The program will conclude that people are quite happy to receive a $1000 check in the mail each month without measuring the economic impact such a program would make if it were applied to every American long-term.
For sure there is a 'living on one dollar a day' community that is willing to receive a UBI. That would be $400 per year. With a $4000 pledge per year, it takes 1000 people to finance a 10000 community. Add some technology transfer, and if UBI works, then the community should be able to finance its UBI by themselves after some years.
This sounds like a disaster. Assuming just 100,000,000 eligible adults, you’re talking about $1.2 trillion per year.
Which is less than Social Security and the federal portion of unemployment insurance. By hundreds of billions.
That is the beauty of benefits defined in currency. You can have the nominal amount, and you can even adjust it per a CPI, but whether or not it retains the same purchasing power is pretty much always a no.
So maybe it's not as unreasonable as it sounds. The next question would be - are we doubling what was spent in 2021 or just swapping out the old system with the new one.
Experimenting with the entire country's population and a significant fraction of its economic output seems infeasible and irresponsible. I think the ball is in team UBIs court to devise a reproducible small scale experiment with a decent hypothesis to test before a country wide rollout.
This is impossible. The “universal” part of UBI is essential. Also, being able to tax it back in order to reduce income/wealth gap is essential, putting it in federal government territory. And, of course, immigration control, which is also federal government territory.
I think we will need some realistic experiments to gather evidence as, obviously I think, UBI can’t be rolled out in a country of hundreds of millions without evidence of success. Or at least evidence of no or minimal harm.
UBI looks a lot like a minor rebranding of communist economic policy and has the same no-true-Scotsman problem in which failures are brushed off with "that's not real {UBI/communism}".
One of the most practical: Negative Income Tax (NIT) is mathematically very similar to UBI (and should have similar effects)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
I'm reminded of optimization methods, but with money instead of with RAM or CPU. You get the effect of spending all of the money, but you can do most of the work on paper. Whether the remaining cost is worth it is then a political decision, but not unworkable.