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UBC’s Kevin Milligan characterizes the problem as the “GAI trilemma.” There are three desirable properties of a GAI: generous benefits, low phase-out rates and manageable costs. Milligan’s GAI Trilemma states that it is impossible to have all three; the best governments can do is to choose two. Even if governments in Helsinki, Ottawa and Quebec City have signalled that they are open to the idea of a GAI, the only real commitment is to study the issue. As long as governments are reluctant to impose a significant increase in taxes, we shouldn’t expect much to come of all this.

The universal nature of the GAI is likely the feature that grabs the imagination, but it’s probably the least attractive feature from a policy perspective. If the goal is to help people with low incomes, a program that devotes half of its budget to augment the incomes of people in the top half of the income distribution is grotesquely wasteful. So why is such reverence given to universality?

The case for universality is usually based on a median-voter model. Public support for a program that redistributes income cannot be sustained, it is argued, if the only beneficiaries consist of a low-income minority. This argument is not entirely without merit, and you could use it to justify making both K-12 education and health insurance universal, instead of simply providing cash payments or vouchers to low-income families.

At least K-12 and health insurance remain programs where public spending generally favours the lower part of the income distribution. To the extent that upper-income families avail themselves of private education and that education budgets focus resources on at-risk children, lower-income families are the principal beneficiaries of universal K-12 education. The same goes for the Canadian health-care system: the NYU economist Sherry Glied estimates that half of the public health budget is spent on households from the bottom 40 per cent of the income distribution.