People would have said the same thing about universal health care before it was done. Providing health care to everyone has a massive price tag, especially by t

People would have said the same thing about universal health care before it was done. Providing health care to everyone has a massive price tag, especially by the standards of the day when it was introduced (mid 20th century -- NHS was founded in Britain in 1948). Income tax was relatively new as a major source of government revenue, so if you asked someone before it was introduced how to fund a public health care system, they would have said it's impossible because it's so fantastically expensive. You would have spent all of the government's revenues on the program, and then some. Just like people say now about basic income. The thing is, the money is going to be spent anyway. Everyone needs health care when they're sick, just like they need to spend money to eat and live. So the net effect on the economy should be negligible. Any difference is because people are currently too cash-poor to spend the money they need to, and that's precisely the social issue you're trying to solve. But the main difference difference is that to provide it universally you need to make the government a middleman to handle redistributing the money. That means expanding the tax base to cover the difference, so the money is routed through the government rather than being spent directly. For universal health care, income tax provided this extra tax revenue. We'll need to either expand income tax or find a new source of tax revenue to fund universal basic income. I view universal basic income as the 21st century version of universal health care: the next evolution in the role of governments in society.