This is a great summary. Your final paragraph actually brings to mind the famous Don't Rewrite Software essay. Specifically: "it's just a simple function... b

This is a great summary. Your final paragraph actually brings to mind the famous Don't Rewrite Software essay. Specifically: "it's just a simple function... but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes." I imagine that as UBI goes to the table, someone will point out that unreliable mothers will squander the money and fail to feed their kids, and so we'll replay the same arguments that created WIC. Someone else will point out that UBI doesn't save the suddenly-unemployed from defaulting on their payments, so for stability's sake we should have payments scaled by lost income, and we'll reinvent unemployment insurance. Etc. Obviously the existing welfare program could be streamlined and improved, but you're exactly right that it exists as-is for a reason. All the little convolutions exist either to make it more politically viable, or to handle some objective more specific than "give money to the poor". That's not going to disappear because UBI looks pretty.