Andrew yang, a Democratic candidate for president current this date, has made universal basic income the foundation of his platform. This appears to be accepted as a “far left” idea. However, the way he has it proposed, is 1000 dollars a month, and that 1000 is not one top of current welfare but instead of. I.e. if you receive 1500 in benefit it’s a month, you now will get 1000 of the UBI plus the 500 in additional welfare.

Logically speaking, this just sounds like a tax refund, as he is not purposing raising taxes. You get a 1000 dollars of your taxes back each month. This sounds like a conservative idea. The only flaw I see is arguing trust those that do not pay 1000 a month shouldn’t get 1000.

Forget about names, except for PR purposes.

A clear-headed analyst looks that the net flow of money, now and in future entitlements. Call it "UBI" or "tax credit", call it "tax" or "mandatory insurance premium" or "tithe" -- people either give money to the government and government-affilated institutions like pension schemes and insurance, or they get money.

Historically, some conservatives have supported welfare systems. In 19th century Germany, the rather Conservative Bismarck introduced worker's health insurance, in part to lure workers away from the Socialists.

Conservatives are a mixed group and any one of them has many goals, some of them contradictory. A few generalizations:

• Conservatives tend to believe that those who earn money should be able to keep much of it. That goes against redistribution schemes (no matter how they are called).


• Conservatives tend to believe that welfare should go to those who cannot help themselves. Not to those who can (or could) earn their own living. To discourage lazy layabouts, there should be a clearly visible gap between the income of an unskilled worker and the income of a welfare recipient.


• Some conservatives are affilated with businesspeople and employers. Employers like to see workers who need a job to make ends meet, because that improves their negotiating position for wages and employment conditions.

The second bullet point is the main thing.

Some conservatives do support basic income.

One of the earliest proponents of basic income in the United States was Charles Murray, who supported the idea before its recent surge in popularity. Although he identifies primarily as a libertarian, it is not inaccurate to say that he is right of center and that he has been associated with conservative publications and organizations.

There are even proposals to do basic income as a feature of the tax system.

One of the mechanisms that has been proposed for distributing basic income payments by right of center advocates for the idea is as a negative income tax. Currently, if you make less than the standard deduction amount, you owe $0 in taxes to the federal government. Under a negative income tax, if made less than the standard deduction, you would owe a negative amount of money to the government, e.g. the government would owe you momey instead. Typically, proposals to doing UBI this way involve increasing the standard deduction amount.

A similar mechanism to this is the Earned Income Tax Credit for taxpayers who make small amounts of money but still work. This is a refundable tax credit. This particular credit is supported by many conservative politicians in office today, and it is possible to implement UBI through another refundable tax credit.

Some conservatives (and liberals) have argued for UBI. The devil is in the details. The conservative plans are, as far as I can tell, a way to entirely substitute the existing US welfare system with UBI... a substitution that isn't quite palatable to liberals.

On the right, UBI has been endorsed by the likes of economist Milton Friedman, former president Richard Nixon, and libertarian pundit Charles Murray. On the left, Martin Luther King, Jr., former Democratic politician George McGovern, and the Green Party have all championed the idea of the government giving each citizen a certain amount of money on a regular basis—no strings attached.

Conservatives tend to see UBI as a strategy to replace most of the existing welfare state wholesale. Nixon, for instance, proposed a basic income for needy families as part of a plan to overhaul the New Deal-era welfare state.

The problem, of course, is that a UBI would be incredibly expensive. Robert Greenstein, founder and president of the Washington, D.C., thinktank Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, estimates that a $10,000 annual basic income would cost more than $3 trillion per year, consuming nearly all of the tax revenue that the government currently raises. A UBI of this scale would either crowd out most other social programs—the conservative wish—or would require ratcheting up the federal government’s tax collection.

Murray endorsed a basic income in a 2006 book, which proposed to scrap all existing safety-net programs in favor of a $10,000 yearly grant to each American adult. Bernstein objected, anticipating that the poor would be made worse off, and defending the safety net’s gains in fighting poverty.

Murray’s basic income looks a lot like a $10,000 Trojan horse. He explicitly rejects any additional government support for families with children, and would refuse any further public aid to those who fall in need after exhausting their income grant. Those with such misfortune, Murray says, must depend on charity.

Liberals like Bernstein are right to resist this sort of basic income. Murray’s plan would voucherize the entire welfare state—a buyout in exchange for unwinding the federal government’s social-insurance obligations.

[...]

In fact, getting government out of the business of providing beneficial services and instead cutting a flat check would mimic the corporate cost-control tactic of moving workers from defined benefit packages to defined contributions. This would complete the decades-long conservative push to reform our social insurance institutions by shifting risk on to individuals in order to promote personal responsibility, as Murray aspires to do with a UBI.

From how you describe Andrew Yang's proposal, it sounds a lot like those conservative (substitution) proposals. On the other hand, you may have misrepresented it somewhat, since some of the comments argue that he is planning to raise new taxes to pay for it... which wouldn't make a lot of sense for a pure substitution. I don't feel inclined to dig into his platform, but you now know what traits to pay attention to in terms of conservative vs liberal UBI proposals.

Conservatives (even I dare say those famous conservatives mentioned in other answers) wouldn't support UBI in addition to current welfare policies, but there is a very good conservative case to be made for replacing current welfare (including related programs like social security) with UBI. It would replace a very complex and disjoint set of rules that is difficult and expensive to administer with a very simple set of rules with much less overhead.

A similar situation happened with cap and trade. Conservatives thought a market-based solution would be better, but then liberals wanted to add cap and trade on top of the existing regulatory burden.

I was just listening to an interview with someone who wrote a book about this. Universal basic income nearly passed under Nixon. It was passed by the conservative senate and the liberal house didn't pass it because they were holding out for a higher wage.

In parallel we were doing research where we gave groups of people a basic income to see what happened. One of the outcomes was that they were no less productive (Somewhat more I think), but one of the "Outcomes" of the test was (it turns out incorrectly) interpreted as women with the financial freedom had more of a tendency to divorce their husbands and strike out on their own.

This result caused major concern among conservatives. The story persisted for years even though they quickly figured out that this had just been a misinterpretation of the results.

I'll try to find the name of that book and add it to this message.

update:

Googled it and Wikipedia had this:

Guaranteed minimum income (GMI), also called minimum income, is a system[1] of social welfare provision that guarantees that all citizens or families have an income sufficient to live on, provided they meet certain conditions. Eligibility is typically determined by citizenship, a means test, and either availability for the labour market or a willingness to perform community services. The primary goal of a guaranteed minimum income is to reduce poverty. If citizenship is the only requirement, the system turns into a universal basic income.

Nixon's proposal was a GMI (I believe he called it GAI, Guaranteed Annual Income) which probably excluded some people that would have been involved in a UBI. Also the article mentioned that I got it backwards, the house passed it but it hung in the senate.