If you do the maths using the UK government's own figures, it's actually cheaper to scrap the entire welfare system and just give every man, woman and child in the UK #3000/year, no questions asked, no strings attached. A family of 4, outside London, could live reasonably on 12k (untaxed, remember) a year, and anything you earned above that would be counted as regular income and taxed accordingly.
There has been a discussion about this in Germany, too. One of the most prominent supporters of it is the boss of Germanys biggest drugstore/pharmacy chain. You'd normally expect such things to come from "leftists".
