I&#x27;m very skeptical of basic income as commonly understood.<p>The typical basic income program I&#x27;ve seen goes something like this: give every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a]<p>1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don&#x27;t need additional income support.<p>2) As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the cost of this program would be $3T!<p>3) If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc., you just reproduce the current welfare system that exists in the US, which balances available government revenue against our desire to help poor people.<p>[a] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Basic_income" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Basic_income</a>, &quot;all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money ... in addition to any income received from elsewhere&quot;