Would this work for utility companies too? How about mega food corps (http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg as an example), who probably have very good statistics about what percentage of the population in an area regularly buys (and "can't live without") their products, and thus figure out the optimal price increases for each area? Gas? Cars? And what about the partners of all these other companies whose customers are other businesses not individuals, but are going to start charging more and expecting the customer business to pass it along to their individual customer -- refineries, mines, mills, graineries, farms, storage warehouses... (As I mentioned before, everyone who has anything to sell will want as big a piece of this new income that they can get and will raise prices to try and find out how much they can capture without starting to make less profit than before. Over infinite time and with everyone having perfect information of the market, I think $x/yr would become the new $0/yr.)

Is it fair for me to think that universal basic income, if it has any chance of achieving its stated goals, is insufficient by itself at least when expressed as "give every living adult $x/yr" and nothing else? Now if the only effect of UBI is making a new $0 baseline and nothing else being changed on average, then it can't hurt that much by itself, so it may be worth trying in a limited area (such as a smaller country like the mentioned Switzerland) just to get an experimental result on record before trying it out on an economy the size of the US. But when you have to do all this other stuff to make UBI achieve its goals, like have the government build housing (it already does and has done that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green), it makes me wonder why even bother with UBI itself and instead just get busy with the other things.