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The High Cost of Stupidity: How government waste and debt could be keeping you from receiving $1000 a month.

Imagine if every adult in the United States received $1,000 a month from the government. With about 200 million adult citizens, that would add up to a staggering $2.4 trillion a year. It’s a nice thought—extra cash in your pocket every month—but the reality of pulling it off is a lot messier. To make it happen, the government would either need to increase its annual spending by $2.4 trillion or carve that amount out of its current budget, which sits at roughly $7 trillion per year. That’s a huge chunk of change either way you slice it.

So, could it actually be done? If you ask Elon Musk, the answer might be yes—at least partially. Musk has suggested that the U.S. government could save as much as $2 trillion just by slashing waste. That’s a bold claim, but it’s not that hard to imagine there’s some fat to trim in a budget as massive as $7 trillion. Even slashing 1.2 trillion would give us enough to provide every adult American citizen $500 a month.

One challenge with getting to $1,000 a month in UBI is that we’re already starting in a hole. We spend almost half the money we need to get there keeping up with the national debt. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that interest payments on the debt will hit $952 billion in fiscal year 2025, and that number is only going to climb over the next decade. That’s nearly a trillion dollars a year just to service the debt—not to build roads, fund schools, defend the country, or provide every American a cash payment every month, but to pay the interest on money we’ve already spent.

Here’s the kicker: what’s really keeping us from handing out $1,000 a month isn’t just logistics or budget constraints—it’s our own stupidity. … continue to blog