In the spring, shortly after the coronavirus pandemic led to a nationwide economic shutdown, the IRS sent $1,200 stimulus checks to roughly a hundred and sixty million people — so many that you might have gotten the impression that it was universal. In reality, this benefit was means-tested and excluded higher earners. Fine with me, you might be thinking, people who don’t need help shouldn’t get checks. 

Unfortunately, the stimulus also excluded undocumented immigrants and incarcerated people. On top of that, payments to tens of millions of people were either extremely slow or in some cases never arrived at all, because the eligibility verification process created bureaucratic hurdles. These exceptions demonstrate one of the big problems with means-tested social programs: usually, if the benefits are not universal, the people at the top of the income ladder are not the only ones left out.

Socialists often argue against means testing and for universal social programs instead. Our reasoning, simply put, is that making benefits automatic for every person fixes them as guaranteed entitlements, which makes sure the people who need them actually get them, and makes them harder to roll back.