If we're talking about a basic income for just working aged Americans (because kids don't need it and the elderly are already covered by other programs) we're talking about roughly 200M people.
200M * 2000/hours per year * $10 hour = 4 trillion dollars a year.
For comparisons sake the current federal budget is about 3.8T.
I picked the $10 value for UBI at random (well, because that was the wage in the article). I should have probably thought about it a bit more. As you point out, it's a bit expensive. Maybe we could pay for it by mining diamond asteroids, who knows?
A more reasonable assumption might be $5 UBI + $10 wages = the proposed $15/hr affordable living wage.
And yeah, you'd pretty much have to tax the rich and the corporations more and stop spending so much on the military to get there. But money was invented by people, I feel like generally more of it should be in the hands of the average citizen. Sure, I want a Scrooge McDuck money vault as much as anyone, but I will argue that wealth inequalities around the globe cause real harm, and a bit more wage/equity/reward flexibility in the way corporations pay non-tech workers might be an improvement.
200M * 2000/hours per year * $10 hour = 4 trillion dollars a year.
For comparisons sake the current federal budget is about 3.8T.