It isn’t just the United States. When former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva introduced a cash-transfer system called Bolsa Familia in 2003—a combination of unconditional cash transfers to Brazil’s poorest families and payments conditional on vaccinating kids and keeping them in school—opposition politicians and newspapers first suggested that the program would be mistargeted and open to fraud. But when evidence suggested the money was well-targeted, mostly reaching poor recipients, opposition moved on to focus on dependency, waste, and disincentives to work. One newspaper editorial bemoaned that “billions are distributed as alms without improving the social status of beneficiaries.”

That concern with handing out money has led to complex systems of in-kind welfare support—or, as Carson put it, “Let me give you housing subsidies, let me give you free health care because you can’t do that.” In the United States, programs range from SNAP (electronic food stamps) and free school meals to Medicaid and rental assistance. In India, the poorest can buy subsidized grains or kerosene. Especially in the developing world, these systems are often inefficient and expensive to run. The Indian government, for instance, has estimated that two-fifths of the kerosene involved in its subsidy scheme goes missing before it is distributed and only half of what is left flows to the poorest families.

But more to the point, the programs are almost certainly less effective at reducing poverty than simply giving poor people cash.

When governments give people in-kind support like food, it frequently costs more to deliver that support than it would to distribute cash—and for the same or even a lesser impact. Jesse Cunha of the Naval Postgraduate School conducted a randomized trial of cash versus in-kind transfers in rural Mexico. In addition to finding that cash recipients didn’t spend more on tobacco or alcohol, Cunha learned that those who received cash experienced the same improvements in nutrition and child-health measures as those who received food. But the food program cost at least 20 percent more to administer, and the cash program led to significantly higher non-food consumption by recipients. In other words: At less cost to the government, cash programs led to the same health outcomes as food-based programs, but also provided additional resources for recipients to spend on schooling, medicine, and transport.

This is not a one-off finding. In many cases, cash programs are simply much more effective than in-kind transfers at turning dollars spent into positive nutritional outcomes. A 2013 survey by Sarah Bailey for the Canadian Foodgrains Bank—involving Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Malawi, and Yemen, among other countries—found that cash transfers usually led to far greater increases in a “food consumption score” of dietary diversity and food frequency than did similarly priced food delivery. In Malawi, the food consumption score increased by 50 percent for cash recipients compared to 20 percent for food recipients. This despite the fact that households in the countries surveyed only report spending between 45 and 90 percent of the cash they receive on food, with the rest going to expenses like debt repayment, household items, and school fees.