You're measuring the cost to the government, not the cost to the public. How much time do people waste filling out eligibility forms? What's the economic cost o

You're measuring the cost to the government, not the cost to the public. How much time do people waste filling out eligibility forms? What's the economic cost of wastefully converting fungible money into non-fungible requirements to buy specific goods and services? Meanwhile the "extra spending" isn't real because the benefits, being universal, are going to many of the same people paying for them, and therefore simply cancel out. The purpose of making them universal is the simplification: It's simpler -- and therefore harder to cheat -- to have a UBI and a uniform tax rate than to have a benefits phase out that effectively cancels out the lower rates on lower income people in the existing tax code. Or worse, creates marginal rate cliffs and highly irregular rates because overlapping benefits phase outs interact with each other in random and perverse ways.