When I thought about universal basic income (UBI), I also thought of this question. To me, it doesn't seem like a UBI can truly be "universal" because the funds to provide free income for all citizens must come from somewhere. If a UBI were to be funded by taxes from the rich, then it wouldn't really be universal: it would be a basic income only for those who weren't already rich. Wouldn't that be more of a "robin hood" income?
In my eyes, the way for UBI to be as universal as possible would be to tax corporations instead of citizens. However, in a sense, this is still taking funds from wealthier individuals who own or work at these corporations and giving them to poorer individuals, so this would still be a "robin hood" income.
Others have suggested that UBI could be funded by taxation on carbon-polluting productions, which would theoretically achieve two things: provide basic income for all citizens -- allowing for more job freedom -- and incentivize businesses to move towards greener production. I feel like there are some issues with this, though.
First, in terms of redistributing money, this could be worse than the aforementioned "robin hood" incomes, because this would involve taxing any business that produced carbon, not just the big corporations. Second, I can't imagine all of the ripple effects that a tax on carbon would have on the whole economy. Just how many products, such as clothes from Walmart and cars from Honda, would become more expensive to buy? Surely, businesses that produce carbon would raise their prices to accommodate for their larger tax bills. Third, although a tax on carbon would incentivize businesses to seek greener forms of production, such a tax might rush businesses into using green productions before those green productions are even effective yet.
No matter where the funds were to come from, however, I think that providing a UBI has many more strings attached to it than it seems at first, and if a future president were ever to experiment with it, it should be brought about gradually and carefully.
