Guaranteed Minimum Income provides a reliable source of minimum income for folks to use on whatever they need most: food, shelter, childcare, education, or business opportunities. With improved economic security and flexibility, recipients gain agency over their lives and have the freedom to pursue the American Dream.
GMI is a simple, practical, scalable way to directly address the root of economic insecurity with minimum bureaucracy.
For more, watch the talk that Alexander Vindman and Jeff Atwood gave on March 20th, 2025 in New York City at The Great Hall at Cooper Union.
(Below is a transcript of Jeff Atwood's section of the talk, which is specifically about Guaranteed Minimum Income, from 25:40 to 1:02:44.)
First of all, it's an incredible honor to be here. It really is.
[Applause.]
It is. Thank you. I want to thank Cooper — especially Chris (sorry!), and Colonel Vindman, of course. What an honor.
[Applause.]
And everyone here in the audience here for showing up, doing the work and helping me speak through such a powerful, historic platform to get the message out.
I have to begin by acknowledging Michael Tubbs' talk at the Long Now Foundation in 2022, where he spoke so eloquently about the urgency of the ideas I'm going to address today. I highly recommend watching his complete talk — he says it so much better than I can.
I'm Jeff Atwood. I co-founded Stack Overflow, a Q&A website for programmers that, much like Wikipedia, builds a Creative Commons Encyclopedia of programming knowledge for the whole world to learn from. In the process, we built a digital democracy, a community "Of the Programmers, By the Programmers, For the Programmers". We voted to rank questions and answers. We held community elections for moderators using Ranked Choice Voting. We did it democratically because that's the American Way. That is what I know.
I also co-founded Discourse, which also builds Creative Commons shared knowledge in a looser, conversational format. The goal of both of these projects was, and still is, to create freely shared knowledge while working together as a community. We believe information that we create belongs to all of us. It belongs to future generations that can build towards even greater goals — ones we can't even imagine yet. My success with these two companies, one might say, is an embodiment of the American Dream.
One might also ask, "What is the American Dream?"
In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, James Truslow Adams first defined the American Dream as "a land in which life should be better, and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity according to ability or achievement. Not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which everyone shall be able to attain the fullest statures of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are" regardless of where they were born and what they come from.
I want to know what those words mean to us today. I need to know what parts of the American Dream we all still have in common, because honestly, I'm not sure. I had to make some sense of what's happening to our country.
I've been writing on my blog since 2004, and on November 7th I started writing what became the most difficult piece of writing I have ever written. I asked so many Americans to tell me, what does the American Dream personally mean to you. And I wrote it all down. Later in November, I attended — this just happened to happen — a theater performance of The Outsiders based on the novel by S.E. Hinton, at my son's public high school. All I really knew about it was the famous "Stay Gold" line from the movie adaptation.
But as I sat there in that audience, among my neighbors, watching the complete story, acted out in front of me these teenagers, I realized what it meant: sharing the American dream. We cannot merely attain the dream. The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans. That act of sharing is the final realization of everything our Dream stands for.
I finally had a name for my essay. It's the hardest part of any essay is the name. "Stay Gold, America." And I published it on January 7th with a pledge to share the American Dream.
In the first part of the Pledge, the short term, our family made eight one million dollar donations to the following non-profit groups: Team Rubicon. Children's Hunger Fund. PEN America. The Trevor Project. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Global Refuge. Planned Parenthood. And First Generation Investors.
[Applause.]
Thank you, thank you.
[Applause.]
But that wasn't enough. The needs were too urgent. Beyond that we made additional one million dollar donations to reinforce our technical infrastructure here in America. Wikipedia. The Internet Archive. The Common Crawl Foundation. Let's Encrypt. Pioneering independent internet journalism, and several other crucial open-source software projects that power much of the infrastructure of the internet world today.
I encourage every American to contribute soon, however you can, to the organizations you feel are effectively helping those most currently in need.
But short-term fixes are not enough. The pledge to share the American dream requires a much more ambitious second act, deeper, long-term changes that will take decades. Over the next five years, my family pledges half our remaining wealth to plant a seed towards foundational long-term efforts ensuring that all Americans continue to have the same fair access to the American Dream that Colonel Vindman and I had.
And let me tell you about my path to the American Dream. It was rocky. My parents were born into deep poverty in Mercer County, West Virginia, and Beaufort County, North Carolina. Our family eventually clawed our way to the bottom of the middle class in Virginia. I won't dwell on it. Every family has their own problems. But we did not remain middle class for long. Through all this, my parents got the most important thing right. They loved me. Openly, and unconditionally. That's everything. It's the only reason I am standing here in front of you today.
With my family's support, I managed to achieve a solid public education in Chesterfield County, Virginia and had the incredible privilege of an affordable state education at the University of Virginia. This is a college uniquely rooted in the beliefs of one of our most prominent Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson. He was a living paradox: a man of profound ideals, and yet so flawed, so trapped in the values of his time and place. And still, this man wrote "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" at the top of the Declaration of Independence. Those words were — and still are — revolutionary.
They define our fundamental shared American values, although we have not always lived up to them. Because the American Dream isn't about us succeeding alone, by ourselves. It's about connecting with each other and succeeding together.
I've been so concerned about wealth concentration here in America ever since I watched a 2012 video by Politizane — which is still amazing, by the way — illustrating just how extreme wealth concentration already was, and this was over 10 years ago. I had no idea how close we were to the American Gilded Age from the late 1800s. This period was given a name by historians referencing Mark Twain's 1873 novel,"The Guilded Age, a Tale of Today."
During this time, labor strikes often turned violent, with the Homestead Strike of 1892 resulting in deadly confrontations between workers and Pinkerton guards hired by factory owners. Rapid industrialization created hazardous working conditions in factories and mines and railroads, and thousands died due to insufficient safety regulations and employers who simply prioritized profit over the welfare of their own workers.
In January 2025, while I was still writing "Stay Gold, America," we entered the period of greatest wealth concentration in the entirety of American history.
As of 2021, the top 1% of households controlled 32% of all wealth in this country, while the bottom 50% had less than 3%. That was in 2021. Spoiler: it hasn't improved since then. It's gotten a lot worse. We can no longer say, "Guilded Age." We must now say "The First Guilded Age."
And today, in our Second Guilded Age, more and more people find their path to the American Dream blocked.
When Americans face unaffordable education, lack of accessible health care, and lack of affordable housing they aren't just disadvantaged — they are trapped, often burdened by massive debt. They have no foundation to even build their lives on. They watch desperately, working as hard as they can, while life simply passes them by, without even the freedom to choose their own lives. They don't have time to build a career. They don't have time to learn, to improve. They don't get to start a business. They can't choose where their children will grow up — or whether to have children at all because they can't afford to. Here, in the land of opportunity, the pursuit of he happiness has become an endless, maybe an impossible task, for too many of us. We are denying people any real chance of achieving the dream that we promised them, that we promised the entire world, when we founded this nation. It is such a profound betrayal of everything we ever dreamed as a country.
Without a stable foundation to build a life on, our fellow Americans cannot even pursue the American Dream, much less achieve it. And I want to ask you this — as an American, tell me: What is the purpose of a dream we've left unshared with so many, for so long? What's happening to our Dream? Are we really willing to let go of our values so easily? We're Americans. We fight. We fight for our values. The values embodied in this dream, our dream, the one we founded our country on. Why aren't we sharing the American Dream? Why aren't we giving everyone a fair chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by simply providing them fundamentals they need to get there?
The Dream worked for both Colonel Vindman and me, decades ago. And we both deeply believe that the American dream can still work for everyone if, if, we ensure every American has the same fair chance we did. The American Dream was never about a few people becoming extraordinarily wealthy. It's about having an equal chance to succeed and to pursue your dreams, your own happiness. It belongs to you. I think we owe you at least that. I think we owe ourselves at least that.
So what can we do about this? There are no easy answers. I can't even pretend to have the answer because there's not any one answer to give. Nothing worth doing, like democracy, is ever that simple. But I can tell you this — all the studies and all the data I've looked at have strongly pointed towards one foundational thing we can do, here in America, over the next five years.
Immediately after this talk I will be publishing another blog post: "The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income".
Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, makes a powerful case for the idea that, with all this concentrated wealth, we can offer a guaranteed minimum income in the poorest areas of this country, the areas of most need, where money goes the farthest, to unlock vast amounts of untapped human potential. We believe GMI could be perhaps the greatest transformation of this country since the Industrial Revolution.
And this isn't a new idea. We've been doing do this a while now in different forms, but we never called it "guaranteed minimum income."
In 1797, Thomas Payne proposed a retirement pension fund funded by estate taxes. It didn't go anywhere, but it planted a seed. Much later that was realized in the implementation of the Social Security Act in 1935. The Social Security Act is the most popular and the most effective program to emerge from this era. It provides a guaranteed income for retirees. Before Social Security, half of seniors in this country lived in poverty. Today only ten percent of seniors live in poverty.
In his 1967 book, Martin Luther King Jr. made the moral case for a form of basic income, "universal basic income". King believed that economic insecurity was at the root of all inequality. He stated that a guaranteed income — direct cash disbursements — was the simplest and best way to fight poverty in this country.
In 1972, Congress established the Supplemental Security Income program, providing direct cash assistance to low income, blind, elderly, and disabled individuals with little or no income. That cash could be used for food, for housing, for medical expenses — the essentials for financial stability. As of January 2025, over 7.3 million people receive SSI benefits.
In 1975, Congress passed the Tax Reduction Act which established the Earned Income Tax Credit. This tax credit benefits working class parents with children and it encourages work by increasing the income of low-income workers. In 2023, it lifted about 6.4 million people out of poverty, including 3.4 million children. According to the Census Bureau, it is the second most effective anti-poverty tool after Social Security.
Now in 2019, directly inspired by King, Mayor Michael Tubbs — who I mentioned earlier — at age 26 [...] Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration. It provided 125 residents with $500 per month in unconditional cash payments for two years. The program found that the recipients experienced improved financial stability, increased full-time employment, and enhanced well-being.
In my "Stay Gold, America" essay I referenced the Robert Frost Stay Gold poem, and Hinton's famous novel The Outsiders, which urge us to retain our youthful ideals as we grow older, ideals that I say are embodied in the American Dream.
Our proposal to ensure access to the American Dream in the long term is Guaranteed Minimum Income, an improved version of universal basic income. It is simpler, it's more practical, it's more scalable, and it directly addresses the root of economic insecurity with minimum bureaucracy.
With our 50 million dollars — half of our family's wealth — we are partnering with Give Directly, who oversaw the most GMI studies in the United States, and OpenResearch, who just completed the largest, most detailed GMI study in this country in 2023. We're all working together to launch a new Guaranteed Minimum Income initiative in rural American communities.
Network effects between communities explain why equality of opportunity is so effective, and why a shared American Dream is the most powerful dream of all. The potential of the American Dream becomes vastly greater as more people have access to it, because they share it. They share it with their families, they share with their friends and their neighbors. The groundbreaking OpenResearch UBI study data — this is freely available on their website, go look at it — showed that when you give money to the poorest among us, they consistently go out of their way to share. And they have nothing. They share with others in desperate need.
Those most impacted by the problem have the solutions, if we're willing to listen to them.
And the power of opportunity is not at what can in what it can do for one person, but how it connects and strengthens bonds between us. When you empower a couple, you allow them to build a family. When you empower families, you allow them to build a community. When you guarantee fundamentals, you're providing a foundation for those connections between us to grow and thrive, and that is the incredible power and value of community that we will unlock. That is what we're investing in. Each other.
A system where there are no guarantees creates conflict. It creates inequality. A massive concentration of wealth in so few hands weakens connections between us and prevents new ones. But America began as a place of connection. Millions of us came together to build this nation, not individually — together. I tell you this: equality is connection, and connection is more valuable than any product any company will ever sell you.
You may ask, why are you focusing on introducing Guaranteed Minimum Income to rural communities specifically? Well, there are consistently higher poverty rates in rural counties. We also hope to encourage entrepreneurship in these areas because we believe all of America should be prosperous. Rural areas also offer smaller populations which lets us start small with many tightly controlled studies, which we can carefully scale and improve for larger areas. We will build — we hope to build — a large body of scientific data from these studies showing that Guaranteed Minimum Income really does improve the lives and the communities of our fellow Americans.
The initial plan is to target two counties that I have a personal connection to, and are currently in poverty, decades later. My father was born in Mercer County, West Virginia where the collapse of coal mining devastated them. Their way of life is all but gone, and good jobs are very hard to find. My mother's birthplace, Beaufort County, North Carolina has been hit just as hard. Farming and factory jobs are disappearing and families are left wondering, What's next? What do we do?
Our third county is yet to be decided but will be also facing the same systemic generational obstacles to economic stability and achieving the American Dream.
We will work with existing local groups to coordinate these GMI studies where community members choose to enroll. We will conduct outreach and provide mentorship to these opt-in study participants. This is community building in practice. It will be teamwork between fellow Americans.
And we also hope veterans will play a crucial role in our effort. We plan to work with these communities and veteran-serving organizations to engage veterans to execute and support our GMI programs — to participate. These are the same veterans who served our country with distinction, returning home with exceptional leadership skills and a deep commitment to their communities. They fought for us. Their involvement ensures that these programs reflect core American values of self-reliance and community service to our fellow Americans. But we'll also partner with established community organizations, churches, civic groups, community colleges, local businesses. Those partnerships integrate our GMI studies with existing support systems rather than creating new ones.
GiveDirectly and OpenResearch will gather extensive data from their existing body of work and improve on it. We'll measure employment, entrepreneurship, education, health, and community engagement. We'll conduct regular interviews with participants to understand their experience. How is this working for you? How can we make it better? You tell us, because we're listening. We want to make it better together.
And economic security isn't only about individual well being — it's the bedrock of democracy. When people are aren't constantly worried about feeding themselves, feeding their family, having decent health care, having a place to even live, we have given them room to breathe. With GMI, we have given them freedom. The freedom to raise their children. The freedom to start their own business. The freedom to even choose where they work. The freedom to volunteer. The freedom to vote.
But this isn't about ideology or government. It's about us, as Americans, and possibly the greatest unlocking of human potential in our entire history. I do not say these things lightly, because I've seen it work. I've done it myself. I've looked at all the existing study data. A little bit of money is incredibly transformational to people in poverty — especially deep poverty, the people who need it the most. The people who can't live up to their potential because they're so busy simply trying to survive in this country. Imagine, please imagine with me what they could do if we gave them just a little breathing room.
GMI is a long-term investment in the future of what America should be, the way we wrote it down in the Declaration of Independence, perhaps incompletely, but our democracy was always meant to change, to adapt and improve.
I'd like to conclude by mentioning Aaron Swartz. He was a precocious teenage programmer, much like myself. Aaron helped developed RSS feeds, co-founded Reddit, and worked with Creative Commons to create flexible copyright licenses for the common good. He used technology to make information universally accessible to everyone.
Aaron created a system to download public domain court documents from a government database that charged fees for accessing what he believed should be freely available public information — and he was right. A few years later, while visiting MIT under their open campus policy and at the time he was a research fellow at Harvard, he used MIT's network to download millions of academic articles from JSTOR, another fee-charging online academic journal repository, intending to make this knowledge freely accessible to everyone. And since taxpayers had funded much of this research why shouldn't that knowledge be freely available to all of us?
Federal prosecutors aggressively pursued felony charges against Aaron for this act with up to 35 years in prison. Very aggressively. Despite JSTOR declining to pursue charges and MIT eventually calling for leniency, facing overwhelming legal pressure and the prospect of being labeled a felon for life, Aaron took his own life at age 26.
That was a bad day.
This sparked widespread criticism about prosecutorial overreach and prompted discussions about open access to information. Eight days later, in this very room you're sitting in now, there was a standing room only memorial service praising Aaron for his commitment to the public good. Aaron pursued what was right for "we the people." He chose to build the public good despite knowing there would be risks. He chose to be an activist. Well, I think we should all choose to be activists, to be brave, to stand up for our defining American principles.
There are only two things I ask of you today.
Visit givedirectly.org where we're documenting our journey and findings from these three GMI rural county studies. Let's find out together how Guaranteed Minimum Income can transform American lives and possibly the entirety of America itself.
Talk about Guaranteed Minimum Income in your communities. Meet with your state and local officials. Share the existing study data, share outcomes, ask them about conducting GMI studies like ours in your area. Because we tell ourselves stories about why some people succeed and others don't. And the truth is a lot of it is random. I want you to challenge those stories. Economic security is not charity. It is an investment in each other.
My family is committing 50 million dollar to this endeavor, and honestly if I could I would give even more. But imagine if we had even more to share. Imagine how much more we could do if we had more to build it with together. Decades from now, people will look back and wonder why it took us so long to share our dream of a "better, richer, and fuller life" with all our fellow Americans.
Please join us on this grand experiment to share our American Dream. Colonel Vindman and I believe everyone deserves a fair chance at what was promised when we founded this nation. Life. Liberty. And the pursuit of the American Dream.
Thank you.
[Applause.]
Thank you very much.