“Give People Money,” proclaims the title of a new book by Annie Lowrey touting the merits of Universal Basic Income (UBI). I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been writing in this vein myself for some time.

The question of how still looms, however. And like other UBI appeals, Lowrey’s book doesn’t provide good answers.

The burden of the argument for Left proponents of UBI is to demonstrate why a UBI is the best way to pursue a national income guarantee. The idea that there should be some kind of guarantee is, within the Left, not in question. The key tenets of UBI’s claim to supremacy are:

Because it is universal, a UBI evades the political stigma usually associated with anti-poverty programs;

Because it is a fixed, unconditional payment, the UBI carries no disincentives to work;

Because it is cash, UBI is a more efficient form of aid than “in-kind” benefits such as food stamps. It affords maximum flexibility to the beneficiary and minimizes the administrative cost of an aid program;

As employment gives way to automation, a UBI will be the only source of income for masses of people;

Because of its efficiency, a UBI could beneficially replace a gamut of existing aid programs.

Nobody on the left is likely to object to income guarantees. The benefits of cash assistance for millions, not least in a rich country, aren’t in doubt. But the UBI is a specific type of assistance, where a broadly-defined constituency is guaranteed a regular, fixed, unconditional payment. In this context, generic arguments for the merits of income guarantees in general, which typically dominate UBI appeals such as Lowrey’s book, are beside the point. From that point of view, a number of tenets of UBI advocacy, including most of those enumerated above, are a distraction.

If we limit ourselves only to those virtues of a UBI that distinguish it from other types of cash assistance, we’re left with the first two benefits listed above, both of which are founded on the advantages of universality and unconditionality. Unfortunately, the fact is that a UBI, despite its name, is neither universal nor unconditional. It can’t be.

The UBI’s original claim to fame was its purported advantages over a negative income tax (NIT). In contrast to a fixed payment that’s identical for everyone, an NIT provides some level of aid that gradually scales down as the recipient’s income from other sources rises. The scaling down, or phasing out, has the same implications as a progressive tax on income: the more money you make, the larger the percentage taken back by the government. For this reason, the NIT is seen as creating a disincentive to work.

Under a UBI, we are told, that doesn’t happen. And yet, in practice, this claim is incorrect.The reason is simple: the government will be obliged to recapture most of a UBI in taxes. (A modest UBI of, say, $10,000 per person annually would cost over $3 trillion, basically doubling the budget of the federal government.) And because most or all of the UBI will be recovered in taxes, it cannot be truly universal: the more money you make, the more your taxes will be increased by the UBI program, a fact that is not likely to escape middle- and higher-income taxpayers. This understanding would detract from the social solidarity envisioned in idealized portraits of a “universal” UBI regime.

The need to recover much of the UBI in taxes also dashes the hopes for a program with no work disincentives. In one way or another, the higher taxes are likely to imply some type of disincentive.

The problem of work disincentives has been addressed by researchers through various real-life UBI “experiments.” These demonstrations occupy a great deal of UBI advocacy, including Lowrey’s. Now, truth be told, work disincentives have never been a great concern for the Left, including this writer. But beyond that, you have to wonder about the political impact of such advocacy: we are testing the poor to see how they respond to a bit of cash assistance. Do they work more, or less? What do they spend the money on? What’s in their refrigerators?

This is a toxic policy narrative. The literature is contested, of course, but from most any left standpoint, decades of research and experience show that giving people money is a good idea, not to mention morally compelling.