I always find it ironic that UBI gets labeled as a loony lefty policy when in a more sane world, it would probably be the conservative position. The whole idea is that you know how to spend your money better than the government does.
It should be noted that the campaign platform I was asked about was $1000/month, which Handy ballooned into $1000/week in order to go into his hysterics. Could a person live off that? No, but it's enough to bump anyone taking it up a standard deviation or two. It's like a non-BS version of W's stimulus that the right loved. You could probably even rope in the White Genocide lunatics on the right(I believe they're called 'Republicans'), because I can't tell you how many middle class white families I know that would have another kid if it wasn't so ****ing expensive.
So how do you pay for it?
First of all, the number of people getting it is a lot smaller than assumed earlier. Nobody at the top is taking it because you can give them a tax incentive to not take it. And nobody at the bottom is getting it because they're already getting it(and hopefully more) through welfare.
Second, it's not fair to say we have a $4T federal budget and we'd be adding another $3-4T on top of that, because a good percentage of the latter is already covered by the former. If you say we need to be spending money on college education and healthcare, guess what? A good chunk of that UBI money is going to be spent on college education and healthcare anyway. An extra $12K a year in your pocket is $12K you don't need to take out in student loans. Again, shrinking the size of bloated government social programs, which leads to inefficiencies, is a very conservative principle.
As far the rest, pull up any chart on wage stagnation for the majority of American workers. There's been more than enough money stolen by the rich from the lower/middle class to make up the difference. Giving some of that back strengthens the middle class back to something closer to what it once was and would do wonders for the economy. It's not millennials that are killing Applebee's. It's that it's a family restaurant which most families can't afford to eat at more than once in a blue moon.
