Guaranteed income programs are all the rage in Chicagoland.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot spent more than $30 million sending $500 a month to 5,000 Chicago households. In 2025, Cook County became the first county-level government in the nation to make a guaranteed income program permanent, putting $7.5 million toward the effort. Springfield is budgeting for a state pilot of its own. Evanston is also running a small pilot.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has been among the idea’s most enthusiastic backers.
In June 2023, weeks into the job, he told conference attendees learning about Cook County’s program that “we are ushering in a more dynamic, prosperous economy by giving people a guarantee that their lives have meaning.”
In May 2024 Johnson relaunched the city’s guaranteed income advisory group and joined Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a national coalition. “When I said I would ensure the city uses these federal recovery dollars to invest in people,” he said, “this guaranteed income program is exactly what I meant.”
But does this program work?
Lucky for Chicago, the best evidence for answering that question was collected here.
Evidence from a groundbreaking study
The Quarterly Journal of Economics just published the employment results from the largest randomized trial of unconditional cash in American history.
Here are the basics of the study design:
Researchers ran the experiment in north central Texas (10 counties) and northern Illinois (nine counties including Cook).
The study included 3,000 low-income adults, ages 21 to 40. The average household income of participating adults was $29,900 a year.
A group of 1,000 adults received $1,000 a month from November 2020 through October 2023.
The control group of 2,000 adults received $50 a month.
And here’s what the study found, for those adults who received $1,000 a month:
Their earnings (outside the stipends) fell by $1,900 a year, compared to the control group. Household earnings fell by about $3,200.
Labor force participation dropped 4.2 percentage points.
There was no improvement in the quality of jobs they held (on measures like wages, stability, or preferred hours).
There was no improvement in degree attainment.
There was no improvement in time with children.
After seeing reported well-being rise in the first year, that measure faded to become indistinguishable from the control group in years two and three.
A companion paper on health found short-lived improvements in stress and food security in the first year that faded, and no lasting effects on physical or mental health.
None of this is a verdict on the people who got the checks, of course. And no single study settles a question forever.
But this is the largest and most rigorous test anyone has run, it was run partly here, and it found the opposite of what Chicago politicians are promising.
A better path forward
The impulse behind guaranteed income programs makes sense. More than 167,000 Chicagoans live on $21 or less a day.
But there is a far better use of this cash than simply cutting checks: eliminating poverty traps inside the current system.
A typical single-parent household receiving child care assistance in Cook County can be severely punished for taking a raise at work, for example.
Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab, working with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the Illinois Department of Human Services, modeled what happens when a Cook County adult with two children takes a raise from $54,000 to $55,000.
That $1,000 raise triggers a $25,000 cut in child care benefits.
“One penny over the amount, and you fall off – so it’s like falling off a cliff,” one Cook County child care provider told the Illinois Answers Project.
Benefit cliffs like these are trapping Chicago families in cycles of dependency. And it’s not a small problem. Research from the Center for Social Development at Washington University suggests 710,000 Illinoisans have taken at least one negative action to avoid losing benefits (turning down a raise or promotion, working fewer hours, declining job offers or refusing to build savings).
Instead of further expansion of guaranteed income programs, local leaders should advocate for identifying and fixing benefit cliffs. The child care assistance program has a simple fix, for example: state lawmakers only need to change the eligibility phase-out for child care assistance to a gradual step-down rather than a steep drop-off. And pilot programs for fixing benefits cliffs in Massachusetts and Ohio offer models to test in Chicago.
Chicago now has the best evidence available, gathered here, on whether unconditional cash moves people out of poverty. It does not.
Meanwhile, there are Chicago families standing at the edge of a cliff. And they’re not asking for a check. They are asking to be allowed to take a raise.
We should let them.
Outstanding article. You're exactly right. It is common sense that if you give me a thousand dollars a month, I am less likely to work as much because I no longer have to. That's just basic behavioral economics, and your point about the penalty for working is completely 100% spot on. In fact, it's hard to believe that such a system has been set up. But there it is. It should certainly be a gradation schedule, wherein the incremental dollar perhaps has an equal and opposite effect, but not on a huge cliff like that. So, I couldn't agree with you more, and I will tell you that I have recently found myself in a position to work with people who are hourly, and they are very much interested in being independent, not in being dependent. Some of these folks are working three jobs and going to school. These are ambitious people, particularly the younger people. To disincent them from becoming independent is nothing but a power play by the Democratic socialists and their ilk to own them and control their votes. Plain and simple. There's no doubt about it in my mind, having observed the workforce that I've been privileged to work with over the last week or so, frankly.