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. It’s the collective dumb decision to let the national debt balloon to $36 trillion and counting, acting like it’s no big deal. That mountain of debt didn’t appear overnight; it’s the result of years of spending more than we take in, kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. And if we ever get serious about tackling it—cutting waste, reducing spending, living within our means—you can bet that same stupidity will rear its head again. People will complain about the short-term pain and say, “See? This was a terrible idea.”

It’s no different from a household that’s been maxing out its credit cards. When you finally stop borrowing and start paying off the balance, you’re not going to have as much to spend each month. Your lifestyle takes a hit. You might have to skip the vacation or eat out less. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s the only way to dig yourself out. The U.S. government is that household, except it’s been racking up debt on a scale most of us can’t even fathom.

Given this mess we got ourselves in, $1,000 a month for every adult might be a pipe dream right now. But if we stopped being stupid—if we cut waste and got smarter about spending—we could probably swing $500 a month in UBI to every adult citizen in America. That’s $1.2 trillion a year, still less than what Musk thinks we could save by trimming the fat, so we might even still have room to reduce the deficit, chipping away at that $36 trillion albatross around our necks. It wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be painless, but it’d be a hell of a lot smarter than what we’ve been doing. The high cost of stupidity has already cost us enough—maybe it’s time to wise up.