Universal basic income

A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, Citizen's Income, unconditional basic income, universal basic income (UBI), or universal demogrant) is a form of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive a regular, unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.

Many basic income supporters believe that it should be enough to meet a person's basic needs. For this reason, an unconditional income transfer of less than the poverty line is sometimes called a partial basic income while one greater than that level is sometimes called a full basic income.

Basic income systems that are financed by the profits of publicly owned enterprises (often called social dividend, also known as citizen's dividend) are major components in many proposed models of market socialism. Basic income schemes have also been promoted within the context of capitalist systems, where they would be financed through various forms of taxation, although basic income could be paired with virtually any form of economic organization whether capitalist or socialist.

Similar proposals for "capital grants provided at the age of majority" date to Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice of 1795, there paired with asset-based egalitarianism. The phrase "social dividend" was commonly used as a synonym for basic income in the English-speaking world before 1986, after which the phrase "basic income" gained widespread currency. Prominent advocates of the concept include Rutger Bregman, André Gorz, Ailsa McKay,Guy Standing, Karl Widerquist, Hillel Steiner, Peter Vallentyne, Philippe Van Parijs and Milton Friedman.

...
Wikipedia