Too little, too late. You should have done this years ago.

UBI is loosely tied to automation, but more a consequence of debt based money. When you rent your currency, there has to be some input into the model or it collapses after the original stock of value is exhausted. Currently that input is from the borrower of last resort (US Govt) masked by trade imbalance. "Saving" the banks in 2008 was wildly unpopular, expensive, and can only be repeated with severe repercussions. So now UBI is being talked up to deal with the automation bogeyman.

Its important to remember UBI would do a few dramatic things to the social safteynet landscape. Most importantly it would remove the overhead from the thousands of social assistance programs, including social security. Printing a check to everyone with a Social Security number is vastly less labor intensive than means testing. Also, eliminating SS alone would remove 5+ trillion (as of 2015) from the national debt.

UBI if implemented would inject cash into the system not to "free" people, but to service existing debt and allow room for more debt based consumption. UBI will never be enough to buy your way off the animal farm though. It is a backdoor bailout of banks and credit card companies that is more palatable to the masses than injecting it directly.

It will also be unlikely to raise taxes significantly. How can that be when the cost of even $1K to every adult citizen would be 250 Billion a month? Cost savings from eliminating the enormous bureaucracy and removal of non-citizens from public assistance would zero out a portion of the cost. Ultimately though the US government is NOT funded by taxes, but by debt. Taxes are just another method of control over the masses, as Al Capone could tell you.

Don't get me wrong - we're fucked no matter what. UBI is a damn stupid solution, just not for the reasons most people think. Its disgustingly populist, dodges the collapse of the social security ponzi, and gives the fiat game a little longer runtime before it explodes. It's can kicking and political expediency disguised as compassion.

UBI only works if the same is given to everyone, rich and poor. Otherwise it is still welfare. UBI is just that - universal - it is an all or nothing affair.

The goal of UBI is not the creation of more jobs. The goal of UBI is the alleviation of poverty. Poverty is socially destabilizing, and revolutionary in the extreme case. Currently we use the welfare state to provide this same service - and the welfare state is inefficient.

With a full UBI system in place you can then change the employment laws to allow employers to hire and fire at will. You can eliminate the minimum wage. You can fully legalize volunteer employment and allow the full return of apprenticeship. You can also eliminate about 90% of the welfare state programs entirely. You basically remove the main political argument of left wing of the political spectrum, (the idea that capitalism fails to provides for all.)

We now live in the era of continuous technological change - jobs are created and destroyed at the fastest rate possible. The social benefit system needs to be redesigned to accommodate this new reality in order to maximize the available mobility of labor. Labor mobility is critical to economic performance, and never more so than today.

The welfare state, and the labor laws that go with it, were designed for an economic system that no longer exists.

Oh God! Here we go again. This scenario has already failed in Finland. But it's known free money will fail.

Money is a proxy for labor. Remove the labor part and you are left with nothing. In 1912, (((bankers))) managed to take control of our money supply and quickly unpegged the dollar from Gold. In effect you have valueless tokens representing labor. The next step is to remove more value: the actual labor.

This won't end well. But it will be forced on us anyway because that's what (((they))) do. (((They))) steal our assets and labor.