[HN Gopher] UBI as a productivity dividend
___________________________________________________________________
UBI as a productivity dividend
Author : 2noame
Score : 100 points
Date : 2026-03-14 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
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| shahmeern wrote:
| Does UBI really solve the problem, wouldn't it just make
| everything more expensive?
| Detrytus wrote:
| Yes, it does cause huge inflation, but that's not even the
| biggest problem with it. That would be: people do not really
| like to share fruits of their labor with strangers, so UBI
| would significantly undermine the motivation to do anything
| other than bare minimum.
|
| UBI is not possible until robots and AI take over most jobs
| (but then we risk that one day the AI decides to just get rid
| of "those useless humans")
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Isn't UBI just a sort of tax, which people pay already,
| whether they like it or not? I agree with your second
| paragraph though.
| xantronix wrote:
| I don't think we should worry about the advent of AGI
| deciding to get rid of us; I'm more worried about the people
| who own the AI current AI infrastructure, as well as the
| current US regime, who don't see the value in the pesky
| humans beyond revenue and votes, respectively.
| ambicapter wrote:
| "Solve the problem" probably not, but trigger inflation,
| probably not, since the amount is so low, it will have very
| little impact on the behavior of the richest, but it would have
| a massive impact on the behavior of the poorest, and their
| purchase habits generally don't impact inflation as much.
|
| UBI is just a band-aid on not taxing the rich, though.
| kbelder wrote:
| The purchase habits of the poor impact the products purchased
| primarily by the poor quite a bit.
|
| Cheap rental properties. Basic phone plans. Cheap food. The
| poor buy vastly more ramen noodles than the rich.
| ambicapter wrote:
| > Cheap rental properties
|
| They buy at most one.
|
| > basic phone plans
|
| They buy at most one.
|
| > Cheap food, ramen noodles.
|
| Humans have fixed calorie needs and even the very obese
| spend maybe 10x the norm, nothing more.
|
| Compare that to the prospect of someone buying MULTIPLE
| properties, possibly multiple properties that are 10x more
| expensive the norm, the price disparity between a regular
| car and multiple supercars, the price disparity between
| owning a boat and/or yacht vs...not owning a boat.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Not necessarily. It's straightforward to make it revenue
| neutral.
|
| You make it revenue neutral for the average tacpayer. If you
| want UBI to be $1000/month, you increase the average tax by
| $1000. The average taxpayer still benefit because even though
| they don't get more money, they have a safety net.
|
| People making less than average get more UBI than the tax
| increase, and those making more pay more.
|
| Most people get more money because the median income us a lot
| lower than the average.
| nostrebored wrote:
| This assumes all goods are wanted and consumed equally.
| Housing, milk, meat, eggs, etc. do not see downward pressure
| from this.
| lotyrin wrote:
| Right, but people with lower incomes spend, and mostly on
| necessities, I think the idea is that most of those
| necessities would become more expensive (naturally or
| artificially due to price-fixing) if the poorest suddenly had
| more financial power. In the system as it stands, it seems to
| me like it'd just result in a bunch of money going to grocery
| giants and their suppliers, landlords, medical, etc.
| shahmeern wrote:
| Yeah this is the downstream effect I had in mind. You could
| say we'd increase supply to meet the demand but that hasn't
| really worked out with housing for example
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Most of those are commodities, where the price is set by
| the cost of marginal supply.
|
| Housing prices should go down. Housing is expensive in
| places with jobs and cheap in places without jobs. UBI
| gives people the freedom to move from the former to the
| latter.
|
| Healthcare is screwed up, UBI or no.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Is it straightforward to get _Congress_ to make it revenue
| neutral? And to _keep_ it revenue neutral? I don 't think so.
| Politicians find "free money for everybody" to be too easy a
| way of getting votes.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Straightforward? Yes. Easy? heck no.
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| Not everything, only stuff that are suddenly in higher demand
| that can't increase supply. If you take food as an example i
| don't imagine demand would increase? And if it did we could
| probably just produce more? And also it's not like everyone
| will have unlimited money, so you'll still have to prioritize
| and luckily we don't all have the same priorities. I'm pretty
| sure the idea is to fund this by taxing production and not by
| printing money, so inflation shouldn't be a problem.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| If the _only_ money is UBI money then things start to get
| weird. If UBI coexists with regular income in moderation then
| it doesn 't change much. Consider that about 1/3 Americans
| receive some form of government assistance. There's already a
| kind of fallback UBI distributed across SNAP + Medicare +
| Medicaid + Unemployment + Social Security + etc, and no one on
| those programs is clamoring for them to be shut down so that
| lentils become cheaper. Giving money to everyone does increase
| inflation (though you can play with the tax rate to offset
| that), but the important effect is it transfers purchasing
| power to net recipients. Basically: the economy wide money
| supply would at worst go up by a modest factor, the income of
| the poorest goes up by an absolute amount (or a massive factor
| if you want to view it that way), which is a huge benefit to
| them.
| rrgok wrote:
| As if things are not getting already expensive by each day.
| Maybe it changes the pace, but that's another problem.
| ambicapter wrote:
| The only way? What about built out infrastructure? What about
| universal health care? What about enforcing laws? What about
| enforcing truth in advertising? What about punishing various
| types of crooks in the various markets and transactions,
| financial and otherwise, that ordinary people take part in?
|
| The only way? Like a silver bullet? Like that thing that the
| common idiom says doesn't exist?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| When someone says something is "the only way", that's a sure
| sign they either have some vested interest in that only way, or
| have an idea fix.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's obviously not the only way. The more likely way is what is
| happening, a new medieval era with lords and serfs.
| keeda wrote:
| _> What about universal health care?_
|
| I haven't thought this through, but I don't see how you could
| have UBI without universal healthcare. If the point of UBI is
| to ensure the most basic necessities are covered, and "basic
| necessities" includes healthcare, and healthcare is the Luigi-
| inducing travesty it is in the US right now, how is it UBI
| without universal healthcare?
|
| The alternative is that UBI is high enough to cover healthcare,
| which is extremely (maybe unfeasibly so) expensive and creates
| all kinds of other incentives for abuse. Or we fix the
| systemic, profit motive-driven problems in the current system
| by nationalizing healthcare.
|
| Yes, nationalized healthcare is also problematic, but I think
| UBI will indirectly alleviate a lot of the systemic problems
| there as well.
| randerson wrote:
| I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if
| everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year?
| Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices
| because they know people can afford it. Obviously if you're
| living in poverty, anything is better than nothing, but would the
| average middle class person be better off? As far as I can tell
| no country has ever tested true UBI (unconditional and for all
| residents) so its all theoretical.
|
| Musk's idea of a Universal High Income (where money is no longer
| necessary because robots and AI give us anything we want) sounds
| great too until you consider scarce resources like land. Who
| decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is
| no longer a factor? What if you want, say, a human hair stylist
| or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to? We
| would lose the human touch in our lives, and that sounds awful.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if
| everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year?
|
| This does not have to be the case if higher taxes decrease
| purchasing power for some.
| nostrebored wrote:
| This does not address the relative purchasing power change on
| the left of the bell curve.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The whole purpose of UBI is to increase the relative
| purchasing power on the left of the bell curve.
|
| But inflation (sum total) is a moot point if total supply
| of dollars for total demand stays the same. Prices might
| temporarily increase for staples, such as shelter and food,
| but that should incentivize sellers in the economy to
| supply more staples, and fewer luxury goods.
|
| The additional supply will eventually bring prices down,
| but end result is more people have more of the basics.
| shahmeern wrote:
| I don't think that line of reasoning has worked our
| particularly well for shelter.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Just because supply of shelter in certain locales has not
| kept up with demand for that specific locale, and/or is
| affected by numerous legalities regarding things like
| eviction and zoning codes and fire codes and animals,
| does not mean invalid the theory of higher prices
| incentivizing sellers to increase supply.
| throwaway94275 wrote:
| In places that consist of many people with subsidized incomes,
| like elderly housing complexes, why aren't local grocery stores
| and gas stations higher than elsewhere?
|
| Also, aside from that question, prices will only rise if
| there's no competition. In a working market, if more people can
| afford a higher rent more apartments will be built.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Because "many" is different than all and these stores would
| otherwise not exist?
| estearum wrote:
| Because the subsidies aren't _on top of_ base income?
|
| The subsidy isn't the problem per se, it's the net increase
| in income.
|
| It is obviously self-evident everywhere that high incomes
| create high cost of living, which can be traced through
| higher costs all the way down to the land rents (the rent
| someone is willing to pay to have market access to the high
| local incomes).
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| I don't see why UBI would necessarily be an increase of
| income for everyone. It could be that, but it could also be
| a decrease in hours worked, or a more equal distribution of
| wealth, or any combination of these.
|
| I don't want a higher income, I want to benefit from the
| productivity gains I and everyone else made happen by
| having more time to do things I like.
| estearum wrote:
| > I don't want a higher income, I want to benefit from
| the productivity gains I and everyone else made happen by
| having more time to do things I like.
|
| Why don't you just do that now and work half the amount
| of hours you're currently working?
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| Money.
| estearum wrote:
| More precisely: purchasing power.
|
| And that's my point.
|
| Your purchasing power will not change.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| If we worked fewer hours for the same pay, our purchasing
| power would remain the same. I'm not saying there won't
| be any disruption at all, but we did it before with the
| five-day work week.
| estearum wrote:
| If "we" means _everyone_ , yes. But the reality is there
| is a sufficient number of people willing to work more to
| earn more, and therefore they will raise prices of
| everything which destroys your purchasing power.
|
| Your purchasing power is defined in a competitive
| equilibrium with your peers.
|
| If you're assuming you can band everyone together to all
| decide to work fewer hours for the same pay, fine, but
| you just invented a union, not an improvement to UBI.
| phil21 wrote:
| > Why don't you just do that now and work half the amount
| of hours you're currently working?
|
| Show me the job like mine where this is an option, and
| I'll take it in a second. Hire another me and we'll split
| duties.
|
| These sorts of "professional job that pays a professional
| hourly rate but is for 20 hours a week" are exceedingly
| rare. You'll usually be taking far less than 50% pay -
| far worse if you include benefits in the calculation.
|
| I've been halfway keeping my eye open for such an
| opportunity so I could fund the basics of my life, plus
| have time to do personal projects with utterly no chance
| of monetary payback. Just stuff like paint the house,
| teach myself how to weld, work on backyard art,
| volunteer, etc.
|
| I could certainly find a job that pays 50% of what I get
| now for working the same number of hours though. Perhaps
| moderately less stress and no "off hours" chance of being
| called in for an emergency. But that's not a great
| tradeoff since I'm looking to trade money for time.
|
| This may not be the point you're making, but it really is
| sort of frustrating this isn't an option. I get why - I
| employ folks too and understand the overheads involved -
| but man it's the dream!
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| The trick though is that you aren't really increasing net
| income. You are just adjusting the way you provide your
| safety net while increasing the volume of money and the
| "velocity" of that money.
|
| A Universal Basic Income gives everyone a flat monthly or
| bi-weekly income. Whatever jobs you work on top of that
| also provide you income.
|
| As a standard W-2 employee (in US terms) this UBI payment
| would be factored into your W-4 paperwork (income tax
| withholding). As your wage increases your withholding
| increases as well and at the end of the year ideally your
| return has a clean net 0 under/overpaid.
|
| Below some income threshold your total income tax
| contribution would be less than the UBI payments and so
| you'd be receiving a prorated negative income tax
| throughout the year. You could also call it a prorated tax
| credit or fixed disbursement social welfare grant or
| whatever.
|
| At that income threshold you are receiving an interest free
| loan from the government for the year with loan disbursment
| on a fixed schedule throughout the year. And of course you
| promise to pay back in full by the tax deadline (either via
| withholding and/or with a lump sum at the end of the tax
| year).
|
| Above that income threshold you are still receiving that
| fixed disbursement schedule interest free loan from the
| government but you also start paying additional income
| taxes on top of that loan. This is of course all still
| handled via W-4 deductions during payroll and nobody
| touches your regular UBI disbursement that shows up in the
| bank as a direct deposit or as a check in the mail. It
| still shows up every 2 weeks or every month.
|
| But importantly this system is resilient to sudden changes
| in income. If your income suddenly increases, you factor
| that in via your W-4 and nothing changes. But if you
| suddenly lose your job or you move to a much lower paying
| job, you keep receiving your UBI disbursements on that
| fixed interval and you aren't left with a tax burden for it
| at the end of the year.
|
| And so UBI as a system is purely an implementation detail.
| If we took existing welfare systems. Housing subsidies,
| food security subsidies (SNAP, etc), insurance subsidies,
| etc. We factor their per person cost/payout and roll it all
| together into one fixed interval UBI check. We keep income
| tax rates the exact same as they are now but shifted to
| factor in this UBI income (i.e. start everyone at a
| negative income floor that slowly gets filled to 0 dollars
| once every UBI check for the tax year pays out). The taxes
| paid and the net incomes for everyone stays identical (more
| or less due to variations in thresholds for existing
| benefits programs).
|
| So at the end of the day your income stays the exact same
| but there's more money moving around and more consistency
| for the tax payer/citizen/resident even when suddenly life
| events change their financial situation.
|
| /rant. sorry for the wall of text
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It would not be inflationary if it's paid for with a tax on
| real value or income. Maybe somewhat inefficient, and prone to
| political meddling, but it's not introducing new money into the
| economy.
|
| If it's just printed money, it would be.
| randerson wrote:
| It would be in a sense, because that money is otherwise
| mostly hoarded by the wealthy, whose spending would look the
| same whether or not they are taxed. If money is saved and not
| spent, it is not really part of the economy in this sense.
|
| But if the money is transferred to others and spent on
| additional goods & services that is when it increases demand
| and raises prices.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Ah yes, the old "we should actually be grateful to the
| ultra-rich, because by not spending all the financial
| resources they accumulate, they save us from inflation!"
| randerson wrote:
| I see it more as, we should have taken their money sooner
| so that we don't have this problem now!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It wouldn't be inflationary. What it would do is to make
| the government's inflation policy have effects immediately,
| instead of delayed by a decade.
|
| That would happen for whatever direction the government
| policy is pushing.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| If UBI is so high that people can afford paying extra without
| working for it then maybe, but I don't think that is the idea
| behind UBI. There still needs to be an incentive for people to
| work, they should just be in a place where they actually have a
| choice instead of living in survival mode every day.
| estearum wrote:
| Doesn't matter at all how much it is. It'll be (almost
| entirely or entirely) eaten by landlords.
|
| I am a landlord.
|
| I am setting prices for renewal.
|
| I have come to learn that 100% of my possible customer base
| now has $200/mo more to spend.
|
| I raise prices $200/mo with absolute certainty that I will
| find a renter.
|
| Congrats, mission accomplished.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Unless of course that UBI is funded by a land value tax.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| How does land value tax help in particular here? Landlord
| pays land value tax, which is distributed via UBI, and
| then paid back to the landlord in higher rents (in the
| above scenaro).
| larsiusprime wrote:
| This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax
| is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This
| is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a
| particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would
| expect the UBI to result in inflated rents.
|
| https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-
| content/uploads/P...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The argument seems to be "that landlords are already
| charging the maximum that tenants are willing to pay for
| access to a given location and so cannot arbitrarily
| raise rents when a LVT is imposed."
|
| But, if the tenants now have _more money_ in the form of
| UBI, then that argument doesn 't hold.
| estearum wrote:
| No the argument is that the landlord will raise rents,
| but they will not _keep_ them. The gain generated by UBI,
| by virtue of raising the value of _the land underneath
| the unit_ , would be recouped by the LVT at tax time.
|
| _UBI_ is passed from the tenants to the landlord in the
| form of higher prices, but is recouped by the LVT, which
| cannot be passed in reverse from the landlord back to the
| tenant.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| How do you control what other landlords do? Why won't any
| undercut you by $200 and get your tenants?
| kbelder wrote:
| In a normal market, they would. But housing is highly
| regulated with artificial shortages, so that pricing is
| very distorted.
| estearum wrote:
| Regulation is not what suppresses production, but the
| actual profit margins. It's extremely hard to make money
| building housing because the cost of land and labor are
| so high. These costs are high because we now live in an
| advanced economy where land can do much more valuable
| things than "be housing", and laborers can do much more
| productive things than "build housing."
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yup. Development companies contract when the housing
| market contracts. They aren't building houses for the fun
| of it, they are building them because they believe the
| 100 houses they build in a hot market will ultimately pay
| back the land purchase rights. They will never build so
| many houses as to decrease the cost of a home.
|
| I actually got my home from a developer right after the
| housing bubble. They confided in me that they were giving
| away these homes pretty much at cost and that they had to
| fire a huge portion of their staff because the market was
| just crap at the time.
|
| Really, the only way to actually achieve lower housing
| prices is through the state ownership and build out. The
| state could also spend a premium on building homes that
| it sells at a loss or rents at lower rates. But that will
| be pretty unpopular with the general public.
| estearum wrote:
| Yep -- or aggressive subsidization of the inputs of
| housing production, or some other cost management of an
| input (such as a high LVT that discourages speculation
| and withholding of valuable land from use)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I disagree. Zoning, building permits, inflated utility
| hook-up charges, etc is what restricts me from buying a
| one-acre parcel and putting in 30 snug cabins.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Because tenants are not scarce. If you cut your prices,
| you lose $200/mo forever. If you simply follow the
| maximum market price and wait, someone will fill your
| room eventually and you have them locked into a higher
| rate forever.
|
| Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone _will_
| rent your room at _any_ price because it 's necessary for
| survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact
| that there are more people who need housing than there
| are rooms to rent to them.
|
| Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally
| don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll
| find a tenant eventually, at any price. Getting tenants
| in rooms a few months earlier at the cost of lower rent
| means you make less money, and are less competitive as a
| business.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Everything you've written here presupposes a housing
| shortage.
|
| Fixing the housing shortage is a central tenet of
| progressive policies (regardless of whether or not they
| may ever actually accomplish this).
| estearum wrote:
| Housing will always fall short of demand. Nobody,
| progressive or not, is actually willing to sustain an
| oversupply of housing.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This just isn't true across the time and space of human
| cultures and civilizations. There are plenty of places,
| even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a
| housing surplus.
|
| The current problems have tended to arise when desirable
| work is geographically limited which then leads to a much
| larger housing shortage in those areas despite the
| presence of sufficient housing across a broader
| territory.
| estearum wrote:
| > There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the
| last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus.
|
| Yes, bad places at bad times.
|
| Can you name good ones?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Defining "good" and "bad" in this context requires lots
| of other answers first.
|
| When NYC had a housing surplus in the late 1970s, many
| people _considered_ it to be a bad place. But even as
| they did so, a new generation of artists were moving into
| it. So was it a bad place at a bad time? Or a good place
| at a good time?
|
| When Seattle had a housing surplus in the late 1970s
| ("Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out
| the lights?" said the billboard in I5), many people
| considered it to be a bad place. But that was actually
| the beginning of a slow and steady population growth that
| now sees it as an incredibly desirable and expensive
| place to live.
|
| Clearly, there are plenty of people for whom both cities
| were, at those times, "bad". But equally clearly, there
| are lots of other people for whom the very same places
| were, to some degree, just what they were looking for.
|
| And these effects occur on even smaller scales. The
| neighborhood in London where I was born was basically a
| slumlords dream in the 1960s. Tons of empty housing, all
| very cheap (so cheap that my grandparents could afford a
| large home there). By the late 80s, it had become
| incredibly desirable and rather expensive. You can say
| "it was a bad place at a bad time in the 60s", but a
| bunch of people considered that an ideal place to be.
|
| If we had completely equal distribution of financial
| resources, this sort of thing might be less of a factor.
| But as long as there are people looking for "value" and
| others looking for "luxury", the good/bad distinction
| doesn't really describe the world very usefully.
| estearum wrote:
| You've described a set of bad places that then became
| undersupplied exactly in lock-step with them becoming
| desirable...?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I think you missed my point. The places were "bad" for
| some and "good" for others.
| estearum wrote:
| The empty places were by definition good for few people,
| typically people who couldn't afford better places.
|
| Artists don't move into neighborhoods because they're
| cool, they move in because they're cheap. They're cheap
| because, by definition, people don't want to live there.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| You're failing to explain what dictates the price the
| market will bear.
|
| > Why don't landlords undercut one another? They
| literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit.
| You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price.
|
| is very obviously not true, otherwise prices _right now_
| would be effectively infinite. Why are prices for an
| apartment in SF only 3k /mo instead of 30k? Surely under
| your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a
| tenant at any price they set?
|
| The answer is always supply and demand. As long as the
| supply is constrained or demand goes up faster the price
| will rise. But UBI doesn't change that math at all. (I
| say this as someone not actually a fan of UBI)
| estearum wrote:
| > Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo
| instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord
| could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?
|
| No, because local wages cannot sustain those prices
|
| If local wages could sustain those prices, then yes all
| rents would rise to that new higher local income level
|
| That is (quite self-evidently) prices are so phenomenally
| high in ultra high-income areas like SF
|
| Every single landlord is setting prices by the same
| metric: what can the people who would live here be able
| to afford? Competition between landlords is almost nil,
| which is why you find almost no "deals" anywhere. The
| market is totally efficient. Everyone agrees on how to
| set prices: by local wages.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Competition between landlords is almost nil
|
| In fact, collusion with the likes of yeildstar is the
| name of the game. Everyone is setting prices based on
| what the algorithm tells them to set prices and they all
| benefit from that uprise in prices because there's
| basically no competition decreasing the price.
|
| There's also been a steady consolidation of ownership of
| rental units which also artificially increases prices.
|
| There's a reason nowhere in the country at this point has
| affordable housing.
| randerson wrote:
| > You're failing to explain what dictates the price the
| market will bear.
|
| Most people like to live in the nicest place they can
| afford. This is a force pulling prices upward when many
| people with excess cash are competing for a limited
| supply of homes. Its why you'll pay more for the same
| size property in a wealthy neighborhood.
|
| > Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo
| instead of 30k?
|
| Because some people in SF can only afford 3K/month. But
| if you added 3k/month to literally everyone's income,
| that number would increase.
|
| (In case you're wondering why the many people with more
| than 3k/month don't crowd those people out: the wealthy
| depend on those 3k/month people for labor. At least for
| now.)
| davyAdewoyin wrote:
| It doesn't matter, because land is scarce resource
| gruez wrote:
| Land might be scarce in the technical sense, but not in
| the practical sense. Housing is only expensive because
| people want to live in superstar cities, which in turn is
| because that's where all the jobs are. If UBI eliminates
| the imperative to live in superstar cities, that makes
| scarcity a non-issue.
| estearum wrote:
| Just need UBI, unlike all other forms of marginal
| increases in income, to spur people to move _away_ from
| cities rather than towards them.
| randerson wrote:
| I can work from anywhere, but I like to live in a
| superstar city because I find it boring living in the
| suburbs. I want to be near my friends, near the live
| events, near the buzzing restaurants and art galleries
| and clothing stores where I can walk around and touch
| things. There will always be a concentration of people in
| cities for these reasons.
| gruez wrote:
| >There will always be a concentration of people in cities
| for these reasons.
|
| That's fine. Not everyone has to move. As long as the
| marginal city dweller would rather have cheaper housing
| than "buzzing restaurants and art galleries", there will
| be downward pressure on housing prices.
| chr1 wrote:
| That extra 200 will also allow some people to move to a
| rural area, decreasing demand, which means you won't find a
| renter.
| lenkite wrote:
| This - since you can live in a rural area with UBI - and
| you get more time in the day to manage your
| accommodations, the move to urban housing is not so
| critical.
| estearum wrote:
| Yes if you simply assert an upside down reality, this is
| a good solution.
|
| However, people actually move _toward_ higher COL areas
| as their income permits them to.
|
| If more income meant people moved _away_ from high COL
| areas, cities wouldn 't exist. We'd have a flat
| distribution of people across approximately all land with
| ultra-low COL and ultra-low productivity everywhere.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I am a progessive state government.
|
| I am considering legislation for the next fiscal year.
|
| I have come to learn that 100% of private landlords have
| increased their rents by the full amount of the UBI we
| introduced last year.
|
| I ban private rentals and/or private ownership of homes
| and/or introduce strict rent control policies (depending on
| precisely how progressive we're feeling this year).
|
| Congrats, mission accomplished.
| estearum wrote:
| Yes! Excellent work. Now there is no incentive for anyone
| to build housing for our growing population!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Indeed, a critical problem. But wait ... what's that? You
| say there are places where _the state_ builds housing?
| How could it be?
| estearum wrote:
| Sure but now you're not just talking about UBI, are you?
|
| You're now talking about UBI, plus rent controls, plus
| state-built housing.
|
| All to make UBI actually do anything at all other than
| enrich existing landlords.
|
| Why don't we just skip the UBI and the rent controls and
| instead just have the state build housing?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Because UBI is largely orthogonal to those things. It's a
| way of taking productivity gains and ensuring that the
| entire population benefits from them.
| estearum wrote:
| But... without those other changes... UBI _doesn 't_
| benefit the entire population, as we've just established.
|
| It benefits landlords.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The broader claim that you're making is that any increase
| in after-tax income benefits only the rent-seeking
| classes (since the same argument you've made for
| landlords would apply to all other rent seekers,
| including netflix, airlines and more).
|
| I don't know enough about economics these days to know if
| anyone who knows a lot about thus stuff thinks this is
| true, but it seems on the face of it to be absurd, since
| it would mean that pay raises are substantially
| diminished by rents paid for anything where demand is not
| elastic. I mean, I'm not insisting that cannot possibly
| be true, but it seems unlikely ...
| estearum wrote:
| No, this argument does not apply to rent-seeking classes.
| I am describing _land ownership specifically_. Land is a
| totally n-of-one asset in that it is completely
| inelastic. It is not created nor destroyed by any human
| intervention whatsoever, and so its supply is not
| affected by prices whatsoever.
|
| The relevance of this is amplified by the fact that land
| is a required input for _all_ forms of production. People
| and machines must exist in space, and therefore demand
| land.
|
| This does not apply to any other asset that we care
| about.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| OK, so there are classes of activity that are fairly
| inelastic, but not as inelastic as those requiring use of
| land. Fair enough. But why would the cost of air travel
| not increase in response to UBI? It's not inelastic, but
| modest increases don't appear to reduce demand much at
| all. Or eggs (again, not inelastic, but not very elastic
| either)?
|
| The housing:land demand ratio is also not fixed, due to
| multi-level dwellings (hence, for example, Singapore or
| Hong Kong), or increased density (e.g. ADUs or smaller
| lots).
|
| I just don't see why you see UBI only affecting owners of
| a nearly-inelastic resource (land) rather than everything
| else too (even if to a lesser degree) ?
| estearum wrote:
| It would increase those prices! But that would then
| incentivize additional production, which would drive
| prices back down close to each good's cost of production
| (modulo the suppliers' dominance and ability to demand
| margin).
|
| So same mechanism applies to land, except then there's no
| way to spur additional production of land, so the price
| _just goes up._
|
| Re density etc: correct, which is why I'm not arguing
| this benefits _homeowners_ or _building owners_ , except
| to the degree they are also _landowners._ A building
| owner who does not own the land underneath his building
| would not benefit much, the person who he pays land rent
| to will capture nearly all of the upside.
| EGG_CREAM wrote:
| I am a progressive government. The free market has failed
| to provide a necessary service. So now I pass a law that
| creates a not for profit contractor that builds houses.
| It's not that complicated. We do it with fire
| departments, police, and many other services already.
| Free market might have been more efficient theoretically,
| but when it fails in practice we find another solution.
| estearum wrote:
| Yes, so un-complicated that we're now talking about
| state-built housing just to make UBI do anything other
| than enrich landlords.
|
| UBI is a bad idea.
|
| State-built housing is not necessarily a bad idea.
|
| You can just do the latter and skip the former.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Por que no los dos?
| EGG_CREAM wrote:
| I kind of lost the UBI plot, to be fair. I don't really
| understand what UBI actually had to do with this exercise
| fundamentally, the exact same thing happens with or
| without it, it's just that the floor of what "affordable
| housing" is gets risen. Unless you think that an
| unfettered, UBI-less economy doesn't produce expensive
| housing? Which, I think we have many real world case
| studies in almost every major city in rich countries to
| disprove that assertion.
|
| I do see what you mean, I think, now that I'm rereading
| and contemplating. A monthly stipend probably does more
| to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also
| pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful
| from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you
| could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.
|
| Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens
| lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum
| paid when you reach age of majority and then again at
| retirement?
| estearum wrote:
| > A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices
| than anything useful, unless you also pair it with
| regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking
| it all for themselves. And at that point you could have
| just done those regulations without UBI.
|
| Yes largely correct, but more specifically than "wealthy
| and powerful," I am referring _directly_ to the landed
| class, wealthy or not. This type of infusion will
| ultimately be baked into the cost of land, which will
| propagate up to rent, then up to wages, then up to goods.
| The gains will accrue _almost_ entirely to the landed
| class in the form of higher land rents with no
| symmetrical increase in costs because land _itself_ does
| not incur costs.
|
| > Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens
| lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum
| paid when you reach age of majority and then again at
| retirement?
|
| It wouldn't have the same effect but it'd have an
| analogous effect in the localized markets in which those
| subsidies are applied. For example, you'd expect the
| price of land (and so rent - wages - goods) to increase
| where retiring people congregate. But it'd be less
| harmful to the exact degree that the subsidy itself is
| less broadly "helpful."
| Izkata wrote:
| > And at that point you could have just done those
| regulations without UBI. Hmm.
|
| Rent control is already a thing, and typically good short
| term but bad long term: renters don't move out because
| they can't get such low rent elsewhere, and landlords
| can't afford repairs so things are left broken. It's a
| great way to create slums over a few generations.
| rickydroll wrote:
| https://www.kuntarahoitus.fi/en/news/affordable-social-
| housi...
| bequanna wrote:
| So in this version of the future, everyone lives in
| government housing?
| t0bia_s wrote:
| UBI is perfect tool to make citizens obey to state.
| You'll always vote for your breadwinners.
|
| Why, instead of centralised planned economy that failed
| ans killed millions people many times in history, not
| just lowering taxes and let people to decide how spend
| their capital individually? Game theory applied on UBI
| sounds really like an ugly idea.
| EGG_CREAM wrote:
| UBI is the opposite of centralized planning. Instead of
| the state deciding what resources people need, and who
| "deserves" help, it leaves it up to individuals to decide
| how best to divvy up resources, and everybody gets it.
|
| As for tools that make citizens obey, the government
| already has the best one: a monopoly on the legitimate
| use of violence. Everything else is child's play compared
| to that.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| So why UBI from involuntary collected money of taxpayers,
| instead of lowering taxes? Whats the benefit of it and
| for whom?
| lejalv wrote:
| You might be interested to check out the Viennese model -
| Approximately 220,000 municipal flats and 200,000
| subsidized dwellings form the backbone of Vienna's
| housing system, housing about 50% of the population.
|
| Prices in Vienna are so much more affordable than in
| comparable European cities - Munich, Hamburg, Berlin to
| speak of Germany, not to say Madrid, Paris, Barcelone,
| Milano.
| pizza wrote:
| In Singapore it seems 80% of people live in public
| housing
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
| though I can't speak as to what the effect is on its
| housing market
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Own nothing, be happy
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Of course there is an incentive to build housing.
| Developers build homes and then sell them to people who
| live in those homes.
| estearum wrote:
| Did you miss the part where GP was proposing price
| controls?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| In response to what is deemed to be unreasonable and/or
| undesirable landlord behavior ... such controls would not
| stop landlords from continuing to earn from their
| properties.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Are you implying that landlords are naturally
| incentivized to build homes? Because in most
| circumstances, the exact opposite is true. In the U.S.,
| the government has a number of programs that offer
| landlords vouchers in order to encourage them to build
| out more homes.
| estearum wrote:
| Landlords are different things from developers.
|
| Sometimes (more rarely than people think) a single entity
| plays both roles, but it's impossible to reason about
| this space if you conflate the two
|
| Yes, developers build homes to make money. This is how
| approximately 100% of the housing supply in the US was
| created.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Did you just imply that landlords are incentivised to
| build housing for a growing population?! * scream laughs
| *
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I am a landlord.
|
| > I am setting prices for renewal.
|
| Landlords do not really set prices arbitrarily, especially
| not in HCOL areas where most of the cost is land rent. The
| rent is set by the market, and if there's a new UBI only a
| negligible fraction of it will go towards rent. Rents might
| even decrease since any given UBI amount will go a lot
| further in a lower-COL area, which incents people to move
| out (reversing gentrification dynamics) and creates future
| opportunities for job creation in these economically
| depressed areas where such opportunities are most clearly
| needed.
| estearum wrote:
| You're making an argument _for_ my point of view.
|
| Rents are set by local wages (via mechanism of land
| rents)
|
| > Rents might even decrease since any given UBI amount
| will go a lot further in a lower-COL area, which incents
| people to move out (reversing gentrification dynamics)
|
| Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim?
|
| History shows -- across the board -- people move toward
| higher COL areas as their ability to pay for COL grows.
|
| Why would this be different?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim?
|
| It's difficult because the main driver is clearly towards
| increased urbanization, driven by the high productivity
| of urban jobs. But if you're planning to live mostly on
| your UBI and work less if at all, you won't care as much
| about that. There were several "back to the land"
| movements in the history of modern developed countries,
| and the early stages of succesful gentrification - often
| involving comparatively marginalized folks and highly
| mobile groups, such as artists and youths - demonstrate a
| similar dynamic that can ultimately lead to the
| flourishing of new urban areas as the stages of
| gentrification progress.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| UBI frees people up to work ...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's one of the flawed arguments used against minimum wage.
| The answer is, no.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who
| would do such a job if they don't have to?
|
| I have no faith in Musk's vision of an abundance utopia for
| many reasons, but I suspect a lot of people would still want to
| do the job of being a human therapist or hair stylist even if
| they technically didn't need to for money.
|
| They may want to work less than 40 hours a week, but most
| people do have an inate need to feel like their life has some
| sort of productive value beyond just base level existing.
| clhodapp wrote:
| It depends. On its own, UBI puts a downward pressure on the
| value of money. Some other things (e.g. setting low interest
| rates) _also_ put a downward pressure on the value of money.
| However, some things (e.g. taxes) put an upward pressure on the
| value of money. So it comes down to how all of those factors
| balance out.
| jmyeet wrote:
| So there are two basic versions of UBI:
|
| 1. The right-wing UBI is a tool to dismantle the social safety
| net. The idea of the likes of Milton Friedman is to replace all
| social safety programs with UBI. This doesn't make sense
| because, for example, being disabled in today's society makes
| everything more expensive; and
|
| 2. Left-wing UBI would seek to have everyone share in the
| wealth they create by _supplementing_ social safety programs
| with UBI. UBI becomes a form of super-progressive taxation
| because it can be viewed as negative taxation.
|
| As for your inflation comment, you have a point, to which I'll
| say: UBI alone isn't sufficient. You need economic reform and
| planning on top of that.
|
| A good example is the US military. If you live off-base you get
| a housing allowance (ie BAH). Now around military bases, in the
| US and overseas, all the landlords know this so you'll find
| that weirdly all the houses to rent cost pretty much what BAH
| is.
|
| So a more equitable economic system, including UBI, needs
| _social housing_. That is, the government needs to be a
| significant supplier of quality, affordable housing so
| landlords (private and insitutional) can 't artificially drive
| up prices, as is the case now. A prime example is Vienna [1].
| Housing simply can't be a speculative asset in a healthy
| economy.
|
| If you wnat to see what an equitable planned economy looks
| like, look at China.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| It's worth noting that Left-wing UBI can still be seen as a
| mechanism to replace social safety programs. It just requires
| that disability payments, etc be merged with the UBI system
| such that added disability needs can be treated like
| additional tax credits that get applied to the fixed-interval
| interest-free loan disbursement from the government based on
| your taxes that UBI effectively is.
|
| In such a system you get your base UBI tax credit which
| pushes your tax burden into the negative. Additional UBI-
| elligible tax credits can push that tax burden even further
| negative. You can file the paperwork to adjust this at any
| point in the year and if it's for the current year the tax
| credit is prorated relative to the date of the next
| disbursement date (and the full amount for the next year).
|
| Then your UBI disbursement updates and you get it. It works
| the same way as updating your W-4 tax withholding for a
| standard W-2 position.
|
| At the end of the year of course your taxes all need to zero
| out still and if not you either get a bill or a refund.
|
| And this also moves all of the social safety program fraud
| prevention together into the same system within your tax
| agency (IRS for the US, or state/local agency, or whatever
| else).
|
| So instead of a bunch of different agencies and systems for
| avoiding and finding fraud it all rolls together into the
| responsibility of the IRS tax assessors, auditors, and the
| IRS Criminal Investigation unit. And while the rich hate the
| IRS and common media frames them as incompetent, the people
| at the IRS are in general extremely competent and more than
| willing to help and accommodate your average person (less so
| for the rich who get caught systematically trying to defraud
| the IRS).
| lyu07282 wrote:
| This is kind of like social security, medicare or the 5 day
| work week, if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income
| per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would
| raise prices because they know people can afford it.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| And UBI would give people the freedom to move to a place with
| cheap rent and groceries. Rent is high in places with jobs
| and low in places without.
|
| Supply and demand will work better, lowering prices.
| skybrian wrote:
| UBI is not luxury communism, or at least not any of the
| proposals I've seen. A guaranteed $1000 a month would help a
| lot of people, but $12000 a year is not a high income and many
| people will want to keep working to earn more money than that.
| Maybe they'd be able to retire sooner, though?
|
| As for inflation, a lot depends on how gradually it's adopted.
| As we saw in the pandemic, supply chains need time to adjust
| and bad things happen after sudden changes.
| pjmorris wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I tend to think a job guarantee would work better than UBI:
| have the government provide a job to anyone who can't find one
| somewhere else, something like what was done in the 1930's in
| the US. Come up with a list of things needed (can you think of
| anything that needs fixing?), and pay people a living wage and
| benefits to take care of those things. Call it 'Universal Basic
| Work.'
|
| Beyond spending government money to take care of the country
| and beyond providing those hired with enough to take take of
| themselves, it'd force private employers to pay and provide
| benefits at least as well as the government UBW jobs if they
| want to hire employees.
|
| I further imagine that a person making enough to get by would
| be less prone to being hopeless and frustrated, supporting
| social cohesion. And that there's a dignity in that both for
| the individual and the community they are a part of.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The government already does this by subsidizing low income
| earners via the EITC. It just outsources the actual job
| provision to the private sector, which is an effective
| alternative to wasteful make-work.
| neilwilson wrote:
| Except that doesn't work as there remains a systemic
| shortage of jobs on offer.
|
| The societal deal with the private sector is that it
| employs everybody at a rate that allows an individual to
| live in return for the chance to make a profit. A job
| guarantee ensures that the private sector overall cannot
| shirk that responsibility.
|
| If the private sector does its job, nobody will be employed
| on a job guarantee.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| An income subsidy does the same thing at lesser cost.
| Whether that subsidy is a UBI or a wage supplement is to
| some extent a political choice: we got the EITC instead
| of a proper UBI (managed as a "negative" income tax bill
| for low-earning folks) largely due to political
| objections to the notion of getting money "for doing
| nothing".
| elevatortrim wrote:
| Not sure if that would work better:
|
| 1. The idea behind UBI is that it is near-zero effort, the
| cost to operate UBI should be minimal. UBW cannot be low
| overhead I suppose. 2. What motivation do I have to do the
| work if I can't get fired?
| neilwilson wrote:
| You have to work if you want to get paid. Otherwise you
| will get fired. The obligation of the state is to provide
| you with a guaranteed alternative job offer, not a
| guaranteed income.
|
| It's up to you if you take up the state's offer or not.
|
| The UBI removes the motivation to work and turns everything
| into volunteering. The result is a rise in the "reservation
| wage gap" - the amount the private sector has to pay to get
| people to work for them.
|
| The reservation wage gap with a job guarantee is near zero
| - which is more economically efficient.
|
| Additionally the job guarantee acts as a powerful spend
| side automatic stabiliser that is temporal and spatially
| efficient - which removes the need to manipulate the base
| interest rate allowing it to return to its natural rate of
| zero. This allows permanent cheaper mortgages and business
| loans.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Is that what UBI has become these days? That everyone is
| supposed to get some extra money on top of whatever they
| already have?
|
| ~20 years ago, when UBI was a popular idea in my country, it
| was understood as a technical fix to the welfare and tax
| systems. It was supposed to simplify the systems and make them
| easier to understand. It was supposed to fix the perverse
| incentives people with low wages face, such as the extremely
| high (often >80%) effective marginal tax rates. It was supposed
| to automatically give people the benefits they are entitled to,
| without having to deal with the punitive bureaucracy. It was
| supposed to help people who fall between the categories in the
| existing welfare system. And so on.
|
| And it was supposed to be funded by making it an accounting
| technicality, at least for the most part. Most basic welfare
| benefits, tax credits, and tax deductions would go away.
| Progressive taxation would go away. Standard deduction would
| either go away or become substantially smaller. And the highest
| income tax bracket would start at 0.
| nout wrote:
| The current UBI frame is nothing like what you said. And I
| think this is the issue with UBI - the incentives are not
| aligned for it to be stable and reasonable over time, but
| rather to get much worse and misused over time.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That's exactly what it's supposed to be, but then opponents
| (or just people who are confused) will often characterize it
| as something else which is easier to find fault with.
| Izkata wrote:
| All of that sounds nice, but the current understanding is
| what fell out when people started questioning the specifics
| of how all of that would work.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| Everything you say is still the idea and I agree but where
| does the idea that progressive taxation would go away coming
| from? What does it have to do with UBI?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| A UBI is a method of achieving the same effect as
| progressive taxation without the complexity and perverse
| incentives of tracking everyone's income and applying
| different marginal rates.
|
| Suppose you have a tax system with progressive tax brackets
| and then a needs-based welfare system with benefits phase
| outs. It turns out, those two things (progressive rate
| structure and benefits phase outs) basically cancel each
| other out -- lower income people are supposed to pay lower
| marginal tax rates but if you're paying a 10% marginal tax
| rate and then have a 25% benefits phase out rate, that's
| the same as paying a 35% marginal tax rate. Worse, the
| benefits phase outs for different benefits often overlap,
| with the result that lower income people are often paying
| _higher_ marginal tax rates than wealthy people, and there
| are some cases when their marginal rates even exceed 100%
| of marginal income.
|
| So you have two unnecessarily complicated systems that
| mostly exist to cancel each other out, and to the extent
| that they don't they're doing something you don't actually
| want (excessively high marginal rates on poor people). It's
| better to just get rid of both -- no phase outs is the
| "universal" part of the UBI, and then you combine that with
| a uniform marginal tax rate for everyone.
|
| You're basically getting rid of the progressive rate
| structure so you can lower the marginal tax rates on poor
| people to the ones being paid by rich people, and if that
| seems counterintuitive it's because the status quo is
| _very_ stupid.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Inflation is a common red herring that people arguing in bad
| faith throw at policies they don't like, because most people
| don't know enough to reject it.
|
| The monetary side of the economy deals with money volumes
| orders of magnitude larger than the real side, and reacts to
| change also orders of magnitude faster. Because of that,
| inflation is almost always completely determined by monetary
| policy. A real shock that can out-impact monetary policy looks
| like the end of the world.
| BJones12 wrote:
| > Inflation is a common red herring that people arguing in
| bad faith throw at policies they don't like, because most
| people don't know enough to reject it.
|
| That's very dismissive. Since you know so much, why don't you
| try to reject it?
| randerson wrote:
| Oil is up due to shortages due to the war in Iran. RAM is up
| in price due to supply shortages due to AI. During COVID much
| of the early inflation was caused by supply shortages due to
| factories shutting down. Then house prices shot up in suburbs
| as people moved out of cities so the demand went up there.
| None of that is due to monetary policy.
|
| Saying that the total money supply is the cause of inflation
| is a very simplified view. There are currently trillions of
| dollars in M2 doing nothing except sitting in wealthy
| people's bank accounts and investments as generational
| wealth. That does not raise the prices of anything until it
| is being spent.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if
| everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year?
|
| The money doesn't come from nowhere. It's a transfer payment.
| People who make a below average amount of money pay less in tax
| than they receive, people who make an above average amount
| still receive the UBI but then the UBI is less than the amount
| of taxes they pay.
|
| The result is not that "everyone has $x more disposable income
| per year" -- it's $0 on average, because lower income people
| have a little more and higher income people have a little less.
|
| Notice that the existing welfare system already does this, but
| in the process creates a bunch of perverse incentives and
| income cliffs (you lose your benefits if you take a job or work
| more hours), leading to de facto marginal tax rates that are
| often >50% on lower income people when you account for benefits
| phase outs and in some cases they're >100%, i.e. if you make
| more money you make less money.
|
| > Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise
| prices because they know people can afford it.
|
| That isn't how competitive markets work. If people had more
| money and a grocery store tried to raise prices, people would
| go across the street to the other grocery store.
|
| It only works like that for products with _fixed supply_ , i.e.
| things you can't make more of if the demand for them increases,
| because then if people have more money they have to outbid each
| other instead of sellers just producing more of what people are
| buying. This is one of the reasons zoning density restrictions
| screw people so hard -- land has fixed supply but housing
| doesn't, because you can build more than one housing unit on a
| piece of land. Unless the government bans that and mandates one
| unit per plot. Then people have to outbid each other. But your
| problem then is _that_ , not people having more money. Notice
| that the same thing happens there if people get more money for
| _any_ reason, e.g. more people go to college or the economy
| improves. It 's a major problem that needs to be fixed
| regardless of what you use for transfer payments or if you do
| them at all.
|
| > Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if
| money is no longer a factor?
|
| The premise of that has always been pretty ridiculous. You can
| reduce the scarcity of some resource by making it more
| abundant, and that's generally a good thing. Good luck removing
| all scarcity from all resources. That's not a real thing.
| scarmig wrote:
| Inflation isn't inevitable, especially in the long term. But of
| course it depends on implementation.
|
| The goal of a UBI is to make sure people get their essentials
| to live. Right now, people get those essentials, one way or
| another (otherwise, they'd be dead; and to the extent people
| starve to death in the developed world, it's issues of
| distribution, not production or money). This makes the UBI an
| accounting trick: there's no actual goods not being produced
| that need to be produced, and it is just shifting costs from
| welfare, charity, family and friends, etc to the UBI program.
| This is not inflationary and frees up human effort to focus on
| higher needs than scraping together a basket of things merely
| to live.
|
| A lot of the time, though, people also want some non-essential
| but still pretty important things covered, which is a bit
| trickier. In this case, there is the potential for more money
| to be chasing a fixed supply of goods. This will drive
| inflation in the short term. However, in the longer term,
| capital will be redeployed to capture that increased demand
| (while being deployed away from the desires of those taxed to
| fund the UBI).
|
| This all assumes that the UBI is revenue neutral; if not, yeah,
| we will get a lot of inflation.
| jdejean wrote:
| I find it hard to believe shifting spending from welfare to
| cash won't result in inflation. It's about accessibility and
| how liquid the assistance is. It's also about how evenly
| that's distributed.
|
| To the parent comment's point, if UBI is evenly distributed
| across everyone ("Universal") and exists as liquid spending
| power ("Income"), there's no way that doesn't result in a
| rate of inflation that perfectly counteracts the existence of
| UBI.
|
| Prices are only low when the seller wants to scale/reach more
| buyers. If low/no income buyers disappear, why would prices
| stay low? If there were an infinite number of high income
| buyers, cheap products wouldn't even exist in a freely
| capitalistic system. Instead we have a limited number of
| buyers in a wide range of income levels, which drives a wide
| range of prices and sellers competing at every price point.
|
| It feels like the laws of physics, once you cut off one side
| of the scale it will fling in the other direction. I also
| hate everything I just said, I would love to exist in a world
| that wasn't subject to these forces. Just seems impossible in
| a freely capitalistic system.
| scarmig wrote:
| The point is that, if limited to a level that just covers
| essential goods, it won't change their distribution, just
| their payer. If it did change the distribution of the good,
| then it wasn't essential (because it's the floor; without
| it, the consumer of the good would be dead; above it, and
| the vast majority of people immediately spend their income
| on luxury substitutes).
|
| That is, to be clear, a much lower floor than what many
| people mean by "essential," which has undergone a kind of
| concept creep in modern discussion that, depending on the
| person, might be a cell phone, to an education at a private
| university, to owning a condo in San Francisco. My
| essential here means enough to afford enough caloric and
| nutrient intake to maintain a livable body mass; a couple
| sets of plain tee shirts and jeans; and a minimal shared
| living space in a low cost of living area. That's quite
| below what the US considers the current poverty line and a
| quite bleak existence (and most people would wonder what's
| even the point of it).
|
| Income beyond that would drive inflation, at least in the
| short term.
| wstrange wrote:
| UBI will require a more progressive tax system. The Oligarchs are
| having none of that.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Communists shared alright 110 years ago in Russia, tens of
| millions of people failed to cope with that much prosperity and
| wellbeing, and then even more with unbearable freedom and peace.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| I think folks may not realize that communism was more popular
| in the early 20th century US just because of how desperate a
| lot of the population became without any safety nets at all
| provided by the government. Educated proponents genuinely
| wanted to improve the plight of other folks. But, where it was
| practiced it became just a worse kind of power and resource
| monopoly - concentrated in the government instead of among a
| minority of robber barren types. I think the learning is you
| have to never stop pushing for no entity to have too much power
| - not the government and not private sector monopolies.
| ciwchris wrote:
| I recently came across the idea of Universal Basic Capital (UBC):
| "granting every person a meaningful ownership stake in productive
| assets from birth." UBC would be enormously difficult to
| implement, as well as have its own weaknesses. It doesn't seem
| realistic, but introduces a new idea into the conversation.
|
| https://www.digitalistpapers.com/vol2/autorthompson#:~:text=...
| gruez wrote:
| How do you prevent people from being swindled and selling their
| stake off? If it can't be sold off, how's that any different
| than a corporation tax?
| rangestransform wrote:
| Part of living in a free society is being able to destroy
| your own life by various means
| neversupervised wrote:
| UBI will likely be necessary but that won't appease society.
| Everyone wants to have a chance to climb the ladder. If it
| becomes self evident that humans can no longer have a meaningful
| impact on their outcome, there'll be riots whether they have a
| roof and food or not.
| K0balt wrote:
| UBI is the actual solution, and is well understood enough now to
| know that most of the arguments against it are moot points or
| simply falsehoods.
|
| Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and
| electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure
| with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue
| to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-
| facto sales tax create incentives that favor even more
| centralized systems.
|
| But wouldn't it be great?
|
| An interesting aspect is that I am constantly observing
| innovators with significant technical and technological skills
| that are employed in fields outside of their expertise as a
| "temporary " measure that often becomes permanent if they get
| further encumbered, simply because they can keel out an existence
| while trying to build the next cool thing. So we are wasting
| probably trillions of GDP in talent because people need to go
| work in a labor job to support their wife and child instead of
| continuing his very promising project in training data for
| humanoid robots, which could easily net 100m+ in the next decade.
| (Actual example. I offered him $1000 a month to keep on it, but
| he unfortunately needs more to survive and he has eaten through
| his savings over the past two years of working on it.)
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply
| falsehoods.
|
| Ah the "I am sure we can all agree ... that I'm right"
| argument.
|
| In actuality, there are plenty of very good arguments against
| unions. That you don't like them changes nothing
| K0balt wrote:
| lol "unions" was thanks to AI deciding "ubi is" couldn't be
| what I meant. This might be saying something about the
| possibility of this working out.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| OK, but the same response still applies. There still are
| plenty of arguments against UBI, and you still need to
| actually refute them rather than just dismiss them with
| "they're false or moot".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply
| falsehoods_
|
| What are the falsehoods in complaints against police unions?
| advael wrote:
| Police unions aren't the same thing as other unions. Most
| unions exist to equalize labor negotiation through collective
| bargaining, and police unions tend to include and align with
| the leadership in the organization that a union would
| traditionally be negotiating with. In practice they're a lot
| more like a military contractor than a union (in that their
| role is to prevent public accountability)
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is correct and the proof is that police do not strike
| with labor they fight labor on behalf of capital
|
| The core premise of a union is that you have solidarity
| primarily across unions which is actually how you get
| collective-bargaining at larger scales
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _core premise of a union is that you have solidarity
| primarily across unions which is actually how you get
| collective-bargaining at larger scales_
|
| Police unions in New York regularly join hands with other
| public-sector unions.
| gruez wrote:
| >This is correct and the proof is that police do not
| strike with labor they fight labor on behalf of capital
|
| I thought it was because they couldn't strike because
| they were "essential"?
| pessimizer wrote:
| No, the core premise of a union is to represent the
| interests of its members. You've confused a union with
| global communism, and delegimitized the ones that don't
| serve _your_ interests instead.
|
| For an extremely salient example, the purpose of coal
| miners' unions is to serve coal miners. The interests of
| coal miners don't necessarily align with everyone else's
| interests, and if the the interests of their union did,
| it would be a _bad union._
|
| If police are racist, police unions are either racist or
| _not representative._ The purpose of unions isn 't to
| serve the purposes of upper middle-class liberal arts
| majors. You don't steer workers through their union,
| that's evil. If you want coal miners to prioritize the
| climate, or police to prioritize civil rights, you have
| to do it the traditional way - by convincing them. You
| might have to convince them to _quit._
|
| The idea that the police don't deserve a union because
| police unions would support your enemy is repulsive.
| Change the laws, maybe you wouldn't have to hire scum to
| enforce them.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Police unions aren 't the same thing as other unions_
|
| What about California teachers' unions? European notaries?
| advael wrote:
| I'm sure there are other things that call themselves
| unions but don't serve the same function we expect of
| organizations using that word. I'm not really
| knowledgeable about either of the things you mention, so
| I don't know if I'd view them as fitting this description
| or not. Both seem unlikely to have the kind of broad
| negative impact police unions have, which is particularly
| egregious because they effectively make public oversight
| of a government function with a lot of potential to do
| harm impossible, which has the knock-on effect of making
| that harm more able to propagate, to the point where it's
| both quite severe and commonplace
| K0balt wrote:
| lol. I typed ubi is and the autocorrect put "unions." It has
| been corrected . But it is kinda funny anyway.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This reminds me of a trading incident decades ago. We were
| unwinding a portfolio of correlation trades. The trades
| basically bet on continued correlation between assets.
| Unwinding those trades means assets which typically
| correlate now correlate less. When we fucked we they
| sometimes anticorrelated. Anyway, some of these price
| movements were noticed and incessantly commented on by CNBC
| pundits. Theories abounded. All wrong. Most amusing.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| If its an easy 100m do a startup and get funding
| K0balt wrote:
| I'm working on that, but there's an incentive alignment
| problem for early stage investment capital that requires
| investors with a little longer view to avoid kneecapping the
| value proposition, as well as the potential positive aspects
| to society.
|
| (Am I allowed to be a little ideological when we are facing
| the potential extinction of humanity?)
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > Unions the actual solution
|
| No, they are not.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
|
| Changing the table stakes is what needs to happen: see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation for a
| counter example.
|
| Unions just create an us vs them mentality. The fact that the
| NUMMI plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI ) was not
| reproducible is a pretty strong indicator of that.
| K0balt wrote:
| Sorry, my AI autocorrected "ubi is" to "unions". When I came
| back to all these "unions bad" comments I was like WTF are
| they on about??? lol.
|
| But, I will say, often, unions are very positive things.
| Other times, basically evil. So, I think unions are a mixed
| bag. But the threat of potential unionization is almost a
| universal good, so it's a right worth exercising once in a
| while.
| sc68cal wrote:
| Imagine posting how unions are bad on a Saturday in your
| leisure time
| softwaredoug wrote:
| What if we build UBI but we turn out not to need it? Thats my
| worry. AI might possibly be "just another technology". If we put
| in UBI we may disincentivize labor from adapting to an economic
| shift.
|
| The real solution is to regulate the industry and break up
| monopolies. UBI is the modern equivalent of Walmart workers on
| Medicaid and food stamps. It's raiding public funds for private
| profit.
| xixixao wrote:
| If you believe UBI can work, why do you think communism failed?
| MrDrDr wrote:
| I'm not sure UBI would work. But what's that got to do with
| communism? Communism failed (IMO), because it was incompatible
| with human nature. People form social hierarchies and like to
| own property. Would UBI prevent that?
| xixixao wrote:
| You are answering my question - you posit that communism
| failed because people like to own property (and form social
| hierarchies) - and UBI doesn't prevent those.
|
| I'm not sure this is the case. Especially since people did
| form social hierarchies and did own propety in
| communist/socialist regimes of the Eastern block.
|
| One might argue that UBI is incompatible with human nature,
| because most humans require a sense of worth, which paid work
| provides (to most). Take away the motivation, will the self-
| worthiness remain? (especially when thinking about _most_
| people, not the struggling artists who wished they could
| pursue art without the burden of bills).
|
| I'm not sure about this at all. I just think drawing the
| parallels and discussing communism failure modes is
| interesting for the discussion of UBI.
| beej71 wrote:
| Seems to be ok in Alaska.
| orangecat wrote:
| UBI doesn't replace market forces with central planning. You're
| still incentivized to produce goods and services that other
| people want, and to do so more efficiently than your
| competitors.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| UBI is good on paper but far from enough. Without Universal
| Ownership of the State, UBI is easily removed by inflation.
|
| A better yet more difficult model is universal basic resources
| (food stamp to exchange for packages, social housing, etc.).
| People can work X hours on these social projects after reviewing
| some training (e.g. training of plumbing to maintain the social
| housing apartments). This also gives them some meaning in life.
| Of course this will degrade in the future if there is no
| ownership of the state by the people, but I think it's going to
| last longer.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _UBI is easily removed by inflation_
|
| Source? A $20k UBI wouldn't likely secularly increase food
| costs on a per-calorie basis. Those folks are already eating.
| There will just be supply-chain friction as the system adjusts
| to their newly-expressable preferences.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Just my hunch, as no major country has really rolled out UBI
| for everyone.
|
| For example, how about supermarkets increasing prices? We
| already saw that happening for a few years since the COVID.
| And how about landlords increasing rents?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| instead of UBI, we could just reduce working hours, while keeping
| the same pay. Easier to manage shifts than to upend the whole
| economy. Something like 3 days a week, with a german approach to
| sundays (everything closed).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Those are two completely different things, with completely
| independent results.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| The goal we all seek - liberation - is a distant one. That said
| I'm skeptical that UBI is the right way. UBI assumes and requires
| an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to
| share their profits. But as we've seen, such class members will
| organize to penetrate the state and contort it for their own
| ends. Thus any successful UBI will be a compromise or it will be
| dismantled by the powerful class that owns the economy.
|
| In my mind, only community ownership of the means of production
| can truly achieve what we desire. Of course with all distant
| goals, it is hard to see how we get there. And to be clear I do
| not mean state ownership.
|
| But I am curious, on my basic point of elite capture of the
| state, does that make sense?
|
| I am struck that TFA's title says UBI is "the only way to share",
| amusing to me since literally directly sharing is another way. I
| understand we all have spooky ideas of what that means, but think
| for example of the concept of library economies. You borrow what
| you need, but you don't own it nor have the right to destroy it.
| We share.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a
| powerful state to force them to share their profits.
|
| It makes no assumption about an elite ownership class at all.
| It merely assumes profits, and rearranges how those profits are
| distributed (away from shareholders, towards labor). There is
| no need for community ownership of the means of production
| (though that might have some different benefits, along with
| some different disadvantages).
|
| You need high marginal (or maybe not even marginal) corporate
| taxes and a committment to the concept of UBI. Who owns the
| companies, from the perspective of UBI, is immaterial.
|
| Community ownership does not share the productivity in sector A
| with workers in sector B. UBI does.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Community ownership does share across sectors if the
| community owns both sectors. Why would it not?
|
| Also, you haven't really answered the point. You may be able
| to get this established. But how do you _keep_ it
| established? How do you keep the elite ownership class from
| dismantling it? (Based on historically observed behavior, the
| default assumption is that they will try.) If you don 't have
| a plan that accounts for that, you don't really have a
| workable plan.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I didn't say that tackling the elite class wasn't
| important.
|
| But saying that the existence of an elite class _implies_
| regulatory capture is a step beyond that.
|
| Regulatory capture is absolutely a problem. While one could
| advocate for eliminating the elite class (e.g. wealth
| taxes, confiscation, execution ... as you wish), I'd
| probably go for tightly controlled political donations &
| spending, combined with a strong anti-corruption culture
| (which has been severely damaged by, ahem, recent
| administrations).
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't think anybody but those that are really close to
| the halls of power and have sufficient capital to engage
| in large scale lobbying is going to be able to achieve
| regulatory capture. So I suspect there is significant,
| maybe even perfect over lap between the groups that
| _could_ achieve regulatory capture and the ones that
| actually do, and that outside of that group it is
| pointless to even try. You can get into the club by lucky
| accident, you stay in the club through regulatory
| capture.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Regulatory capture requires that laws (or regulations)
| are drafted that favor your interests. The only ways I am
| aware of for that to happen are:
|
| (a) sufficient political donations/bribes to get
| lawmakers to draft suitable language themselves (or via
| their staff)
|
| (b) a combination of political donations and a worldview
| on the part of lawmakers in which it is "just normal" for
| those affected by regulations to draft them, such that
| you yourself are able to draft the legislation.
|
| There are levels of government where neither of these
| require incredible levels of wealth, I suspect.
|
| Both could be stopped by limiting political donations and
| a political culture in which "the chemical industry
| writes its own rules" is self-evidently corrupt and/or
| non-sensical.
| jacquesm wrote:
| True, but the USA has institutionalized the power of
| money in politics to the point that this is now a
| reality: what would be called outright bribery elsewhere
| is called campaign donations, there are lobbyists who get
| to write the laws that favor their paymasters and in fact
| it has been argued that 'money is speech' (it doesn't get
| much more bizarre than that to me). What Musk did during
| the last elections would get you jail in some 3rd world
| countries, you know, where they take voting serious.
|
| Whether any of these require incredible levels of wealth
| or not is moot, I think. The reason for that is that it
| only matters when 'lesser levels of wealth' come up
| against 'greater levels of wealth' and the latter will
| always win that confrontation.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If you can manage to believe in a system of 1 person 1
| vote for just a bit longer, or maybe even 3 poor people 1
| vote, then I think there is still plenty of space for
| "lesser levels of wealth" to overcome "greater levels of
| wealth". There are simpler more of us than there are of
| them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I hope you're right, but I fear you are not. I guess
| we'll know by November this year.
| asdff wrote:
| I think you make perfect sense. And given that one has to take
| a cynical take to the writings on UBI knowing the voice of the
| elite establishment will overwhelm any grassroots thinking
| since it is actually supported by a financial sponsor to ensure
| the message is received the world over, unlike say you and I
| blogging to 7 people. So one can expect most points on it in
| the public discourse to be biased and in favor of elite-
| benefitting outcomes. Indeed, when you consider most topics in
| the media, no one has unique perspectives, they regurgitate the
| same couple perspectives everyone else does, which are probably
| crafted by PR firms.
|
| The more I think about UBI though the more I come to the sad
| conclusion that you can't eliminate money. We can't just give
| everyone everything they could want for free; I don't think the
| planet can sustain everyone living like elon musk. So there has
| to be some forcing factor, some hand on top of the cookie jar
| that tells your monkey brain that just wants to be high, fat,
| and orgasming all day that it needs to endure a delayed reward
| or face some physical exertion to keep the party going. And for
| better or worse, that forcing factor is by making you have to
| do something to get credits, that you return for your portion
| of the produced abundance. This mechanism is able to tolerate
| the fact that someone might work on efforts not directly tied
| to any one thing and reap a generalized benefit from all the
| diversity of that which is produced. Whatever comes next, has
| to get through that hurdle and the more I think about money the
| more I find reasons why it is actually a great tool for this
| sort of distribution of resources and incentivizing labor.
|
| I guess the challenge is that there is a lot of lopsided
| compensation, where people like say elon musk are paid
| handsomely even though there is realistically only so much a
| single human can do. When Elon musk does something that say
| moves billions in real world dollars on his decision, again
| this isn't because he is a unique superhuman, just that we have
| set up power on this planet such where one single person can
| make a decision to move billions in real world dollars, and if
| it wasn't musk it would have been someone else in that seat
| because the seat exists at all. So much power shouldn't be
| accumulated in one position, because again, we aren't
| superhumans.
| dangus wrote:
| Well, there's definitely other ways. I would prefer a system
| where company ownership public and private has a mandatory public
| stake in both ownership and voting on company policy and major
| business decisions.
|
| I would prefer it illegal for the wealthy to possess an excessive
| amount of assets. If your assets became more valuable than the
| limit, the asset share would automatically rebalance toward other
| employees and owners in the organization who are below the asset
| ownership limit.
|
| You don't even really need UBI if healthcare, housing, food, and
| education are considered basic human rights that are included and
| free of cost at point of usage.
| keeda wrote:
| My take is that UBI is the most obvious solution but not one we
| should count on happening. There is just too much political
| resistance and a population-level mental block against it, at
| least in the US. Not to mention, Capitalism doesn't like if it
| can't push labor around. (Which is largely why the mindset
| exists, but I digress.)
|
| I say that we need to realize that by the same token(s) that AI
| reduces the need for labor, it also reduces the need for capital.
| A single motivated, disciplined individual can now do, using AI
| and public elastic clouds, what used to require an entire team.
| So companies can decimate teams, but companies are largely a
| source of capital. If you don't need so many people, you don't
| that much capital either! You could potentially parlay an insight
| or domain expertise into a viable business. Your moat could be
| the obscurity of your niche, or relationships, or IP (yes,
| _patents_. Suck it up and use every leverage you can.)
|
| Easier said than done, of course. This essentially means everyone
| becomes an entrepreneur. Most people are not cut out for that
| because (besides hard-to-acquire domain expertise) that requires
| being immersed in an ocean of uncertainty at all times. None of
| our education systems prepare people for that, or for what is
| coming.
|
| I expect a time of disruption, but we need to realize that AI not
| only a tool for the Capital class. It's a tool for us too, if
| only we can adapt.
| mattlondon wrote:
| A think a more workable and politically palatable version of UBI
| would be some form of universal utility allowance.
|
| E.g. the first x kWh electric you use, or the first X litres of
| water, or the first x GB of data you use is entirely free, for
| everyone (where X is some reasonable number that someone could
| just conceivably survive on). Then as you use more and more the
| prices start to gradually increase across a series of bands so
| that the heaviest users are subsidising those using the least.
|
| It would promote efficiency, would be progressive, and would
| allow people to live without quite so much "bill fear" for
| essential utilities.
|
| Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is
| often unpopular with some demographic groups. People would still
| need to work but there would be some element of safety net.
| skybrian wrote:
| That seems worse because it doesn't encourage conservation
| enough. You want people to be able to keep the gains if they
| conserve energy, to set the right incentives.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands
| which is often unpopular with some demographic groups
|
| I'd be really opposed to this. It'd only be ok if we
| nationalized the industries where we set these rules and rates.
| Otherwise, this ends up being a simple handout to private
| industries.
|
| For example, let's say we say x liters of water. Well who's
| deciding how much x liters cost? If it's a private company and
| the government is guaranteeing it, you can bet water (which is
| relatively cheap where I live) will end up being the most
| expensive resource imaginable. And that may actually be true
| depending on the location, but it'd also be true in non-desert
| areas with plenty of water.
|
| We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the
| government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so
| dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the
| cost of health insurance increased by $800. Private industries
| aren't stupid, they'll always charge the maximum price the
| market will bear. And when we start talking about captured
| industries like data provider, power provider, or your water
| provider... well that's where we can trust private industry the
| least as they literally have the public over a barrel. Utility
| boards are an OK solution, but the better solution is to turn
| these into public institutes instead of private ones.
| physPop wrote:
| Aren't utilities, by definition, state owned? Or is that also
| backwards in america?
| righthand wrote:
| Utilities in America refers to the service relative to
| ideas of basic needs for survival in the US so they are
| often public infrastructure with private operators but in
| the case of some things like the internet, it's purely
| privatized.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It depends. Water is usually provided by the city here, but
| most electricity and natural gas is corporate-delivered.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| We don't even own all of our roads here. Sometimes we sell
| city streets to parking companies.
| konaraddi wrote:
| > We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the
| government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or
| so dollars of your health insurance. What happened?
| Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800.
|
| I don't think that's an accurate description of ACA [1], it
| didn't lead to a dollar to dollar increase in premiums (share
| a citation if otherwise), and it's a bit misleading to say it
| led to an increase in premiums because plans pre-ACA were
| effectively inaccessible to and lacking in benefits for
| impoverished people or people with pre-existing conditions.
|
| [1] Here's a brief description of ACA from Wikipedia:
|
| > The act largely retained the existing structure of
| Medicare, Medicaid, and the employer market, but individual
| markets were radically overhauled.[1][11] Insurers were made
| to accept all applicants without charging based on pre-
| existing conditions or demographic status (except age). To
| combat the resultant adverse selection, the act mandated that
| individuals buy insurance (or pay a monetary penalty) and
| that insurers cover a list of "essential health benefits".
| Young people were allowed to stay on their parents' insurance
| plans until they were 26 years old.
| cogman10 wrote:
| There will never be a cited reason for increases, but
| here's 2023 where basically all insurers filled for a 10%
| increase in premiums. [1]
|
| Since the 2022 covid bill which significantly increased the
| subsidization of premiums, health insurers have found
| various reasons to increase their premiums by inflation
| beating numbers.
|
| That's obviously a "the market will bear it" situation.
|
| The ACA was a big bill that did a lot. I'm not talking
| about all of it, but rather the premium subsidization along
| with the covid premium increase which both expired in 2026.
|
| Look, the premiums expiring was bad. IDK if that was clear
| from my earlier comment. But there's a fundamentally
| unaddressed issue with insurers in general where they
| charge not based on competition or the cost of service, but
| based on what consumers can bear. Profit incentives for
| healthcare in the US are completely misaligned with
| providing good general healthcare. The ACA premiums are a
| bandaid over an artery laceration. Better than nothing, but
| that thing is going to very quickly start bleeding through.
| You can keep slapping on band-aides, but ultimately you'll
| be looking at more damage if you don't just address the
| issue.
|
| [1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/an-early-
| look-at-w...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| A non-tradable utility allowance would incent people to waste
| these basic goods, and a tradable utility allowance, while
| obviously fixing this, would be no different than a UBI that
| was indexed to the price of basic utilities.
| cwillu wrote:
| The "demographic groups" that find it unpopular dislike
| anything that can be _remotely_ construed as giving to the
| poor. There is literally no purpose trying to cater to them
| while trying to set up a social program.
| stego-tech wrote:
| UBI, as the OP points out, as _many_ of us have _continued_ to
| point out /scream about, is a single component of a larger agenda
| of reforms.
|
| It's not just about giving people money (though we absolutely
| should), it's also about ensuring wealth pumps can't just vacuum
| up that money into the hands of the already wealthy - like the
| stimulus checks did during COVID, like tax subsidies for
| healthcare do, like tax breaks for employer-provided benefits
| contribute to.
|
| It's reforming housing from investment asset into human right.
| It's detaching healthcare from employment as much as it's about
| negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on pricing and creating
| more public healthcare rather than outsource to private firms.
| It's rent controls on older housing stock to incentivize growing
| revenue through volume (more housing) instead of scarcity like we
| have now. It's levying taxes on higher-priced rentals and luxury
| housing stock to force investing in more affordable supplies.
| It's penalizing for-profit employers whose staff
| disproportionately rely on government subsidies to make ends
| meet, and taxing the shareholders for supporting such bad
| governance.
|
| It's taxing wealth and assets properly, rather than capping rate
| increases to keep people in homes (and thus drive up values).
| It's cities who reward businesses whose staff take public transit
| and taxing those who rely on private vehicles. Lifting property
| tax caps so that taxation rates float with the market, and
| accepting that this will mean some folks will see foreclosures
| and others will see valuations plummet as the market corrects
| itself. Incentivizing longer leases from landlords by tying
| property tax increases to lease renewals (yearly renewals mean
| yearly appraisals), to encourage more community and investing in
| buildings.
|
| It's expanding SNAP to everyone by default on raw foods only, and
| expanding access to cooking and nutrition courses so every adult
| can eat healthy meals. It's shrinking the work week to create
| more jobs, capping overtime instead of merely 1.5xing it, and
| raising minimum wages. It's also taxing the absolute shit out of
| executive compensation, _especially_ on equities and securities.
| It 's barring share buybacks other than those amounts that would
| give the company 51% control over its outstanding shares (or
| more), and replacing Capital Gains with Income Taxes. It's
| closing loopholes and shrinking the tax codes.
|
| It's _so much more_ than "UBI and we're fine". There is _no
| silver bullet_. _Nothing_ is an "easy fix", and no single fix
| will make a meaningful impact on the whole. It's nothing short of
| a coordinated rejection of the status quo in favor of a more
| equitable future that balances the need for innovation and growth
| with the needs of the masses for basic sustenance, shelter,
| healthcare, education, and safety. It's a cessation of promoting
| business over all, and a return to balancing business with
| community, with family, with individuality.
|
| It's a _lot of fucking work_ , and anyone lounging in here
| nitpicking UBI specifically without considering the _whole of the
| problem_ shows they 're simply not ready to deal with problems of
| this scale.
| drbojingle wrote:
| I think the issue with ubi is it's not really basic. Cloths food
| and shelter are basic. I'm much more inclined to support ubi if
| it's food shelter cloths.
| asdff wrote:
| UBI doesn't make any sense when you imagine how it will play out.
| Let's consider what it actually implies on the face: labor has
| been obviated through automation and therefore humans no longer
| have a purpose on earth. UBI then amounts to a bribe paid to the
| remaining surviving masses of humanity so they don't go on to
| destroy all the automated economy and those who remain in control
| of the automated economy, if those are actually people in this
| future and not some statistical models running on their own. This
| is unsustainable. The masses of humanity will inevitably want a
| larger and larger bribe to sustain a standard of living in
| probably an inflationary environment. Eventually a tipping point
| will be reached where the models in charge of the planet
| determine it is more efficient to eliminate humanity than to
| continue paying increasing bribes.
| theopsimist wrote:
| Have not seen a counter to the what-seems-to-me trivial point
| that the condition of possibility of UBI is the elimination of
| manual labour - or otherwise slavery and slave labour like
| exploitation
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