UBI would be a set amount paid to every citizen according to the purist form of the theory . Any paid work would be above and beyond that and taxed accordingly . How do you pay for that ? If you believe the supporters of the idea ( and it's not new , it dates back 500 years ) the savings from welfare and lower social disfunction costs would fund it . So no one would bother working , that is what people say who don't support the idea . Maybe that's true , but in the studies they did in Dauphin Canada in the 1970's it reflected a 5% drop in work hours and mainly attributed to mothers and people returning to school to increase their skills .

It's a theory and I'm not going to parrot fashion it here . If interested you can research yourself . I do think our current system is past it's use by date though . If a space man came down and you were trying to explain our system to them it would seem a bit odd don't you think . Hello Mr spaceman , yes that's right 3% of the population control 90% of the worlds wealth . We still have poverty and we still have working poor and struggling lower middle class who continue to make bad choices and cost the state huge amounts of money as they are desperately unhappy . 80% of our income tax goes to funding the welfare system , so in effect we have not enough money left to run the current system anyway . Our system is based on greed and a lust for power by the few . We are indoctrinated in school that this is the only way , so we just accept it and meekly plod along . We live in a world where people who are good at playing basketball get 50k a game , and people who collect the garbage and keep our health safe are on minimum wage … crazy .