If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
If you apply for benefits you have to fill out the form attesting you need help. You need to talk to a civil servant to have that need verified. Then you need to fill out more forms declaring your assets. You will also need to do this semi regularly. And you will need to do this for each benefit program you apply for.
Now multiply that by about 30 million applications/check-ups a year, per program. That's where the money comes from. That entire apparatus is no longer needed and the annual funds from that will actually be enough to run a UBI program. Then on the taxes end you can recoup about a 1/4 of the money sent out so that can be reinvested into the program.
As I said earlier the math has been checked. It works. We wouldn't need to fund any extra money than we already do.