@scottsantens
Hey, so when we had a first home buyer thing the price of houses went up by roughly that amount... What protects ubi money from just getting eaten by hikes in rent/groceries/utility bills?

@scottsantens No wonder the wealthy are against UBI. After all, they get most of their money via economic instability ("pump and dump", etc.).

@scottsantens @EndlessMason Well initially a lowish level UBI may not actually provide many families with a much larger income - the immediate aim as Scott says is to *stabilise* lower incomes. But anything eventually making poor folk richer needs measures against being predated: specific taxes that target wealth (LVT), controlling rents, regulating utilities etc can all play roles. UBI doesn't fix inflation or rent-seeking on its own, that's true, it's an important tool not a solo magic bullet.

@scottsantens everyone should be forced to be without a stable income for some period of their lives so they will understand this.

@alisynthesis @scottsantens For some *undetermined* period - if there's a known end in sight, they still won't have any idea what it's like.

@scottsantens Sadly, the main thing that universal basic income would be, is cancelling of the entire currency-tax system that creates markets. The governments release money, and demand from you to pay some of those money back, under threat of violence, thus forcing you to trade whatever goods or services you have to offer for the money. UBI would effectively cancel that, letting you pay the taxes and grow your own food and trade outside the official markets, effectively secesing from the state.

@jwcph exactly

@scottsantens

@EndlessMason competition, mostly. Housing is supply-constrained, and also heavily leveraged, which makes it a very unusual kind of commodity.

@EndlessMason
UBI can't just be free money. That would cause inflation as you suspect. UBI needs to be a big policy change include new income taxes. Roughly someone in the upper end of middle class and up would have the same take-home money before and after UBI. Someone in the middle would have more money but not a lot more. Everyone would have enough money to live.

This is a well studied problem. Just means UBI needs to be implemented carefully.

@scottsantens

@scottsantens @EndlessMason A flat payment would not have protections from those things, but would if the payments were scaled based on need and an economic inflation factor. A successful UBI system would need to track average costs and adjust accordingly, which would mean that the cost of the program would rise with population and inflation growth.

If you already own a home, it may not be that big of a help to you. But for folks that are living paycheck to paycheck, it would provide security. Even if UBI isn’t enough to live on, it could theoretically supplement the income from the lower-wage or part-time jobs.

@scottsantens also drive up inovation, because when you want to inovateyou must leave your current job, knowing that a failure will not make you homless is already good too.

@scottsantens I’m retired military, so I have basic income.

And, yeah. It means that even if things change drastically, I can pay the mortgage.

Which… makes me really hard to exploit, for employers.

So, yeah, billionaires hate it.

@scottsantens Kind of like defined benefit pensions.

@scottsantens

I would recommend reading the natural economic order written in 1916 by Silvio Gessell. Some of it might grate a bit, but if you read patiently, you understand how spun up this guy was..

The sections that are most interesting are the ones on his description of the money system as it is versus the money system he designed along with all the argumentation in it, which is very rich reading.

@scottsantens it’s very very obvious that many people have never missed a meal (through no choice of their own) or been worried about where they would sleep. Do I pay bills or buy food? How much longer can I stay on a friends couch? Can I afford to use a laundromat to get my clothes clean for work or am I washing them in a sink and hoping they dry?

@scottsantens would it not help people get out of the 'survival' stage of maslows and in to the generative, 'self-actualization'? Like, if people dont have to worry about losing their house or eating for the day, that frees up SO MUCH MENTAL SPACE OMG and then we can actually use our brains to think and create and do what humans do best

@EndlessMason @scottsantens One reading of a paper by Johns Hopkins economics researcher Daniel Thompson (Stagnant services, 2021) is that inflation is largely capped by constant costs associated with a growing "stagnant services" sector. These are any services where there's no big productivity gain in automation, and very slim profit margins.

A UBI could transfer some of the total productivity of society to increase the take-home of workers in low-wage stagnant services. This could be done without increasing inflation, because the cost of those services remains the same.

You could also see more workers prepared to take lower paid or volunteer jobs if their basic needs and health care needs were met. That would be dis-inflationary too.

@scottsantens
Oof dat timeline

@scottsantens

Which is like the reason it's so opposed.