Well, look at it with a macroeconomic point of view. Or, if you prefer, you, playing Civilization, with the actual economy as your world map.

Money doesn't represent anything inherently - it has no meaning other than what the participants in the economy ascribe to it. It's a useful tool to enable trade.

So forget about money in terms of € or £ or $ for a moment. If you want to buy a fancy new TV, someone has to mine some precious materials from the earth, someone has to melt some plastic into a nice shape, someone needs to write some software, yadayada.

How do we get society to mine materials, melt the plastic, and all that, in a way that nicely optimizes happiness, productivity, and investing in the future?

If 'UBI' is the right answer, then we should do this with UBI, and society can then therefore pay for it. Because if the system can productively ensure that the TVs are rolling off of the belt, and today's societies (at least in the west) seem to be economically viable, then there must be an economically viable model, too, for the UBI world. Money is just a tool; adapt the tool to properly do the job that you require of it. Don't adapt the job around the tool.

Let's say you spend a lifetime driving a truck around. a long, storied career of 55 years. Sounds nice and productive, but it feels a bit pointless if someone could have spent ~100k, once, and created a robot whose running costs are maybe €500 a year and could have done your job. better, even.

That trucker could be doing something more productive. Or not - society can support this trucker now, getting paid to drive a truck around. Therefore society can support the same trucker at the same level (minus 500 bucks a year) with the trucker doing nothing whatsoever.

I'm pretty sure that's reality already. Right now it sure feels like society is spending a million or two on that trucker over those 55 years (a salary of €40k a year, benefits and all that, traffic accidents caused by humans on the road, and more - oof, that is easily going to hit a million, no?) - on something that a robot can do for a fraction of that. It's inefficient. How do you pay for UBI? By the gains of optimizing this stuff away.

But the trucker needs a society that doesn't look down upon someone who now has no work at all, and needs a way to still get the psychological benefits that work brings. These things, too, are optimizing moves: Happy people are surely better for the economy, and 'happiness' should be a goal in its own right.

Here's a simple thought: If everybody gets a UBI that is enough for the basics and a little luxury on top of that, then all jobs are themselves a luxury thing. At that point, you can start taxing all income, starting at the very first penny, at 60%. You never risk taxing the population so much they go homeless or have adverse health effects, _IF_ we posit that UBI covers all basics already.

Then, making UBI affordable is a matter of tweaking the 60%. Tweak it to 90% if you have to; people are motivated to work for reasons other than money, and 10% of some number is still more money than people without a job (solely UBI) would get. Taxation, especially in europe, _WAS_ at those levels after the second world war and people just worked, so, any claims that incredibly high income tax levels means nobody would work are [citation needed]. All the research I've seen suggests 60% will more than take care of it, but it's just a number on a dial. You can rotate the dial, society isn't going to break if you crank it up.

Now, how do you _politically_ make this happen? I have no idea. But busting some myths and adding more research to the pile probably helps, no?