Is This the Universal Basic Income That Americans Will Buy?

As far as most of the country is concerned, universal basic income—that’s when the government just, like, gives people money—is the stuff of NBER white papers and Star Trek economics. Beyond a handful of notable experiments, like a pilot program in Stockton, California, to give 130 random residents $500 a month for a year and a half, UBI demonstrations—in the U.S. at least—are more elusive than UFOs. That’s at least in part because the premise itself is so fundamentally antithetical to the American mythology of self-made men and women: Handouts are for places like Finland.

But with job-eating automation looming and the wealth gap growing, the essential logic behind UBI—a no-strings-attached cash transfer program that helps vulnerable low-wage households from teetering into ruinous poverty—is more relevant than ever. And we might not have to wait for a socialist revolution or an Andrew Yang presidency to see what it might look like in the United States. Leaders in the here-and-now are thinking about ways to expand a conventional tax credit to guarantee the wages of low- and middle-income working households. Changes to the tax code could help to make up the wage stagnation that has dragged the economy for more than a generation.