UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords. There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear. If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
> UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords.
No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.
> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear
That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.
> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.
(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)
Do the math. It'd cost huge, huge amounts of money that would need to come from somewhere, except there is no such "magic money tree". So in practical terms it is impossible. Or you print money to finance it and things balance themselves out in the end through inflation and you end up handing worthless money.
It would depend a lot on just how much people value working or producing to get luxuries. I would guess people trying to do something like bag a wife/girlfriend would value them a lot if they were trying to impress a certain segment of most sought after mates and thus would man the machines to gain the prestige, but yeah there are plenty of people out there that are happy to just have necessities and then go skateboarding or smoking crack or whatever and presumably that would significantly lower production of necessities produced by those people.
It's impossible in any case, but if many people are OK to live off that money and don't work at all (well, as long as that money is worth something, as pointed out) then the whole society would collapse...
The trick is to make it enough that you can live off it, but the vast majority are not content.
What is the minimum? Something like a tiny bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen (there are very few of these in the world so we have to build it - including zoning changes to allow it). You eat "rice and beans" that you cook in that kitchen because you can't afford more. You sleep on the floor because you can't afford a bed. You get two outfits that you have wear until worn out - and wash in the sink because you can't afford a washing machine or laundromat. You don't get TV, phone, internet - if you want those luxuries you have to work for it. You can borrow books from the local library, but otherwise you don't have entertainment options.
If we limited UBI to that level it is easy to see how the vast majority will want more luxury and be willing to work a job to get it. However the above is bad enough that I'm not willing to allow the truly needy to live like that, so we end up still needing welfare for those who need help (not to mention my point elsewhere that the needy often need help other than money).
I don't think it's impossible, just unlikely. It depends on luxuries being valued enough by some people that they're willing to overcome the tax and bothering to produce and there being enough of that to cover everyone's necessities.
The only human drive I can think of strong enough to overcome that is that it would probably give you better access to mates or prestige in the community, thus some people would be willing to do it. However you'd have to have an insanely efficient production infrastructure for it to cover all the necessities, I'd guess.
Envision for a moment a society where most of the most attractive women want to date the richest guys. And the way to become the richest is to produce things. Conceivably a large group of men would still work despite UBI so they can get with the "hottest" women.
Put this at grand scale and you have why a lot of men bother with anything more than living in a tent by the river. If that production is high enough to actually produce enough necessities it might work, but would require some insanely efficient production.
In America there used to be a 90% marginal tax rate the wealthiest members had to pay. They used their influence to do away with it.
I’m just saying, I know where the money is. One man’s “right” to own a billion dollars doesn’t outweigh providing the base needs of living to everybody.
Take 100% of the wealth of everyone with more than $1B in the US and you get $23k per person / $33k per adult. That's a good amount of money; the adult number would be enough to live off of in the right parts of the country. It's about 4x the annual welfare spend. But then next year comes, you have to find the money again, and you're out of billionaires.
Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.
An important point is that this wealth is purely notional. It doesn't exist as cash you can distribute unless there is a liquid market, and confiscating it would annihilate any liquid markets. Furthermore, ~70% of that wealth in the US is non-liquid generally.
That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
Central bank prints the money, puts it into bank accounts or hosts the bank accounts itself. Government taxes money to destroy it. I think its interesting if you can assign money different "classes" or make it programmable; give fiat away to stoke consumption but make it have an expiration or prevent it from being invested if sourced from a central bank allowance, but lots of hazards too (usual suspects of human governance failure modes). Money earned "human to human" could have a different, higher value or class than money printed for consumption of goods or services that can be produced by automation also comes to mind. Much better imho than the blunt instrument of target interest rates for adjusting the speed of an economy and blanket fiat value.
I don’t mean to denigrate anyone, but I don’t think you understand that no amount of logic will ever be able to sway emotions let alone most propaganda conditioning.
People like the idea of UBI on an emotional level, and they would probably support UBI, even if the wealthy and powerful of the world came out and had a joint global press conference, declaring that the whole purpose of UBI is a fraudulent plant to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else on the whole planet and that UBI is just the vehicle for doing that. The response would be something like “ok, but when do I get UBI”.
Whatever the processes in humans is that allows such things to happen, it seems very common across most domains, even in fields where one would believe that everyone is logical and applies scientific principles, only to find out that no, if emotions clash with scientific logic, then clearly the scientific logic must be bent and manipulated to meet the emotion.
Another way of looking at UBI is simply as an adjustment to the tax system that shifts the baseline of the tax curve to that people with less than a certain income receive money instead of paying it. This probably works better in countries hat have a more nearly smoothly varying progressive tax rate than those like the UK which have just a few widely spaced thresholds.
Then it is simply a case of adjusting the parameters of a fairly simple formula so that the total tax revenue is as it was before and that the minimum after tax income is something one can live on.
The general idea is that in civilized countries you are paying out the money anyway, just less efficiently.
Government expenditures are ~30% of GDP in US. Theoretically you could just distribute ~30% of the gdp/capita (about $28,000) to every person in the USA, make them buy all government services on the private market (government now gone except to collect and distribute the single UBI), and you'd not have much tax effect on productive enterprise (or alternatively, distribute ~20% or almost $20,000 and return to pre-1913 non-wartime government services).
> make them buy all government services on the private market
The market won't magically provide all the services that people need. The government would have to have some mechanism that made sure that all the necessary services were available to everyone.
