Some conservatives do support basic income.

One of the earliest proponents of basic income in the United States was Charles Murray, who supported the idea before its recent surge in popularity. Although he identifies primarily as a libertarian, it is not inaccurate to say that he is right of center and that he has been associated with conservative publications and organizations.

There are even proposals to do basic income as a feature of the tax system.

One of the mechanisms that has been proposed for distributing basic income payments by right of center advocates for the idea is as a negative income tax. Currently, if you make less than the standard deduction amount, you owe $0 in taxes to the federal government. Under a negative income tax, if made less than the standard deduction, you would owe a negative amount of money to the government, e.g. the government would owe you momey instead. Typically, proposals to doing UBI this way involve increasing the standard deduction amount.

A similar mechanism to this is the Earned Income Tax Credit for taxpayers who make small amounts of money but still work. This is a refundable tax credit. This particular credit is supported by many conservative politicians in office today, and it is possible to implement UBI through another refundable tax credit.

Conservatives (even I dare say those famous conservatives mentioned in other answers) wouldn't support UBI in addition to current welfare policies, but there is a very good conservative case to be made for replacing current welfare (including related programs like social security) with UBI. It would replace a very complex and disjoint set of rules that is difficult and expensive to administer with a very simple set of rules with much less overhead.

A similar situation happened with cap and trade. Conservatives thought a market-based solution would be better, but then liberals wanted to add cap and trade on top of the existing regulatory burden.

Some conservatives (and liberals) have argued for UBI. The devil is in the details. The conservative plans are, as far as I can tell, a way to entirely substitute the existing US welfare system with UBI... a substitution that isn't quite palatable to liberals.

On the right, UBI has been endorsed by the likes of economist Milton Friedman, former president Richard Nixon, and libertarian pundit Charles Murray. On the left, Martin Luther King, Jr., former Democratic politician George McGovern, and the Green Party have all championed the idea of the government giving each citizen a certain amount of money on a regular basis—no strings attached.

Conservatives tend to see UBI as a strategy to replace most of the existing welfare state wholesale. Nixon, for instance, proposed a basic income for needy families as part of a plan to overhaul the New Deal-era welfare state.

The problem, of course, is that a UBI would be incredibly expensive. Robert Greenstein, founder and president of the Washington, D.C., thinktank Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, estimates that a $10,000 annual basic income would cost more than $3 trillion per year, consuming nearly all of the tax revenue that the government currently raises. A UBI of this scale would either crowd out most other social programs—the conservative wish—or would require ratcheting up the federal government’s tax collection.

Murray endorsed a basic income in a 2006 book, which proposed to scrap all existing safety-net programs in favor of a $10,000 yearly grant to each American adult. Bernstein objected, anticipating that the poor would be made worse off, and defending the safety net’s gains in fighting poverty.

Murray’s basic income looks a lot like a $10,000 Trojan horse. He explicitly rejects any additional government support for families with children, and would refuse any further public aid to those who fall in need after exhausting their income grant. Those with such misfortune, Murray says, must depend on charity.

Liberals like Bernstein are right to resist this sort of basic income. Murray’s plan would voucherize the entire welfare state—a buyout in exchange for unwinding the federal government’s social-insurance obligations.

[...]

In fact, getting government out of the business of providing beneficial services and instead cutting a flat check would mimic the corporate cost-control tactic of moving workers from defined benefit packages to defined contributions. This would complete the decades-long conservative push to reform our social insurance institutions by shifting risk on to individuals in order to promote personal responsibility, as Murray aspires to do with a UBI.

From how you describe Andrew Yang's proposal, it sounds a lot like those conservative (substitution) proposals. On the other hand, you may have misrepresented it somewhat, since some of the comments argue that he is planning to raise new taxes to pay for it... which wouldn't make a lot of sense for a pure substitution. I don't feel inclined to dig into his platform, but you now know what traits to pay attention to in terms of conservative vs liberal UBI proposals.

Conservatives want less government intervention when it comes to economic policies. Administering this program would create more government and would require funding of some sort.

I have pulled information from https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/ as I am not completely informed.

1. You say that current welfare beneficiaries that receive $1500 a month would continue receive $1500 if universal basic income is rolled out. Could you provide a source for that because I doubt a democrat would advocate a policy that does not benefit somebody currently on welfare. All I see is they cannot claim the full $1000, so maybe they will receive $2300 a month instead of $2500? Overall if the amount of money they get has increased, it will require more government administrative funding to process that money.




2. They propose to fund this program by putting a value added tax. It is really not much different from just straight up increasing taxes on businesses; end result is the same. Possibly businesses will just pay their workers less and justify it by saying their income is supplemented by universal basic income. It would also require government bureaucracy to collect this tax.

Overall, it is very clear that universal basic income is only a left wing platform. It is wealth redistribution that increases government. He could have simply said increase taxes on businesses and give it to poorer people and the end result is exactly the same.

I was just listening to an interview with someone who wrote a book about this. Universal basic income nearly passed under Nixon. It was passed by the conservative senate and the liberal house didn't pass it because they were holding out for a higher wage.

In parallel we were doing research where we gave groups of people a basic income to see what happened. One of the outcomes was that they were no less productive (Somewhat more I think), but one of the "Outcomes" of the test was (it turns out incorrectly) interpreted as women with the financial freedom had more of a tendency to divorce their husbands and strike out on their own.

This result caused major concern among conservatives. The story persisted for years even though they quickly figured out that this had just been a misinterpretation of the results.

I'll try to find the name of that book and add it to this message.

update:

Googled it and Wikipedia had this:

Guaranteed minimum income (GMI), also called minimum income, is a system[1] of social welfare provision that guarantees that all citizens or families have an income sufficient to live on, provided they meet certain conditions. Eligibility is typically determined by citizenship, a means test, and either availability for the labour market or a willingness to perform community services. The primary goal of a guaranteed minimum income is to reduce poverty. If citizenship is the only requirement, the system turns into a universal basic income.

Nixon's proposal was a GMI (I believe he called it GAI, Guaranteed Annual Income) which probably excluded some people that would have been involved in a UBI. Also the article mentioned that I got it backwards, the house passed it but it hung in the senate.

Conservatives have historically been in favor of lower taxes for all, meaning the rich people they represent. Giving poor people a tax break exclusively doesn't benefit them in anyway.

Historically the U.S have had high income tax on rich people. But those were the days when they were in a race to beat the Soviet Union. Can't have the American people appear to be poor when you want to show that your system is better than theirs.

Today the Soviet Union is long gone and the threat of socialism only exists in the form of people like Bernie Sanders and AOC. So no wonder the freshman AOC gets constantly attacked by them. As they view her as their main threat right now.

When in reality, the best way to keep socialism away is to share some of that wealth with the working population. Rather than having 1% of the population owning 40% of the country's wealth.

Time to make America great again. By taxing the rich again.