Universal Basic Services

Foster traces the political and intellectual development of seven government-backed economic guarantees (housing, health care, college education, dignified work, family care, an inheritance, and an income floor) from the post-2008 reckoning through the pandemic-era expansions of the child tax credit and eviction moratoriums. Foster's core argument is that the United States already extends extensive guarantees to the private sector through bailouts, bankruptcy protection, and deposit insurance, and that extending analogous guarantees to individuals is a matter of political will rather than economic novelty. Useful as a narrative history of how UBS-adjacent policies moved from activist aspiration to temporary implementation in the U.S., and as a catalog of the specific coalitions and campaigns that made each guarantee politically viable.

OpenAI proposes building benefit systems not tied to a single employer by expanding access to healthcare, retirement savings, and skills training through portable accounts that follow individuals across jobs, industries, education programs, and entrepreneurial ventures. Public programs can decouple key benefits from employment status, with implementation running through portable benefit platforms that pool contributions from multiple sources and route them into standardized accounts attached to the individual, not the job.

Kathryn Anne Edwards proposes a federally funded Child Development System that brings together early childhood care, after-school programming, and summer provision within a single framework. Providers would be reimbursed at cost rather than relying on market-based fees, enabling a wider range of institutions, including schools, community centers, and religious organizations, to participate without needing to operate profitably. Edwards argues that this model could expand supply in childcare deserts and other underserved areas, support nonstandard work schedules, and make provision more responsive to community needs than to market profitability.

The author of the book "Fully Automated Luxury Communism," argues that AI should lead to more leisure and rising living standards, but that UBI is the wrong solution. He advocates for UBS as the primary vehicle to distribute technological gains, effectively using AI productivity to demonetize the cost of survival. He envisions the state directly providing free housing, public transport, education, healthcare, and digital infrastructure (broadband). His broader political theory is that AI and renewables can structurally reduce the marginal cost of these goods to near-zero, but only if the state breaks corporate control over technology deployment.

While not calling for full UBS, their report recommends a key US-specific step toward it: decoupling healthcare from employment. Noting that 60% of Americans lose health coverage if they lose their jobs, they propose "automatic triggers" that expand Medicaid funding in regions with high job displacement or higher unemployment. This would function as a targeted basic service, ensuring that technological unemployment does not lead to a loss of medical security.