Hi Daniel, thanks for writing.
I’ll try to address your points briefly, because I’m in a bit of a hurry today.
Cost
“The actual cost of a government program is generally significantly larger than the actual cost of the product or service being rendered.”
It’s inaccurate to compare UBI as a program to SNAP when looking for expected overhead. The whole point of UBI is it’s much simpler and requires dramatically less bureaucracy to implement. It’s the same amount of cash to every person at the same time periodically. A sophomore undergrad in computer science could code that. SNAP requires people to qualify applicants, monitor recipients, etc. UBI is more comparable to (although even simpler than) Social Security, which experiences an overhead of under 1%.
Global universality
Eventually, yes, UBI should be seen and implemented as a universal human right, regardless of nationality, but today we have borders and barriers to blanket global implementation.
Extra for everyone?
You present UBI as necessarily meaning everybody nets extra income or else it isn’t universal. Try not to think of it as “universal extra income" and try instead to recognize it as “universal guaranteed starting income", meaning the first money for everyone. Of course we can tax it back from those who become very successful. UBI done right is absolutely a wealth/income redistribution mechanism. We’ve been funneling unearned money to the wealthy forever. UBI is a way to begin to recalibrate the flow of money in society to be more fair and productive.
Replacing programs
“Additionally, it is assumed that UBI would replace the other programs mentioned in this article? Do you and Cynthia really believe that these programs will go away?”
Why are you pulling Cynthia into this? Anyway, your blind assertion that of course programs like food stamps would obviously come back is silly to me. You haven’t backed it up with any specific reason, so I don’t really know how to respond, because it’s very un-obvious to me why that might be the case.
Crypto
I thought I sensed a blockchain pitch coming on. Listen, if we can create a coin that will be accepted and trusted, safe and incorruptible, widely accepted, and that doesn’t pollute the hell out of the Earth to create, maybe then we can implement this Utopian global decentralized digital UBI you and others insist is the only possible way. I’m totally open to it at that time. But how far is that off, really? People are suffering and dying now, today, and I don’t feel like telling them we’ll probably maybe have a solution for them in a decade or two. Get something together that’s accepted and works, and we can talk about switching over. In the meantime, cash is king and government is the only reasonable way to implement something at the scale needed, and kindly please stop trying to railroad real change we can make in the near term for unproven, long term, futurist ambitions.