This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 12, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown, a great idea in theory that falls apart in practice.

That's Cato Institute Senior Fellow Michael Tanner's take on the guaranteed national income, a base level of income for every American that might serve as a replacement for the current welfare state.

Tanner's new paper evaluating the idea was released today.

Well I think we'd all agree that the ideal situation would be for poverty to be

handled through private charity or failing that at least at the state and local level rather than the national government getting involved.

But that's not the world we live in.

The fact is we spend about 688 billion dollars at the federal level and other 300

billion at the state level. We have over 120 anti-poverty programs that are not

working. So maybe the question should be, is there a better way and maybe instead of all these different programs

spending all this amount of money and not getting any results maybe it better to just move to something like a flat

Guaranteed National Income it has a certain elegance to it something like a flat guaranteed national income.

It has a certain elegance to it.

The people who promote it say our current welfare system,

the way it's devised, compels people to spend hours, sometimes tens of hours a week in order to get the benefits

that they've, that they're entitled to.

And it does tax people in order to qualify and continue to remain qualified.

But the current welfare system is sort of the worst of all possible worlds, and a guaranteed

national income offers a theoretical alternative that seems much better in many ways.

It would be far simpler, far more transplant, we'd know how much we're spending on each individual

rather than have scattered across all these different programs that are impossible

to track.

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