> I don't see a way to BI without significant buy in from Dept. of Agriculture and Dept. of HHS to provide some of the value of benefit as actual food and as gratis-rent, subsidized-utilities housing.
HHS doesn't provide gratis-rent, subsidized-utilities housing without BI. Section 8 is subsidized-rent (and even so has long waiting lists and behavioral controls, so that many people that are income qualified for it don't receive it.)
> Moving 100% of the benefit as cash leaves too much opportunity for middlemen to take a cut.
Actually, it eliminates lots of the opportunities for middle men to take cuts (starting with government bureaucrats and government contractors.)
> The ways to do that range from straight-up charging you interest on advance loans secured by the benefit
So, just make contracts to secure loans by UBI benefit void as contrary to public policy. You can pay people from the benefit, you can contract to pay people from the benefit, you can't provide a lien on the benefit to secure a loan, because the benefit cannot legally be seized from you.
> to charging slightly more for the goods and services typically consumed by poor people.
Price increases are an expected market effect that drive increased quantity supplied. It's not a bad thing.
> So I don't see the same magnitude of cost savings as the idea-evangelists do. If anything, government payroll would probably expand in the short term, as it builds the infrastructure to provide non-cash benefits to citizens.
Yes, in a phase-in approach that phases out other programs using eligibility calculations (where UBI counts as part of income) rather than a slash-and-burn implementation where UBI immediately replaces other programs, in the short term you'd have an additional program office with only caseload related reductions in the administration of other programs, until the UBI reached a level that entire programs could be eliminated because it became impossible to qualify for them.
> BI would have to assemble 300 million fungible daily ration packages and truck them to distribution centers sized and located appropriately for the needs of the population.
No, the whole point of BI is that its just money. "fungible daily ration packs" are not being built and trucked, monthly fixed-amount benefit checks are delivered (or electronically deposited.) [0]
People use the money to buy services in the market.
> Just moving the money around is not going to be enough to satisfy the need. If all you do is cut checks, it may take decades for the supply chain to adapt, if ever.
If you use a ramp-up UBI and phase-out of other programs (which is the only way you get the short-term surge of government workers you talk about), the supply chain can adapt slowly, and its not a program.
> Food stamps have existed for a long time, and we still see "food deserts" in lower-income neighborhoods.
Arguably, the restrictions around food stamps and the administrative cost of dealing with them contributes to that problem.
> Even the promise of having a local monopoly on rent-seeking the free government money has not motivated food distributors to set up shop in otherwise unprofitable areas.
Food deserts typically do not have no food stores, or even no food stores that sell some things that qualify for government food benefits. There are lots of specific concrete definitions used to identify food deserts, and they tend to focus on local availability of particular variety of selections or prices of particular options.
Most food deserts have some (often small) food-selling stores, including ones that accept government food benefits.
[0] Incidentally, a universal basic banking service would be a useful side-program along with UBI, reducing the problem of the unbanked.