I've been thinking about Universal Basic Income, the idea that the government should supply everyone with a decent salary, just for breathing, and in addition to any wages a person might receive. In my opinion, something like UBI is needed if machines continue to automate jobs. At some point, most of the population will not be employable.

A possibly related problem is that welfare is enormously complicated, consists of hundreds of different programs, and is plagued with fraud. A single program might be simpler and cost less.

It's not entirely obvious how to make UBI work. How do you make sure no one is drawing two UBI salaries? A related problem is that some fraction of the people that the program would currently help (i.e. the homeless) have various mental conditions that make it impossible to handle money. No matter what size income you give them, they'll be homeless. Some kind of special arrangement would need to be made for those cases.

As of this writing, UBI has been tried in a few places and has not been particularly successful [https://fee.org/articles/universal-basic-income-has-been-tried-before-it-didn-t-work/]. While I think the studies so far have been too small in scale to draw any serous conclusions about, it might be worthwhile at this point to think about some related ideas which have worked.

First on my list isn't a government program at all, it is the Catholic Worker House movement. The concept is simple: they serve lunch to anyone who walks in the door and sits down. Lunch was never fancy when I volunteered there, but it was hot and nutritious. No one checked to see whether you were homeless or in need, but the vast majority of people who ate there were homeless. When the homeless got their government checks, they went elsewhere for a few days. The beauty of the program, was that costs were low and fraud was essentially impossible.

Utah has had similar success with their free housing program [https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how?t=1557897501181]. Imagine you could get a free house/apartment if you decided you needed it, and said house was in a neighborhood (a "free housing community") with a free meal plan similar to the Catholic Worker House model. That handles food and shelter, and does so in a way that virtually eliminates the possibility of fraud. Further, while it is available to everyone, once people are able to afford something better, they are likely to move out, lowering costs.

What is still missing is transportation. People living in the free housing community need to be able to get around. These communities could have a shuttle service to ferry people to local jobs. However, it might be better to just have a better public transportation system combined with a public transportation allowance. The improvement to public transportation might happen soon if self-driving cars become mainstream.

A transportation allowance would be vulnerable to fraud and would require administrative overhead, but it's hard for me to imagine there would be too much interest in stealing rides. Alternatively, we could try to make public transportation free, or free along certain routes.

If you combine food, shelter, and transportation, you have the basics of what UBI intends to guarantee. The difference is, providing services of money (call it UBS for Universal Basic Services) you have a system that is much less vulnerable to fraud, or issues of mental competence; already proven to work in many cases; and (in principle) lower overhead (because you don't need to see who qualifies or if fraud is being committed).

In time, as the machines take over all our jobs, we can expand the services provided by UBS until it provides. When that day dawns, we can all be artists, poets, or write essays about how to fix social services. :)