[ChuckMcM]

I agree and that is in part because you can "guess" what those effects will be but its not possible to say definitively they will or won't be produced.

Assuming 280M adults[1], $200 a month, per person, would be over 672 billion dollars a year if I did my math correctly. So you have to take that cost and figure out how much crime and welfare expense would be removed from the system.

I think most politicians assume that no entitlement program is ever successfully removed from the system so they would just add it on to the annual budget in full. So it makes it a hard pill to swallow. The Department of Health and Human Services is only $961B [2] and a big chunk of that is the institutes of health, the FDA, etc.

That said, I tend to agree that if you set the amount high enough that it can drive a services market at the BI level then you convert an inefficent fiat economy into a more efficient market economy for basic human services.

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[2] http://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/budget-in-brief/index.html