Well, the libertarians wouldn't support it as an addition to the current welfare state, and the liberals wouldn't support it if it was conditional on dismantling Social Security, Medicare, etc. If we were building something from scratch, we might be able to get to a basic income, but right now, there's too much disagreement about the proper size of the welfare state to make any sweeping changes to its structure.

A workable implementation will probably end up somewhere in between—many programs might continue to exist, but the number of people they support would decrease, as would the level of support.

If the basic income was set somewhere near the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) for an individual, it would be ~ $1000 / month [1]. (This is just for a rough sense of scale. I don't actually think it's a good idea to specifically aim to match that number, but I suspect we shouldn't go much above it. That's a longer discussion, though.) That wouldn't completely cover Social Security for everyone—the average monthly retirement benefit is ~ $1300 [2]—but it would cover a large chunk. Further, the minimum eligibility level for Medicaid is 133 % of the FPL [3], so if we'd like to maintain our current standards, provision of a roughly FPL basic income won't obviate Medicaid for everyone. (Medicare's qualification criteria are primarily age based, so the number of eligible beneficiaries would be unchanged by the existence of the basic income.)

[1] http://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines

[2] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfact/stat_snapshot/

[3] http://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid-chip-program-information/by...

So give people a one-time option when the program is introduced to choose either social security or the basic income. And of course for anyone more than a few years from retirement age, the basic income will be the obvious choice because it begins paying immediately, so social security will de facto phase itself out over time. But then you can trivially sell it as "no changes to social security."

That would serve a somewhat different purpose than Social Security—a lower income throughout life rather than a higher income in retirement.

Regardless, though, it seems like there should be relatively elegant options for achieving both objectives with one system if we want to. Perhaps just increase the basic income after some age. (That sets off some warning bells in my head, though—it could be a step toward complexity and means testing.)

$12,000/person/year * 320 million people is the size of the current U.S. federal budget.

Yep. That's roughly the upper limit of the range that I think would make sense for a nationwide basic income, and even that wouldn't fully cover Social Security or lift everyone out of Medicaid eligibility.

(I don't think it would make sense to actually start that high—I would experiment with lower levels, and on more local scales, to try to understand the economic effects. Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if the maximum benefit to the full economy and to general well being occurs for a Federal component of a basic income near the FPL, though.)

I don't think that's quite right. The liberal crowd I run with sees basic income as a replacement for Social Security, or, another way of putting it, "Social Security for all" (rather than just for the old) in the same sense that Bernie's proposed single payer medical system would be "Medicare for all" as he puts it, rather than just for the old.

Yes, but expanding Social Security to cover everyone (huge budget increase) is very different from shutting down Social Security and using the savings to pay part of a basic income (budget neutral). Even if the liberals and the libertarians use the same words, they mean different things by them.

Eliminating SS and replacing it with UBI is not budget neutral unless we're operating from the assumption that it's okay for UBI to be below subsistence levels. Nobody I know, libertarian or otherwise, sees that as viable. We all agree that UBI would need to replace Social Security in that it pays out just enough to live on.

You'd obviously have to cut a lot more than just SS in order to pay for a reasonably-sized UBI (that's why I said "pay part of"). But in any case, SS is probably a bad example, since it's already just a cash transfer (albeit a regressive one). If you paid for "Social Security for all" by cutting Medicare and the rest of the welfare state, I think most libertarians would go for that.

Well we need to take into account a transitional program. We can't eliminate SS instantly, it has to be done over generational time as part of a transition program. The SS program would taper off over time as it's slowly replaced by UBI.

I envision a system like this:

Person A has just graduated from high school and has never worked right when the UBI program goes into effect. He never pays into SS and receives only UBI for life and will never be eligible to collect SS.

Person B has worked under the existing system for n years and has paid into SS a significant amount. He stops paying into SS now and begins receiving UBI as well. When he reaches retirement age, he collects either SS or UBI, whichever is greater, based on the points he earned from paying payroll taxes.

Person C is a current typical retiree. He continues to collect SS, as it pays better than UBI since he paid so much into it from his payroll taxes.

This UBI system would pay out less benefits than someone with maxed out SS benefits gets today, but we wouldn't have the payroll tax anymore. Instead, the UBI program would be funded through income tax.

This would cost significantly more than today's wealth redistribution programs even added together (setting aside Medicare/Medicaid which are kind of a separate issue), so it would certainly require higher taxes to support it.

If basic income was implemented, then it would have to be much smaller, than current welfare payouts (because there would be 15 times more people who collect it).

Lefty liberals would not agree with the decrease of the payout for such transition, so there is no transition.

If welfare is having a bad time in term of public opinion, how do you want basic income to have a better public perception?

Basic income is very cheap to administer — removing huge staffs and lengthy, error-prone processes disliked by libertarians and liberals alike – and it avoids the perverse incentives which do things like punish parents for getting a job which pays enough that they lose childcare support but not enough to come out ahead after replacing it. The other big win is that if it doesn't require a visible symbol, you avoid the cognitive trap where someone sees someone using food stamps to buy a steak and spends the next 20 years yelling about how wasteful welfare is (and, of course, never once asking how much it cost per calorie).

Because we are not going to call a universal basic income "welfare." Rather, we are going to call it "The America Permanent Fund" and loudly brag about how it's just a copy of the wildly-popular Alaska Permanent fund, that literally nobody has opposed ever.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that has less to do with nomenclature and more to do with oil, rather than working Alaskans, paying for the Permanent Fund. Plus there can't be too many people aiming to go through life living solely off the Permanent Fund.