There is strong opposition to UBI.

The $1.9-trillion COVID-19 relief bill that President Biden signed into law Thursday includes an initiative that looks a lot like guaranteed income for families. Starting in July, parents of children ages 17 and younger will get monthly cash grants of up to $300 per child, to spend however they please.

Could this be the start of a broader effort to combat poverty with bigger monthly checks? Some signs point to yes. Although no Republicans voted for the COVID bill, there has been bipartisan support in Congress for increasing the child tax credit and for turning it into a monthly payment, rather than a once-a-year reduction in one’s income taxes.

But once the extreme circumstances of the pandemic are behind us, the high political hurdles to guaranteed-income programs will remain. More data from more trials would help overcome those hurdles and show that such programs are sustainable, scalable and more effective than other approaches.

Consider, for example, how Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah, two proponents of much larger child tax credits, blasted the increase in the COVID relief bill because it made the money available to the indigent as well as the comfortable. “That is not tax relief for working parents; it is welfare assistance,” they complained in a statement last month.

Herein lies the biggest challenge for anti-poverty programs in general, and guaranteed income programs (or “universal basic income”) in particular. Like Rubio and Lee, many Republicans — and many Americans — argue that government aid should flow only to people who have earned it somehow, and that it should be temporary. It’s the flip side to the myth that government handouts breed dependence and indolence, rather than lifting people up to the point where they can escape poverty’s gravitational force.

Proponents of guaranteed income argue that the aid enables people to surmount the many obstacles they face to earning a decent living — something that the existing collection of safety-net programs often fails to do. By providing cash with no restrictions on how it’s spent, the programs are not only far cheaper to administer, they allow recipients to use the dollars to meet their own unique needs, which may be child care for some, tuition for others.