The negative assumes that the government budget is fixed, but a UBI increases support for increasing the budget.

Other Challenges with Targeted Transfers In choosing between a broader approach like a universal basic income and a more narrowly targeted approach, several other important considerations arise in addition to inclusion and exclusion errors. We consider four issues: breadth of political support, horizontal equity, transparency, and labor market distortions. First, we have focused on the case where the government has a fixed budget available for the transfer program. However, political support for redistribution may be much higher if everyone gets a “piece of the pie” (Gelbach and Pritchett 2002). Thus, as inclusion error increases, the overall amount of funding available for transfers may increase. As the elasticity between the total budget and the number of beneficiaries increases, universal transfers become more attractive (Klasen and Lange 2016). Second, the principle of horizontal equity holds that each person who has the same relevant conditions should be treated the same. Transfer programs using proxy-means tests will have errors in the prediction algorithm—and so they do not treat all people with the same utility of receiving the benefits identically. For programs where the income cutoff for providing benefits is near-zero, horizontal equity violations are (mechanically) close to zero, because almost no households receive the program. Violations of horizontal equity are also mechanically zero for universal basic income: by definition, if all households receive the transfer, then all households are treated the same.