A Basic Income is distinct from a minimum income --- a basic income is universal, while a garunteed minimum income only gives money to people based on certain conditons

Universal basic income (UBI) is often used to describe any instance in which a government or organization hands out some form of cash with no strings attached. The nearly two dozen programs sprouting up around the U.S. that have been associated with UBI, however, are actually not all that universal.

These trials, better described as tests of guaranteed minimum income, tend to be limited to single parents, families who live above the poverty level but still can't afford basic necessities like housing or childcare, or teens aging out of the foster care system.

Cash transfer advocates have often discussed UBI and this type of guaranteed minimum income in the same breath until recently, Chris Hughes, Facebook cofounder and co-chair of the Economic Security Project, a nonprofit working to advance policies like guaranteed income, says. It's been confusing for people to understand the difference because they have a simple commonality: They both give cash directly to the people, he says. That alone was a radical enough concept for so many years that there often wasn't enough room in the public discourse to substantively discuss the differences.

Now that more people are talking about basic incomes thanks to the pandemic and the popularity of the stimulus checks, advocates see an opening to discuss the nuances.

To Hughes, guaranteed minimum income is about countering income inequality, racial injustice, and other social ills. While universal basic income backers care about income inequality, they are also driven by fears of automation, or when the robots take many of our jobs.

Unlike the guaranteed minimum income programs being tested from Compton to Chicago to Pittsburgh, a universal basic income would be given to everyone in a designated geographic area and it would be distributed unconditionally, regularly, and on a long-term basis, as Dr. Ioana Marinescu, an associate professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania who studies UBI, explains it.