Well, but that's kind of unimportant. So, look, suppose that we have four people in our population. Before taxes and redistribution, their incomes are $0, $50

Well, but that's kind of unimportant. So, look, suppose that we have four people in our population. Before taxes and redistribution, their incomes are $0, $50,000, $100,000, and $150,000. We want to create a more egalitarian society and basically redistribute $25,000 from the richest person to the poorest, and $10,000 from the next richest to the next poorest, so our target final incomes are: $25k, $60k, $90k, $125k We could do that just in a straightforward way, as described, in which technically the government takes in $35k and the cost of the program is $35k. Or we could do it with a GBI, giving everyone a $25k basic income, and taxing everyone including the next poorest person, so everyone's total incomes look like this: $0 + $25k - $0k = $25k $50k + $25k - $15k = $60k $100k + $25k - $35k = $90k $150k + $25k - $50k = $125k And then technically the government has taken in $100k and spent $100k instead of $35k... but everyone is exactly as rich as they were in the version where the tax was $35k. Government expenditures look bigger, but are actually the same, because a lot of the expenditures are essentially taxed down to zero. You can do this with any desired level of redistribution. You shuffle money around a lot more in a GBI system, but what matters is the amount of redistribution, not the total "expenditure." It would be admittedly hard to make the general public understand that.