It's referred to as minimum income as well, actually, not to be confused with the minimum wage.
You have to keep in mind that under such a system, the United States would suddenly save hundreds of billions, if not trillions, annually by basically not having to pay for a lot of the welfare net that they currently do such as the extra costs associated with things like running a food stamp program (along with the giving of food stamp money in the first place), etc.
The working age population is about 200 million people at most (18-62 in my eyes). 200 million x $1,000 a month = 200 billion per month. 12 months in a year means it would cost 2.4 trillion a year to run such a program. However, take into account the hundreds of billions of dollars in government savings, the hundreds of billions more you could save by drastically cutting the bloated military budget and the hundreds of billions you could raise by increasing the effective tax rate on high income earners (higher marginal tax rate and elimination of various loopholes). Suddenly, it really doesn't look all that expensive.
Basically, if you ensure that the program itself is cutting down on government costs while eliminating the pointlessness of, say, having a military that could blow up the world a thousand times over (especially in the era of automated drone based warfare), it can work as a cost neutral wealth redistribution scheme. In other words, the money is already there, just in the hands of a few.
And again, people
will continue to work. But plenty that see other avenues will be free to do whatever they want with their lives while the shittiest jobs are now going to have to pay a hell of a lot more in order to make it worth people's while. I imagine we would immediately see an elimination of the most pointless jobs in our society.
That near-jailbait restaurant hostess who is merely paid to sit at the front of the restaurant and lure in middle aged creeps? Gone. No longer affordable to pay her a now competitive wage of $40 an hour for doing fuck all in an industry that's likely to collapse immediately as few want to work in restaurants and fast food when given money to avoid it.
Private security guards posted everywhere because those wallowing in poverty want to commit crimes? No longer necessary now that people have a stable income and aren't walking America's city streets at night in hopelessness.
People working their ass off butchering animals in terrible conditions? Gonna have to get paid a hell of a lot more if you expect anyone to do it. Work will then be redefined with essential jobs paying high wages and inessential sectors and jobs being eliminated completely as employers can't just throw money around at nonsense now that the work force will be smaller. For once, business will compete for workers instead of taking advantage of a constant unemployment trough to scare everybody.
And plenty of conservatives are starting to rally behind the idea because it can drastically shrink the size of government. Cut people checks and say goodbye to hundreds of thousands of government workers. Oh, all those people are out of work? No big deal because they at least have the minimum income to fall back on while pursuing a career in something else.
Minimum income studies have been tested before in Europe and Canada to great success, even if the results were just kind of ignored by the mainstream up until the last couple of years when the idea has begun to take hold again. Plenty of European countries are starting smaller studies or having referendums on the idea and they're even going through with it in communities in Africa. Common results are barely a downtick in people not working, improved health, lower crime rates, etc. And stop with saying that "they can do that somewhere else, but not in the United States"...if it works in one place, it can work somewhere else once it's implemented. It's writing out checks for god's sake, there's nothing else to it.