14 ms·

I'd be much happier if UBI proposals were higher. Living on ~900$/month nowadays would be difficult. 20 years ago I was able to split rent for a tiny concrete

by willjp 5y ago

I'd be much happier if UBI proposals were higher. Living on ~900$/month nowadays would be difficult. 20 years ago I was able to split rent for a tiny concrete windowless-basement-bedroom for 450$/mo, trimmed my grocery/cleaning bill down to 100$/mo by eating nothing but rice, beans, and frozen vegetables, 120$/mo for a phone and internet (which I consider essential), and another ~80$/mo in bus tickets. That's ~750$/mo. Nowadays, when two bedroom appartments in small remote cities are going for 1600$+, I'm guessing splitting rent is much closer to 800$. That doesn't leave enough money for food, transportation, and communication methods. Heaven forbid you get injured or sick.

ProfessorLayton 5y ago
The solution to your housing costs isn't increased payments, but cheaper housing. Housing prices are spiraling out of control almost everywhere because we refuse to build more of it through asinine zoning restrictions. High housing costs have such ripple effects on the cost of everything else that it's incredibly frustrating to see everything else but cheaper and more available housing be proposed as a means to help the less well off (This isn't a jab at you in particular).
- throwaway1777 5y ago
  I kind of agree with your idea that we should work to decrease housing prices, but the problems with housing are not as simple as remove zoning and building restrictions and watch prices fall. One example. Energy prices are the base input to everything including housing, so if you want to make housing cheaper then better energy policy might be a good start.
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    Energy is a large portion of the cost of aluminum ingots or tanker cars full of ammonia. It is not a large portion of the cost of constructing new housing. I wouldn't start with energy prices if I were trying to figure out how to make housing affordable. I'd try to contrast e.g. Tokyo, where housing is reasonably affordable, against the city of New York, where it is much less affordable. Japan doesn't have cheaper energy than the US.
  - AuthorizedCust 5y ago
    It’s not just zoning. It’s things like urban growth boundaries, which arbitrarily contain available land and encourage more dense housing, both of which drive up prices. All so that we can “conserve” an extremely plentiful commodity: open land.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Also - giving people money is likely to increase the cost of housing. You could give everyone $1 bajillion dollars a month. The cost of housing would go up until a lot of people are still homeless.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    > The cost of housing would go up until a lot of people are still homeless That’s true if building enough housing to meet demand continues to be illegal.
    - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      The effective purpose of a UBI (why the ruling class likes the idea) is to constrain risky tendencies of a highly financialized economy that depends on a large supply of dirt cheap labor without too much inflation. With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Everyone else will be a reserve army of cheap labor that serves to bare the weight of the financial ebbs and flows of the mighty dollar in the global market, similar to the function of America’s current lower class, but intensified. Rent prices in rural, small city, and slum neighborhoods will be saran wrapped to the UBI amount, and escaping those areas will be practically impossible because rents in the cities will be affordable only to the elite. In other words, sure, you’re probably right.
      - barry-cotter 5y ago
        > With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Gainful employment is when the product of your labor is worth (much) more than you are willing to sell your labor for. If you’re not rich and you want to become rich working for Google at $200K a year is clearly superior to a UBI of $40K a year. Even with an arithmetically impossible UBI[1] like that there are still many people who would like to be rich, but just middle class. [1]US average household income per capita is under $60K.
        5y ago
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  > we refuse to build more of it We also refuse to move to cheaper places. I still think from time to time, "what's stopping 10k smart young people from just moving into empty land?"
  - aperson_hello 5y ago
    In one word: Infrastructure. Roads and water and sewer and electrical lines are expensive. The better question is: What's stopping those same 10k smart young people from moving to Detroit?
    - cjbgkagh 5y ago
      Land taxes
  - patmcc 5y ago
    It's easy to be the ten-thousandth, it's hard to be the first.
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    I think Madison Avenue style advertising is far more effective than commonly given credit for. Even if you personally avoid the brain washing, it’s not just you, it’s your family, friends, partners etc. All encouraged to live a more expensive lifestyle.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    Infrastructure, jobs, coordination, state and local regulations, capital. The list goes on. Your comment is a particularly egregious example of, "I could do that in a weekend." Internet commenters tend to blithely assume hard things are easy.
    - maerF0x0 5y ago
      I definitely couldnt do it in a weekend. But I have been wondering how new cities are born, like not a suburb beside an existing city, but the ones that are in the middle of "no where". And what would stop a few thousand people from having a mutual interest to start something in the middle of no where? Most of the jobs could be remote save for the ones that support the citizens themselves. maybe this would fail for the same reason those preplanned cities in china failed? IDK. I'm definitely not implying it's dead easy, just that maybe it's easier than fitting 1M more people in a city that is already dense and full of NIMBYs?
- austincheney 5y ago
  There is no evidence that building more housing has ever reduced housing prices or that it will do so into the future.
  - Guest42 5y ago
    I agree. To me it seems as though a small handful of corporations owns a large percentage of multi-tenant housing and an increasing percentage of single tenant houses and is able to set prices algorithmically and that other landlords price similarly.
    - TulliusCicero 5y ago
      A handful of corporation own most of the grocery stores, but grocery prices remain reasonable, nowhere close to as insanely priced as rent. The difference is real competition: there's only so much land that exists, and localities only allow so much housing on that land. Demand goes way up, supply goes up only feebly, the result is predictable.
      - austincheney 5y ago
        Rent is not ownership.
        TulliusCicero 5y ago
        ...okay?
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    This is the opposite of true. The evidence that building more housing decreases prices is overwhelming: https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-... > To be clear, this debate is not about whether new housing can reduce housing prices overall. At this point, that idea isn’t really in doubt. There’s good reason to believe that in regions with high housing demand, building more housing can help keep the prices of existing housing down. In their Supply Skepticism paper from 2018, Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan offer an excellent introduction to the broader question of how market-rate development affects affordability. Citing numerous individual studies and reviews of dozens more, they conclude that “the preponderance of the evidence shows that restricting supply increases housing prices and that adding supply would help to make housing more affordable.” Because of course it does. Demand doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's a number judged against supply. If you want to see the real world impact, look at rents where the rules make it easy to build housing. For a city of its size and national importance, Tokyo has dirt cheap rent compared to the states: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=Japan&city1=New+York%2C+NY&city2=Tokyo&tracking=getDispatchComparison https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  That isn’t a solution either, because individuals and businesses with the money will simply snap-up the real estate. Discouraging multi-ownership and preventing residential ownership by business mes needs to happen as well.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Discouraging investment in housing will have exactly the opposite effect that you intend.
    - nobodyandproud 5y ago
      Would you mind explaining? Upfront investment by building-out to provide supply is the policy that we need. Yet current policies favor rent-seeking and parking-funds in desirable areas, leading to properties that owned but actually vacant (e.g., most of London or Vancouver Island).
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        A larger secondary market leads to more capital being available in the primary market that directly funds new construction that adds housing stock and renovation that prevents its depreciation. >>but actually vacant (e.g., most of London or Vancouver Island). Most of London and Vancouver Island are not vacant.
        nobodyandproud 5y ago
        > A larger secondary market leads to more capital being available in the primary market that directly funds new construction that adds housing stock and renovation that prevents its depreciation. I don’t buy this. The speculators who make-up the secondary market are not the ones who make money by tearing down and building new properties. There’s no value added to these speculators and is akin to domain squatting. https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/empty-homes-vancouver-report https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/empty-homes-vancouver-report Vacancy is a problem in most areas of Vancouver. London also had similar issues.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  There are plenty of places in the USA with loose zoning rules, the problem is not many want to live in those places for some reasons. Why are strong job markets correlated with stricter zoning rules?
zozbot234 5y ago
$900/mo. is near the high-end of the feasible UBI range. If you want to live on your UBI, it's pretty much expected that you'd move to the lowest-cost feasible area, and content yourself with a somewhat dignified subsistence. UBI has by far the most potential as a supplemental income to low-skilled, entry-level or low-intensity work. The key aim is to make it seamless for people to enter or leave the job market as they choose, which removes the threat of exploitive "wage slavery".
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If you doubled federal individual income taxes for everyone in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen around $750/mo in UBI with that increase. If you doubled ALL federal income taxes in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen ~$1500/mo in UBI. And of course, the higher you set UBI, the less point there is to work like a chump and pay 2x current tax rates so other people don’t have to, so fewer people would work (which is one of the promises of promoters of UBI), meaning taxes would have more than double to make the payments. The math is daunting because the number of people is so high.
  - __john 5y ago
    I wonder how many businesses could survive doubling the federal income tax?
    - kiawe_fire 5y ago
      Likely not the very business owners that would benefit from UBI the most. Thereby likely forcing those business owners to rely on UBI entirely for income, thus removing their upward mobility.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Probably a higher percentage than middle and upper middle class taxpayers could sustain doubling their federal taxes.
    - aperson_hello 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ouid 5y ago
Look, UBI isn't for living comfortably. UBI is just a knob for producing more negotiating power for laborers. It's the means to quit a job and look for a new one. It's not about living a happy work free life. That doesn't make any sense.

by willjp 5y ago

ProfessorLayton 5y ago

The solution to your housing costs isn't increased payments, but cheaper housing. Housing prices are spiraling out of control almost everywhere because we refuse to build more of it through asinine zoning restrictions. High housing costs have such ripple effects on the cost of everything else that it's incredibly frustrating to see everything else but cheaper and more available housing be proposed as a means to help the less well off (This isn't a jab at you in particular).

throwaway1777 5y ago
I kind of agree with your idea that we should work to decrease housing prices, but the problems with housing are not as simple as remove zoning and building restrictions and watch prices fall. One example. Energy prices are the base input to everything including housing, so if you want to make housing cheaper then better energy policy might be a good start.
- philipkglass 5y ago
  Energy is a large portion of the cost of aluminum ingots or tanker cars full of ammonia. It is not a large portion of the cost of constructing new housing. I wouldn't start with energy prices if I were trying to figure out how to make housing affordable. I'd try to contrast e.g. Tokyo, where housing is reasonably affordable, against the city of New York, where it is much less affordable. Japan doesn't have cheaper energy than the US.
- AuthorizedCust 5y ago
  It’s not just zoning. It’s things like urban growth boundaries, which arbitrarily contain available land and encourage more dense housing, both of which drive up prices. All so that we can “conserve” an extremely plentiful commodity: open land.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Also - giving people money is likely to increase the cost of housing. You could give everyone $1 bajillion dollars a month. The cost of housing would go up until a lot of people are still homeless.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > The cost of housing would go up until a lot of people are still homeless That’s true if building enough housing to meet demand continues to be illegal.
  - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    The effective purpose of a UBI (why the ruling class likes the idea) is to constrain risky tendencies of a highly financialized economy that depends on a large supply of dirt cheap labor without too much inflation. With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Everyone else will be a reserve army of cheap labor that serves to bare the weight of the financial ebbs and flows of the mighty dollar in the global market, similar to the function of America’s current lower class, but intensified. Rent prices in rural, small city, and slum neighborhoods will be saran wrapped to the UBI amount, and escaping those areas will be practically impossible because rents in the cities will be affordable only to the elite. In other words, sure, you’re probably right.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      > With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Gainful employment is when the product of your labor is worth (much) more than you are willing to sell your labor for. If you’re not rich and you want to become rich working for Google at $200K a year is clearly superior to a UBI of $40K a year. Even with an arithmetically impossible UBI[1] like that there are still many people who would like to be rich, but just middle class. [1]US average household income per capita is under $60K.
      - 5y ago
maerF0x0 5y ago
> we refuse to build more of it We also refuse to move to cheaper places. I still think from time to time, "what's stopping 10k smart young people from just moving into empty land?"
- aperson_hello 5y ago
  In one word: Infrastructure. Roads and water and sewer and electrical lines are expensive. The better question is: What's stopping those same 10k smart young people from moving to Detroit?
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    Land taxes
- patmcc 5y ago
  It's easy to be the ten-thousandth, it's hard to be the first.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  I think Madison Avenue style advertising is far more effective than commonly given credit for. Even if you personally avoid the brain washing, it’s not just you, it’s your family, friends, partners etc. All encouraged to live a more expensive lifestyle.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  Infrastructure, jobs, coordination, state and local regulations, capital. The list goes on. Your comment is a particularly egregious example of, "I could do that in a weekend." Internet commenters tend to blithely assume hard things are easy.
  - maerF0x0 5y ago
    I definitely couldnt do it in a weekend. But I have been wondering how new cities are born, like not a suburb beside an existing city, but the ones that are in the middle of "no where". And what would stop a few thousand people from having a mutual interest to start something in the middle of no where? Most of the jobs could be remote save for the ones that support the citizens themselves. maybe this would fail for the same reason those preplanned cities in china failed? IDK. I'm definitely not implying it's dead easy, just that maybe it's easier than fitting 1M more people in a city that is already dense and full of NIMBYs?
austincheney 5y ago
There is no evidence that building more housing has ever reduced housing prices or that it will do so into the future.
- Guest42 5y ago
  I agree. To me it seems as though a small handful of corporations owns a large percentage of multi-tenant housing and an increasing percentage of single tenant houses and is able to set prices algorithmically and that other landlords price similarly.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    A handful of corporation own most of the grocery stores, but grocery prices remain reasonable, nowhere close to as insanely priced as rent. The difference is real competition: there's only so much land that exists, and localities only allow so much housing on that land. Demand goes way up, supply goes up only feebly, the result is predictable.
    - austincheney 5y ago
      Rent is not ownership.
      - TulliusCicero 5y ago
        ...okay?
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  This is the opposite of true. The evidence that building more housing decreases prices is overwhelming: https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-... > To be clear, this debate is not about whether new housing can reduce housing prices overall. At this point, that idea isn’t really in doubt. There’s good reason to believe that in regions with high housing demand, building more housing can help keep the prices of existing housing down. In their Supply Skepticism paper from 2018, Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan offer an excellent introduction to the broader question of how market-rate development affects affordability. Citing numerous individual studies and reviews of dozens more, they conclude that “the preponderance of the evidence shows that restricting supply increases housing prices and that adding supply would help to make housing more affordable.” Because of course it does. Demand doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's a number judged against supply. If you want to see the real world impact, look at rents where the rules make it easy to build housing. For a city of its size and national importance, Tokyo has dirt cheap rent compared to the states: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=Japan&city1=New+York%2C+NY&city2=Tokyo&tracking=getDispatchComparison https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
nobodyandproud 5y ago
That isn’t a solution either, because individuals and businesses with the money will simply snap-up the real estate. Discouraging multi-ownership and preventing residential ownership by business mes needs to happen as well.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Discouraging investment in housing will have exactly the opposite effect that you intend.
  - nobodyandproud 5y ago
    Would you mind explaining? Upfront investment by building-out to provide supply is the policy that we need. Yet current policies favor rent-seeking and parking-funds in desirable areas, leading to properties that owned but actually vacant (e.g., most of London or Vancouver Island).
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      A larger secondary market leads to more capital being available in the primary market that directly funds new construction that adds housing stock and renovation that prevents its depreciation. >>but actually vacant (e.g., most of London or Vancouver Island). Most of London and Vancouver Island are not vacant.
      - nobodyandproud 5y ago
        > A larger secondary market leads to more capital being available in the primary market that directly funds new construction that adds housing stock and renovation that prevents its depreciation. I don’t buy this. The speculators who make-up the secondary market are not the ones who make money by tearing down and building new properties. There’s no value added to these speculators and is akin to domain squatting. https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/empty-homes-vancouver-report https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/empty-homes-vancouver-report Vacancy is a problem in most areas of Vancouver. London also had similar issues.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
There are plenty of places in the USA with loose zoning rules, the problem is not many want to live in those places for some reasons. Why are strong job markets correlated with stricter zoning rules?

zozbot234 5y ago

$900/mo. is near the high-end of the feasible UBI range. If you want to live on your UBI, it's pretty much expected that you'd move to the lowest-cost feasible area, and content yourself with a somewhat dignified subsistence. UBI has by far the most potential as a supplemental income to low-skilled, entry-level or low-intensity work. The key aim is to make it seamless for people to enter or leave the job market as they choose, which removes the threat of exploitive "wage slavery".

sokoloff 5y ago
If you doubled federal individual income taxes for everyone in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen around $750/mo in UBI with that increase. If you doubled ALL federal income taxes in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen ~$1500/mo in UBI. And of course, the higher you set UBI, the less point there is to work like a chump and pay 2x current tax rates so other people don’t have to, so fewer people would work (which is one of the promises of promoters of UBI), meaning taxes would have more than double to make the payments. The math is daunting because the number of people is so high.
- __john 5y ago
  I wonder how many businesses could survive doubling the federal income tax?
  - kiawe_fire 5y ago
    Likely not the very business owners that would benefit from UBI the most. Thereby likely forcing those business owners to rely on UBI entirely for income, thus removing their upward mobility.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Probably a higher percentage than middle and upper middle class taxpayers could sustain doubling their federal taxes.
  - aperson_hello 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ouid 5y ago

Look, UBI isn't for living comfortably. UBI is just a knob for producing more negotiating power for laborers. It's the means to quit a job and look for a new one. It's not about living a happy work free life. That doesn't make any sense.