The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is widely considered the federal government’s most effective anti-poverty program. Sending tax refund checks to millions of low-income Americans every year, it helps people keep more of what they earn, and helps people stay working (and not claiming other benefits). In the 2015 tax year, more than 26 million families and individuals received the EITC, with an average payout of about $3,000 (the maximum amount available is about $5,500). Unusually, the EITC also has broad bipartisan support. Everyone from Paul Ryan to Barack Obama to Ro Khanna , a liberal Democrat congressman from Northern California, has argued for expanding the program both in the amount of credit-dollars available and in the number of people who can claim it. Being an effective tax cut, it gets endorsement from Republicans, who love tax cuts; being anti-poverty, it gets support from Democrats, who tend to want to help the nation’s poorest.

Some advocates say it could even be the basis for, or an alternative to, a basic income. Indeed, the EITC is like a basic income in that it gives people more to spend on basic goods and services. But, of course, it’s conditioned on people working to get the credit. A basic income isn’t necessarily conditioned on its recipients doing anything at all.

Republicans and Democrats, including Ryan and Barack Obama, have both called for expanding the EITC to include young people without kids–a group that’s largely excluded at the moment. Workers under the age of 25 aren’t covered at all, even when they have kids. And that’s the focus of a large ongoing trial in New York City led by the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity and involving several large philanthropies, including the Kresge Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the Robin Hood Foundation. It tests the effects of increased EITC payments to childless workers earning up to $30,000 per year, including their levels of after-credit incomes, their participation in the workforce and their well-being.

At the moment, the tax system does few favors to people on the lowest incomes. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a 21-year-old man on poverty-level wages ($12,500 a year) must pay $956 in payroll taxes, plus $214 in federal income taxes. That leaves him $1,170 below the poverty line. He is not currently eligible for the EITC.

A 30-year-old woman earning the same money pays the same taxes but is covered under the EITC program (because she is over 25). But, if she’s childless, she receives just $184 in credit–meaning she too is effectively “taxed into poverty.” Currently, $506 is the maximum EITC available for workers without dependent children, and that’s only on offer until they reach a threshold of about $15,000 in annual earnings.

The experiment shows what might happen if the federal EITC was extended to childless recipients. Starting in the 2015 tax year, the trial, called Paycheck Plus, randomly selected 6,000 recipients, half of whom receive extra money, and half of whom act as a control. The pilot makes annual payments, running over three years, reaching as much as $2,000, or about four times the maximum EITC credit currently available to childless workers.

MDRC, a nonprofit social policy research firm, recently announced the results from the first two years in New York, and it says the impact was largely positive. After-bonus incomes went up (that is, above the amount people get in EITC) and work rates increased by 3.5% in the first year (compared to a control group). Moreover, there’s no evidence the program was a disincentive to work. That’s despite the oft-repeated idea that giving people government money naturally leads them to be lazy.