This City Eliminated Poverty, And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It - HuffPo [View all]

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This City Eliminated Poverty, And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It
Zi-Ann Lum - HuffPo
Posted: 12/30/2014 9:44 am EST Updated: 3 minutes ago


An aerial view of the city of Dauphin, Manitoba. Forty years ago, a groundbreaking experiment provided checks to Dauphin’s poorest to raise their incomes to a livable wage. (Photo: Dauphin Economic Development/Facebook)

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On a December afternoon, Frances Amy Richardson took a break from her quilting class to reflect on a groundbreaking experiment she took part in 40 years earlier.

“Well, that was quite a few years ago,” she said. “There was a lot of people that really benefitted from it.”

Between 1974 and 1979, residents of a small Manitoba city were selected to be subjects in a project that ensured basic annual incomes for everyone. For five years, monthly checks were delivered to the poorest residents of Dauphin, Manitoba –- no strings attached.

And for five years, poverty was completely eliminated.

The program was dubbed “Mincome” -- a neologism of “minimum income” -- and it was the first of its kind in North America. It stood out from similar American projects at the time because it didn’t shut out seniors and the disabled from qualification.

The project’s original intent was to evaluate if giving checks to the working poor, enough to top-up their incomes to a living wage, would kill people’s motivation to work. It didn’t.

But the Conservative government that took power provincially in 1977 -- and federally in 1979 -- had no interest in implementing the project more widely. Researchers were told to pack up the project’s records into 1,800 boxes and place them in storage.

A final report was never released.

Richardson is now 87 and still lives in Dauphin. She says only three or four of the city’s original Mincome recipients remain among the prairie community’s 8,251 residents.

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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/30/city-eliminated-poverty-mincome_n_6392126.html