How basic income became impossible to ignore

For thirty years, BIEN had described basic income as an income granted to all, individually, without a means test or work requirement. Launched in 2017, the Ontario Basic Income Pilot paid about four thousand low-income adults in Hamilton, Brantford, Lindsay, and Thunder Bay. At the 2019 Basic Income March in New York, Santens remembers that most attendees had entered through the campaign. By late 2019, the municipality’s Citizens’ Basic Income paid 130 mumbucas per person each month to about 42,500 low-income residents. Between those points lies the real history of 2016-2026: basic income became impossible to ignore, and BIEN had to become capable of carrying the weight of being heard.