Technically Yang's UBI plan is that everyone receives it, regardless of wealth. Also there are plenty of entitlement programs already and replacing them with UBI would probably yield less total cost from simpler implementation and less bureaucracy, while making it more available.
"Also there are plenty of entitlement programs already and replacing them with UBI would probably yield less total cost from simpler implementation and less bureaucracy, while making it more available."
This is a fundamental flaw in the argument.
1) That a 'single program' will be cheaper. Maybe, but maybe not. My government spent more than $1 Billion implementing a simple 'gun registry' for police to store gun records.
(They spent $100M on a 'judicial assessment' of Aboriginal community's historical crimes - not a single study or dollar was spent on scientific analysis, research. Just lawyers.)
2) That any way shape or form those 'other programs' will disappear or a single government worker will lose their jobs.
The most powerful bodies in the world are Public Sector Unions. Tell me, what is the turnover rate for such jobs? How often are people laid off? Fired? What salary do they earn compared to private sector peers? How often are government agencies that have lost their material relevance shut down?
So aside from all of the regular arguments about UBI, social impact, cost, redistribution ... all of the arguments about 'efficiency' are completely moot. Government projects are generally extremely inefficient - they tend to work best through regulation, and/or competitive bidding for work that can be independently assessed, or when there's a social element. For example, road work and construction: we can roughly estimate cost, there are many bidders, and it's outsourced, not done directly by gov staff. This is efficient. Public schools are roughly efficient. Garbage collection. etc.
Your first example shows that government is terribly inefficient so a single program that just writes checks should be better than many programs with complex requirements and giant overhead.
As for the second, just because some labor unions are notoriously rent seeking doesn't mean we don't have mass changes in govt organizations. Programs are shutdown all the time. I doubt those labor unions would have a good argument against this anyway. What are they going to say? We're keeping our jobs so we can keep you from getting paid?
