City-owned housing works great here in Vienna. The City owns like somthing like 20% of all apartments and rents them out at basically non-profit rates. It works fantastically! It does not only offer lower rents, but it makes people realize that landlords often charge unnecessarily high prices and makes people demand better from landlords, so these lower their prices as well to compete with the city apartments.

Edit: for reference, i'm paying 500€/month (roughly $600/month) on rent and it's already a private-owned apartment. In the city apartments, the rent is even lower still.

Controlled rent is better than uncontrolled rent, but it suffers from the same problems as minimum wage. And why should landlords even exist? I'm not convinced private rentals should be legal at all. If you're not using a property for personal use or a place of business, why shouldn't it be seized and auctioned or rented publicly?

Also most of the studies of ubi show it doesn’t cost all that much because it allows a reduction in expensive to administer social programs - obviously less of an effect in the USA that doesn’t have those.

The idea of UBI is a great one, and I agree with it in principle, but I have yet to run any numbers that make it viable and that is my number one issue.

I just finished an edit to my original post going into more detail with the numbers. If you have any data that can show how the money can be made so that "you never earn less by working harder" and "everyone gets an even payment" I would be really interested to see it because I have not found anything realistic.

If someone can make hundreds of millions of dollars while being taxed at 80% (Or 2 million net earned per 10 million gross gained at the top of my 5 minute tax structure) they either cheated and should be dealt with appropriately, or deserve it for never sleeping.

Problem is the uber wealthy aren't actually PAID that much. They're given stock options or other, non-liquid cash, which isn't taxed as income. It also doesn't get taxed until you withdraw it (see the capital gains "scare" that the media hyped up over the recent changes to tax code). Had to dig a bit to find it, but Quebec provides their people with >1mil income per year, which is about 7,000, or 0.08%. Extrapolated to Canada-wide (which I'd argue is not accurate and way too high) gives us 27,000. That's not a lot of people to try and draw any major funds from. Especially at a ramping rate of return like proposed.

Very rich (bezos, Westons, etc) then draw it out as needed, or use it as collateral against loans at lower interest rates than their return on investments, driving things like private equity, corporate landlords, etc. This then cycles, increasing their paper wealth while not actually having a lot of income to tax easily.

We should de-incentivize wealth hoarding

I agree. The problem is how to do that without penalizing the bottom end, overcomplicating tax laws further, and/or creating some other loophole for the rich to jump through. What counts into your wealth hording? Property? Investments? Are unrealized gains (ie stocks worth a ton but not yet sold to gain actual money) counted against them? What about property - if the market skyrockets, are people forced to sell their homes?

What about things like the wealthy transferring their extra wealth to children or spouses? How does that play into it? Its messy once you get into the details of it, and those are the key points that would actually make a difference.

UBI means a net tax reduction, with clear quality of life improvements, as long as the obvious social spending programs are eliminated. The higher the UBI, the more programs are obvious elimination candidates.

Combined, what is the total cost of all of those programs?

UBI is simply tax credits offsetting tax debits

UBI is a payment made to every eligible person, regardless of any status including wealth, every month.

UBI always costs 0. Just net credits and debits that equal 0. Drastic discretionary budget savings means net tax cuts.

With the numbers I ran the cost is $555,687,356,784 per year with the current population to pay for the program using the Ontario studies payment model.

If you did work in some reasonable proportion of married couples, it might get close to break even. Then remember that CPP, OAS and EI all disappear, and whatever funds they have would contribute to UBI. CPP at max draw by itself is almost as much UBI.

Couples should not receive less under a Universal Basic Income. The point of UBI is every individual receives the same payment regardless of their potential status'.

Then, for people that also have some other form of income, some quantity of the UBI would be taxed back.

This is not UBI. The point of UBI is to be the basic income separate from working income, and not impacted by what one makes.

I’m not saying that it really does scale up, but your analysis is overly simplistic.

Feel free to provide all of your own data and analysis to demonstrate your assertion.

As UBI is not a lot per person and only goes to very low income people

It goes to everyone. But as it also goes to wealthy people, you can tax them more in that way, and so basically there's no real extra expense there.

Especially with that single-payer healthcare we have. The unit rates for things like Dr. hours or beds in hospitals are enormous. If we can cut down on the number of visits required because people have somewhere safe to live and aren't getting injured/sick living on the street, we could save huge amounts of money. Add onto that the cost of policing and/or incarcerating them, plus the economic benefit of having downtown areas feel safer for people, thus encouraging more people to live/work/spend time in those areas.