It's economically quite different. Much less is spent, but lower income people end up facing very steep marginal tax rates. If you make 12k or under, you might

It's economically quite different. Much less is spent, but lower income people end up facing very steep marginal tax rates. If you make 12k or under, you might as well not work or work in an unpaid role. Even if you make more than that, given a choice of working 40 hours/week for 24k or 0 hours/week for 12k, many or most people will go for the 12k. With a UBI, you're paid the 12k, and if the job's salary is 24k, you get paid 36k total, which is a much more attractive proposition. A similar effect keeps some SSDI recipients in a poverty trap. All that said, there are lots of nonlinear effects, and any solution will have to be phased in slowly to account for and respond to them. There are also ways to make the guaranteed income have much better marginal effects, though doing so also makes it more expensive. In fact, those mitigations if taken to an extreme lead to a UBI.