Is Universal Basic Income a policy worth pursuing? Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a policy proposal that provides income to every citizen. UBI has 2 main principles: unconditionality and universality. Unlike means-tested programs, where you have to be below a certain income threshold to qualify, everyone is supposed to get the benefit, and it is often flat. This means if a UBI policy gave $100 a month to all American citizens, it would not matter if you have no income to your name or if you were a wealthy billionaire; we’d all get the same benefits. 

There is a certain appeal to this approach to welfare policy. Because it is universal, we don’t have to fight over who is “deserving” of the benefit or not. Everyone benefits equally, whether you are rich, poor, black, white, working, not working, young, or old. And so, I can see where the policy has appeal. Compare this to programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which has various conditions to be eligible for the benefit, including income, work requirements, and other rules dependent on which of the 50 states you reside in. The weakness here is that this creates an administrative burden for eligible beneficiaries, where they have to navigate a sometimes complicated, bureaucratic system to attain benefits they are entitled to under the law. As a result, many people who are qualified to attain food benefits under SNAP do not actually get the benefit. On the contrary, reducing barriers to benefits increases access to those benefits and reduces food insecurity. 

The main point is that the more rules and complications you add to gain access to welfare programs, the less likely it is to be used by those the program is meant to target. UBI, on the other hand, is an elegant and simple solution. Everyone gets benefits, the system does not vary across 50 states, and it needs no complicated bureaucracy to administer. Thus, everyone can attain the benefits easily. Means-tested programs require an application process, with the government verifying documents, such as evidence of work, drug tests, and paperwork, whereas to qualify for UBI, the only condition a beneficiary must establish is that they are a citizen of the state. 

The simplicity of UBI, unlike targeted welfare programs like SNAP and Medicaid, is what garners its appeal and could serve as an alternative model for welfare policy. However, there are some critiques worth considering. Conservatives argue that UBI rewards “laziness” by giving benefits to those who do not work. If everyone were given an income, and it was enough to live on, what would be the incentive to work? The argument here is that the labor supply would fall, productivity would decline, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth would weaken, and America would be poorer. There is some evidence for this argument, such as from a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, which finds that a UBI program that provided 1,000 low-income individuals with $1,000 per month reduced 1.3-1.4 hours per week in labor hours and reduced labor supply by 2 percent, relative to the control group. The analysis also found that leisure hours increased significantly. The labor supply argument is a well-known point of objection, but it needs to be weighed with a broader, subjective consideration: is productivity the ultimate economic good? If UBI’s biggest sin is reducing some labor supply, but more Americans can have access to more leisure, because they choose to, is that necessarily bad? The answer to that is not merely an empirical one, but values-based. 

I have my own objections to UBI, particularly the standard $1,000 a month proposal, which was popularized by Andrew Yang when he ran for President in 2020. The problem is the fiscal cost and what we can get out of it. A UBI that provides every American with $12,000 a year would cost $2.8 trillion, according to a 2019 estimate by the Tax Foundation. This estimate is conservative, given that it does not account for the population increase since then. If we account for the current number of adult U.S. citizens, the cost of this UBI program would be $3 trillion dollars, accounting for nearly 43% of the $7 trillion the federal government spent in the 2025 federal budget. In my view, this is an inefficient use of budgetary resources. The federal deficit is already large as is, and a $3 trillion program – which is not targeted to help the most vulnerable –  won’t be effective. A more effective approach, in my view, is to still use targeted programs like SNAP, but make the regulations centralized, rather than having different rules for each of the 50 states. SNAP costs $100 billion, far less than the proposed UBI program, but because it is targeted, the intervention and impact is deeper. Support provided to those who already have money does little to help, versus support given to those who have very little. This is known as the Marginal Propensity to Consume, which suggests that lower-income individuals are more likely to spend when given new stimulus, and thus boosting economic growth. If your policy goal is to increase economic mobility, targeted investments are still more effective. 

Therefore, UBI (in its classical application) is not a policy I generally support, despite agreeing with the simplicity and lack of conditionality in the policy design. I think more good can be done by reforming existing, targeted welfare programs, such as SNAP, Medicaid, childcare tax credits, and others. This is because it is more fiscally sound, even if program design will remain more complicated than UBI. A form of UBI I could get behind, however, is a small  $50-a-month cash transfer, costing $150 billion a year rather than the original $3 trillion proposal. And if this small-scale UBI program works, maybe it can be expanded on a greater scale. The current priority, however, should be to improve existing welfare programs to improve their efficiency and simplify application.