Town biz!
Bay Area Bossip fam, this one for you! This week, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced that for the next 18 months, low-income Black and indigenous families will receive $500 per month with no strings attached or questions asked according to CNN. This new policy is part of The Oakland Resilient Families program which aims to institute a “guaranteed income” to those in need. This program will serve as one of the countries first wealth redistribution programs that became very popular during the presidential campaign season under candidates like Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang.
This social safety net, if you will, serves to slowly balance the enormous wealth gap that persists in the Bay Area. The Oakland Equality Index research shows that the median income of white families is THREE TIMES as much as Black families.
This concept is something that was previously championed by Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1967 book “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”
“I’m now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income,” King wrote.
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