10,000.   



In part, King's thinking seemed to stem from a sense that no amount of economic growth could provide jobs for all or eliminate poverty. As he put it:




In other words, King believed that the government was obligated to provide both work and income for those inevitably left behind by capitalism's economic engine. Looking back from today's vantage point, one can even imagine that King might have supported attaching a work requirement to such a program, so long as everyone could be guaranteed a job. 

King's goal wasn't merely to alleviate poverty. Rather, it was to raise each American into the middle class. He argued that the guaranteed income should be "pegged to the median of society," and rise automatically along with the U.S. standard of living. "To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions," he wrote. Was such a plan feasible? Yes, he argued, noting an estimate by John Kenneth Galbraith that the government could create a generous guaranteed income with $20 billion a year. As the economist put it, that was "not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by 'experts' in Vietnam."

As practical economics today, ensuring every single American a middle-class life through government redistribution and work programs seems a bit fanciful. The closest such an idea ever really came to fruition, meanwhile, was President Nixon's proposed Family Assistance Plan, which would have ended welfare and instead guaranteed families of four $1,600 a year, at a time when the median household income was about $7,400

But as a statement of values—that it is not merely enough to lay out the tools of self-improvement in front of the poor, that such a rich society should provide every citizen some reasonable standard of living—King's notion remains powerful. So with that in mind, I'll leave you with man's own words. 



This post is based on a version we originally posted on August 28, 2013.