[scarmig]

I doubt that the basic income bears much resemblance to the dole-outs for the poor in India. "For the poor" is the kicker: by far the most economically appealing aspect of the basic income is that it's provided to everyone. If it's only provided to a particular type of person, that offers opportunities for corruption, administrative costs, and, most importantly, a very sharp disincentive against improving yourself and working harder, sometimes amounting to implicit marginal tax rates that are higher than 100%.

Another aspect is simplicity of administration. Providing some restrictions is a bit paternalistic, though I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand: for me the biggest issue would be how you can implement that with a minimum of cost, administrative overhead, and opportunities for corruption. And there's a bunch of areas that'd result in vindictive political debate. Sure, slot machines and vodka might be things we'd agree to restrict. But liberal arts MA programs? For-profit colleges? MLM schemes? Online class certificates via Coursera? Internet connectivity? Reddit gold? Gym memberships?

If you doubt that this kind of item by item trench warfare is what would happen, just look at the furor in the USA over something as obviously {good,bad} as providing {cost-effective,immoral} birth control to the insured.

I have difficulty imagining a system where the government picks and chooses what's good and what's bad for people to use that's not rife with corruption, sclerotic from past decisions and bureaucratic rules, and easy to use for the actual citizen it's intended to enable. The value recovered from preventing "bad spending" would almost certainly be outweighed by the cost of policing the billions of purchases that happen every day.

[gautambay]

Valid points on the complexity and the ensuing corruption.

I suspect that as real-time data-gathering becomes cheaper and more prevalent, the costs of policing will become trivial. That's certainly some years away though.