I'm not sure how one would manage to produce $1,000 per month per citizen over 18 without printing money. That's $2,500,000,000,000 per year. You'd have to raise taxes by more than 50% to cover the costs.
The average American pays $10489 in taxes each year. Double the taxes and give average Americans $12000 and they'll come out ahead. Median Americans will do even better. Even if you assume no efficiency improvements, no benefits from velocity of money changes, and no cuts to existing social welfare programs such that the average tax increase equals the $12000 expenditure, you can fund it purely on taxes and most people will still end up with more money in their pockets.
He doesn't do it all with taxes. He cuts a lot of welfare programs, as those would now be covered by UBI. He cuts spending in Social Security, as 12000 dollars a year of that is covered by UBI. There were some more overlapping areas he laid out that I heard him mention in an interview. It wouldn't be, "Oh, you get this program AND this program" unchanged, but more of, "You already get $12000 in UBI, now what more of a subsidy do you need? Not as much." At least, that's the way he was laying it out. He was far more conservative with spending than a lot of people were getting by just looking at the headlines, but that's one of the failures of our media structure.
The US govt has recently dumped trillions into the banking system in a matter of days. Last I checked they were talking about additionally cutting payroll taxes for the year.
Somehow they were able to do this without raising taxes by 50%... Turns out we have the money after all.
