But that number is misleading. I have a spouse and three children. Does that mean we all will get 10K/yr?

I have had a different thought on this in the past; Every child born should have $10K put into an account in their name on the day they are born. It will gain interest and grow until they are 18, then they get the money. And as an adult after 21, they are taxed at some rate to pay back the initial 10K that will then be deposited into the account of some other new baby.

Note that the about 23% of the population is under 18 (possibly zero or reduced BI), and 14.5% is 65 or older (possibly offset by SS).

Also, since the census is tasked with counting all people in the united states, it also includes non-citizen long-term visitors and illegal (or undocumented) immigrants.

So it's not quite as simple as latest census count * 10k. It's still quite a lot though.

Federal poverty level is 15930 for a two people family unit, that gives 8000 USD/person/year (slightly below 10k), * 300 mln is 2.4trln. Total income from social security tax (assuming you're replacing all social security with flat just-out-of-poverty basic income) comes to 1.1trln. So definitely short, but assuming 4% annual growth (figure reverse engineered from budget predictions in the futute), that gives us 20 years when in real terms we would be able to fund it entirely from social security tax.

Sources: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/federal_budget_detail

Does your "US population" number include people <18yrs old, people receiving social security, and people who volunteer to not receive their basic income payment? They should be exempt from your calculation...

Basic income is generally designed to be revenue neutral on the middle class. In other words, you send them a cheque for $10,000 and increase their taxes by ~$10,000. So your cost is off by about an order of magnitude. That you get from increasing taxes on the rich and from cost savings for social security and other welfare benefits.

Except almost all of that money will be immediately spent by the recipients, greatly accelerating economic activity. It should provide quite a boon to local entities and the federal government through taxes. Not to mention the various businesses who will suddenly have more customers with money to spend.

Economics is not a zero-sum game and trying to treat it as one will always lead you astray.

P.S. If total US household income was 13 trillion and we assume that the top 1% took home half of that we can just tax the uber-super-mega rich at 50% and pay for a basic income for every man, woman, and child in the US.

I'm also willing to bet that those rich people will end up better off as the resulting economic spending boom circulates through the economy and ends up back in their pockets.

If current trends of automation continue there simply won't be many jobs (Foxconn is deploying a million robots right now to replace "cheap" Chinese workers). How long do you think society will last under those circumstances? Makes a 50% tax look like a bargain.

It's still quite a lot of money, but I think the basic assumption with a guaranteed income is that it would be accompanied by a tax increase such that net income is neutral for some percentage of the population.

Taking the extreme example where no one's net income is decreased and people below median get the full $10k net, you've already halved that number. I think most formulations of actually paying for such a guaranteed income would include some degree of reduction as you approach median and increased taxes at the high end of the income spectrum, further reducing the cost. As mentioned exhaustively, you also can subtract the cost of many of the pre-existing social programs because they get replaced by the guaranteed income.

Or, in more relevant terms, 3.2T is about 1/5th of US GPD (~17Y).