The goal is to ensure people have a minimum. Taxing money back is perfectly fine if you need to. People can move to less expensive areas which the UBI facilitat

The goal is to ensure people have a minimum. Taxing money back is perfectly fine if you need to. People can move to less expensive areas which the UBI facilitates. This makes expensive areas less expensive as well. In terms of how much to give, the idea is to eliminate poverty. Children should not grow up hungry and fearful nor in shame of their parents. That is the fundamental goal. Our current welfare programs do not address this (see Tyranny of Kindness from 1993 for an in-depth personal account of the system then -- it has not improved though it has changed). So go with the poverty threshhold numbers and see how it goes. I think $1000 a month sounds perfectly reasonable. Also, various programs are income related and so without changing them at all, they can become less needed. As for healthcare, while I am dubious about government run healthcare, from what I've read, the government pays for over half of the healthcare costs in this country already. The US also spends twice as much in terms of GDP on healthcare as most other countries. So if we were to reduce the healthcare costs to the level of other countries, then our government could cover universal healthcare without paying more for that. And since premiums would disappear, it could even tax a lot more without changing the ultimate take home pay after taxes + premiums. In theory, that is how it could go. I don't believe it would turn out well, but that's because I don't believe the government would handle healthcare well. It is not because of the cost of it. And given our current system, I could probably be persuaded to try it.