That's $2k a month in our household.

People wearing the MATH hats seem to be unaware that negative numbers exist.

Where does your $2000 a month come from? The largest single claimed source is a value-added tax. This will raise the price of everything you, and the poor, now pay for.

The first funding source mentioned is savings on current spending, because people will have to choose between their current benefits and $1000 a month; they can't get both. (Hence the people who now most rely on welfare programs won't get any benefit from UBI.) But where is the savings? If people keep their current benefits, there is no savings. If people switch from current benefits to UBI, there is only savings if their current benefits cost more than $1000 per month. But those people are more likely to keep their current benefits. This looks like half a trillion in wishful thinking.

The critics demonstrate more interest in arithmetic than Yang does. But I think he has a good pitch; voters don't care about numbers or evidence.

If I were an enthusiastic UBI advocate, I would know this experimental evidence forwards and backwards. Almost all of the advocates I’ve encountered, in contrast, have little interest in numbers or past experience. What excites them is the “One Ring to Rule Them All” logic of the idea: “We get rid of everything else, and replace it with an elegant, gift-wrapped UBI.” For a policy salesman, this evasive approach makes sense: Slogans sell; numbers and history don’t. For a policy analyst, however, this evasive approach is negligence itself.