# In Our Hands *Published 2006 by AEI Press; substantially revised edition 2016 (Rowman & Littlefield). Author: [[Charles Murray]], W. H. Brady Scholar at the [[American Enterprise Institute]]. The book in which the intellectual architect of American welfare reform proposed a universal basic income.* ## Why this book matters to the KB Murray wrote *[[Losing Ground]]* (1984), the book that supplied the Reagan-era and Clinton-era case that welfare programs cause the dependency they claim to cure. Twenty-two years later he proposed giving every American adult an unconditional annual cash grant. That is not a reversal, and reading it as one misses the point. **The through-line is not generosity — it is the abolition of the administrative state that supervises the poor.** *Losing Ground* attacked transfer programs for their behavioral effects; *In Our Hands* attacks them for their existence as institutions. The cash grant is the delivery mechanism for a demolition. This makes the book the single most useful document for understanding why [[Universal Basic Income]] has a right-wing pedigree — and why the right's institutional apparatus now works to ban municipal versions of it (see [[Guaranteed Income Preemption]]). ## The plan The 2016 revision is the version Murray defends today: | Parameter | Provision | |---|---| | Grant | $13,000/year per person, deposited electronically in monthly installments | | Eligibility | Every American citizen aged 21 and older | | Health carve-out | $3,000 mandated for health insurance — leaving $10,000 disposable | | Retirement | A portion mandated into retirement savings | | Clawback threshold | No reduction below $30,000 of earned income | | Phase-down | Graduated surtax above $30,000, falling to a floor of $6,500 at $60,000 earned income — never lower | | Abolished | Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, housing subsidies, all cash welfare — plus agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare | The 2006 original used $10,000 with the same $3,000 health carve-out. The 2016 edition raised the figure, reworked the health provisions around the Affordable Care Act, and — notably — adopted the "UBI" label that the 2006 edition had avoided. Two design choices are worth flagging: **The floor, not the phase-out, is the ideological statement.** Murray's grant never reaches zero. Even a high earner keeps $6,500. This is deliberate: it makes the program genuinely universal, which is what gives it political durability and what distinguishes it from a [[Negative Income Tax]] that phases to nothing. Murray understood that a benefit only the poor receive is a benefit that can be cut — the same insight that explains the [[Alaska Permanent Fund]]'s survival and the argument against [[Means Testing]] generally. **The mandates undercut the autonomy argument.** The book's central claim is that individuals allocate their own resources better than bureaucrats. Then $3,000 is mandated for health insurance and more for retirement — because Murray does not actually trust the outcome of pure autonomy at the tails. The paternalism is reduced, not eliminated; it is relocated from the caseworker to the statute. ## The arithmetic argument Murray's fiscal case is that the current transfer system is already more expensive than a universal grant and diverging. His 2016 estimate: a UBI would have cost roughly $200 billion less than the existing system as of 2014, and by 2020 would be close to a trillion dollars cheaper — the gap driven by healthcare and Social Security cost growth that a fixed grant does not track. The obvious counter is that **this is exactly the vulnerability.** A cash grant that does not grow with medical inflation delivers, by construction, progressively less real security over time. The savings Murray projects *are* the benefit reductions, relocated into a growth-rate assumption. This is [[Starve the Beast]] achieved by indexation rather than by appropriation. ## The adequacy critique The strongest empirical objection is distributional. After the health carve-out, a recipient has $10,000 — with retirement mandates, less. For a single adult that is near the poverty line; for a single parent with three children facing a poverty threshold well above $18,000, it is not close. The plan contains **no child allowance**, so household size does not affect the grant at all, which means it redistributes sharply from large poor households to small ones. Murray's response is that low earnings would be supplemented by work at market wages — an argument weakened by his own opposition to minimum wage floors, and by its assumption of continuous employment for people whose caregiving obligations preclude it. Basic-income advocates have nonetheless been ambivalent rather than hostile: a $10,000 floor is an improvement over current provision for many, and some have argued it could function as a beachhead to be raised later. That ambivalence is itself the interesting thing — the book is genuinely load-bearing on both sides of the debate. ## Lineage Murray places himself in a line running [[Thomas Paine]] → [[Milton Friedman]] → himself, and the claim is fair. *Agrarian Justice* (1797) argued for a citizen's dividend as compensation for enclosure; *[[Capitalism and Freedom]]* (1962) proposed the [[Negative Income Tax]] to dismantle the welfare bureaucracy; *In Our Hands* completes the move by naming every program to be abolished. When [[Andrew Yang]] made a $12,000 basic income a presidential platform in 2020, the public read it as a novel tech-left idea. It was a number Murray had published fourteen years earlier from a desk at AEI. ## See also [[Universal Basic Income]] · [[Negative Income Tax]] · [[Guaranteed Income Preemption]] · [[Charles Murray]] · [[Losing Ground]] · [[The Bell Curve]] · [[Capitalism and Freedom]] · [[The Social Safety Net]] · [[American Enterprise Institute]]