[thomnottom]

Your basic math is assuming the money is distributed to everyone. Wouldn't it make more sense to only give it to adults? That knocks out probably about 25% of the population so you're looking at 48 million. That gets us to £5000/year. Of course the article mentions differences between what single people get and what couples/families get which would also bring down the numbers.

[JonFish85]

The reason for that is to cover the cost of raising kids (in my extremely basic example). If the idea is to replace things like welfare, food stamps or whichever programs cover the cost of raising children, I think it's easiest to assume that everybody gets the same dollar amount (the de-facto average amount). There's a lot of ways to try to dice up the numbers (family size, married/unmarried, etc), but I think as a basic example, the numbers are fairly solid.