I'm not saying this is a good idea. Cash transfers are generally pretty bad.
If it were up to me? Make sure every person has at least some kind of apartment/dormitory with working heat and plumbing. People who own or rent their own home would get it as a tax credit, people who don't have a place to live would get a place to live. We've tried this experiment eliminating homelessness in various cities; what it costs in money, it more than saves in ER visits and jails. Always a net gain. This is just plain financial sense once you run the numbers.
Giveeveryonefood benefits via EBT, but less than the current system provides. People who are wealthy enough that they don't want to use their food benefits could have their food benefits automatically transferred to a certified food bank/food distribution NPO. Let faith-based organizations help on this, to keep the conservatives happy. Make sure every area is adequately covered. Keeping the NPOs involved in food distribution at the poverty line or below would help them keep contact with people in those communities so they could provide them with job seeking services, keep an eye on their mental health, drug use, etc. The current welfare system isolates people too much, and pushes them off to the fringes.
Create a temporary worker pool system for temporary state and municipal jobs. There's tons of shit that needs fixed/cleaned up all over this country, and plenty of idle labor. Technology should be able to make this happen. You can clean up neighborhoods AND pay people to do it, think Uber for low-medium skill labor. Conservatives should fucking love this, you get the upsides of public sector workers without having to pay their retarded pensions or pay them to sit idle.
Fix education. I could write 80 fucking pages on this. By the time I've gotten my PHD I'm sure I'll have written 200 pages on this or more. It's such an exhaustive topic that there's no room to even talk about it here. Fix it. Public schools, private schools, charter schools, desegregation, boarding schools to ship kids out of dysfunctional cities, whatever. Education is such a fucking mess, there's room for trying every decent sounding solution on the table for this one. That's without even talking about higher education. My thoughts on that one could fill six textbooks.
I don't know what you do about clothes, transportation, gas, etc. The Uber-for-labor program would help jobless people out here, but only the able bodied ones. Sick people probably still need help here, but they don't really get out much so probably not all that much help. I've literally spent less than 1500 dollars total on shoes and clothes in the 5 years since I lost everything in the flood, and that's with working at a university 4 days a week. Thrift shops ftw; poor people will still look poor so conservatives will still know who to spit on.
