[dragonwriter]

> Basic income would allow for people to focus on their own health and take work when they want to do something.

A very mature, robust UBI might, but we’re far from being able to support that. Realistically, a near term UBI increases opportunity and aggregate economic performance by reducing perverse incentives and friction in means-tested welfare programs.

It takes about $7350/year/person (average household size weighted by population is around 3.4, interpolating between poverty line by household size numbers that’s about $24,500 annual household poverty line) to have an on-average poverty-line-level UBI, which costs $2.4 trillion/year.

That’s 11% of GDP (and not all ofnit additional, because many existing poverty support programs would be subsumed), which is enormous but probably not unsustainable with political will—but you aren’t realistically, no matter how much political will there is, be able to maintain enough of a multiple to make work really unnecessary for most people—poverty level income after government transfers isn’t a “living income” level (which is why ”living wage” efforts typically target an income level that starts, as a baseline, about 4× higher for full-time work.)