2 ms·

You make a good point that landlords will increase their rent to eat up the majority of the basic income increase and that's a real concern. I'm not sure what c

You make a good point that landlords will increase their rent to eat up the majority of the basic income increase and that's a real concern. I'm not sure what can be done about that. What I think might be a positive aspect of basic income is that we can expect everyone to have more money, so we can expect them to spend some of that money to improve their situation. The sanitation issue in this trailer park is one example I thought of as the story was posted recently. In my opinion, when people are at a subsistence level they can't invest in improving their situation in a meaningful way. If employment isn't growing in their location there's no way to increase their income without basic income. Tax breaks will not help them as their income is already so minimal.

lucozade 9y ago
> when people are at a subsistence level they can't invest in improving their situation in a meaningful way You are, of course, correct. Why? Because the investment usually needs some form of capital outlay and folk don't have the capital nor have reasonable access to capital. And UBI, assuming it's at a non-trivial level, will not solve the former problem but most definitely will the latter. Again, imagine what happens when you give a lot of poor folk access to a regular, guaranteed, future income stream. Overnight, you've pretty much taken all the default risk out of the payday loan business. Let's assume the first call is from a septic tank company. You can have that $15k tank installed next week! What's the monthly payment on that going to be? And what if it's not the sanitation company who calls. What if it's a white goods company or an AC company or an auto financer? And note, I'm not arguing that poor people make poor financial decisions. Some do, some don't. Like rich folk. But these are all things that would genuinely make their lives better. And, they are very likely to get offered them. At a "reasonable" interest rate. So there's no solution? I don't know. I do know that it can be substantially better than it is today without diving into the unknown. It's not as if no welfare state models have been attempted to varying degrees of success (for varying definitions of success). But that's really the point. If you want to "fix" poverty, the problem isn't the distribution model, it's actually having people want to fix poverty.

lucozade 9y ago

> when people are at a subsistence level they can't invest in improving their situation in a meaningful way You are, of course, correct. Why? Because the investment usually needs some form of capital outlay and folk don't have the capital nor have reasonable access to capital. And UBI, assuming it's at a non-trivial level, will not solve the former problem but most definitely will the latter. Again, imagine what happens when you give a lot of poor folk access to a regular, guaranteed, future income stream. Overnight, you've pretty much taken all the default risk out of the payday loan business. Let's assume the first call is from a septic tank company. You can have that $15k tank installed next week! What's the monthly payment on that going to be? And what if it's not the sanitation company who calls. What if it's a white goods company or an AC company or an auto financer? And note, I'm not arguing that poor people make poor financial decisions. Some do, some don't. Like rich folk. But these are all things that would genuinely make their lives better. And, they are very likely to get offered them. At a "reasonable" interest rate. So there's no solution? I don't know. I do know that it can be substantially better than it is today without diving into the unknown. It's not as if no welfare state models have been attempted to varying degrees of success (for varying definitions of success). But that's really the point. If you want to "fix" poverty, the problem isn't the distribution model, it's actually having people want to fix poverty.