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These days, when Mark Zuckerberg talks people tend to listen. And it’s not just the early speculation about his 2020 run for President. It’s the fact that Facebook, the company he founded, has 1.9 billion users logging onto the service at least once a month. Given that massive platform, it’s worth paying attention when Zuckerberg wades into political issues.

In May, during a commencement address at Harvard, the Facebook CEO told graduates that we should “explore ideas like universal basic income.” This week, he returned to the idea in a Facebook post to his 93 million followers.

UBI, as it’s known, calls for giving every U.S. adult a set amount of money every year, regardless of employment status. UBI itself has a wide range of business support ranging from Tesla founder Elon Musk to bond-investing guru Bill Gross.

The concept of a universal basic income goes back centuries, and has drawn support across the political spectrum. In 1797, “Common Sense” author Thomas Paine advocated for a version of UBI in his treatise “Agrarian Justice.” Libertarian economist Milton Friedman backed a basic income for the poor -- a “negative income tax” -- to replace entitlements with cash payments. Friedman believed that food stamps, housing vouchers, and similar programs were inefficient, as people know their needs better than government bureaucrats. On the other side of the spectrum, UBI has won occasional support from socialist politicians.

With automation eliminating jobs, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are now gravitating to the UBI idea, as well. Some people might view Silicon Valley’s UBI embrace as stemming from a guilty conscience -- a way to make up for “disrupting” so many jobs. But a more charitable reading holds that basic economic security would allow people to make risky entrepreneurial moves, whether or not they come from a wealthy family. Zuckerberg recently called that a “cushion to try new ideas.”

There’s no simple way to estimate the cost of UBI. But let’s assume the program is intended to alleviate poverty. The U.S.-defined poverty line for individuals with no children is $12,500. If the government were to give that annual sum to the 250 million adults in America, the cost would come to $3.125 trillion a year. It’s a massive figure, but not as crazy when you consider the cost of existing entitlement programs.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Social Security payments came to $888 billion in fiscal 2015. Medicare, Medicaid and other health-related subsidies were $938 billion, while food stamps and other safety net programs totaled $362 billion. All in, that’s $2.19 trillion.

UBI is a radical policy proposal, but try finding another idea agreed upon by both libertarian economists and French socialists. In our hyper-polarized environment, that alone makes UBI worth thinking about.