I notice the author claims Milton Friedman supported this idea. I doubt it, but I could see how he might say that it would be better than what you point out we have now.
First, it wouldn’t punish people for working, at least not directly. And since there would be (supposedly) no strings attached, you wouldn’t need the millions of federal, state and local administrators to run it. It’s possible it could save enough on administration to make up for paying all those extra checks, while encouraging poor people to work and save.
But of course, “no strings attached” would never happen. The nature of government is to attach strings to everything we do. The morality police on the left and right would demand that the money be tracked and not allowed to be used on whatever vices they deemed unacceptable. And the left and some on the right would complain about “the rich” getting subisdies, and those who worked hard to get ahead would find their “mincome” taxed or otherwise reduced, and once again government would be in the business of punishing success and subsidizing failure.
Friedman proposed a negative income tax.
We have pretty much achieved what he was talking about with earned income tax credits, food stamps, welfare, crazy money, section 8 housing. His plan was simpler. What we have done is provide millions of government jobs to administer 80 different income redistribution schemes.
The logical extension of that idea is that the same government that gives the money out (to people who allegedly need it) then turns around and does whatever it can to get the money right back. That's why lottery sales, for example, are highest in places where people live in poverty.
What the author of this article doesn't understand (among a lot of other things) is that poverty is usually the result of poor decision-making, not unfortunate circumstances. When Rodney King won a court settlement against the LAPD for nearly $4 million after he got his @ss beaten by a bunch of cops, he didn't suddenly become a rich man. He became a poor man with a lot of money ... which is why he ended up dead at the bottom of a swimming pool with alcohol and multiple narcotics in his system.
One model was proposed by Milton Friedman. In this version, a specified proportion of unused deductions or allowances would be refunded to the taxpayer. If, for a family of four the amount of allowances came out to $10,000, and the subsidy rate was 50% (the rate recommended by Friedman[citation needed]), and the family earned $6,000, the family would receive $2,000, because it left $4,000 of allowances unused, and therefore qualifies for $2,000, half that amount. Friedman feared that subsidy rates any higher would lessenthe incentive to obtain employment. He also warned that the negative income tax, as an addition to the "ragbag" of welfare and assistance programs, would only worsen the problem of bureaucracy and waste. Instead, he argued, the negative income tax should immediately replace all other welfare and assistance programs on the way to a completely laissez-faire society where all welfare is privately administered. The negative income tax has come up in one form or another in Congress, but Friedman eventually opposed it because it came packaged with other undesirable elements antithetical to the efficacy of the negative income tax. Friedman preferred to have no income tax at all, but said he did not think it was politically feasible at that time to eliminate it, so he suggested this as a less harmful income tax scheme.
I suggest his book Free To Choose, or you can find the pbs series he did by the same name on YouTube for more details. It should be required reading in high schools as far as I'm concerned.