How much it costs to provide $30,000 to each and every US resident can be computed with a simple multiplication. For 320 million people, it works out to 9.6 trillion dollars. If we take adults over the age of 20 and the $11,670 poverty threshold from the Department of Health and Human Services for a single-person household, we end up with $2.7 trillion (all numbers for 2014 or 2015, source: Wikipedia articles on Demographics of the United States and Poverty in the United States). Those are obviously very rough estimates but it's useful to seriously consider these numbers to get a feeling of the costs involved.
On one level, it's not absurdly high. After all, US GDP per capita is a little more than $53,000 so the country does produce enough to give everyone $30,000 per year. 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 $9.6 trillion is way more than the cost of current welfare programs, total discretionary spending or even the total amount of taxes collected at all levels of government in the US. Even the lowest $2.7 trillion estimate is close to the entire federal budget ($3.6 trillion in 2013). Finding that much money would require giving up every existing program, disbanding the military, drastically increasing taxes and fundamentally upsetting the way government works in this country.
Just to give an example, SNAP benefits (food stamps) cost only $76.4 billion in 2013 or 0.8% of the $9.6 trillion we need. The total cost of all means-tested programs was only $927 billion in 2011, 9.7% of our high estimate and 34% of the low estimate (and that number includes Medicaid, more on that below).
If we assume this basic income would be paid to all adults and could therefore replace Social Security, we can also add that money ($785 million) to the pot but it's still not enough. Note that you frequently hear people warning that the cost of all this has increased and is or will soon become unsustainable but most of the time, the figures include social security and Medicare.
It's relevant because if we consider that funding a basic income scheme would require all the money currently going towards means-tested programs and programs helping the elderly, it would also mean stopping Medicare and Medicaid. All the current beneficiaries would therefore need to pay for health insurance out of pocket, which would in turn imply a large cut in their disposable income. For a given level of funding, it's a massive transfer from those currently benefiting from various welfare programs to those who are above the thresholds (for whom the basic income is a kind of cash allowance on top what they already get).
Looking at it from another angle, $9.6 trillion is about 57% 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.
An argument you sometimes hear from proponent of a basic guaranteed income is that current welfare programs waste a lot of money because the constant suspicion that recipients are lazy “moochers” led to increasingly arcane, arbitrary and intrusive eligibility requirements and huge administrative costs to handle them and fight fraud. If we establish that everybody is entitled to a basic income, we just need to ensure we pay each person only once and we can do away with most of the administrative overhead and the whole debate about what's fair or not.
It's an intriguing idea but the simple calculations I just presented show that the numbers do not add up, we still need a lot more money than what's already going to social programs. Importantly, some of the people who make this argument that a (meaningful) basic guaranteed income would cost too much are left-leaning economists who are sympathetic towards the welfare state. It's not simply the welfare-is-too-high-we-can't-afford-to-pay-for-anything line of those who favor tax cuts no matter what.
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 European countries with large welfare states and less ideological prevention against government meddling in the economy, it sounds more like a pipe dream than a serious proposal…