Honestly what are you talking about?

Yeah but how do you get the information from the IRS into the systems that manage this hypothetical program? How do you get your parents’ and grandparents’ IRS data correlated with your own? What about people who don’t file taxes? The risk is that all that work falls on the applicant. Or if the program administrators do all that work, that’s where the overhead costs come in.

This is something which happens with existing public assistance programs, where so many requirements have been put on the aid application that people give up trying to to prove they made less than X dollars in the last 12 months, or lived in the state for at least 5 years, or have passed a drug screening, and so on. Too often that’s done intentionally to stymie a program, but the phenomenon exists regardless of motivation. The more complicated the program requirement are, the more people will fail to get aid they should, and the more it costs to administer.

Has it worked well for France? I’ve been arguing that such an approach would work much better for the US.

Using self-identified racial identities for aid programs is too easy to argue is itself racially biased. Even if you can make good contextual arguments that race-based aid is a compensation for race-based oppression, either current or historical, that’s not a winning political position.

Using metrics like generational wealth, income, education is a much easier argument to make, even if in effect it would disproportionately benefit these identity groups.

The primary downside seems to be that administering such a program is more complicated, which means more of the expense goes to overhead, and more people will not get the benefits they could because of the difficulty of navigating a more complex process.