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What I got out of this was the suggestion to fund Basic Income by taxing unearned income. I'd like to read more on how the numbers would actually work out. If that were the only funding source of BI, then how much impact would that be on the rich, and how much benefit would that be for the people that could use BI?

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The US collects about $1.5 trillion from income taxes per year. A bit of googling leads me to believe that about 10% of that is from capital gains so that's 150 billion. Let's say we 2x capital gains rates and (magically!) earnings from capital gains don't go down.

So we have $150B for our Basic Income. There are about 300 million Americans (I rounded down to make the math easy). $150 Billion / 300 Million = $500 each per year.

There is no such thing as "unearned income". Assets are risky.

Unearned income is a technical term. Here is the IRS definition:

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch31.html#en_US_2016_pu...

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