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grass Yas. This is Latino USA, the radio journal of news and curlture Latino USA, latin Us, Latino USA.
I'm Maria Inojosa.
We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you, overlooked by the rest of the media, and while the country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to the stories of black and Latinos. Studio United Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement.
I'm Maria Inojosa. Nose Bayan.
Marta Lopez was sitting in the passenger seat of the family car in October of twenty twenty one while her husband Freddie drove through the streets of Los Angeles. She was checking the local news on her phone when something on Univision caught her attention.
There is Milo Sintras Families cal do Asta.
The city of Los Angeles was launching a new program to support low income families, especially those hit hard by the pandemic. But it all sounded Martha thought just too good to be true. The program would give them one thousand dollars a month for one year. Martha's husband had lost his job early in the pandemic and she was a stay at home mom taking care of their two young daughters, so the family hadn't had a stable income for more than six months. Those way up, so Martha
decided to apply for the program. About six months later, she got the call.
Yeah you medi here on Yosa sikomon chok o Hami No.
She couldn't believe she had been selected. It felt like a miracle.
She says, Anda youady a media Yes, yes, staff to Premier mild is the miss.
And then Martha got her debit card with the first one thousand dollars on it, ready for her to use. However, she wanted no rules, no restrictions, no receipts needed from Futuru media and pr X. It's Latino USA. I'm Maria no Josa today, no strings attached. What happens when people who are ruggling to make ends meet get a stable income from the government. We look at how this strategy could help tackle inequality in the United States. Maybe you've
heard this term before. Universal basic income. It's the idea of giving people cash regularly and unconditionally, so that they can spend the money as they wish, regardless of their economic status.
Or immediate need.
It's all to ensure a basic living standard for everyone. It's a concept that's become pretty popular in recent years, especially with the fear of technological advances leaving more and more people out of work. In his twenty twenty presidential campaign, tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang ran on the promise to provide people universal basic income. It was the first time a candidate had done that.
Soniversal can Come.
Would be one thousand dollars dividend for every American adult citizen every month under my plan. Cash programs aren't new. Different variations have existed for decades, both inside and outside of the US. They often target specific groups in need, and they try to promote certain behaviors like restricting what
people can or can't spend the money on. But the idea of the government handing people free money is something that some Americans still find uncomfortable, or maybe many did before the stimulus checks received during the pandemic made us a lot more familiar.
With this idea.
Federal stimulus checks are being distributed this week, and it's a welcome relief for those out of work and hoping for better days to come.
Even before the pandemic, California was already leading a kind of renaissance of the basic income idea. More than one hundred guaranteed income programs have launched across the country, and most are found in the state of California. All of them are still in the pilot phase. They usually run for one or two years. The results have been interesting, but these conversations have mostly stayed inside city councils and university classrooms. So what's it like for the people who
are participating in these programs? How is a guaranteed income making a difference for them?
If at all?
Latino USA Senior producer Marta Martinez spent a month in Los Angeles following two women who participated in one of the biggest guaranteed income programs in the country and where half of the beneficiaries are Latinos and Latinas. Here's Marta with the story.
Ola p Pasa see Oh Stuck here a Plan.
It's January twenty fifth, and the twenty fifth of the month is when everything starts for participants of Big Leap. That's the guaranteed basic income program the City of Los Angeles launched in twenty twenty two. Marta Lopev, who we met at the beginning of the show, is one of over thirty two hundred people who got selected, and almost eighty percent of them are women.
Nokamira for Tunaa Perosi is the Kreya Mucco.
Marta feels very lucky. More than fifty thousand people applied.
Sandamlas Say is the La man Larba.
Marta, who is from Honduras, has been running around the house since six am. She's also thirty eighty years old, the median age of Bigly participants. She has straight, dark chocolate hair cut in the perfect horizontal line right above her shoulders. Her prominent cheeks and forehead are sprinkled with freckles. Media the program coordinators put me in touch with Martha
and some other participants who feel comfortable sharing their experiences publicly. Today, Martha will get a transfer of one thousand dollars on her program debit card for her to spend however she wants. Martha only has three deposits left. Her twelve months are almost up. Today, Martha hasn't been able to go to the ATM to retreat the money, as she usually does on the twenty fifth of the.
Month if on the Yoma is protecting Locala.
Her daughter, Lizzie, who is eight years old, is sick again, so Martha had to stay home and take care of her water in Lawuka, the skinny girl with black, shiny eyes and two missing frontis, has asthma, and the unusually cool temperatures California has been experiencing this winter are testing her health. She's been missing school more often than Martha would like to beta, and because Lizzie didn't go to school, her little sister, Sophia, who is five years old, didn't
want to go either. No yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chow.
Sophia prefers to spend the afternoon hanging from her mother's neck and kissing her. She's the clown of the house. You never know what will come out of her unfiltered mouth. The family of four lives in a one bedroom apartment in South Lay, tacked between the One and Freeway and Broadway, immersed in the never ending buzz of traffic.
It's a wainbow. She loves rainbows.
It's a welcoming home. The living room is filled with toys, and there are studio pictures of Lizzie and Sophia hanging on several walls.
Preparing caldo gaina una ros blanco.
Marta is preparing Lizzie's favorite food, calo hen soup to help her recover from her cold. Well she cuts the vegetables. Martha shares some tips on how she tries to save money Parta.
De casa, manera massabien and too pecto rodinero bradio La casa so significant.
She cooks at home every day because it's healthier and cheaper than eating out.
Termina sien dome na al gore let's to burget mohrhence.
Mano.
Also, eating out can be more of a concern than a fun experience for the family because, besides having asthma, Lizzie has a severe allergy to cow's milk. Lizzie's fragile health has limited MARTA's options to find a full time job because she needs to keep a clothes eye on her at all times. The family's earnings are under the federal poverty line that was less than twenty seven dollars a year for a family of four in twenty twenty one, and they rely on food stems for their food supply
that's usually enough for the month. Lately, inflation has made things tighter, but Martha says there are some items that she just cannot not buy, like cooking oil.
Lotre go cord mediavo uno inmoteroluso Martin.
It's oil to fry food or to make her seasonings. So instead of buying two bottles now she buys one and moderates use. Having the extra help of one thousand dollars a month through the city's program has allowed the family to afford themselves a caprico every once in a.
While prove tacos so they were sen.
Guando Sunday is smartas day to rest and be with her family. Sometimes they eat out, usually tackles, and during the summer, she took the girls to the aquarium or the beach, Sophia Lizzie. Dinner is ready, but only Sophia shows up with her bubbly eyes and mischievous smiles. Lizzie has fallen asleep in the bedroom while watching cartoons. Well we eat caloa. Sofia tells me where babies come from. She says, parents buy them.
At stores, My mom my Fami.
Marta came to the United States in twenty fourteen. It wasn't her first time visiting, but this time Martha wasn't traveling alone. She was pregnant with Lizzi. She first lived with her sister in Philadelphia, and that's where she gave birth to Lizzi on her own. Her husband, Freddi was still back in on duras im Asalio. Lizzie was beautiful, like a little doll, Marca says, but it was a difficult time for her.
Not dino yo barra barastra, mihiirago vien duruwa is dressed.
Martha didn't have money to buy clothes for her daughter, not even when they left the hospital. So when Lizzie was three months old, Martha had to start working at a factory packaging fruit. She worried about so many things. Ami Freddie wasn't there to support her. She had to earn money to pay for rent a babysitter, to cover for her daughter's basic needs and her own. On top of the financial stress Martha was dealing with. This was nine months old when she was diagnosed with a severe
allergy to cow's milk. Martha felt like she had failed. She started having trouble sleeping, She lost her appetite, her hair started falling off.
But as dion Dia k.
One day, when she got back from work, she felt like her body was exploding. You imps.
Or Media fell on a party.
Scared, she couldn't breathe. A tingling sensation spread across the left side of her body.
To the girl, let's say you memor your memoir.
Martha thought she was going to die. At the hospital, doctors told her she had had a panic attack. She had never heard that term before, but Marta knew that going back to Honduda's was not an option. Two of her brothers, who run a bus company, had been killed by criminal gangs who demanded a quota, a monthly payment in exchange for their safety. Meha Caparos, Martha was scared that in Honduras. She could get killed at any moment. Eventually, Freddie came to the US and the family moved to
Los Angeles. Martha gave birth to their second daughter, Sophia, and became a stay at home mamuando. When they moved, she asked Freddy half jokingly to live near her hospital.
Well, sim maybe then well.
Martha says that after the panic attack, her life has never been the same. The next day, on January twenty sixth, I accompany Marta to get her big lip deposit at an ATM inside a supermarket in South La Liza didn't go to school today either. She still hasn't fully recovered from her code. This is the ATM Marta uses most of the time to get her cash from the program. She inserts the card into the ATM slot, A button appears on the screen that allows her to directly withdraw
one thousand dollars at once. The program decided to distribute the money through prepaid debit cards because they were looking for a system that would be flexible but also safe. Some of the participants don't have bank accounts, and some people aren't used to making card payments.
Gussie its list.
In less than a minute. Martha has the cash in her hands and she quickly puts the stack of bills inside of her purse, except for a couple of twenties she keeps in her pocket.
Yeah, thank you and nich manus putla Ana.
Met with.
These deposits make Martha feel secure and give her the confidence that she'll be able to pay for her basic expenses each month, which are around fifteen hundred dollars without rent. The family pays a little over one thousand dollars a month for their one bedroom apartment. Martha uses five hundred from the Big Leap program for rent and the other half well, in recent months, she started investing the money on something she's very excited about. Well.
In Bertier and Loquez San Pres.
Martha has been investing the other five hundred on what she calls her small business.
Coming up on letting the USA, we find out how Martha is investing the other half of the cash from the Guaranteed Income program, and we learn about the origins of universal basic income. Stay with us not themas.
Get usuena umo jote came through Muchasa mucho amor Inlardino Musical and Miss Agri and Milman much at the Ponto.
Hey, we're back before the break. You met Marta Lopez, one of the participants of Big Leap. It's the guarantee basic income program the city of Los Angeles, launched in twenty twenty two and one of the biggest in the country. Participants get one thousand dollars a month for a year without any restrictions how to spend the money. Marta has been investing half of the money on something very special for her. But before we find out what that is,
we're gonna meet Michaela, another program participant. Here's Latino USA Senior producer Marta Martinez once again with the story.
It's Saturday morning and we're in the car with Mikaela. We're not using Mikaela's last name because she's undocumented. The Big LEAG program didn't ask about legal status in its application because the city wanted to broaden access as much as possible. This is also the first time Mikaela has ever gotten any aid from the government. We're heading from South la where she lives, to a food bank in Korea Town. Mikhaela's landlord is driving.
TIEMP.
Mikhayela is fifty one years old and she doesn't have a car, so she can only go to the food bank whenever her landlord can drive her. She says, you wouldn't be able to afford a n uber. Mikaela sits in the front and most of her face is covered by a black face mask, but her eyes are delicately made up with a rose colored eyeshadow and a touch of glitter. She has a curly mop of blonde hair, almost white at the top. Her nails are painted light pink, but they look worn down.
Rat They are rat pour k as the pis fasi.
Mikhaela says she's very thrifty. In this country, people spend money on things they don't need, but she can't afford to do that. Mikhayela is a siamstress and a single mother of two. The majority of Bigley participants are single mothers like her. She came to the US almost thirty years ago from Mexico with the father of her two boys, but he was physically abusive and they soon separated. Mikaela says he has never provided any support for her sons, who are now in their twenties.
Mos Con La Costa for Que Malaga.
Mikaela relies on her sewing, but it's not a well paying job. On a good week, she says she makes six hundred dollars, but that means working every day from seven am till eleven pm. She rents two rooms in her landlord's house, one for her and one for her oldest son, who is twenty five years old. She pays eight hundred and fifty dollars a month for the rooms, and she's been using most of her program money on rent. She's also been supporting her youngest son through college in Merced, California.
He got a scholarship, but it didn't fully cover his tuition, so Mikaela sent him about five hundred dollars a month to pay for his classes and other things he needed, depending on how much she was able to make sewing or how much she could borrow from friends and acquaintances.
Listen dian Naervio's with Hi.
Mikhaela always worried would she be able to make ends meet, and it wasn't just a tuition. He always needed something.
Then God tample Mansa Kokoopoo pastades Kokopo cal Setenis.
He texted her saying he needed soap, toothpaste, socks. As a single mom, Mikaela has to figure out ways to save money all the time, and that's how she found out about this food bank. She's been going there for ten years now. Nikayla comes every two or three weeks to stock up for her and her son, and for fifty dollars, she can get as much food as she wants.
Fat In the end, you say that.
Mikhaela.
Mikaela got her twelve and last cash transfer from the Big Lee program this month. She was among those who were first randomly selected to participate. The City of Los Angeles partnered with the University of Pennsylvania to manage the selection process, as well as all other research aspects of the program. Angelina's were able to apply either online or in person during a period of ten days. In the fall of twenty twenty one, we.
Had two hundred and fifty thousand people visit our website and in the air little over fifty thousand people applied for the program.
This is Abigail Marquez, the General manager of the Community Investment for Families Apartment with the City of Los Angeles. Her unit is in charge of implementing the Big leap program. Abigail says that the fact that over fifty thousand people applied illustrates how big the need is. Some ten thousand people who applied actually didn't respond when the program informed them that they had been randomly selected.
People distrust government, and so people felt like, this is a catch. How is it that that we're getting one thousand dollars.
It's unheard of.
It really is unheard of.
Another five thousand out of fifty thousand didn't fulfill the selection criteria, that is being an adult living in the city of Los Angeles under the twenty twenty one federal poverty line and having at least one child that means making less than eighteen thousand dollars a year for a family of two. Because of the people who either didn't respond or didn't qualify in the first selection round, some participants got their first CATSH trend first a little bit
earlier than others, about a couple of months apart. That's why Marta, the woman we met at the beginning of the show, still has some deposits left, but Mikaela doesn't.
The pandemic created an opportunity for us to do something different as local government in the way that we were responding to the needs and challenges, primarily those from communities of color. But I think it's an opportunity to reflect on how we could do things differently moving forward.
In early twenty twenty, Mikhaela was working at a textile factory and.
La Pandemias and dicaol Mundo and Sima servajo mebermas carrillos.
With a pandemic. The world fell apart for her. She got COVID, she lost her job. Then she started sewing face masks on her own to get.
By janoomere no poor mir Pergatia, Bantos, dress, Santiacae, Sali, Jello so Caveza.
She couldn't eat, she couldn't sleep. Her head hurts so much she felt her eyes would fall out. She had takikardias. Her heart started pounding in the middle of the night, and she was falling deeper and deeper into dead. To help her youngest son.
For Doma Trasco Noja.
He was going to graduate from college soon and she felt she couldn't leave him hanging. It was actually her youngest son who found out about the Big Clip program.
See applicat meal Manzueles Punao.
He helped her fill out the online application because Mikaela barely speaks English and she's not great with technology either. Six months later, she got a message from the City of Los Angeles. She had already forgotten what it was about, but she went to the government office anyway, and then they gave her a debit card tray.
So inclusive Chao yallow a ladio is positively di Jossi.
Mikaela couldn't believe it. At first. She thought she was going to have to work in exchange for the cash, and she worried about how she would combine that with her sewing. When she found out that she didn't need to do anything, just use the money as she needed, she thought she was going to pass.
Out semi Yeah, not a lass.
Like you in this difficult tekastoid omega manalo sayula milan.
For someone who's poor, Mikhaila says, one thousand dollars a month is a lot of money. She closed her eyes and said, now I have to give it my own. The City of Los Angeles has invested more than thirty six million dollars into the Big Lee program. The city is tapping money from its general fund, which also finances it's public safety and infrastructure, among other services. And all of that gets funded through taxes, fines, and other fees
local government collects. This year, for example, LA's general fund has a budget of almost eight billion dollars, and so the Bigley program is barely making a dent. At the heart of the program is the idea that there are no rules or guidance on how to spend the money. Here's Abigail Marquez again from the city.
I fundamentally believe that if we remove barriers from people to access programs and we empower them to make decisions for themselves, they are in the best position to make those decisions. Oftentimes, in my opinion, government is overly prescriptive. We have too many requirements, too many rules.
So far, data the city has collected shows that participants are spending the money on covering their basic needs.
Many are spending the money on helping to cover their rent costs. Thirty four percent of our participants are spending money on food and groceries. They're not spending money on purchasing a new car or anything that's lavish.
We could say that there's a new wave of guaranteeing come program, and probably the one that initiated it and got a lot of media attention was the one Michael Tobs started when he became the mayor of Stockton, a city of over three hundred and twenty thousand people in California, a central body.
I told my staff to look at like, how are we going to get rid of poverty? At art meet and they came back with this idea of giving people money, And honestly, at first I was a little bit nervous. It felt very bold and very radical, a little bit of a crazy idea.
The program started in twenty nineteen and it gave one hundred and twenty five people five hundred dollars a month for two years.
So Stockton is very important because it was the first city led or mayor led pilot in the US.
This is Juliana bi Dada Nure, a political philosopher and the faculty director of the Stanford Basic Income Lab.
After one year into the program, people reported feeling less stressed, there was an uptick in employment, and also people spend the money wisely.
Juliana is from friends and the concept of universal basic income or UBI can actually be traced back to the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century with William Thomas Pain's idea of a dividend.
Essentially the idea that we are all owed a share of what we own in common. Could be natural resources, you could frame it as the wealth of the earth, but it's also connected with the idea that we are all owe a share of the wealth generated by previous generations and.
The wealth that we could create as current generations. A similar idea became popular among neo liberals as well, who saw basic income as a tool to keep the government out of people's lives. Even President Richard Nixon in the late nineteen sixties pushed for a reform of the national welfare system that actually sounded pretty similar to providing a basic income.
And that is why tonight, I therefore propose that we abolish the present welfare system and that we adopted its place a new family assistance system.
Nixon's Family Assistance program aimed to give families of four sixteen hundred dollars a year, which today it would amount to a little over thirteen thousand dollars, so actually pretty similar to the amount of money participants of the Los Angeles program got this year. But Senators rejected Nixon's plan twice. It was a complex process, but basically Republicans thought the program was too expensive and expensive, and Democrats thought it
wasn't enough money for the families. Around the same time, in the nineteen sixties and seventies, universal basic income also became a central fight for feminists. They saw UBI as a way to pay for all the unpaid care work that women were doing at home, and a tool to rebalance the power relationships between men and women men.
There's also a really interesting origin that comes from Martin Luther King, the Black Panther Party, and also the National Welfare Rights Organization.
That was an organization for mostly by black matters, and.
The idea here was really to ensure that no one was reduced to live in poverty without access to the means of survival that was supposed to be key to the notion of economic freedom.
More recently, UBI has become very popular in Silicon Valley among tech millionaires who see this concept almost as a magic wand that could quote unquote disrupt the social welfare system and fix all social problems, some problems created by these millionaires themselves. For example, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter donated fifteen million dollars to a mayor's coalition created by the Mayor of Stockton.
Now, the tendency of billionaires to like quick fixes that do not really address the root causes of inequalities and poverty makes them really sub optimal advocates of basic income, because I think the idea of basic income is really one of building a very robust safety net. It's not one that makes a system that produces so much inequality work a little better.
There are ubi supporters coming from very different political backgrounds, but there are also many critics. Probably the most common criticism is the belief that if you give people money, they will stop working.
There is considerable evidence that people want to work and will work when given the transfer, and throughout the world with cashtroms for our programs, what we've seen is that people use the cash to retrain, to get a driver's license, to pay for childcare, to do what is needed to do to remove barriers to employment.
Another criticism targets the universal aspect of this concept. Why give money to people who don't need it?
Universality is really key to this sigmatized public assistance. We've created this system that is so stigmatizing that a lot of eligible people end up not claiming benefits, in part by fear of being demonized as welfare queens and benefits scrounders. So these stereotypes are very damaging.
A quick note here, the pilot programs that have launched in recent years across the US are not fully universal. They all target groups in need, like people living in poverty or above a certain age. But they're similar to UBI in that they provide a stable income and don't have any restrictions on how people can use the cash. And then, of course there's the criticism that UBI is
too expensive. It's undeniable that these programs cost a lot of money, But Julianna says there are other important social costs in.
The equation poverty object Poverty costs enormously to communities. You just have to think about the costs in terms of health, in terms of crime, of the clustering of this advantage that happens when people start losing an income, losing their homes, and then it becomes extremely costly on the long run. I mean, of course, the human cast, the moral cost is the most important one, but even in monetary terms,
it's it's a disaster. So once you start building that in and once you start thinking about the fact that actually giving people cash can even grow the economy, you realize that it's not as bad as it looks.
Royal Hanna's Taipei.
We're on a busy block on Manchester Avenue in South LA with Martha, the woman from Andudas met earlier, and her daughter Lizzie.
I'm pretty sure my light slow and they're like, berg, think it not.
In left leg, Martha shows me this big empty space with very tall ceilings and freshly painted white walls. This is how Martha has been investing the other half of the big leap money. She's about to open her own.
Store, well La Mayoria de Cosa so on.
The Martha will sell mostly clothes, but also toys, shoes, women's accessories. She buys these carded palettes from big retailers like Target or Costco, and then she sells the items at an affordable price in her neighborhood.
And musium.
Martha is excited about opening the store, but when she thinks about having to make rent for the space and about starting something new, she gets a little scared too. Her husband, Freddy isn't fully on board with Marthas and Davers. He thinks it's a huge financial risk. Her daughters aren't very supportive either, because they aren't used to her mother spending so much time out of the house. But none of that stops Marta la. It's a dream Martha has had for a long time, but she was too busy
taking care of her daughters. She feels confident about taking this step because she knows how to run a store. She's done it before me Mama.
Tormented the pas of Pecanos.
Back in Onduras, Marta studied marketing in college. In the small city of Choloma in the northwest of the country, her mother opened a mini market. The family business started small, selling groceries, and Martha helped her mother manage the store. She loved it and she was good at it. The business grew and the family soon owned three stores.
Sstaalas Jimmy Mama's Diversifico muchosun Negosha followed Exito Total.
When criminal gangs killed her two brothers, Marta and her mother decided to close the businesses. And when Marta left Ondudas, her dream of following in her mother's steps became more and more distant. When the pandemic hit and Freddi lost his job and then injured his hand. The family was left without a stable source of income for many months. They barely survived on the three to four hundred dollars Freddy was able to make every week with spontaneous gigs.
Marta was trying to find ways to help keep the family afloat. She applied for the weekly program, but she also got creative at home.
Al Principean Kosalski Missi hasi wan the hand of Kenaiann Proveecho Mahenka.
At first, she was giving away toll is her daughters didn't use anymore, using platforms like Facebook. Then people started offering her money for them and and that experience revived her dream. So when she got selected for the Big Ley program, she knew she had to invest the money wisely.
Jeans closes.
She could have spent the money on shoes or clothes for herself and her daughters, but that would have been it. Instead, Marta decided to buy merchandise and then sell it to generate a profit. Martha is unfolding clothes and hanging them on a circular hangar, being busy makes Marta feel good. It's like therapy, she says. Well, she organizes sneakers and Ellie caps on a long white plastic table. Martha gets a video calls it's Martha's mother calling from Honduras. Her
name is Martha as well. Moving the phone around, MARTA's her mother the new.
Space, Mama r.
Martha's mother recommends her not to drill any holes on the walls because she might not get her deposit back today. She has to leave the space. Martha actually borrowed money from her mother and some other family members in Hondudas to open the store.
Grandmos.
Martha's mother tells her she has a gift that God gave her. And look at you're a business woman, her mother tells her, as she is, Mamma the.
Way I am.
Martha tells her mother she's gonna call her later because she needs to call a client who wants to buy some gifts. They talk every day, often more than once.
By a mom.
I asked Marta if she already has a name in mind for her store.
The one outlet, the one and honor as a your daddy was Sonya Looras.
Martha says she would love to name the store dubone outlet. The one is her mother's last name, and she wants to honor her, a strong, bold woman who worked a lot and was also a dreamer, just like Martha.
Coming up on Latino USA. We go to Martha's grand opening and we asked, what's the future of guaranteed income programs in the United States?
Stay with us, not the ys.
Hi, Latino USA. My name is Magali garciaflex. I grew up along the US Mestical border in Laredo, Texas. The first time I started listening to Latino USA was in the fall of twenty fourteen. I had just started a new job at Providence College, and I turned to Latino USA as both material for class, but also as a
way to feel closer to home. The familiar voices, especially the trans languaging between English and Spanish, and the topics that really resonated with me are what made me feel like I know, USA was so right.
And so special for me.
Seal complex, here's too many more.
Hey, we're back.
Before the break, we saw how Marta and Michaela, two participants of Los Angeles's Guaranteed Income program, are spending the one thousand dollars they're getting every month for one year. You know, USA senior producer Marta Martinez is going to pick up the story from here, Ola.
Today is the grand opening of Martha's store. I can't even recognize the space. It's now so full of clothes, toys, home supplies. By the window, there's a display for Saint Valentine's Day, full of hearts and stuffed animals. I noticed that Marta didn't follow her mother's advice, and she drilled two giant racks on the left wall. They're packed with T shirts, sweaters, jeans. She's going all in. Hello, ladies, how are you today. MARTA's daughters, Lizzie and Sophia are
also here, and they're dressed for the occasion. They each wear a big bowl on their hair. Lizzie is covered in rainbows, a big rainbow on her chest and a rainbow pattern skirt. Sophia has a T shirt with a unicorn on the front and on the back.
Well, yes, Corney, fairly, Fia, oh, Sophia.
Marta greets everyone who enters the store and answers their questions single promise. In the back of the store, there's a small table where they're serving natches the fruit. The same long plastic table from the first day I visited the store is now covered in all kinds of chips and sodas for everyone to pick up for free. Sophie asks me if I want anything.
Oh, by the way, we have chips, drinks, whatever, And.
Then she tells me about what a particular soda is made of.
And it's made of sugar coop And that's.
More than a store opening. It feels like a neighborhood birthday party. And then Martha's next door neighbors sho Gloria and Marcus neighbors.
Welcome.
They're both tall and thin and here waiting for you. Marcus walks slowly and is always joking.
Nurse is nice.
Marcus sits and it's some natchos well. His wife Gloria browses around. He sits next to two solvador and women who don't speak English, but he seems to be enjoying himself.
Go back in her pressure room.
Gloria ends up buying a couple of long sleeve shirts and a pair of pants. It took a while for Martha to have a relationship with Marcus and Gloria. Language was a barrier but over time they've become closer. The couple sits down its cake and chats with the group for a while. It's getting late. While Marcus and Gloria leave, Martha gets a call from her mother. Martha moves the phone around and shows her mother how full the story is.
Now the celebration is complete. The City of Los Angeles doesn't have hard data yet on the impact of the Big Leap program. It'll still take months to analyze what happened during the year when partic sipens cutter cash transfers, and what happened during the six months after that. But Abigail Marquez from La City Government is quite impressed so far, even after twenty years working in public administration.
It's all anecdotal at this point, but we have learned that through this program, people are feeling less stress and less anxiety. That's allowing households to plan for the future, which oftentimes many people take for granted.
Reports from over twenty other pilot programs across the country have shown similar positive results reduced stress levels, improved physical health, higher full time employment rates, including the final results from the Stockton program, which came out recently. Abigail says Stockton, sparked the national movement.
We have cities for guaranteed income, we have counties for guaranteed income, and we're talking about this at the federal level, you know, with the President and many of our congressional representatives as well.
The state of California is funding several guaranteed income programs for mothers and children, and in the state of New York, people are pushing for a similar initiative. In twenty twenty one, the Biden administration expanded the Child Independent Tax Credit that gave families up to three hundred dollars a month per child. They didn't call it guaranteed income, but it was pretty similar and it helped cut child poverty in half. For
many experts, it's clear that guaranteed income programs work. The question is how they can strengthen the social welfare system, not dismantle it. I shared it with Abigail one of the questions that keeps resonating in my head since I started reporting on the Big Lead program on what this year has been like for Marta and Mikaela and another thirty two hundred people.
They've definitely gotten this economic stability for a year, but now are going to stop receiving that, Like, what's going to happen to these people?
So that's you know, that is the unfortunate aspect of this work is that we won't really know people are working, but the economy is not working for our lowest wage earners.
I also asked Juliana Bida Lanure from Stanford's Basic Income Lab.
Yeah, that's such an important question. I worry about this too, you know.
I think people have been incredible by enlarged using the cash in ways that put them in a better.
Position after the program ends.
But it's still a very big concern because the idea of the of the program is not like we give you cash for a little while and then you're on your own.
It's actually the opposite of that.
The idea is we create this robust flaw that will ensure that this is guaranteed and you know that you will always be able to rely on this. And the question is also like what kinds of choices you make when that's secured.
Juliana believes that beyond the hard data that these pilot programs will gather on their positive impact, there are bigger moral and political questions to consider when thinking about the future of UBI.
It's really about what we owe each other. In wealthy Nasian, we have accumulated unprecedented wealth off the backs of workers past and present, and so I think it's really time to redistribute this wealth more fairly.
And she wishes that the pandemic helps us think differently about emergencies.
Now we think about cashas like effective, but we continue to think about cash as only for emergency situations, but not realizing that abject poverty, economic insecurity ah emergencies and that we need to fix it now.
I meet Mikhaela at the red brick home in South where she rents two rooms. We walked to the backyard where there's a shed she has converted into her sewing workshop.
The man.
It's been hard to meet with Mikhaela because she's always working. Last night she finished her latest assignment. She sold five hundred blouses for two dollars.
Each Plando in Tregando.
She was folding clothes until eleven pm the night before. She won't be receiving any more cash transfers from Big Leap, so she feels she can't say no to any new assignments. Mikaela shows me around the tiny well organized.
Shed connom presta Makina is the makina is tramakina.
After Mikhayela paid off her son's college debt, she bought four second hands sewing machinets. They added up to about five thousand dollars and she's still paying for them.
Reno borgestava, pagandoodiz sala rerenta and ton says yo no al cansa and no salad in nero.
She used to pay one hundred and ten dollars a month to rent the machines, but now all she makes with her work she keeps, even if it isn't much. Mikhaela says that without the help of Big Lip, she would never have been able to purchase the sewing machines. That's because you always left hand to mouth.
Doosolo parami san sali loyo yora was.
Mia yudai.
This whole year of receiving a stable income was a big relief for Mikhaela. She felt she was getting out of the hole, that she was finally able to breathe. But now that the program is over, she still has other problems to worry about.
Miss Manos komote Otterna.
Mikaela shows me her hands. She wears two black wrisbands after developing carpal tunnel on both hands from so many years of sewing and iron clothes. The doctor says she'll probably need surgery, but she doesn't have the money to pay for the procedure and she can't afford going on signif either.
Independent was.
Medicina, Mikaela shows me a giant orange bottle full of pills. Chelsea, and she's taking a hundred milligram ibuprofen pills to keep going. A couple of nights ago, at one in the morning, she was in bed and the taki cardia came.
Back my pega barossolo sinkos wundos verte meat.
Her heart started racing so hard she could even see her nightgown going up and down. She thought her heart was going to jump out of her chests.
Yes and dia perro ci fut.
It went on for twenty minutes. She thought she was going to faint, and she ended up calling an ambulance.
Talvesi yo talves me pantstres prone.
Mikhaela wonders if all of this is because of the Bigley program ending, but she tells herself that she has to move forward and work harder. She does have a dream, like Marta. Mikaela wants to open her own small business, a sewing workshop. She wants to hire about five people to help her.
Permitted questa adasatamente novi aldiya viorna in Berti and ali mi propio peke presita.
With the Big Lip Program, Mikhaela got one step closer to her goal of creating her own business, but she's still pretty far away from achieving it. I catch up with Marta at her store three days before her next Big Lip cash transfer, her second to last. There are even more goods now, a small fridge with sodas near the entrance, columns of toilet paper piling up in the back room.
The loya vendid contradovoice this fetch i dig grandia.
There hasn't been a single day when Marta left the store without selling anything. Today it's three pm and she's already made one hundred and fifty dollars. Marta worried a lot about being able to cover rent for the space with the store cells because it's twelve hundred dollars a month. It's the best person.
See see.
See I thank you maday, so he puts, yeah, this is excellenteo ya competra marcari yoo mas.
Martha says she's already made double the rent for this month and all the extra money she has invested it in new merchandise. Martha only has two more cash deposits left from Big Deep, but she says she's not sad that the program is ending. Having a steady cash support allowed her to do things she always dreamed of, but she would have never been able to achieve on her own.
So on those dollar nomelo u ningun son and now that sun Cantida buena de avechalgo Provicio's.
See that's as at brend she would have never in her life had access to twelve thousand dollars otherwise, and Marta thinks she's used the money well. When she was leaving day to day, she wasn't able to think beyond how to get to the end of the month, and like Mikaela, that made her physically sick. Once they were able to get out of survival mode and keep their head above water, that's when they started thinking long term
and making smart decisions about money. Both Marta and Mikhaela had dreams to open their own businesses, businesses that would employ other people and contribute to the economic prosperity of their communities. But now that they'll stop receiving cash, it's not clear what they'll be able to keep up with the steady growth They've both decided to keep trying. Martha gets to work for herself now, not for others, making her own schedule and adapting to her daughters too, and.
We don't think connecting for snack time.
Her husband, Freddie, picked up the girls from school early today because Sophia isn't feeling well. No, it looks like the virus that first made Lizzie sick has been passing from one family member to another. The girls and Freddie still aren't fully on board with this new life of Martha as an entrepreneur.
Why you don't like here?
And there's no TV so I can't do anything.
After school, the girls spend some time at the store with Martha, and then they all go home for dinner. Martha has no plans to go back to the life she had before the.
Program, unless my belly will get my dad's.
Sophia looks very pale and her stomach aches. She's far from her usual bubbly self, but she'll still make the most unexpected comments, like when she's talking about her dad.
Him and Spanish. I call him Babby in the English, as you know, but I've called him sometimes sometimes I call him that.
It's almost five pm. Marta decides that today she's gonna close the store early and she's gonna go home and take care of her daughters. Yeah, because now she is the boss.
However, s we go about?
Have you seen?
This episode was produced by Marta Martinez and edited by Daisy Contreras. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebau and Julia Caruso. Fact checking for this episode by Monica Morales Garcia. The Latino USA team includes Andrea Lopez Ruzado, Mike Sargent, Miktrri Estrada, Rinaldo, Leanos Junior, Patricia Subrand and Elizabeth Loental Torres. Our editorial director is Fernande Santos. Our associate engineers are Gabriel La Bayez and JJ Carubin. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna.
Our theme music was composed by Sane Rubinos. I'm your host and executive producer Maria J. Josa join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on social media. Remember and we'll see you on the next one.
Joe Latino U s A is made possible in part by California Endowment building a strong state by improving the health of all Californians. The Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, and the Anni E. Casey Foundation, creates a brighter future for the nation's children by strengthening families, building greater economic opportunity, and transforming communities.