3 ms·

I disagree with the parent you replied to but still think there are other solutions that may work better than UBI. My idea (disclaimer: not an economist, socio

• AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > Free (i.e. public funded) education at all levels, healthcare, mass transit & access to public housing at restricted cost (we already have that in many western countries but means-test who can get into public housing & do not build nearly enough of it). There are two possibilities when you provide stuff instead of money. One is that people actually need the exact specific stuff you're providing. They want to live in government housing and eat government cheese; it's what they would choose if you just gave them the money. But then there is zero difference between that and giving them the money. You're not keeping them from using the money to buy drugs or whatever because giving them $500 worth of housing means they have $500 of their other money they didn't have to use for housing that they can go use to buy drugs. The other option is that they wouldn't buy the same stuff, in which case the restriction is waste. You give them government housing 30 miles from where they work even though the non-government housing across the street from their job is higher quality and has a lower underlying cost. You deprive them of the option of living in a smaller space in order to use the money for something more productive -- or the other way around, renting a place slightly larger than the allocated government housing unit so it can be used as a studio or home office. You're basically assuming that the government can do better than the market. That may actually be true for things like mass transit with huge up-front costs and trivially small incremental costs per rider, but there is no reason to expect it to be for things like housing and education. (In practice, existing government involvement in both of those markets has done nothing but inflate costs dramatically.) > And make sure that each 1$ you earn reduces your benefits by less than 1$ (maybe 50 cents) so that you're never disincentivized from taking work. 50% is still crazy high. There is no reason the poor should be paying higher marginal rates than the rich. > It's the working poor to lower/middle class that just about keep their head above the water that will be in a much better position. This really has more to do with how redistributive a policy is than what (as opposed to who) the resources are allocated to. The ways to help lower/middle class people are to give them more money (independent of which form, but very expensive and hard to pass) or to use the specified amount of money more efficiently so that the same dollar goes further, which is what you get from a UBI instead ordering people to buy specific stuff.
  • ido 8y ago
    > (In practice, existing government involvement in both of those markets has done nothing but inflate costs dramatically.) here in Germany education is (mostly) government funded and for the majority of students studying in public universities is free or very cheap. The American model of just providing backing for student loans is the broken one. When I did my M.Sc. in Austria I paid €350 per semester for another example of publicly funded higher education not making education expensive.
    • AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > The American model of just providing backing for student loans is the broken one. I would agree with that assessment. Convincing the government to subsidize loan interest for education and housing is one of the nastiest tricks the banks pulled on the American people. But the point is that those markets would be more efficient if the government had left them alone. > When I did my M.Sc. in Austria I paid €350 per semester for another example of publicly funded higher education not making education expensive. That's the out of pocket cost, then how much did it cost in tax dollars on top of that? I assume still less than in the US, because the banks did such a number on the US, but I doubt any better than schools in ordinary markets without that level of crazy.
      • ido 8y ago
        But the point is not just the total cost (tax payers & own money) but that shifting this cost to the public means everyone will be able to afford it (including poor kids who currently aren't & just remain "uneducated" instead). The argument is that society as a whole benefits from a better educated/more healthy/etc population so even tho it will cost you some tax money in the greater scheme of things as a whole we will benefit. If this means e.g. a 20% premium on the cost of education or healthcare I'd be willing to accept that. If it's 10x the cost that's obviously a different story. But we don't actually know the scale of the effect.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• strken 8y ago
  > And make sure that each 1$ you earn reduces your benefits by less than 1$ (maybe 50 cents) so that you're never disincentivized from taking work. This is more or less how Australian dole works, and when you hit the income band where your payments start decreasing you lose anywhere up to 70 or 80% of marginal increases in income to the government, if you include tax. At that point a rational person could and does question whether working an extra 6 hour shift for $4/hr take home pay is worth it.