I'm not saying a universal basic income is good or bad, but notice the pivot you did there. You criticize programs that don't just spend all their money by giving it to the poor, then you say: "Which we could instead do directly with a universal basic income". That's a program which probably spends most of its money on something other than giving it to the poor, because lots of the money goes to people who aren't poor. Such a program could well have all kinds of perverse incentives too.