Not really, the central premise of UBI is that its recurring allowing you to plan for and adapt to the income. This was just a bandaid for a financial disaster.

What is interesting about the payouts is that we magically made the money for them while also magically making the money for a ton of other stuff. Obviously the scale of one time vs recurring is vastly different but I feel like this does go a ways towards proving its possible.

True that it was a band-aid, but the Magic was a massive increase in the national debt[1]. Be careful wishing for any more.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/05/08/national-d...

No more so than the 2008 stimulus checks. Both programs were non-universal and under both the number of dollars sent to eligible recipients depended on their incomes.

Oh maybe I'm mistaken. I was under the impression that the COVID payouts were universal.

The cutoffs before payments started to taper off—not even get cut off entirely yet, but drop—were pretty damn high. Much higher than I expected when they started talking about it. Not by SV or NY professional-class wage earner standards, but very high for normal people. It wasn't universal but it wasn't too far off, either.