On the unofficial side of the ledger—programs not counted as income for poverty purposes—we have things like SNAP (food stamps), Section 8 housing vouchers, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Tax Credit, among others. Had it been counted as income, SNAP alone would have reduced the ranks of officially impoverished by 4 million people last year. Although we don’t have the numbers yet for last year, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit pulled 9.4 million people out of poverty in 2011, according to the Census’ supplemental poverty measurement.

So we know generally how to bring folks out of poverty. We have a long list of successful programs that already do so. The question still before us is can we do more?

How hard would it be, for instance, to cut official poverty in half?

Using the dataset from the latest Census poverty report, I determined that if we cut a $2,920 check to every single American—adults, children, and retirees—we could cut official poverty in half. Economists consider this sort of across-the-board payment a “universal basic income.” You can think of it as Social Security for all, not just the elderly.

The upside of giving everybody about $3,000 is that it’s a very easy policy to run and a surefire way to cut poverty in half. But it's a large program: it would require about $907 billion in 2012, or 5.6 percent of the nation’s GDP. (In a real implementation, we might exclude the more than 45 million Americans receiving OASI Social Security benefits from a basic income, bringing the cost down substantially.)

Could we afford it? Sure. For starters, we could raises taxes, first on the rich, who would pay more in new taxes than they would receive in basic income, and then on lower-middle class and poor families, who would come out ahead. There is also plenty of room to cut tax expenditures on homeowners, personal retirement accounts, capital gains exclusions at death, and exclusions on annuity investment returns. This submerged welfare state for the affluent costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year. There is also the matter of the $700 billion military budget, which could take some trimming.

The point is: this could be done.

It is important to stress that this idea is not as exotic as it might seem. Multiple movements are already afoot across Europe to put in place a basic income for both the entire European Union and in particular countries. Activists in Switzerland recently collected over 100,000 signatures to put the matter of a basic income before Swiss voters in a coming election.

The idea also attracts an interesting assortment of political support. Those backing the concept of a basic income have spanned the entire spectrum from left-wing redistributionists like Martin Luther King, Jr. to conservative icons like F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Charles Murray.