Guaranteed Minimum Income. One of the many very bad economic ideas pushed by.......Richard Nixon!
Wow. Of course we never tried it. Let’s think about it for a moment....we would not need unemployment, welfare, food stamps, social security, Obamaphones, reduced housing, free medical and a lot of other bennies......if it was 30K a year. I bet we would come out even due to all the bennies we give out.
Of course to the poverty pimps it would never be enough.
You’re forgetting supply and demand. You would essentially be creating a whole lot of money out of thin air, because there was no productivity put into the economy in order to back that $30k income for every individual. If the money supply expands faster than productivity increases, then you get devaluation of the currency (and inflation of prices). So, most people would end up no better off than before they got that “free” $30k.
People who argue for GMI say it would actually be cheaper than administering our current assortment of welfare programs with all of the attendant bureaucratic and administrative costs.
Forgetting that those came into being in the first place because no one believed that you could just hand money to poor people and not have them throw most of it over the bar.