> I think the assumption is that the money you save by reducing the complexity of the welfare bureaucracy would be passed into the income itself. Agreed, but t

> I think the assumption is that the money you save by reducing the complexity of the welfare bureaucracy would be passed into the income itself. Agreed, but there are currently many more people who aren't currently receiving benefits than those who are. Expecting to save multiples of the current expenditure by decreasing the bureaucracy is obviously unrealistic. > But I was assuming that the basic income system would give the same amount of total money to people currently receiving welfare benefits. Fair enough, I was trying to point out that achieving that would require either restricting those who receive the basic income or increasing taxes in order to keep the change revenue neutral. > My point was that among people currently receiving benefits, some portion of them would receive a lot less on basic income, even though the money received would be the same on average. Again, I agree, though I don't see that as a problem. Politically, I don't think there would be enough of those people to be a problem. And socially, they probably shouldn't be receiving that much more than the average anyway. I guess I wasn't so much arguing with you as using your comment to go off on a tangent :)