Work isn’t the universal provider it used to be. It pays some people decent wages and benefits. But, these days, it leaves a lot of people short of what they need to earn. For example, only 15% of retail workers nationwide make a living wage, according to Just Capital , a corporate responsibility research firm. Many new jobs are either temporary or offered on a contract basis , not full time, meaning they don’t provide the middle-class security that traditionally came with a job.

And that’s before we address the looming threat of automation. Once robots and artificial intelligence can move boxes around warehouses, drive trucks down highways, and answer calls in call centers, traditional employment may be a minority sport–something involving only a slice of the population. We’ll reach a situation where some people can work for a living while everyone else is struggling on gigs and handouts.

There are lots of emerging ideas to address this. We could, for example, have portable benefit schemes, where workers collect fractions of benefits between gigs, thus making up whole benefits. We could expand the Earned Income Tax Credit–a popular scheme supported by the left and right–so it reaches more people. Most popularly, we could have a universal basic income (UBI), like the one advocated by Andrew Yang, the New York entrepreneur turned candidate for president.

The problem is UBI, though, is obvious: it’s very expensive. Yang’s version–which calls for everyone to get $1,000 a month–would cost $2 trillion a year. This is at a time when, as a nation, we’re already $21 trillion in debt, and many of us aren’t keen to pay more taxes (Yang would institute a national value-added tax, sort of like a sales tax). While UBI has a lot of admirers, the real question isn’t whether it’s a good idea worth trying. It’s how you find $2 trillion to pay for it.

Enter Universal Basic Assets

One answer may come in the form of “universal basic assets” (UBA). UBA can mean a fund of publicly-owned infrastructure or revenue streams–like Alaska’s Permanent Fund which pays residents up to $2,000 a year from state oil taxes. Or, it can mean actual assets that drive down the cost of living, like tuition-free education and free public broadband. There are lots of proposals going around now that fall into these two camps–below are some examples.

Entrepreneur Peter Barnes has called for the creation of a Sky Trust that would both limit the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and provide revenue from carbon taxes. These “carbon dividends” solve two problems at once: income inequality and climate change. He would also tax corporations for using natural resources, on the thinking that the atmosphere, minerals and fresh water around us represent a “joint inheritance.” He would also tax speculative financial transactions and use of the electromagnetic spectrum.