With the massive 2020 presidential campaign rollout from Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., on Jan. 27 will come more talk of one of her policy proposals: the LIFT Act, a $500 monthly tax credit to help struggling working families. It is not quite a basic income, a sum of cash paid out monthly to citizens as a modern form of welfare and income redistribution, but it comes very close. Combined with the not-quite-basic-income proposal from candidate Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., — “baby bonds” that give $1,000 to newborns, and supplementary deposits to children of poorer families, that will grow to five figures by the time most are 18 years old — the idea of simple cash transfers or tax cuts as a cutting edge welfare policy is sure to be front and center from now through 2020.

Not just Democrats are interested in a basic income. Some call it the most libertarian of welfare systems, because of its presumed low administrative costs and lack of top-down moralizing — everyone gets a check of the same size every year. Prominent conservative/libertarian Charles Murray wrote a favorable book backed by just such reasoning. If there is a bipartisan idea to reform the welfare system in the U.S., the basic income is it.