• Spain is taking steps to implement a basic income to help citizens weather the economic fallout from the novel coronavirus, which would make it the first nation in Europe to do so.
• “We’re going to do it as soon as possible. So it can be useful, not just for this extraordinary situation, and that it remains forever,” the minister of economic affairs said.
• No specific date was unveiled.
• In the US, Andrew Yang’s Democratic presidential campaign helped thrust the idea of universal basic income into the mainstream.

Spain is moving to implement a universal basic income as a measure to help workers battered by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Nadia Calviño, the country’s minister for economic affairs, told the Spanish broadcaster La Sexta on Sunday evening that the government was planning to introduce the cash handouts as part of a barrage of policies meant to help people get back on their feet.

She said enacting basic income was “mostly aimed at families, but differentiating between their circumstances.”

Calviño didn’t offer a specific date as to when basic income could be rolled out in the country. But she said the government hoped it would become “a permanent instrument.”

“We’re going to do it as soon as possible,” she said. “So it can be useful, not just for this extraordinary situation, and that it remains forever.”

If the plan moves from proposal to reality, Spain would become the first nation in Europe to pass universal basic income, according to The Independent.