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Presidential candidate Andrew Yang raised $16.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 alone. While it's much less than the $34.5 million Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders raised, for example, Yang's campaign has become a surprise success based largely on one idea: giving Americans a $1,000 per month universal basic income payment. Yang's platform helped get America talking about universal income again, but his plan is expensive. Now a think tank has laid out a universal basic income plan that would pay more than Yang's and be zero cost to the government. Here's what it would look like and who it could actually benefit.

Yang's plan is expensive

While the idea of a cash payment for U.S. citizens over the age of 18 has catapulted Yang from virtual obscurity to a contender (though he's not appearing in Tuesday night's Democratic debate in Iowa), it's very often met with the same criticism: It's too expensive. According to one estimate, Yang's universal basic income would cost $2.8 trillion a year — an estimated 236 million adult citizens in the United States multiplied by a $12,000 yearly payment. (With Yang's plan welfare and social program beneficiaries could choose to keep their benefits in lieu of receiving the cash payment, so number of adults receiving it could vary.) To pay for the plan, dubbed the "freedom dividend," Yang has proposed things like a 10 percent value-added tax (VAT) on the production of goods or services (the majority of countries already have a VAT), a higher capital gains tax and removing the Social Security tax cap. However those numbers don't add up according to a July analysis of Yang's plan by Kyle Pomerleau, then the chief economist and vice president of independent nonprofit Tax Foundation (now of the think tank American Enterprise Institute). Pomerleau found that to work, Yang's VAT would have to increase to 22 percent and the payment would have to decrease to $9,000 per year or $750 per month.

(Yang's campaign says "the Tax Foundation's analysis makes some flawed assumptions" and does not take things like resulting economic growth from the payment into account, S.Y. Lee, national press secretary for Yang, tells CNBC Make It. Pomerleau, however, tells CNBC Make It that Yang's campaign is unreasonably optimistic in the amount of revenue it hopes to get from the tax income on economic growth and about other revenue sources.)

There is a plan that won't cost the government anything