It sounds good on paper, and I used to be in favor of it pre-COVID, but now that a bunch of places basically did it, it's become clear that it leads to way too many people choosing not to work.
I'm not sure many places actually initiated a program of unconditional monthly payments under conditions where people were permitted and encouraged to work.
(With covid, a lot of the payments were as compensation because people couldn't go to work, so you wouldn't see the effect of encouraging work :-/ )
It wasn’t perpetual. But they got a raise to not work. And they not only maxed out the benefit but some of them moved back home with family to minimize their costs and banked their unemployment and still aren’t working. They spent their time smoking and playing games.
This was unprecedented. I would like to see a study into how frequently this actually happened as I don’t know how common my anecdote is.