Expecting those children to then spend it on education seems like a stretch, but we're already playing what-if here, so why not?
But unless you have that plan in your back pocket, we're still in a world where scarcity is relevant. If some people want to repurpose the commons in support of their own non-common agendas, then it's up to the rest of us to oppose that.
And you'd give the money to the children's guardians, who can make those decisions on the children's behalf. Maybe they hire a tutor. Maybe they send their kids to a school. Maybe they use the money to offset a stay at home parent.
I don't think UBI makes sense for a variety of reasons, but that's the gist of it, no?
No. That's an argument used by the subset of UBI supporters who believe that UBI should displace all other social support including non-means-tested aid, but that's not the general case of UBI advocates (who generally advocate that UBI should displace means-tested benefits, but there's no general position on universal/unconditional non-cash programs alongside UBI.)
Support for universal (public single-payer or otherwise) health coverage of some kind among UBI supporters is pretty common, for instance.
The more general reason for UBI is the belief that multiple means-testing bureaucracies are duplicative of each other and thr tax system, and prone to adverse incentives due to too-quick clawback both in where it cuts in and in the ratio of aggregated benefit reductions for each increment of additional income.
In general, I prefer:
1. a functioning government
2. a UBI-enabled market
3. a malfunctioning government
It seems to me that the least violent way to kill off a government and bootstrap a new one in its place is to turn your back on the currency that the incumbent is minting. I view UBI a tool to get us through such transitional times (3 -> 1).
It still has to be backed by something, and I think the most likely candidate for that something is demonstrated success in other areas of DIY-government. If people can look around and see that the problems are getting solved, then they'll maybe be interested in a UBI currency issued by those problem solvers. I imagine that these would be problems like education and healthcare, which is why I say I have a hard time imagining a UBI system getting up and running in a community that does not have a grasp of those more immediate problems.
Without that initial success as a credibility-builder, the UBI-paved road to a functioning government will be indistinguishable from a ponzi scheme.
If people truly have no faith in the existing government's ability to do government things, then their DIY efforts should be gathering steam to sideline that government, not angling for a slice of the tax bill from the very government that they've lost control of. If they get that slice they'll become the very sort of corruption that they're objecting to.
If that's not an amount of work they're ready to stomach, then maybe they should rethink their disavowal of the existing channels in the first place.
Government funded homeschool co-ops or government funded homeschool families... Not so much.
As someone who pays taxes under the expectation that the government will do its best to use the money to provide a consistent education for all, I have a limited set of options when it comes to influencing how it gets spent. There is opportunity to improve that situation, certainly, but it's not corrupt. We pay in together and we vote for people who will spend that money on our collective behalf.
I don't have kids, so presumably I won't have the option to redirect that money towards Newton and away from Chaucer (or you know, whatever politically motivated alteration I come up with). People who do have kids shouldn't get different options than I do w.r.t. how the money is spent.
If somebody wants to influence the curriculum that gets funded with tax dollars, they should have the same power to do so as all of the other taxpayers.