[82lsju]

It's not about entitlement.  It's about efficiency.  We do not have weeks and months to figure out how to verify current income.  Even if you could use payroll tax receipts or the like, there are millions of contractors, business owners, etc. who don't have payroll taxes taken out of their income.  

And it's the easiest thing in the world* to recoup excess payments to the wealthy by increasing their marginal taxes a bit next year.

*practically speaking and ignoring the politics

why not just have a cut off at $x of AGI from your 2018 tax return and pay $y/dependent on the return?  I would think that generating that list would be a database query at the IRS.  

Of course this would exclude people who did not file a tax return, not sure how many people are in that group that would be on another list that the government could use to generate checks.

[82lsju]

It's not about entitlement.  It's about efficiency.  We do not have weeks and months to figure out how to verify current income.  Even if you could use payroll tax receipts or the like, there are millions of contractors, business owners, etc. who don't have payroll taxes taken out of their income.  

And it's the easiest thing in the world* to recoup excess payments to the wealthy by increasing their marginal taxes a bit next year.

*practically speaking and ignoring the politics

why not just have a cut off at $x of AGI from your 2018 tax return and pay $y/dependent on the return?  I would think that generating that list would be a database query at the IRS.  

Of course this would exclude people who did not file a tax return, not sure how many people are in that group that would be on another list that the government could use to generate checks.