The Citizen's Dividend is Affordable:

$12,000 to every American every year is not a big deal.  We're already spending that much per American, but instead of money it's offered as various services no one can make any use out of except the service providers who get the lion's share of the reward.

There's little sign that medical care helps people in any way.  The primary source of health is diet and exercise, and avoiding vices like STD's, smoking, and alcohol -- after that it's just down to luck.  A person who leads a healthy life with absolutely no access to health care will live decades longer than a person who lives an unhealthy life with all the best doctors in the country at his beck and call.

It's crazy to spend so much on health when it's basically a superstition that it even helps any.  We should cut all government spending on health care and just give the money to people directly so that they can spend the money on something useful like water, electricity, rent, transportation, or food.  Everyone would live much longer if they could afford basic necessities instead of health care, so what possible moral justification is there for supplying health care but not any of these other things?

Another outlandish service our government provides is a $1 trillion dollar military.  There's no way we need that powerful a military to deter aggression against the United States.  That's bigger than the rest of the world's militaries combined.  Let's cut the military down to, say, $200 billion dollars, still more than enough to annihilate any possible opponent on Earth, and plow the rest into the citizen's dividend, which would actually benefit Americans, instead of just special interest corporations who receive all the military funding kickbacks.

Meanwhile, we're spending $10,000 per capita annually on every child in America for their education.  Any child can learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic after a few months of tutelage from their parents or older siblings.  Dumb children will never be able to retain any information beyond that, so education is a waste of time on them.  Intelligent children are too smart for school curriculums and have to be home schooled anyway, so education is wasted on them too.  Home schooled children do better in college and the workforce than the average public school graduate, so there's no indication that any of the money we're wasting on kids is doing them any good whatsoever -- the only people it benefits are the people working for the education industry, yet again it's just money being funneled to parasitic special interests.

Likewise, there's no sign that college graduates learn anything from college.  People's productivity is better predicted by an IQ test than their certificate of education, so the whole thing is just a waste of time and everyone who wants a job would be better served serving as an apprentice in the job right out of high school, learning whatever quirks there are to the job on the job, and after a couple years just doing the job themselves like they've been taught.  I'd be totally fine with requiring businesses to accept anyone whose IQ is within the range of their career choice to hire them on as apprentices and if they pass an objective review process of their apprenticeships should be required to hire them after the two years.  This is all the government support necessary to make sure kids get the jobs they want, it would be a hell of a lot more helpful than subsidizing useless slips of paper.

Social Security, food stamps, HUD housing and the like are all made redundant by the citizen's dividend so naturally you can cut all of those.

You can keep everything else -- NASA, the EPA, the FDA, the SEC, the national parks and monuments, whatever you want.  All the regulations and government funded special projects you want, they're chump change either way.

If everyone, starting at birth, were given $12,000 a year they could afford anything they wanted.  Food, water, electricity, housing, internet, a car, entertainment -- even marriage and children.  It would be the dawn of real human rights -- the freedom from fear and freedom from want we were promised way back in the 1940's available for the very first time.  And it wouldn't cost us an additional dime.  Heck, we could even cut taxes and still do it.  The citizen's dividend is not the dawn of communism or socialism or whatever, it's just reprioritizing our already existent public spending away from special interest beneficiaries and towards the actual people of the United States.

And if the argument is that lazy Americans don't deserve free money to be spent on them, that really makes no sense, since 80% of Americans already receive more public spending than they pay in taxes.  If people really objected to the citizen's dividend on this basis 'if you don't work you shouldn't eat,' then why is government spending so high right now?

It seems to me that people only trot this hatred of lazy people out to counter the citizen's dividend, for some reason the argument immediately disappears once we start talking about providing the exact same lazy people health care, education, or a military that could already take out the Galactic Empire.  So which is it?  Do we want to genuinely help our fellow citizens or not?

There is no practical argument against the citizen's dividend.  All opposition seems to be built around religious hysteria.  The only argument ever made is "it's just wrong!  it's taboo!  it's icky!"

While we're worrying about the feelings of snake handlers, real people are really suffering from things that, in the modern era, they should never have to worry about.  It's as despicable as letting people die of cholera when we've already discovered the solution is clean water centuries ago.  If you can't give a practical argument for why the citizen's dividend is wrong, you shouldn't be allowed to stop it.  This is the next step of moral progress America, and the entire world really, simply needs to be making.  Its time has come.