Money for nothing: a rhetorical history of the universal basic income

This dissertation is a rhetorical history of arguments for a universal basic income. A universal basic income is a recurring cash stipend designed to establish a minimum income floor. Through three case studies, this dissertation investigates how advocates leveraged economic rhetoric to promote the idea of an unconditional guaranteed income to a skeptical public. Tracing the rhetorical history of arguments for a universal basic income provides opportunities to study argumentative topoi of welfare policy discourse, the impact of institutions like the presidency on those appeals, and the economic rhetoric at play in discourses of work and automation in modern liberal capitalism. I focus on three key texts in the history of arguments for a guaranteed income: Quaker activists E. Mabel and Dennis Milners’ pamphlet “Scheme for a State Bonus,” Richard Nixon’s “Address to the Nation on Domestic Programs,” and Andrew Yang’s The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is Our Future. I argue that rhetors promoted the unconventional and radical policy of a universal basic income to the public by employing three main argumentative strategies. First, they continually invoked the locus of the irreparable to warrant radical policy action in response to dire circumstances, highlighting the unique and precarious nature of strategic inflection points and stressing the importance of a timely response. Second, rhetors emphasized the simplicity of the universal basic income, arguing that a guaranteed income could accomplish more than existing social welfare structures while reducing the economic and logistical burden encountered by the state. Finally, rhetors consistently called audiences to attend to the material and social precarity felt by marginalized populations and argued that universal cash stipends were the simplest way to alleviate poverty and precarity among those populations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Moist, John Thomas

Contributors dc:contributor

• Finnegan, Cara A
• Murphy, John M
• O'Gorman, Ned
• Cisneros, Josue D

• Rhetoric
• economic rhetoric
• UBI
• welfare
• universal basic income
• rhetorical history
• social support
• social welfare
• economic policy

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 John Moist

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116172

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F116172