Those seem incompatible to me.
(UBI means Universal Basic Income, giving everyone a basic income, for free)
All you people thinking prices will just go up have already been poisoned by billionaire propaganda.
It’s not
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Nobby Nomoney £0 > £10k a year
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Sammy Scrapesby £20k > £30k a year
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Maddie Medianearner £38k > £48k a year
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Billy Billionaire £1m > £1.01m a year
The median earners will have tax adjusted so they earn about the same. The lower earners will get more. The high earners will get less. You’ll have pretty much the same amount of money sloshing around the system, it’ll just be in the hands of the people who need it.
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Nobby Nomoney £0 > £10k a year
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Sammy Scrapesby £20k > £27k a year
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Maddie Medianearner £38k > £38k a year
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Billy Billionaire £1m > £700k a year
Guess which of those doesn’t want this to happen.
Exactly, it’s an economic stimulus package aimed directly at the people who are currently being forced to work for as little money as possible. The people with the money do not want the boot taken off the neck of the poor.
It would be more cost-effective to give homeless people home and treatment than to allow them to be on the streets. So why don’t we? Because homeless people exist as a reminder to everyone else that there is a huge penalty for failing to continue working.
Those billionaires aren’t paying rent. Rent increases are what most people are worried about with UBI. If the lower earners suddenly have more money that the landlords know about, they are definitely going to hike up rent until we are back to square 1. Those billionaires will just claw that money back. UBI doesn’t make sense until we have more regulations in place for price control.
Even if that did happen, why not tax the additional billionaire income and create subsidized or public housing?
Just because the first step isn’t perfect doesn’t mean status quo is better than progress.
I agree with universal basic income and also believe it will cause issues. The only way it works is if regulations are put in place to avoid making it useless. The rich can spend large amounts to find loopholes so basically the government will have to provide a bunch of guidelines and when the government steps in people get mad. Even if the pool of money is the same, the pool of money in each market may not be. Stocks and Yachts (extreme example) may go down and investment in rent or cheap food would go up, therefore demand and therefore prices. An alternative would be to make UBI use a separate commodity but it wouldn’t really fix the problem as it would likely mean that the commodity could only be spent in select stores and there not provide the freedom it should.
Unfortunately, its a matter of needing real investigation into the market as there’s a chance it could drastically backfire.
Eh. Watching what was basically a UBI trial run during Covid in Canada and how it, among other things, has really put financial strain on the government and citiizens, has definitely made me opposed. This shit bankrupts nations.
it was a guaranteed amount of income monthly for those chose not to work. “But that wasn’t real UBI” fucking whatever.
Ain’t that just welfare? I thought UBI means that you will get the money, even if you work.
TBH my perspective might be skewed cause I am qualified for disability income, but I choose to work anyway. So I naturally tend to assume that others would do the same.
My issue with it is that you haven’t run trials with people min-maxing how to squeeze people for their UBI checks. As a start, just raising rent until it eats all the UBI
As a start, just raising rent until it eats all the UBI
You can’t just arbitrarily raise the rent to whatever you like.
You must live in VENEZUELA or some other SOCIAMIST HELLHOLE!
Americans have the freedom to literally arbitrarily raise the rent to whatever they like YEEEEEEHAW!
Okay let’s say I own a condo and I’m renting it out. I raise the rent to a million dollars a month.
What happens next?
Yeah, the socialist hellhole that is the Netherlands. Ranked 8 in the Index of economic freedom (USA is #25)
It depends on local regulations. There’s no federal law that limits the rent increase, if given notice. Like I’m pretty sure NYC has some kind of rent control, but at least here in Oklahoma it’s not common.
Edit: I found this, and I now feel worse
the state has rules that prevent local governments from creating their own rent control laws. In simpler terms, landlords in Oklahoma have the power to decide how much rent they want to charge without any legal limitations from the state or local authorities.
So you’re telling me rent in OK is off the charts? Or could there be some mechanism other than government limiting how high rents can go?
That’s insane! The law of the land is that you can’t ban things that limit profit for those with capital. It reminds me of a law that prevents gun bans in Atlanta, GA.
Landlords also have to comply with the law, which limits the height of the rent they can charge and the maximum yearly increase.
The problem with that argument is that UBI frees up people to move to lower cost of living areas.
It also means there’s more money in the pool of demand for housing, so as long as it’s a free market there will be more effort applied to fulfilling housing needs.
I grew up in a small coal town in Southern Illinois. The last time I was there was for my grandfather’s funeral. The town was abandoned and empty, even compared to when I was growing up which certainly wasn’t it’s booming time. Most of the stores on main Street were closed except the bar and the legion which is also a bar.
I’d move back in a heartbeat, but there’s no jobs there. The house that five generations of my family lived in sold for $30,000.
If we had Ubi, my family and I would definitely live there. A few thousand dollars a month to make sure we survive and money actually coming into the town? It would seem like a miracle and I know there’s so many little towns like that all across America that are just completely forgotten about.
People like to say that the rent will just go up to match ubi, but underestimate the number of people who live in cities solely because that’s where the work is.
The sad thing about UBI in places like the US is they further systematic change needs to happen prior to UBI being implemented.
If you have UBI added on to our current capitalist hellscape (since UBI rates will be publicly known) landlords and corporations will just hike prices to make life cost just as much as UBI—therefore forcing people to work for any scrap above that. So essentially UBI will be fed back into corporations/the elite, who will also continue to make profit on the labor the lower class does to afford anything above basic necessities.
And when landlords hike the rents, what do you think will happen to the rate of new housing construction?
Okay. So you’re onto something with there being money involved in the decision. Right.
And so when owning a building becomes more profitable, what happens to construction? Construction that is already too expensive.
Expensive is costs too much money … right? Anyone? High construction cost, then there’s an increasing in the net present value of an apartment building …
Anybody see where I’m going with this? Yes, you in the back there
who will also continue to make profit on the labor the lower class does to afford anything above basic necessities
If someone can afford basic necessities, they aren’t going to choose to work three jobs at minimum wage where they are treated badly, forcing an improvement in pay/conditions to find any workers. As for setting prices arbitrarily, that isn’t actually possible except where a monopoly is held, the idea that supply and demand influences price is not a myth. Having money and the choice of how to spend it does actually give you additional agency and leverage, and UBI would serve as a form of redistribution if it is funded by taxes of some kind.
You can set the prices if they are well known at a federal level—look at the number of disparate vendors who charged exactly the price of a stimulus check for goods when they were being given in 2020.
What goods were those? I am guessing the market price of those goods was already relatively close to that number. You can see a pattern like that sometimes with stock or crypto prices; when it passes across a nice round number, or a number with some significance like the price of another related stock, the price may seem to exist in relation to that number, sticking to or avoiding it. But crucially this is only as long as it is in the vicinity; there are other factors that have more influence over price and after the blip around the round number, the line moves on.
The core mistake here I think is not recognizing that wealth is a form of power. Controlling a greater share of society’s wealth means more control in general, which is why companies are trying to do that to begin with. Redistributing wealth is anything but an empty gesture.
Not so simple honestly it would also be funded by a reduction in bureaucracy, and spending on poverty alleviation. I’m in NY there are 50 something counties here each with their own DSS office. Think of the reductions in demand for some of these dumb programs that essentially kick the worker while their down.
Except that landlords are coming together to set prices so that they can all set them high. I don’t remember what the group is called, but someone was discussing it a while back. Doesn’t have to be a monopoly if they’re conspiring, which is what is happening with so many consumer goods and services.
Cartel is the word you are probably looking for. Cartels are when an association of different suppliers collude to restrict competition and keep prices high.
I’ve seen that stuff but it’s too much to assume that this kind of coordination is the controlling factor in housing prices, or most other prices. You do need a monopoly because there’s too much incentive for defecting from the conspiracy if the fixed price is too far away from what the market price would be. I think housing is expensive mainly because of supply being suppressed and wealth inequality, and UBI would begin to address the latter.
Most children get a UBI. Where TF are their bootstraps? Bring back child labor.
