| Varies from country to country of course. The UK has comparatively little job security and benefits and it is an expensive place to be out of work. I did the back of the envelope calculations for the Netherlands a few years back and the amounts spent on this are quite high. I've confirmed with friends from Finland and Germany that the situation is similar there. But based on the numbers you cite, the UK has about 66M inhabitants. So 167 billion/ 66 million, is about 210 per month per capita. Not great to live on of course but it's a start. And this is absolutely everybody counting babies, children, the elderly, etc covered. I quickly googled some numbers https://fullfact.org/economy/welfare-budget/ that are loosely aligned with what you cited with a little more detail. Based on their number of 217 billion, you get to about 273/month. That's a little under what wellfare gets you per month (https://www.gov.uk/income-support/what-youll-get). Interestingly that 217 billion includes only 2.4 billion as unemployment benefits as opposed to a category of 'other' that is listed as 14.5 billion or 18 pounds per month per capita spent on what I assume is bureaucracy. That 217 excludes NHS, which is another 110 or so billion; or about 138 per month. Since that basically already takes care of healthcare for everyone; no need to change that. You get where I'm going with this. if you start doing back of the envelope math like this, stuff starts adding up towards an admittedly lowish basic income for everybody being feasible at the cost of 23% of GDP. It gets better if you take into account that some people live together (aka. families) and can pool resources. It gets even more interesting when you start looking at the tax situation. Income tax + social insurance fees don't quite add up but can be supplemented by VAT, corporate taxes, and other fees. Arguably, if you make labor cheaper, you could raise the corporate taxes a bit. Also, people that work still pay taxes over what they earn extra. There are a lot of people that are not working at all right now that might work a little bit if it earned them some extra. So, it's not a zero sum game and there are lots of financial knobs to fiddle with here of course. |