[jfindley]

This sort of thing gets mentioned a lot, but in practice doesn't work. The amount of money spent on welfare benefits[0], plus the cost of the administration, ends up several orders of magnitude less money than UBI wage x Population size. This is the key problem with UBI: making it actually universal costs an unsustainably huge sum of money, and making it not universal just means you've re-invented welfare benefits, but worse.

0: Doesn't really matter which country you choose the results will be the same

[dogma1138]

It’s also important to note that the direct and indirect benefits of traditional welfare are also considerably higher than even the highest suggested UBI allowances.

For example in the UK housing benefits would be greatly dependent on where you live in some London councils housing benefits can be as high as £400 per week, this alone is more than the highest proposed UBI allowances that aim to match the tax free allowance (currently at £12.5K).

UBI with removal of all other benefits could easily mean that the people that need it the most would be getting less and sometimes much less.