Welfare is a loaded term, but an appropriate label to apply to basic incomes. In the very least, other forms of welfare can, through conversion to monetary sums, be thought of as kinds of income of varying degrees of base-ness.
The principal divide in welfare is between liberal welfare and universal welfare. Liberal welfare is means tested welfare, or monies that are given based on some kind of perceived need to those who deserve it. Most forms of welfare practiced in the world today are liberal: food stamps are for people who demonstrate food insecurity, medicaid is for people who cannot afford healthcare, housing subsidies are for people who cannot afford housing, and so on. Liberal welfare regimes tend to predominate for a variety of reasons, such as:
By clearly attaching the welfare received to a need being met, the welfare justifies its expense.
By being conditional, they are cheaper as they only apply to a subset of all people.
Universal welfare is welfare that is not means tested, meaning that it is given irrespective of the needs of the recipient. Social security and veterans' healthcare are both good examples [1].
[1]Technically, both social security and veterans' healthcare can be thought of as liberal welfares, in the sense that there are conditions that must be met in order to be eligible [1-1]. The reason why I am still counting them as universal here, is because nobody is too wealthy to receive either benefit; most liberal welfare dispensations use wealth and/or income as a crucial variable in their logic.
[1-1]One must spend a minimum period of time in the workforce, or have been enlisted in the armed forces, respectively.
Universal welfare is sometimes more attractive than its liberal counterpart for reasons such as:
Since there is no means-testing, its administration tends to be dramatically cheaper for the amount of money dispensed.
There are fewer thorny political questions about where to draw the line for who receives it, and who doesn't.
It doesn't create poverty traps. When a person's income rises, the liberal welfare they receive dries up, sometimes leaving them equivalently situated despite their improved income.
For these reasons, when basic income is considered as a policy, it usually (but not always [2]) takes the form of a universal basic income, rather than a liberal basic income.
[2]Because most people are unaware of this distinction, liberal basic income schemes are often erroneously called universal. Because basic income tends to be expensive [2-1], the most common way that their proponents will try to make them feasible are to make them means-tested, a move that strips the scheme of its universal qualifier.
[2-1]This is the elephant in the room, the one item on the list → that, more than any other consideration, threatens to keep UBIs in the realm of fiction. From the perspective of the recipients of a UBI, they are getting money for nuthin', but the money itself has to actually come from somewhere. Since USD is a fiat currency, the government could in theory print money to meet its obligations, but this is an economically disasterous path when so much money is involved. Thus any serious and pragmatic UBI will actually have to find the trillions of USD required to fund it.
Since money is fungible, its sources could be many and varied, however such large figures are difficult to meet through nickel-and-diming. Most proporents of a UBI either believe it could be adequately covered by eliminating existing forms of welfare (that it would replace), or point to some large government expenses (typically military) as a source for this income.
I am wholely unsatisfied with all proposed sources I have ever seen. Our example 'measely' $10K basic income, costing $3T, exceeds the total sum of all other government welfare programs and exceeds e.g. military expenditures by almost an order of magnitude. The US government budget for 2019 is ~$4.4T; a UBI simply will not fit without being balanced against some new tremendous source of revenue to fund it.
It is for this reason that I no longer recommend implementing a Universal Basic Income, and why I think any implementation along the lines of the schemes that have been publicly floated so far would be a disaster: basic incomes are fundamentally unbalanced