Every time we look at fixing an issue like this, it seems like we're only looking at the half of the problem that involves creating the benefit, because paying for it is unpopular. But wealth accrual in this economy is a net drag. The tax side of trickle-down means that we're only ever working with a trickle to power major public benefits that could otherwise consistently run our economy, and provide robustness where we have a lot of weakness.

You could pay for UBI by heavily taxing stock portfolios of the richest people. + 10% tax on the richest 1% of stock portfolios would raise about 2.3T (source CNBC). It would also take money from people who "can't spend it all" (something Bezos has literally claimed, he has trouble with), and give it to the 300M people who actually have something to spend it on, as evidenced by the huge boom in the economy created by the stimulus package.

It's not that you can't find the money to tax this, it's that no one has the political will to tax anything.

The point I'm making is that the problem is there's a lot of stagnant dollars providing no value to us, that you could readily reinvest in something like this.

Also, before someone brings up inflation in response, I will point out the reason inflation is rampant, is we're not pulling the money out of the economy at the same rate we're putting it in...

It's really odd to stand on the pretense that the UBI wouldn't (effectively anyway) be taxed.

Today, about 57% of households pay no net federal individual income tax. That figure would only increase with UBI implemented as a negative income tax.

Maybe it seems reasonable to some for the median household to receive money from the feds on top of the services they get today for free. That doesn’t seem stable and sustainable to me.