The bureaucracy exists to limit welfare spending though. If you have a fixed budget it is more efficient to only give it to those who truly need it even if it is self defeating over the long term. That is simply how politics works.
> he bureaucracy exists to limit welfare spending though. If you have a fixed budget it is more efficient to only give it to those who truly need it even if it is self defeating over the long term.
If it is self-defeating, it is not more efficient. And we already have a bureaucracy whose functions include verifying income claims and adjusting net payments based on them in the income tax system, we don’t need a bunch of different bureaucracies doing that redundantly with slightly varied definitions and rules and paperwork that serve little practical purpose besides justifying additional bureaucracies and enforcing self-defeating funding cliffs.
With UBI, there is no means testing. So the main “abuse” possible is income tax evasion.
It is possible that there would be fraud around pretending to be a person when that person doesn’t exist, or continuing to collect benefits for someone who is dead.
But “are you a live person” is much harder to fake than “did you make sure you didn’t do these 6 illegible things that would make you ineligible”.
> You will still need the bureaucracy there to be monitoring for abuse
When you eliminate means-testing in favor of income taxes and eliminste the myriad different definitions of income and assets for qualification for different programs and the opportunity it creates (and the incentive funding cliffs create) for specialized benefit fraud, there is no special “UBI abuse” to monitor for. You have to monitor for tax fraud, but we’ve got a bureaucracy doing that at society-wide scale anyway.