| ▲ | phkahler 3 hours ago |
| >> A basic floor of income that everyone gets, Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation. |
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| ▲ | AndrewDucker 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this. |
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| ▲ | phkahler 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region. | | |
| ▲ | AndrewDucker 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's more than when minimum wage goes up (which has a similar effect on people at the lowest end of the wage earners - their income goes up by X) the effect is not that food/housing immediately captures all of that X, it captures about 20% of X. (I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.) | | |
| ▲ | ponector 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are multiple points against such comparison:
1. Minimum wage goes up - for some amount of people. Most are not feeling it as they are not on the minimum wage or not working.
2. Salary is not UBI, it is actually earned, taken from revenue. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | UBI isn't positive for everyone either, above a certain income point people have to be paying more in tax to balance it. |
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| ▲ | jplusequalt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The real issue isn't inflation, it's that UBI is too bloody expensive in practice. | | |
| ▲ | AndrewDucker 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Entirely true. If you want UBI without massive inflation then you have to suck back in most of the money you've produced. Of course, you can then do that pretty sensibly so that you don't have cliff edges like we do at the moment. |
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| ▲ | pebbly_bread 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It would, leading to more resources going towards producing those goods. A UBI is price signal indicating the needs no/low income people matter. Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term. |
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| ▲ | inigyou 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think as well as UBI we should have universal basic land. Grant everyone the right to a share of an apartment building that doesn't exist yet on a specific plot of land on the city outskirts. Few people will want to actually group together and build apartment buildings on vacant land on the city outskirts, but I would hope that just having the option would bring down the price of land for everyone. Private options would have to actually compete with the basic public option instead of taking advantage of their customers having no alternatives. Same thing that already happened in telecoms. |
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| ▲ | inigyou 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It would still compress the distribution wouldn't it? Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money. |
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| ▲ | mr_toad 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You can’t just move assets of that scale around without knock-on effects. If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help. If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land. | |
| ▲ | derektank 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, a UBI (really all government spending) re-allocates demand, either directly through taxes and transfer or by decreasing the purchasing power of the currency through inflation. At any point in time, there is more or less a set amount of productive capacity in the economy, and money is what allows it to be allocated. |
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| ▲ | occz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Radical concept: you could provide UBI in the form of housing, food and transportation |
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| ▲ | ponector 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Food and transportation is extremely cheap nowadays. Big bag of rice is couple dollars and a bicycle is a 100$. Oh, people don't want affordable food but a 20-buck burrito and a 100k truck of ridiculous size? | | | |
| ▲ | fortzi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What's happens to the price of construction when the state suddenly commissions millions of homes? | | |
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| ▲ | idbnstra 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| one of the solutions that they put forward in combination with UBI is LVT. When LVT is implemented, it is likely that those three things will not get more expensive relative to income even with a UBI. Let me know if you want me to explain why. |
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| ▲ | pixl97 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation Please tell me what's different than what I am seeing right now without UBI? |
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| ▲ | thrance 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Proponents of UBI usually also suggest countermeasures to the (real) issues you pointed out. |
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| ▲ | BobbyJo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Things now are completely different than 5 years ago /s |
