Governments could instead distribute the money through UBI. The advantage, if you do that, is that people will spend that money on things they need. This seems better, to me, than keeping alive zombie companies that are "too big to fail" and contribute little to no value to society. If you give people UBI, they are voting with their wallets and giving money to companies that produce something useful.
As for the national debt... When the government borrows money from a central bank, it's effectively borrowing money from itself. They might pretend otherwise, but central banks are effectively an arm of the government. The national debt is an artificial construct. Governments could eliminate it with the stroke of a pen.
Serious question: are there any modern sovereign defaults that don't have a decade or two of stagnation or regression associated with them?
(Of course, this is ignoring the idea that UBI would possibly let them do something better with their lives, but humans are gonna human, right?)
If daily UBI was implemented then society will find a way to take the money easily and at low/minimal cost (automated, immediate online bank transfers are free in Europe for many years now). I think landlords would be quite happy as it is guaranteed, no worrying if the person is employed or not.
However back to the original concern about people just spending all this money and having nothing left for essentials, a daily payment still has this problem (ie imagine paying all your UBI on rent with nothing leftover for food, transport, healthcare etc).
My suggestion would be no, we don’t step in. I think for one, we overestimate the number of people who would not use the money for their needs first. I think if we found there were a lot of people who still needed help, we could create an assistance group that can help people find the help they need.
Someone can only blow the two weeks of money.
If they still can’t survive, I am a saying we could have other programs to assist that group (it will be a much smaller population), and I am saying the help would be counseling, training, etc.
Of course, it would be good to it while also offering help with education, any substance abuse issues people might have, etc. but the paternalistic kind of "can't trust people on welfare to spend their own money" view just makes things worse. We've definitely seen it in Australia, they created a cashless debit card that locks out certain types of spending and trialled it in certain areas. It's been a massive failure, people not being able to get cash out to pay rent, it doesn't work in a lot of stores, forcing people to higher priced shops that are part of the system, the card has a lot of stigma attached to it so people are ashamed to use it, social outcomes are worse, and the administrative cost per person is about half as much as the actual annual amount given in welfare (!!) but the company that runs the scheme has links to the party that is in Government and donates to politicians so they're expanding the trials of scheme...
Society can only help so much - at some point, personal responsibility must step in.
People in that situation are still human and are not doomed. People do recover from such ailments all the time given the right structure and support.
And if they can't recover they still deserve the support. That's our responsibility to each other. When "personal responsibility" means just letting people suffer and die we should leave it behind.
So, it sounds like UBI would be effective in reducing overhead, but not much else will change if people choose to blow their UBI?
Between the applications, compliance, debit card fees, reimbursement schemes, and a completely separate financial network, that money is sucked out of a system supposedly designed to supposedly help people with money issues.