There is a significant problem of scale to virtually every proposal on how to fund this. 50 grand fun for 4 people... ok. There are 330,000,000 Americans. I presume by the moniker "Universal" that it is meant to be paid out to everyone. 330MM times 12,500 per person is 4.125 Trillion dollars. If that is gleaned from investing in the S&P500 and was from a 5% annual return, that would require approximately 82.5 Trillion dollars in the fund. If you owned every share of every company in S&P's bundle, your fund would be worth approximately 40-45 Trillion. But it's not realistic to own and sell every share. If we look at just one company (actually the largest company in the S&P500) - Apple - it has over 15 Billion shares and in a given year, there might be 40-50 million that get transacted. That's about 1/3 of 1% of the market that actually moves. So if we take that ratio and extrapolate out to the whole S&P500, assuming your fund could consume all the current traffic of all the stocks in it and that APPL is reasonable representative, that would give about 141 billion to work with or about 11 million of those $12,500 annual payouts. Far from universal, and yet still way more than would be realistically possible by that methodology. If the funding could be found for even a million payouts, I would be shocked. And then at that point, it wouldn't even be UBI. It would be just another Welfare.