In 1967, the year before he was assassinated, King published a book titled, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? In it, King held up a basic income as a solution to the poverty that afflicted people of all races in the United States. “In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derived from racial discrimination, I will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike,” he wrote. He went on to add that “ the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
The poverty that King spoke of afflicting white and black Americans alike is today threatening those people who have been replaced in offices and on assembly lines by robots that can do the same job more cheaply. Experts have pointed to the “economic anxiety” of voters in the Rust Belt states, where manufacturing jobs have declined steeply, as one of the primary reasons for Donald Trump’s victory. Trump blamed trade policy for the job losses, though the real culprit is technology.
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