Another solution instead having some people working and and others not is to have everyone working, but spending less hours working per capita. Lets say that the standard work week became 30 hours a week, giving people much more time to spend with their families, pursue hobbies, generally express their individuality, etc. This would be a great improvement on the current system, where many hourly workers work 60 hours a week to make ends meet, or salaried workers being pressured by capricious bosses to work more than 40hrs a week (I recently talked to my mother about work, and she said her boss doing consider a full-time employee to be putting forth sufficient effort unless they’re working 55 hrs a week).

$20 isn’t much to build a BIG on.

1. The cost seems bigger than it is, because for a lot of the full-time employed it would be largely a wash: you pay more in taxes, and then get the basic income payment back. Which isn’t to deny that some people would see a net reduction in income–but of course a big problem with the current form of capitalism is that it concentrates so much wealth and income among a small number of people. You can either deal with that by trying to restructure the labor market to create lots of full-time high-wage jobs, or you can do less labor market regulation but then directly redistribute income at the back end. I think the latter is more workable and more desirable.

2. A baseline guaranteed income can partly be diverted out of other existing benefits–you obviously don’t need welfare, social security or unemployment insurance as specialized programs insofar as everyone has access to a minimum income. This is one of the many reasons why basic income is likely to catch on in Europe before it does here–since they already have more generous benefit systems, the overall increase in taxes needed to finance the basic income guarantee would be a lot less.

3. For the sake of argument, I argued that I’m not against reducing labor supply, but it should be emphasized that the effects of income guarantees on labor supply aren’t all going to be negative. By removing the poverty trap that’s inherent in means-tested social welfare benefits, you would make it easier for people to maintain various kinds of intermittent and part-time work, supplemented by the basic income.

4. I recognize, of course, that you can’t restructure the entire economy and give everyone a living wage all in one shot. The most likely starting point is a small minimum income that’s well below what you would need to survive on by itself. Ultimately, the trajectory of the program would then have to work in two directions: bringing the size of the grant up, and bringing the cost of living down so that the necessary level of a basic income is lower. My guess (and my hope) is that the cost of living would to some extent come down naturally as people chose to substitute their own unpaid labor for things rather than pay for services. But there’s a big public policy component, too: affordable housing and transit would be key priorities since they make up about half of consumer expenditures.

The general point, which goes beyond what you think of basic income as a specific proposal, is that there are basically two kinds of social-democratic equilibrium you can shoot for. The first is one where everyone works a lot, makes a lot of money, and has to spend a lot of money–either to pay for things they don’t have time to do themselves, or to pay inflated asset prices for things like housing that get bid up simply because everyone has more income. That equilibrium is the 20th century Keynesian/Social Democratic, “full employment” ideal. The other equilibrium is the one with lower income and lower costs, and one objective of my post was to say that this latter situation is one we should actively prefer.

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR25.5/contents.html