A basic income, every which way

There are many policies that have been proposed that fall somewhere on the spectrum of a basic income. It can be challenging to keep them all straight. Hence, this primer.

These tables were created by David Thigpen on behalf of the Roosevelt Institute and I have slightly updated them. Thigpen is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future. This list is not exhaustive, but includes a number of the major ideas that have been proposed (though each idea has many variations and alternative proponents not listed here) and gives some sense of the chronology of how this issue has developed over the past 50 years.

Some basic income programs can be funded by shared wealth or co-owned common assets

An earlier wave of basic income proposals funded by tax revenues

Several recent variations on a tax-funded basic income around the world