I am the daughter of a single mother, a mother who raised me and my sister with the help of food stamps, visits to the local food pantry and government-subsidized housing. I’m the daughter, that is, of the sort of mother now at the center of a burgeoning national debate about universal basic income. Does such a mother — and it is almost always a question of mothers — deserve, say, $1,000 a month from the government or candidate Andrew Yang, no strings attached? Can we trust her with such a sum? Won’t she just use it to buy cigarettes and vodka?

It’s true my mother might have bought a few cigarettes — though she rarely drank, she did smoke. What I remember most though is watching her scratch figures on a back page of her calendar, playing that month’s cat-and-mouse game of paying the bills. As a teenager, I didn’t know the details of our financial situation, but I knew it wasn’t good. It had never been good. Toward the end of every month, my mother never failed to say, “I’m broke.”