&quot;As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the cost of this program would be $3T!&quot;<p>So you raise taxes. For the people who don&#x27;t need the extra $10k... well, that&#x27;s OK, because their taxes will go up by some amount. Possibly more than $10k, possibly less. It depends on how much they earn.<p>You do still have the problem of determining what the progressive tax looks like, but this is a simpler problem than administering a large number of social welfare programs, all with their own eligibility criteria.