While their numbers do seem a bit low, they are not off by an order of magnitude. Canada's healthcare system averages $375/month expenses across all citizens. [0]

> tax revenue would decrease as at least a portion of the population would simply drop out of the workforce.

Even if the bottom 50% of earners drop out of the workforce, this is a loss of tax revenue of 2.25% [1]. So the first-order effect of reduced tax revenue isn't meaningful.

> It won't work in the real world. I have always wondered why otherwise intelligent and successful people keep bringing up ideas

It would be one thing if there was broad empirically-based consensus that BI "won't work in the real world" but if so you have not brought that evidence with you today. It is probably best to refrain from unsourced assertions that people who disagree with you are stupid.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...

[1] http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html

That sounds great, but that's an apples to oranges comparison. Medical care in the US is drastically more expensive than in Canada, and unless we implement single payer (which will not happen) those numbers will not come down. Therefore $12K (which also has to cover living expenses) won't come close to supporting the medical expenses of the Medicare set in the US.

BI as a supplement to wages and other resources already exists in the form of welfare and the like, its just a matter of reducing the conditions to nothing.

somebody mentioned 600 a month for BI, you could do something lower without needing to quadruple tax revenue

From the calculations above, that requires 5050*267 million more government revenue than we have, or 1.35 trillion dollars (after cutting the non-old age part of Social Security, and the welfare part).

How are you going to raise that 1.35 trillion dollars?

Also at 600 a month, we arguably cannot drop minimum wage.

As far as the rest of your comment, by reducing the conditions to nothing, you dramatically expand the expenditures while lowering the tax base by encouraging a portion of the population to not bother being productive. People like to say that welfare acts as a form of BI, but that is far from the truth. Most welfare programs in the US contain requirements that recipients at least look for a job, stay drug-free, etc. With BI, people that don't want to work will simply move in with each other. $12K/yr isn't really enough for 1 person to have a good life; however $60K/yr for a household of 5 with no taxes taken out comes alot closer.