Also, running a deficit by providing services (universal income included), is far better for the working poor and middle class than Quantitative Easing (i.e. jacking up asset prices, which predominantly benefits the rich).
Universal income is essentially the same as Steve Keen's suggestion of a modern debt jubilee, in which the level of private debt is returned to reasonable levels by expanding the money supply and paying down privately held debt. This would reset the clock, so to speak, allowing economic growth to continue. Whether such a policy makes ecological sense is, of course, a separate issue.
Edit: clarified "paying down privately held debt"
Unless this plan is revenue neutral, which is likely not going to be the case, markets will continue to charge ever greater premiums for borrowing. Ontario desperately needs to get its fiscal house in order; it spends like it's a sovereign with the capacity to access a broad set of monetary and fiscal measures that only sovereigns have.
It's hard to see how that could be anything but a good thing - it'll give us more data on how basic income performs today, so people can finally stop pretending the behavior of people in some town in Manitoba forty years ago has anything to do with the very-different present.
Once we have more information - god knows when, perhaps a decade from now - then we can measure the actual benefits, ask the hard questions you're asking, and figure out if the costs would be worth it. But right now that's premature.