[_heimdall]

Social safety nets today are needed weslth distribution. A UBI needs to cover everyone. With the same funding a UBI would have to provide less benefit than the programs we have today.

That said, my argument against a UBI isn't even that it's too expensive. Anyone claiming that a UBI will be too expensive is falling into the same trap those arguing for a UBI fall into. The impact when making such a massive change to our social and economic system is impossible to accurately model and predict. The OP author actually seems to agree with this by pointing out that a UBI program can't be tested. Oddly, though, the author's solution to that is to YOLO a UBI program into our entire country without being able to understand what the likely impacts will be.

[Retric]

UBI requires changes to the tax code, but look at the comparison between SNAP and the 10% tax bracket for people making 0-11,600$ in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41086690

At least for single people how SNAP sunsets with income is almost 1:1 with the discount for the lowest tax bracket.

Thus changing SNAP to a low UBI could have almost zero impact.