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).