How much it costs to provide USD 30,000 to each and every US resident can be computed with a simple multiplication. For 316 million people, it works out to 9.48 trillion dollars.

On one level, it's not *absurdly* high. After all, US GDP per capita is a little more than USD 53,000 so the country does produce enough to give everyone USD 30,000. Beyond that, determining what it would mean for the economy is obviously a very complex question and would require some assumptions and probably a bit of modeling that's way over my head.

But that's not really the point of the argument. The point is that it's way more than discretionary spending, the entire federal budget (between $3 and $4 trillion in recent years), or the total amount of taxes collected at all levels of government in the US. [SNAP benefits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assistance_Program) (food stamps) cost only $76.4 billion in 2013 or 0.8% of the $9.48 trillion we need. It would require giving up every existing program, disbanding the military, drastically increasing taxes and fundamentally upsetting the way government works in this country.

Relative to the GDP, it's about 56% which is close to the level of government spending in France or Denmark, the (stable/developed) countries with the highest level of government spending in the world. That's the *entire* government spending, which include things like law enforcement, military spending, investments in infrastructure, debt service and, for these countries, education, healthcare, etc. All this would still need to be funded somehow.

You could still make an argument for basic income based on some optimistic view of its effects on the society (e.g. arguing it will boost demand, free up people to be more innovative, educate themselves without going in debt, reduce the massive costs created by poverty, etc.) but it's quite clear that you cannot fund it at this level using the money currently available for welfare programs or get anywhere close to that in the current political context. Even in France, it sounds more like a pipe dream than a serious proposal.