It seems to me that you are focusing on the costs of UBI (which are admittedly very large) and the edge cases where people might be lazy or irresponsible withou

It seems to me that you are focusing on the costs of UBI (which are admittedly very large) and the edge cases where people might be lazy or irresponsible without also giving proper consideration to the massive and transformative benefits that it could bring. How much would UBI reduce the crime rate? How much would it increase the rate of entrepreneurship? How much would it reduce anxiety and depression? How much would it increase average education levels? Upward mobility? Democratic participation and voter turnout? Volunteer work and charitable giving? No one knows the answers to these and many other similar questions, but it seems plausible to me that the cumulative effect could produce drastically more wealth than it costs to implement. Our country (not to mention our world) is facing many extremely severe and worsening problems, many of which are rooted in economic inequality. We are, in my opinion, highly unlikely to solve these problems by incrementally chipping away at them, and the prospects for leaving them unsolved look increasingly bleak. So I think we need to be willing to consider big solutions if the cost-benefit analysis is favorable, even if they do require huge investments. We know UBI is technically affordable based on the amount of wealth that exists in our country—the question is whether it would really work (something we can test), and then if it would, whether we can summon the political resolve to make it happen.