[_delirium]

Milton Friedman (of all people!) had a pretty worked-out proposal for it, though he was going more for a poverty-line basic income. Basically, everyone (rich and poor) would get a refundable tax credit roughly equal to the poverty line (something like $11k), rather than having a specific cutoff or phase-out. It would implicitly phase out for richer people because a flat $11k credit just doesn't equal too much if you're making a lot of money.

At the time, at least, he argued that it could almost entirely be paid for just by rolling all our current welfare programs into it: instead of this patchwork of welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing assistance, etc., just have one refundable tax credit, thereby massively reducing both the bureaucracy and the market distortions while still providing a social safety net.

[JamesPeterson]

In Australia, we almost match this by (a) having a "Low Income Tax Offset" (being fazed out in favour of an $18k tax free bracket) and (b) having a wide-reaching 'Centrelink' social security scheme. One of our greatest worries as a nation is that we're very dependent on such structural measures, but that we're using a medium-term cyclical benefit (the mining boom) to pay for it.