The Editorial Board

USA TODAY

Paying out that kind of cash would require coming up with roughly $2.8 trillion a year.

That's $1 trillion more than is raised by the current federal income tax.

Earned income tax credit already pays people who are working but still have trouble earning enough to make ends meet.

Andrew Yang is probably the most entertaining of the score of candidates seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. He couples his wonkish policy points with self-effacing humor. And he disarms his audiences with candor and nonjudgmental attitudes.

What’s more, Yang has what he sees as the ultimate winning issue: He wants to hand out cash — a "freedom dividend" — to people. Who couldn't use some more of that?

Yang is the only Democratic hopeful to support something called a “universal basic income,” or UBI. His plan would give $1,000 a month to all nonincarcerated, adult U.S. citizens.

The idea isn't completely far-fetched. Supporters of the concept see it as a partial solution to the problem of jobs being lost through automation and digitization. Other potential benefits include its stimulative impact on the economy and its role in addressing wealth concentration.

For all the plan's appeal, however, it has huge liabilities. The first, and most obvious one, is cost. Money has to come from somewhere. Paying out that kind of cash would require coming up with roughly $2.8 trillion a year, which is $1 trillion more than is raised by the current federal income tax.

Following in the long tradition of politicians, Yang’s proposal for paying for this, in part by imposing a national value added tax, doesn’t come close to adding up. America can't afford more red ink at a time when the nation is already running $1 trillion annual deficits and has reached nearly $22.6 trillion in accumulated debt.

OPPOSING VIEW:'Universal basic income' is Social Security for the 21st century

Even if the math worked, the taxes required to pay for the UBI would blunt many of its macroeconomic benefits. And in an era of massive income inequality, it would be hard to justify making anyone pay higher taxes so the federal government could send $12,000 a year to Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and other billionaires.

Rather than a massive and costly UBI, a more targeted effort to deal with change is in order.

The government already has a negative income tax, with all of the infrastructure needed to implement it. The program is called the earned income tax credit, which pays people who are working but still have trouble earning enough to make ends meet. The EITC helps struggling families while also incentivizing work. Working for your money is a core American value. The program impacts roughly 28 million taxpayers with either reduced taxes or actual cash payments.

The UBI, in contrast, is profligate in its spending and is wildly anti-family.

At $1,000 per month per adult, the UBI would pay $24,000 a year to an affluent young couple. It would pay only $12,000 to a single mother with three children.

The UBI reflects the cynicism of today’s politics. It proposes giving money to rich people to avoid the label of welfare. And it implicitly buys into the argument that government can’t do anything right, so it shouldn’t even try to decide how to allocate limited resources for the largest impact.

Government can and should make such choices. If the problem is certain jobs disappearing, government should focus directly on the people losing those positions. If the problem is wealth concentration, it should refrain from giving more money to rich people. And if it concludes that direct monetary payments have social benefits for certain individuals, it should start small and measure the results.

Andrew Yang's "freedom dividend" is one of those too-good-to-be-true proposals that are hard to take seriously.

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