Canada

I had previously moved more towards a negative income tax approach rather than a universal basic income. The latter seems to be consistently found to be too expensive to implement universally, and how does it make sense to give the basic income to someone who's currently a billionaire or even a millionaire? (Ok, if a former millionaire loses it all and ends up deep in debt, that's a bit different, but that's why I'm limiting to current millionaires.)

That's why I found this,

which found it is possible to halve previously projected costs while maintaining or even increasing its poverty-reduction impact.

To be so intriguing. Alas,

The PBO, therefore, confirms the P.E.I. report’s conclusion that it is possible to roughly halve the cost of a basic income program for Canada and each province by using the economic family definition instead of the nuclear family.

Basically, the use of the artificial "economic family" standard is what justifies giving lower payments to these folks. So the proposal saves money by .. refusing to spend extra money.

Since housing is so expensive right now, many more are living together than we'd normally see otherwise, so I think today's "economic families" are a bit artificially inflated. If a UBI based on this did go through, I'd expect folks to start moving out of their parents homes to qualify for additional basic income - which would legitimately help them afford their new places, but also cause the programme's costs to skyrocket.

I don't think the above was accounted for properly. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a UBI or an NIT come to fruition, and Canada does have a working example of this from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

But having a badly designed proposal tried and failed would hurt the movement, so we have to look at these ideas closely. Ultimately, I don't see that the "economic family" concept makes sense, and without it the cost of the programme doubles. Perhaps it still works, but be prepared to fund it at double the stated level, don't let that rise catch us by surprise.

How about once a month, we just direct deposit the same amount into the bank account of each and every person.

FTFY. Kids still cost a lot to raise