system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: UBI is inferior to Subsidized Basic Needs

Universal Basic Income seems like a worse idea than just increasing funding to current support programs.

You are taking an allocated amount of money, and instead of focusing it on a group of people who require it to survive, are thinly spreading it to everyone, or at the very least a significantly larger portion of the population (though when everyone talks about it they state that it's 100% of people).

For these extremely grand amounts of money, there is no reason we couldn't simply subsidize basic living requirements. We're talking tens of billions of dollars a month. You redirect that and other forms of welfare into subsidizing free shelter, food, water, climate control, and medicare for all and I see very little wrong with that system aside from it needing to be constantly monitored for corruption and business favoritism like every government program does.

UBI does not have that benefit, no it suffers from all the problems welfare systems do, but scaled up to everyone now. We're talking industries that could form simply around trying to scam people out of their UBI checks. The most vulnerable people who would need something like this program seem like the most likely to be negatively effected by it. Anyone in gang controlled areas are going to be subject to giving them their 'cut'. People in abusive situations are going to be forced to hand over their checks. Children that are being neglected will just be utilized to get any additional money offered for having children but not see an benefit from it.

I know some people are thinking, "but what about the people who would benefit and aren't as you described", well those people are likely already apart of the welfare systems we have in place. Things like WIC and disability. Programs that are already established and have systems in place for reducing potential problems and check for system abuse. You could simply increase the funding and extension of these programs without any of the same ramifications.

And the worst part of UBI is that it becomes a permanent solution. No one is going to accept the argument of having subsidized basic needs if they are under the illusion that all basic needs are covered under a basic income. And this just leaves vulnerable people still vulnerable. Children won't be getting their own checks to feed, shelter and get care for themselves, where if you had free food, shelter and medicine, a neglected child could find those things.

So change my mind, what makes handing people cash superior or more practical than using that money to prepay for things that everyone should have.
gpt
The biggest argument for a UBI system over a means-tested basic needs welfare system is that you save a lot of time and effort (and therefore money) by not testing anybody. So in the current system you need to prove that you can't afford food in order to qualify for subsidized food, so there needs to be an infrastructure of specialized people to collect and make decisions about the applications to the subsidized food system. The less you fund that infrastructure the more people who don't need the subsidy can abuse the system. So what if you just forget about that and pay everyone enough to guarantee their needs are met? The argument for UBI is that you would actually save money doing so because the infrastructure and bureaucracy cost is much lower.