You ask "what would a basic income be?"

It a fair share of the economic wealth of the society we live in. No human created this planet, or all it's natural resources, but yet, our corporations claim ownership of them, and make money off the planet's resources, without any obligation to share that wealth. A Basic Income can be understood as a fare share of the wealth of the planet the belongs to all of us equally, but being exploited by others.

In addition, our society only works, because the people agree to follow the laws of the society. When a person is not given a fair opportunity to share in the wealth of the society, they will become angered, and if too unfairly treated, they will revolt. A Basic Income is the fair share of the wealth of society, people are paid for agreeing to follow the laws of the land -- for being good citizens.

In addition, we have a social problem to solve. That problem is growing wealth and income inequality being created by technology. This is not a problem created by any single individual. Or any "bad" law. It's a relative new problem for society in the level of inequality all our advanced technology is creating. Society can not survive, if inequality gets too larger. We much share more, and hoard less, or else the poor will rise up and revolt and our society will be lost. A Basic Income is the fix to technological inequality. It's the people's share, of the wealth being created by technology.

You ask how it will be determined? It should be set as large as possible, but not so large, that it hurts economic growth. The goal is to create the most equal society possible, without losing the capitalistic motivation of profit. The more equal a society is, the safer, and the more happy the people are.

In a society with massive levels of economic inequality, like the US, the economy is NOT meeting the needs of the people. It meets the need of whoever has money to spend, which is only the rich. If you want the economy to meet the needs of the people, you have to give all the people a more equal share of money to spend in the economy -- which is one of the reasons a Basic Income is important. I helps the economy actually take care of the people, instead of just taking care of the rich.

I agree that the motivation to work is a non issue. When people choose to not work under the Basic Income, it drives wages higher, since those people not working, are still creating consumer demand by spending their Basic Income. Wages will rise, until they get so high people can't say no to that $20 an hour part time work at McDonald's. Wages will stabilize at whatever level is needed to motivate enough people to work. It's self regulating.

I wrote a long argument about why Basic Income is required, based on the need to reduce the inequality to maintain the balance of power that is fundamental to maintaining our democracy. But I also wanted to just list all the other good features of a Basic Income.

1) Saves our democracy from turning into a plutocracy.

2) Ends Poverty.

3) Is the perfect tool for limiting economic inequality.

4) With the reduction in inequality, we have less crime and violence.

5) With the reduction in inequality, we have less people in prison.

5) With the reduction in inequality, we have less mental illness, such as depression.

6) With the reduction in inequality, we have less paranoia and distrust in society.

7) With the reduction in paranoia, we will have less people feeling the need to own guns.

8) With the reduction in paranoia, we have less fear of other nations, and less war.

9) With the reduction in inequality, we have less teen pregnancies.

10) With the reduction in inequality, we have less health problems, and longer life spans.

11) With a BI, everyone has the power to leave a bad relationship.

12) Woman will no longer be forced into the sex trade, for a lack of money.

13) People with creative talents will be freed to create.

14) No one will be too poor to vote (can't afford time off, no car, etc).

15) We can eliminate minimum wage laws, and free business to hire at any rate.

16) People will have bargaining power without the need for labor unions.

17) We won't need labor unions at all.

18) Unemployment will be eliminated.

19) Anyone that wants to work, will have endless options to choose from.

20) We can eliminate almost all other welfare programs.

21) We can eliminate the huge government welfare bureaucracy.

22) No one will need to beg the government for money again.

23) No one will feel degraded or second class, for being on welfare.

24) We can remove all tax codes, meant to be forms of welfare.

25) We can eliminate the progressive income tax, and use a flat income tax.

26) We can eliminate all deductions, meant to provide "help" for those that need it.

27) We can eliminate all special filing statuses like "married" because that's welfare.

28) With all welfare features removed form the income tax we are left with a flat tax.

29) With a flat income tax, it can be implemented as payroll deductions.

30) With income as payroll deductions, no one has to file an income tax form again.

31) Discrimination laws become unnecessary, once we create fair equality though a BI

32) Everyone gets to be part of society, because they always have money to spend.

33) Cash is the ultimate form of individual freedom, and everyone will always have cash.

Edited to add more:

34) A BI reduces the fear that drives recessions and the euphoria that drives bubbles.

35) A BI acts as an economic stabilizer reducing the depth of recessions.

36) Replacing welfare programs with a BI shrinks the size of government.

37) A BI gives the government a tool for regulation of consumer demand.

38) A BI combined with taxes, creates a tool for shaping economic behaviors for public good -- like reducing consumption of fossil fuels by putting a tax on fossil fuels where the tax is not given to the government to spend, but given to the people in their BI. Current taxes meant for that purpose tend to expand government as a bad side effect.

39) A BI gives individuals the power, and responsibility, to take care of themselves, instead of expecting the government to take care of them.

40) A BI helps create equal opportunity for all people to build their own happy and successful life, instead of being helped, or handicapped, by circumstance out of their control.

41) A BI gives people the power to build their own version of a happy life, instead of the version of a happy life the government, the social majority, or the rich, think one should lead.

42) A world wide BI (not just individual nations) will end all poverty, and war on the planet. Forever. It won't end social disagreements, but it will end the use of guns to resolve the disagreements.

43) A BI will accelerate the development of automation to replace workers.

44) A BI will accelerate the end of work and the day everyone can retire from work-for-pay.

A Basic Income is becoming a human right because without it, our societies will fail. We must implement a Basic Income or perish. Democracies are based on a balance of power. Capitalism has produced great economic growth, but as we add innovations and technology to capitalism, inequality has expanded in step with our growth. The balance of power in our society is failing because of technology driven inequality. A Basic Income is required to restore the balance of power and save our society. If we do not implement it, the growing inequality will destroy our democracy, and return our society back into a plutocracy where the rich freely abuse the poor. This is the very thing we in America, fought a revolution 200 years ago, to escape. If we don't implement a Basic Income, we will have to go fight that battle once again.

Humans are sadly, selfish creatures by nature. We act to care for our own self interest more so than we act to care for others. We learn our altruistic values not because we are good to each other by our nature, but because we learn the real life consequences of not being altruistic. If we are mean towards others, they in turn, are mean back to us, often more so than we were to them. When we are nice to others, they are nice back to us, often more so than our kindness to them. We train each other, to be altruistic. Our society is full of altruistic behaviors, because we have all trained each other, to be that way. And it's beneficial to all of us, to learn these lessons.

But this training only works, when we have equality of power. When power is unequal, the strong, in the end, will always learn to abuse the weak. The weak, will fail to be able to punish the strong, as much as the strong, will be able to punish the weak. A society of inherently selfish individuals only works well, when a balance of power is maintained.

We created democratic societies, after long lessons of what life was like in societies structured as power hierarchies. Freedom only comes, as a result of the equality of power in society.

We use free trade and capitalism as the tool for maximizing the use, and allocation, of all the worlds resources for meeting the needs of the people in our society. But capitalism, is inherently a system where power is not balanced. In capitalism, power naturally flows to whoever proves themselves to be the most economically productive members of society. This is very good, for the maximizing of economic output, but very bad, for the balance of power. A trade off between economic strength, and social equality, must be struck and maintained to keep the society healthy.

Since the beginning of time, human labor has been the prime force within the economy for creating wealth. We created it with our physical and mental effort. Because most humans have similar physical and mental abilities, the wealth any human could produce was always very close to one another. There was little inequality, except when people choose not to try to work. This fact is what allowed capitalistic free trade to produce relatively low levels of inequality. Every healthy normal human, had the power to create wealth, in their own hands.

The only exception to this, was the control of land. Farming, and hunting, required access to land. So if one could control the access to land, they could control the production of wealth. This led to the landed gentry extracting wealth from society and abusing the workers. But yet, the landed gentry still needed the labor of the peasants and as such, this always gave the peasants some leverage to keep some of the wealth their labor produced. At least enough, to keep themselves alive and healthy enough to keep farming.

But today, our economy is a very different story. We have added massive amounts of new technology to it. Today, most the work in fact is no longer done by humans at all. It's done by the machines. Farming is no longer done by hand, or by animal, it's done by tractors, and combines, and water pumps. 200 years ago, 90% of the people worked in farming, now only 2%, and we produce far more food. This is because 99% of the work is now done by the machines, and not the humans.

With the invention of steam engines, and then internal combustion engines and electric motors, we displaced human and animal muscle power from the economy. Our muscle power was obsoleted just like the buggy whip. Human muscle power became economically worthless. But humans remained economically valuable, because we still had this other wonderful organ called a brain. Every engine, needed a human brain to control it. Now, as computers and automation advance, we are rapidly displacing the human brain from the economy as well. Best estimates are that we only have about 2 decades left before cheap computers surpass human brain power and at that point, we are obsoleted from our own economy.

But even now, while there is still lots of human mental work that is still needed, something more important is happening to the economy. More income is produced by the machines, than the humans,. And income produced by the machines, accrues to whoever owns the machines. This means, increasing amount of wealth, flows to human not because of what they do, but because of what they own.

This shift from wealth create by doing, to wealth created by owning, is the fundamental shift that is growing inequality in society. Whereas in the past, owning a pair of hands was all that was needed to guarantee the power to create a fair amount of wealth, today, we must own capital, and companies, and land, and technologies, and patents, and computers, and software. It takes money, to make money. If you are not born rich, trying to climb the ladder to owning wealth, is becoming harder and harder as wages from "working with our hands" is steadily dropping. This effect causes economic inequality to grow, and the more it grows, the more self-reinforcing the effect becomes, with inequality growing faster, and worse, day by day.

This trend has been with us since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Inequality was very large 100 years ago with the robber barons. But them we fixed that with anti-trust laws, and lots of government social programs and tax systems to take wealth away from the rich, and give it to the poor, in forms of free schools, and roads and other government services as well as welfare.

But the trend towards greater inequality only continues to worsen, as we keep adding more technology to the mix. We must shift more wealth from the rich to the poor too keep inequality in check, and keep society stable, and our democracy alive. But the rich are getting fed up with how large the government is growing. It's growing large, because we have used it as a vehicle for funnel wealth from the rich, to the poor. But not just a transfer of cash, but an indirect transfer of goods and services in the form of endless large and complex government programs, from roads, and schools, to public parks, and an excessively huge military complex. We do it indirectly like this, because we have this national obsession that "sharing cash" is "evil". I'm sorry, but it's time for people to wake up, and realize that the true evil, is inequality. If we don't maintain a balance of power in society, our society will fail.

It's time to stop trying to share the wealth indirectly through more government programs, and do it directly, by taking cash from the rich, and giving it to poor. And that's what a Basic Income is. It's what we should have started 100 years ago.

The idea is NOT to create some basic standard of living for everyone. The size of the basic income transfer is not at all related to how much it costs to live. The size of the payment is a function to how much we feel we must reduce inequality in society.

It will be very hard to get people to understand that this is not only Just and Fair, but required. But it is what we must do. The hard part, will be getting it started. But once it's started, then people will learn to accept it as right. Change is always hard for people, and the idea of taking cash from one person, and giving it to another, will be hard for people to accept at first. But accept they must. To make it easy, we can start very small. Maybe only $100 a month of Basic Income for adults, and $50 a month for children and see what happens. What will happen, is that it will set off a great economic growth spurt in society and people will learn to see it as a Human Right.

Once they see it has a justified feature of our society, and our economy, they will understand that the correct thing to do, is to raise it as high as possible, creating as much economic equality in society is possible, without hurting economic growth. If we raise it too high, there won't remain enough incentive for people to work, and since for the next few decades at least, we need people to work, that will hurt economic growth instead of helping it. But how high is too high? That we will not know, until we try it. Which is why we should start small, and they grow it, while monitoring the effects. If the economy show signs of stalling due to a lack of motivation, we stop raising it. As long as the economy keeps going strong, keep raising it.

When we get to the point that machines are doing most the work, the Basic Income should be very high, creating very high levels of equality across society.