Your proposal gets the math a lot closer, although I thought social security paid more than 7k/yr... so now grandma has to take a haircut on her income and pay

Your proposal gets the math a lot closer, although I thought social security paid more than 7k/yr... so now grandma has to take a haircut on her income and pay for Healthcare out of pocket too. I'm no social security lover but that seems extreme. The allure of UBI is interesting but I've never figured out how the math works out without making sizable reductions in quality of life for significant chunks of the population. The money has to come from somewhere... I think UBI works out to be worse than zero sum economically. Anyway I've always been a firm believer that if you can't come up with a compelling and largely accurate back of the envelope justification for your story, you're not going to get many adherents.