Any kind of a universal safety net would allow human civilization as a whole to chill out a bit, and could also reduce various petty scams and/or the damage they cause to people.
Giving all 258 million adult US citizens $1000 a month totals to $3.096 trillion per year.
Giving them all $2000 a month totals to $6.192 trillion per year - more than all US tax revenue from all sources combined.
Of course, we already have a $1.7 trillion deficit, with $38 trillion and counting in debt without the UBI, and I assume you're not planning on defaulting on our $1 trillion+ in annual interest payments on the debt either, right?
How about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which by themselves take up over half of the entire federal budget, are we keeping those too?
If you'd like, we could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire that's a US citizen and hope to sell all of the non-liquid asssets at market prices, that'll get us 9 months worth of current federal spending levels - less if we're adding UBI on top and not getting rid of any other programs.
Now if you want to get creative, we could keep funding the military and use it to go after all of the other global billionaires, that'll get us almost through a full 4-year presidential cycle, at the low, low cost of invading just about every other sovereign nation on earth to rob their citizens, too.
We could also have the treasury start minting trillion dollar coins to both pay off the debt and fund the UBI, but I don't think you're going to like your $2000 monthly UBI check as much when market rent on a studio is $200,000 a month.
If you have better ideas on how to pay for this, I'm all ears.
B) repeated studies and measurements have shown that attempting to police it just doesn't do anything.
> Issue special debit cards for UBI
> Issue special machines/payment processors for those cards to registered merchants, landlords, and utility and healthcare providers.
Various countries have various things that operate on similar principles, such as transit cards etc.
Hell, even VIDEO GAMES have done this: Special "premium" currencies that you can use only for certain things, buy with realmoney or earn through various activities, and cannot trade.
The situation makes it quite hard to work if you are on disability and similar which has led the the numbers shooting up
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBrits/comments/1mxxksa/whats_dri...
If you extrapolate the graph in the link in a few decades no one will work and we'll all live by claiming benefits off each other. UBI might be better.