How Could a Universal Wage work in the US?

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I think having it will be inevitable once we get to the point that automation takes enough of the jobs for full employment to be impossible - even among juggled scraps and multiple part-time jobs.

Curious to see what you guys thing would be the way it would look if it actually worked or what steps would get it there?

My own take at the moment - it would probably need to start out just above the US poverty line - something like $12,000 - $15,000 a year per person over the age of 18. That would encourage people to get jobs while employment is still a high likelihood and it would also increase the variety of jobs that could provide a person with workable finances. It would also set the growth of certain kinds of financial activity in motion which would both benefit from that system and stabilize it. Obviously if a person has a disability to where they literally can't work they'd get something closer to 200% of that to assure that they're not being punished for their situation.

Once that sort of seed environment was in place it would be possible to slowly raise that universal income closer to $18,000 then $20,000, $30,000, etc.. but it would have to still be done in a very delicate manner and we'd really need to figure out how we're addressing society's competitive pressures when more and more people just have that universal wage - ie. civic integration and charitable activity, lots of cultural enrichment, education, and urban beautification NGO's and perhaps income bonuses for people active in them would be needed to make sure that the whole thing is building a better society rather than just a bunch of disconnected people sitting around in apartments collecting checks all day.

It's impossible, especially in this country. FWIW, when there was still a Soviet Union, and it's Eastern Bloc satellite states, they had Universal income and it ruined them. Doctors and Nuclear Phyisicists made the same wages as Road workers and garbage workers. The only innovation that they had was in Military hardware. Why stress yourself if you are going to get the same amount of cash to do something great as you would doing not too much?

Also FWIW, all of the people that I've met who lived under Communism in Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, an Czechoslovakia had nothing nice to say about communism.

So communist income equality is a bad idea - check.