There are two things that are hardly ever addressed when Basic Income comes up: 1) What problem is it trying to solve, and 2) what will the social effects be?

There are two things that are hardly ever addressed when Basic Income comes up: 1) What problem is it trying to solve, and 2) what will the social effects be? For (1) the thing we hear is that BI will be a way to deal with the increasing automation of labor and progressive unemployment that it will bring. That's a decent motivation but we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that it will solve poverty. Whenever people have choices, some will make bad choices. A cheque for 1K a month can be used wisely or squandered immediately. The net effect is that the power-law distribution of wealth will not go away. For (2), it's easy to imagine our future being something like Star Trek where people don't have to work but elect to. Again, some will and some won't. When people have a lot of fee time, they can opt for self-enrichment and charitable work, or they can sit on the couch all day (every day) and play video games, or they can cause trouble - delinquency/crime. The path people take is really more influenced by culture than economics. Basic Income will take the issue of what people do with their time and make it a pressing issue for society. I'm liberal, but I do buy the conservative argument that work engenders responsibility. When work is unnecessary, hopefully there's some other social force that helps us stay healthy as a society. I think that Europe would handle a transition to BI better than the US would.