The government is very good at giving people money. It's less good at adjudicating whether people require that money. Replacing every government assistance program with direct, unconditional cash transfers would almost certainly be cheaper than the bureaucracy that must be maintained to ensure only "deserving" people get assistance.
I'm very much in favor of UBI. Replacing literally "every government assistance program" has me worried though. I think for most folks this will work well. I do wonder about people with special needs though for whom that won't be sufficient. Might it be physical or mental disabilities, it can get more expensive quickly.
I broadly agree with you, I favor UBI for similar reasons, though I'd maybe frame it less as "very good vs. less good", vs. just acknowledging the enormous overhead costs of means-testing, to say nothing of the consequences when bureaucracy turns corrupt or Kafka-esque.
But devil's advocate: is there any reason the same outcome couldn't be accomplished with a negative income tax instead, leveraging a bureaucratic infrastructure which already exists and isn't going anywhere?
I don't really care how it's delivered, as long as it's a regular payment throughout the year that people can depend on.
(US specific) The monthly advanced child tax credit, effectively a negative tax, lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty for the short time it existed. Building that into a permanent, regular, universal cash transfer is not mechanically difficult but is intractable politically.
That's a good point. It was famously the preferred policy of Milton Friedman (presumably as a cheaper alternative to the welfare state, back when the Overton window was still more FDR than Reagan). A negative income tax might need to be paid out weekly or monthly to make a meaningful difference to the homeless and the working poor (to say nothing of access to banking services; as long as we're waving policy magic wands, let's add postal banking to the mix.)
Of course, I feel obliged to bring up the Georgist objection: that either negative tax or UBI would need to contend with the problem of ground rents, lest landlords simply jack up the rent by the $X additional income that they know for a fact that everyone has.
Fun aside: Thomas Paine, the author of "Common Sense", made one of the earliest proposals for a citizen's dividend [0] (funded by ground rents), but going the other direction: a one-time lump sum during young adulthood, as a means to bootstrap a homestead or small business.
