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# Conservatives Demonized UBI as Programmable Currency. Then They Proposed Exactly That.
- URL: https://www.scottsantens.com/conservatives-demonized-ubi-as-programmable-currency-basic-income-rise-pilots/
- Published: 2026-09-05T20:48:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-24T20:50:19.000Z
- Author: Scott Santens

### RISE pilot programs propose government-controlled spending, behavioral requirements, and weekly surveillance instead of the cash and freedom of choice of basic income

There’s a new white paper circulating in conservative policy circles called “[Reforming the Safety Net through RISE Pilot Programs](https://americanideafoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/AIF-White-Paper%5FReforming-the-Social-Safety-Net-1.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com).” RISE stands for Resources for Independence, Stability, and Employment. If that sounds familiar, it should. RAISE US is the new organization [launched by Gina Raimondo with Paul Ryan on the advisory board](https://briefing.forwardfuture.ai/p/gina-raimondo-says-basic-income-would-end-america-her-new-billion-dollar-org-is-how-she-plans-to-sto?ref=scottsantens.com), explicitly designed as a counter to universal basic income. They clearly want to message *raising* people out of poverty through work, as opposed to the welfare framing they apply to UBI. This white paper, published by the American Idea Foundation with Paul Ryan pushing it, smells like part of that strategy. They know job retraining alone is a losing argument. They need something more. These RISE pilots appear to be it.

> Proponents push Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a cure-all, but the data tells a different story. Recent trials show unconditional cash reduces labor force participation and earnings. Americans deserve better and that’s what states can offer with the RISE pilots.…
> 
> — Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) [August 31, 2026](https://x.com/SpeakerRyan/status/2094441820742652306?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=scottsantens.com)

I’ve read the entire proposal. Some of it is genuinely good actually. Most of it however is a dystopian perversion of the very freedom that conservatives claim to champion. And the section on universal basic income is of course riddled with misinformation.

But first things first, let’s get into what they get right.

## Where They’re Right

The American safety net imposes the highest marginal tax rates in the country on the people with the lowest incomes. I’ve been making this argument for over a decade now, and I’m always happy to see it be fully acknowledged in a policy paper.

Here’s what I mean: SNAP reduces benefits by 30 cents for every dollar earned. SSI takes 50 cents. Housing vouchers take another 30 cents. Stack those programs on top of each other and someone who earns an extra dollar can lose more than a dollar in combined benefits. That’s a marginal tax rate above 100%. We would never impose that rate on someone earning $200k, but we do impose it on someone earning $12k.

The RISE proposal correctly identifies this as a problem to solve. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that a single parent with one child where I live in Washington, DC would [see zero financial gain](https://www.atlantafed.org/-/media/Project/Atlanta/FRBA/Documents/research/publication/discussion-paper/2023/09/26/01-a-case-study-mitigating-benefits-cliffs-in-the-district-of-columbia.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com) from increasing their earnings from $11,000 to $65,000\. That’s someone increasing their income from work by a whopping $54k and being $0 better off. Does that sound smart to you? Or in any way fair?

RISE proposes to fix this by consolidating **seven** separate benefits into a single benefit with a unified phaseout: SNAP, WIC, TANF, LIHEAP, CCDF, the EITC, and the Additional Child Tax Credit. It’s not stated in the paper, but based on the charts in their appendix, that phaseout rate appears to be around 17%. I support this general approach. It’s what I’ve long argued basic income experiments should incorporate into their designs. Test the impact of lowering stacked marginal tax rates as part of the pilot design rather than layering cash on top of existing programs and then blaming the cash when high MTRs produce disincentives.

If you give someone basic income and they also have SNAP and SSI, their combined marginal tax rate is 80%. A dollar earned only increases their income by 20 cents. When that person chooses not to accept a job, it’s the 80% marginal tax rate behind the disincentive, not the basic income, which by itself carries a 0% marginal tax rate. Any serious experiment should account for this, and some actually have.

So yes, consolidation and lower phaseout rates are the right idea. Milton Friedman proposed exactly this with his negative income tax in the 1960s. A single cash benefit replacing the tangle of programs, with a reasonable clawback, but *no behavioral requirements*, because Friedman believed in freedom.

The RISE proposal does not.

## Where They’re Catastrophically Wrong

Here’s where the RISE pilots proposal jumps the shark. It takes Friedman’s core insight of simplifying the safety net and lowering marginal tax rates and then perverts it with a mass surveillance apparatus that Friedman would have found repugnant.

RISE pilot participants are to complete at least 10 hours every week of “approved” activities. They must meet weekly with an assigned caseworker, in person. If they fail to meet requirements, their benefit is reduced by 8.3%, and then by another 8.3% the following week, every single week. For a parent with a sick child who misses a meeting, that’s a devastating penalty. For the child, it’s worse. The proposal punishes children for their parents’ inability to jump through hoops.

That is not freedom.

It gets worse. The proposal also calls for lifetime time limits on the consolidated benefit, modeled on TANF’s five-year cap. One of the worst features of TANF is that very limit. Most people don’t need five years of assistance. But some will, and they shouldn’t be denied it just because they needed help before. Imagine falling out of a boat not once but three times, and instead of being thrown a life preserver for a third time, being told you’ve exceeded your lifetime life preserver allotment. The RISE proposal wants to combine multiple benefits into one benefit and make it as punitive as TANF’s arguably worst feature.

To their credit, I will say this though: a three-year pilot for a program intended to last only three years is better experimental design than a three-year basic income pilot meant to inform us about a lifelong basic income. On that narrow point, they’re right. But a three-year limit as permanent policy is a welfare version of three-strikes laws, where people got decades to life in prison for stealing a slice of pizza ([this really happened](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-03-03-me-38444-story.html?ref=scottsantens.com)).

We are going to spend money on poverty either way. The downstream costs of untreated poverty via emergency rooms, incarceration, homelessness, and lost productivity dwarf [the net cost of basic income](https://www.scottsantens.com/how-to-calculate-the-cost-of-universal-basic-income-ubi/). We can spend that money proactively and humanely, through a floor that’s always there when people need it, or reactively and punitively, cleaning up the mess after we pulled the floor out from under people. One approach saves money and is a good investment in human capital. The other just punishes people for needing help longer than we want them to.

But wait, there’s more… **the RISE benefit itself isn’t even cash**.

The proposal envisions **a “programmable benefit” distributed through a technology platform, potentially blockchain-based**, **that restricts purchases to approved categories and tracks spending in real time**. Politicians get to decide what you can buy. A caseworker oversees your transactions. If you don’t do what the government tells you to do, the programmable currency gets turned off.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s [the exact dystopian bogeyman that QAnon folks](https://www.scottsantens.com/is-unconditional-basic-income-ubi-a-trap-being-laid-by-wef-global-elites-to-control-and-enslave-us-all/) have been falsely attributing to basic income for years. How many times have you heard someone warn that UBI is really a Trojan horse for central bank digital currency (CBDC)? That the government will give you money and then control what you spend it on? That they’ll take it away if you don’t comply?

That is not what any UBI proposal has ever looked like. UBI is **unconditional cash** *by definition*. Over 200 guaranteed income pilots across the United States since 2017 have distributed actual cash with no strings attached. Money directly deposited or loaded on debit cards, with recipients spending it on whatever they choose. Just cash. Just freedom. Just trust.

But a programmable, conditional, government-surveilled benefit distributed through “privacy-enabled blockchain infrastructure” that gets reduced when you fail to comply with weekly government-mandated meetings? That’s what RISE is proposing. So will conservatives support it because it’s coming from fellow conservatives? We’ll see.

As I wrote when RAISE US launched, the organization exists specifically as an alternative to basic income. They don’t want people to be able to say no to a bad job or bad pay. They want control of the poor to be maintained, and they think cash provides too much freedom, even when it’s attached to behavioral requirements. This white paper is the next iteration of that ideology in the Age of AI. It recognizes the need for something like UBI, but refuses to propose UBI, and instead proposes expanding the existing levers of control over people’s lives.

Milton Friedman is spinning in his grave. [His negative income tax](https://www.scottsantens.com/negative-income-tax-is-not-cheaper-than-universal-basic-income-ubi-nor-is-guaranteed-income-more-progressive-by-excluding-the-rich/) was cash that imposed zero behavioral requirements because he understood that people know better than bureaucrats how to spend their own money. He didn’t propose caseworkers, spending categories, or compliance schedules. He proposed freedom.

The RISE proposal takes his idea, guts the freedom, and calls it *more* conservative.

## A Bonus Healthcare Disaster

The RISE proposal also suggests including Medicaid in the pilot as an option, allowing recipients to use the benefit value toward private insurance premiums instead of Medicaid coverage. I believe this is completely the wrong direction.

A [new analysis by Yale University researchers](https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/universal-health-coverage-could-save-one-trillion-dollars-and-114000-lives-every-year/?ref=scottsantens.com) found that Medicare for All would save the United States over $1 trillion per year while preventing 114,000 deaths annually. Those savings come from reduced administrative overhead, lower pharmaceutical prices, elimination of fraudulent billing, and fewer emergency room visits through universally available preventative care.

Pushing low-income families from the Medicaid system into the private insurance market, in the most expensive healthcare system in the developed world, is going to result in even more deaths than we already see. It is irresponsible. Education and healthcare are public goods. Merging either into a single programmable benefit is not the answer to our broken healthcare system. It just isn’t.

## The Misrepresentation of Basic Income Evidence

The most dishonest section of the RISE paper is its treatment of basic income research. The authors claim that unconditional cash pilots “reduce employment and earnings” and cite the 1970s Negative Income Tax experiments as proof.

This is a fundamental misrepresentation of what those experiments tested and found. As Karl Widerquist documented in his [comprehensive analysis](https://widerquist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/A-Failure-to-Communicate-What-If-Anything-Can-we-Learn-from-the-Negative-Income-Tax-Experiments-4.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com) (that I highly recommend reading), the 1970s experiments in New Jersey, rural Iowa and North Carolina, Gary, Indiana, and Seattle-Denver tested negative income taxes with phaseout rates of mostly 50%, with some as low as 30% and others as high as 70%. One in Seattle even tested a nonlinear phaseout function that imposed marginal tax rates as high as 80% on the lowest incomes. The experiments also varied payment levels from 50% to 148% of the poverty line to examine size impacts.

These experiments were designed to measure how different people responded to different marginal tax rates applied to different sizes of payments. That’s what a negative income tax does. It phases out as income rises, imposing a marginal tax rate on every dollar earned. The central question was the difference between a 30% rate and a 70% rate, and how much the amount mattered, not whether people should receive cash at all.

The reductions in work that occurred (with an average 50% MTR) were concentrated among specific groups: mothers treating the income as maternity leave, students using it to stay in school longer, and primary earners spending modestly more time searching for better-paying jobs instead of grabbing the first available position. These are not bad choices being made. These are rational decisions made by people using a temporary income floor to invest in their families and their futures. The aggregate labor supply reductions were small, and they were entirely consistent with what you’d expect when you impose high marginal tax rates on a benefit payment.

[Spain actually tested this more recently](https://www.scottsantens.com/did-spains-b-mincome-experiment-prove-that-unconditional-universal-basic-income-doesnt-work-ubi/). Their basic income experiment found that cash with a 100% marginal tax rate decreased work (which isn’t basic income since a dollar was lost for every dollar earned). But monthly cash with a marginal tax rate of 25% to 35% *increased* work (a model of UBI paired with a 25% to 35% flat income tax). The marginal tax rate is what really matters. Too high and paid work is punished. Low enough and paid work is encouraged.

The RISE paper also cites the ORUS pilot as evidence that cash reduces work. I have [covered that study extensively](https://www.scottsantens.com/did-sam-altman-basic-income-experiment-succeed-or-fail-ubi/). That pilot launched in 2020 and ran through a global pandemic followed by the highest inflation in 40 years. It measured individual effects without measuring community effects. Any actual UBI would go to everyone in a community and generate macroeconomic stimulus where people spending it creates new business revenue which creates new jobs. The ORUS design could not capture this. It measured what happens when you give a few people cash in a broken economy, not what happens when you give everyone cash and watch the economy respond with new job creation. It also only found a small negative impact of 15 minutes a day, and found no impact on childless adults, or adults over the age of 30.

Meanwhile, the largest [peer-reviewed systematic review of basic income experiments](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/22/9459?ref=scottsantens.com) found no evidence of a significant reduction in labor supply. The overall effect on employment was positive: labor supply increased globally, offset only by small, functional reductions among children, the elderly, the sick, people with disabilities, mothers with young children, and students who stayed in school. We should want children out of the labor force. We should want new mothers at home with their babies. We should want students finishing school. These are reasons to support UBI, not to fear it as “work-killing.”

## The “Too Expensive” Lie

The RISE paper also claims 2021’s expanded Child Tax Credit of $300 per month for young children and $250 for older children would have cost **$1.6 trillion over a decade**, and frames this amount as clearly unaffordable.

This one really pisses me off. Child poverty [costs the US well over $1 trillion every year](https://brownschool.washu.edu/2018/04/childhood-poverty-costs-u-s-1-03-trillion-in-a-year/?ref=scottsantens.com) in lost economic productivity, increased crime and healthcare costs, and increased costs from child homelessness and maltreatment. **That’s over $10 trillion a decade** in downstream damage. How is $10 trillion cool but $1.6 trillion is too much?

Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy conducted a [benefit-cost analysis](https://povertycenter.columbia.edu/publication/2022/child-allowance/benefit-cost-analysis?ref=scottsantens.com) of the expanded CTC and found a return of 15 dollars for every dollar spent. That’s $1.5 trillion in annual social benefits from $100 billion in increased annual federal spending. Calling something with a 15-to-1 return on investment “too expensive” is like refusing to eat for a month because you’d save money on food. The savings are real, but so is the much larger hospital bill from malnutrition.

Don’t call yourself conservative if you’re willing to burn $15 to avoid spending $1.

## What Conservatives Should Actually Want

The “I” in RISE stands for Independence. But how independent are you when the government orders you like a trained seal to perform approved activities or lose your income? When the government decides what you’re allowed to purchase? When a caseworker monitors your transactions and a blockchain records your spending? You think that’s independence? That’s compliance.

I find it remarkable how any conservative would claim to champion small government and individual freedom, and then propose a benefit that lets the government program what you can purchase, track your transactions on a blockchain, require weekly in-person meetings with government-assigned case managers, and cut your family’s income by an additional 8.3% every week if you fail to comply. Many conservatives absolutely flipped out over vaccine mandates during Covid. I fully support vaccines and believe everyone should get every vaccine their doctor recommends, but if you’re someone who disagrees with that, consider what RISE means for you. A program built on government-imposed behavioral conditions could easily impose vaccine requirements on your survival. Do you want to be in a position of needing assistance in an AI-disrupted economy and being told you must get a list of vaccines or not be able to buy food (and approved food only of course)? Conditions are not small government. They are big government. UBI is unconditional by definition. That is independence. That is small government.

UBI is cash. Unconditional cash. No bureaucrats deciding if your spending counts. No weekly check-ins. No programmable restrictions. No punishment for missing a hoop. **The administrative overhead of Social Security is 0.5%. A UBI would likely be even lower**. It is extremely cheap to direct-deposit identical payments to everyone. It is extremely expensive to figure out who deserves what first, and then to continually monitor what is done with the money afterward.

Consider the administrative overhead of the programs RISE seeks to replace. SNAP runs about [6% to 7% in admin costs](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42505?ref=scottsantens.com). TANF spends [10% on administration](https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/tanf%5Fspending%5Fus.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com) and only 25% of total TANF funds actually reach families as cash assistance. Even the EITC is worse than most people realize. As Matt Bruenig documented in [his analysis](https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/project/the-myths-of-the-earned-income-tax-credit/?ref=scottsantens.com), 60% of EITC recipients pay tax preparers who charge fees equal to 13% to 22% of the benefit. When you count these private administrative costs that are very real costs borne by recipients, the EITC’s true overhead is around 11%, and one in five eligible people never receives it at all.

But RISE doesn’t just consolidate, it adds entirely new layers of administration on top. We’re talking weekly in-person case management, a blockchain technology platform requiring government contracts, real-time spending category enforcement, work engagement verification, compliance tracking, biometric identification, and more. Given that the programs being replaced already run 7% to 11% in admin, and RISE adds a surveillance and case management infrastructure that dwarfs anything those programs currently require, **the total overhead would likely land somewhere between 15% and 25%**. For every dollar that reached a family, 15 to 25 cents would go to the people watching and controlling them. It makes zero sense to spend a quarter of a program’s budget on administering conditions when we could deliver the same dollars for a fraction of a penny on the dollar through universal direct deposit of cash.

Again, Social Security’s overhead is half a penny on the dollar. It doesn’t tell seniors what to buy. It doesn’t require them to meet weekly with caseworkers. It doesn’t reduce their check if they skip the appointment. It trusts them with cash and lets them decide. Seniors aren’t controlled by the government because of Social Security. [Seniors ](https://www.scottsantens.com/wont-basic-income-give-too-much-power-to-whomever-distributes-it/)[*control*](https://www.scottsantens.com/wont-basic-income-give-too-much-power-to-whomever-distributes-it/)[ the government](https://www.scottsantens.com/wont-basic-income-give-too-much-power-to-whomever-distributes-it/). They vote in large numbers to protect their cash benefit. That’s what universality does. It transforms recipients into stakeholders.

The RISE proposal transforms Americans into suspects.

## The Real Choice

We are at a turning point. AI is accelerating automation. The labor market is shifting beneath everyone’s feet. The conservative response to this moment should not be to build a more sophisticated cage for low-income families. It should be to trust people with cash and the freedom to navigate an uncertain economy on their own terms.

Both the left and the right get something wrong about safety nets. The left too often wants to add on top of *all* existing programs, ignoring that stacked programs create marginal tax rates above 100% that trap people in poverty. I agree with the RISE authors that program consolidation matters. Optimally, UBI would replace certain cash and cash-like programs, depending on the amount of UBI and the nature of the program. Programs like TANF and SNAP are fair game for replacement with unconditional cash. However, education and health programs are in my opinion off limits. Some programs can also be reduced in size and treated as additional to UBI, depending on the amount and what the program provides.

But the right often goes to the opposite extreme by insisting that people can’t be trusted with cash, that they must be monitored and policed and managed and punished into compliance, that a massive bureaucracy supervising their spending is somehow more efficient than just giving people money and the freedom to spend it with agency.

[We know work requirements don’t increase work](https://www.niskanencenter.org/all-hail-medicaid-1115-waivers-slayer-of-work-requirements/?ref=scottsantens.com). We know dropping them doesn’t decrease work, and often does increase it. If an experiment shows the same employment outcomes with and without conditions, why are we paying for the conditions? Why are we funding caseworkers and compliance systems to verify what people are already doing on their own as free adults? Every dollar spent on administration is a dollar that could have gone directly to a family that needs it.

There have been over 200 guaranteed income pilots across the United States since 2017\. They used cash. They imposed no work requirements. And they worked. People paid down debt. They bought food. They kept the lights on. They started businesses. They went back to school. They invested in their futures. They didn’t need a caseworker to tell them to do any of this. They didn’t need a programmable token to restrict them to approved purchases. They mostly bought food and other basic needs. They needed what everyone needs: enough money to live, and the freedom to use it.

I believe that everyone in a UBI system should face a marginal tax rate of no more than 35% on incomes under six figures, and preferably closer to 10% at most on the very first dollar of employment income. As incomes rise, progressively higher rates are appropriate, but no one should face an effective marginal tax rate above 50% until perhaps the top 5% to 10% of earners. This is not a radical position. It’s basic incentive design.

But the RISE pilots proposal ruins that one good idea of reducing marginal tax rates on benefit recipients with mass surveillance, paternalism, punishment, and control. Programmable money, behavioral compliance, benefit cuts for noncompliance… these are all the worst fears people have about government overreach, and they are built into the design of this “conservative” proposal.

What’s being proposed as RISE is Milton Friedman’s NIT stripped of the freedom that made it elegant, wrapped in surveillance tech, and marketed as conservative. It addresses one real problem, the problem of stacking marginal tax rates on the poor, and creates all new problems. The answer to poverty is not a more sophisticated way to control people in poverty. The answer is to trust them with cash, like we trust every senior in America with Social Security, and let them be free to breathe with the boot finally off their necks as those in over 200 pilot experiments have already experienced.

Friedman trusted us with bureaucracy-free cash. It’s time his successors did the same.

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