The only issue with that the big difference is that there is already a lot of money being handed out via welfare, projects, income-based rental prices, and tax credits. What if instead of offering all those programs, they were stream-lined into a single process removing all beauracracy of the different sections, and just handed out the money. You would no longer be paying to make sure that money was being spent correctly, only that the person is a verified citizen (automatable) and still alive.
The number I would like to see is what do we currently spend on all welfare programs, and would this reduce costs to effectively reach a 10,000 - 15,000 per person.
There would also probably be a phase out at about 3-4x poverty so anyone making 60 - 70k would receive about half, and above 90k would receive nothing.
To simplify things let's run some napkin math:
If we are only talking about giving 50% of the population this money, then the phase out would be somewhere around 50k.
US population is about 318 million. Let's say that children make up 73-million leaving about: 245 million adults and 123 million that would receive this money.
Let's assume that we set our amount at about 12k per person. This leaves us with a program that will cost 1,476,000,000,000 or 1.5 Trillion plus operating costs.
All current welfare spending fed and state is 524 billion leaving a deficit of 952 billion dollars.
The article above says that medical spending was reduced by about 10%. Health care spending is at 1.27 Trillion so we ca reduce our deficit to 825 Billion.
So now let's reassume some numbers: instead of everyone under 50k, let's say everyone under 30k which is about 25% of pop. Which brings us to saving another 738billion and a deficit of about 87 billion which is close enough to 0 for napkin math.
But there are still a lot of unknowns, such as who would stop working. What affect does this have on lower wage jobs? and how does this affect supply/demand chains for lower economic products?
All numbers from:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2014USbn_15bs2n_401080#usgs302 and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States