Basic income would put recipients over means-tested thresholds---renders SNAP irrelevant

In the U.S., we’re left with a patchwork benefits system, an indecipherable alphabet soup of programs: SNAP, TANF, CHIP, Section 8, EITC, WIC, SSDI. The U.S. government spends nearly $1 trillion across dozens of separate programs at the state and federal level,2 as this byzantine diagram from the House Ways and Means Committee shows. This all requires enormous administrative oversight on the part of the government, and it requires the ability to navigate multiple agencies on the part of recipients.

The problems with this system go beyond its complicated structure. Because eligibility for most social assistance is based on income (or is “means-tested”), recipients lose their benefits as they earn more income — this is often labeled the “welfare trap” or “poverty trap.” For example: A family of four can’t qualify for food stamps if it earns more than $31,536. These benefit phase-outs, or “cliffs,” essentially create steep marginal tax rates on the poor.

Even welfare advocates are critical of the incentives embedded in this system. “If you’re a dollar over, you can’t get assistance,” said Wessita McKinley, founder and director of Sistas United, a nonprofit working with individuals in poverty around the Washington, D.C., area. “Sometimes it feels like a governmental control; you’re on a leash, and you can only go so far.”

Basic income promises an escape from the welfare trap — all the benefits would be the same, regardless of circumstance. And by cutting a single check for the same amount of money, it could dramatically reduce administrative costs.

“The money we spend on welfare will be better spent — more productive for the kind of ends we want — if we spend it through a basic income,” said Matt Zwolinski, a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego and one of the most prominent libertarian advocates for basic income. Despite squeamishness at the idea of government “handouts,” some libertarians see basic income as a more efficient replacement for current social programs, one that would streamline the welfare bureaucracy and reduce costs overall.

He also argues that basic income is superior on moral grounds. People could spend their money however they want. No longer would food stamp recipients, for example, be constrained to using their benefits to buy food, or even certain types of food. “There is something objectionable about paternalism: treating adults as children who need to have their decisions made for them,” Zwolinski said.