Next Session: Bring Back Minnesota's Proposed Basic Income Program With An Improved Design

By Alex Meyers Patrick Carter Sigrid Jewett Eric Harris Bernstein and Kelly McConney Moore, Minnesota Reformer

June 5, 2024

From pacemakers and hearing aids to open heart surgery and organ transplants, Minnesotans should be proud that innovative research from our state is pushing boundaries and improving lives.

Twice now, however, the Minnesota Legislature has considered but not passed an equally groundbreaking innovation: A statewide guaranteed basic income pilot program that would be the largest ever conducted in the United States. We urge state lawmakers to improve and reconsider the proposal — with an improved design — during the next legislative session.

Guaranteed basic income programs provide no-strings-attached monthly payments to families living below an income threshold. Unlike most government programs, they don’t require recipients to participate in job training or other activities and don’t restrict how the money is used. Guaranteed basic income programs trust that individuals know best how to improve their lives.

A basic income program could lift thousands of Minnesotans — and most importantly, children — out of poverty without micromanaging their lives or requiring a complicated new bureaucracy. Studies of these programs to date have found meaningful benefits including reduced poverty, increased employment, and improved health and well-being. Initial research suggests this flexible approach may be more efficient than other traditional anti-poverty programs.

Furthermore, support for a guaranteed income has been growing in the United States. Since 2019, over 150 jurisdictions have experimented with it — including the Twin Cities. Saint Paul was at the forefront in implementing and evaluating a guaranteed income pilot program, kicking off a series of trials in the state.

The statewide Minnesota Guaranteed Income Pilot Program proposed this past legislative session would have built on this foundation of success and support by allocating $100 million to local and tribal governments and nonprofits to design and run guaranteed income pilot programs. The bill allowed significant flexibility for the administering organizations to determine eligibility, select recipients, and administer funds and measure outcomes.

The proposed statewide pilot program represented an opportunity for the people of Minnesota and for our understanding of whether a guaranteed income could help alleviate poverty and improve lives across the state. But the decentralized design of the program risked repeating mistakes of past small-scale guaranteed income evaluations. The bill should be reintroduced next session, but with an improved — more centralized — design that would better serve our community and generate more useful evidence for the future.

Specifically, a more centralized approach would provide three benefits:

First, it would increase efficiency. Rather than asking local partner organizations to each develop their own implementation approach, Minnesota’s program could offer a single approach based on identified best practices from previous pilot programs around the country while retaining the inherent flexibility in how participants’ use funds. There is no need for each local partner to reinvent the wheel.

Second, a single statewide study would allow for the largest evaluation of a guaranteed income pilot program ever conducted in the United States and would better measure impact. A larger sample size provides a clearer picture of the program’s effectiveness, like increasing the resolution of a photograph. Small sample sizes have plagued guaranteed income evaluations nationwide, making it challenging to say with confidence what metrics are most impacted by the added flexible monthly income. Running a large, centralized evaluation of pilot programs in localities throughout the state would help fill a national knowledge gap and make Minnesota a leader in this research.

Finally, a larger evaluation sample size allows for comparisons between localities, making it easier to see what communities and conditions are most affected by a guaranteed basic income. A large study which includes Minnesotans with diverse characteristics will be more likely to measure differences due to those traits, as opposed to many small studies narrowly focused on specific populations. We agree it is essential to study a guaranteed basic income at a local level, but the best way to do this is through a well-designed, centralized study.

Minnesota has consistently pioneered the use of high-quality research to inform policy decisions. Today, Minnesota’s executive branch is a leader in documenting proposed programs’ ability to meet specific standards for evidence of effectiveness, reporting on the evidence behind its investment decisions in public budget documents, and summarizing how evidence was used in bills signed into law.

Results for America, a national nonpartisan nonprofit that helps governments implement data-driven, evidence-based policies, has recognized our state and a number of our local governments for using evaluations to allocate resources effectively. Minnesotans are better off because bipartisan elected officials and public employees seek evidence where it exists, build it where it doesn’t and develop processes to incentivize these efforts.

That laudable commitment should be reflected in the design of the Minnesota Guaranteed Income Pilot Program.

Next session, legislators should introduce and pass a pilot program that carefully follows best practices and centrally evaluates its outcomes. By doing this, Minnesota can continue to be at the forefront of innovative research, this time about whether a guaranteed income works — for whom and under what circumstances — in order to build a more prosperous future for participants.

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..