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This is a very hard problem to solve. The issue is not just the money and wealth itself but the power to control its flow. You can arbitrarily distribute the mo

• MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  It's almost like it wouldn't be feasible in isolation. One would first have to remove all the gatekeepers who control the absolute basic necessities like food, shelter and healthcare first. Otherwise the general population will just be extorted out of their basic income.
  • nerpderp82 4y ago
    In some ways we already are and have been for a great long while. Starting with the industrial revolution.
    • fghfhgfhjdjdnd 4y ago
      Industrial revolution has extorted workers and not benefited them?
• paxys 4y ago
  In an ideal world low earners would spend UBI money and it would circulate in the local/state/national economy in the right proportions. In reality our capitalist system has near-perfected the art of upward movement of money. We saw this happen during COVID, and there's no reason large scale UBI would be any different.
  • _carbyau_ 4y ago
    ^This. The issue is that money seems to have a gravity whereby having more will get you more. Splash a lot of money evenly around? That's simply more money to end up in the Bezos Black Hole.
  • jerojero 4y ago
    Iirc there was a pilot done in South Korea where they gave citizens of a town a kind of UBI but it was only spendable on local stores. So you couldn't use it to buy online on amazon for example. I haven't followed up but you're right in pointing out this problem of money syphoning.
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      What about where the local shopkeeper spends it? Unless that money permanently carries around with it a "local only" bit, as soon as it is spent once, it's likely eventually getting sucked out to Amazon, Walmart or one of the world's other "wealth gravitational singularities".
• antihero 4y ago
  History has had various methods of trying to curtail the unbelievable greed of landlords, how effective they are is subjective in many ways.
  • fghfhgfhjdjdnd 4y ago
    Are you implying a Marxist revolution? Many wars have been fought over this and many would be against you
• carom 4y ago
  >Then landlords will increase the rent by 800~900 bucks. Landlords don't set rents, they are price takers. Now if everyone gets more money and wants to live closer to work, then yes, prices will go up to meet increased demand.
  • jwarden 4y ago
    Where do you get that number from?
  • jrockway 4y ago
    It's more complicated than this. There is rent control and rent stabilization, for example. I'm sure my landlord would LOVE to raise my rent to twice what I'm paying, but they're not legally allowed to. Yes it's weird and anti-free-market and unfair to people that didn't get in early and all that. But that's how it goes! UBI would not raise rent on rent stabilized apartments in NYC.
    • carom 4y ago
      That just means you are paying below market rent. There is someone willing to pay twice your rent to live where you do. Rent control creates a first mover advantage where the incumbents have a good deal and everyone else suffers. Whether this is fair depends on your beliefs, but I would rather have healthy turn over to give more people an opportunity to experience an area.
      • WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
        > There is someone willing to pay twice your rent to live where you do. And as much as that is permitted to happen, the devastation to society increases. We presently have people entering homelessness with money in the bank. It's unlikely we've hit the possible upper limit on our broad housing catastrophe - but wherever that limit is, we certainly know how to reach it.
  • reillyse 4y ago
    This is not true. In a theoretical market it may be true but in a real world market it just is not. People don’t make rational decisions. Prices don’t reflect what “should”happen. Landlords increase rent because they can. No shade on landlords - because they are encouraged in the US to do so. But to pretend like this wont happen is naive.
• dataflow 4y ago
  The article says "conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it", so maybe the problem is the conservative approach and not UBI?
  • sokoloff 4y ago
    The problem is math; there are ~307 million citizens, around 75% of those over the age of 18, plus 23 million non-citizen residents of the US. Even taking a pretty conservative approach of only paying $1K/mo UBI to the citizens over the age of 18, that's 307M * .75 * $1K * 12 or $2.75T. US Federal tax revenue for 2021 was just over $4T. So, even with a fairly paltry UBI, you're talking about UBI representing an increase of taxes of almost 70% of total federal taxes. Make the UBI $1500/mo per adult citizen and UBI costs more than every dollar of federal tax received currently. Pay the $1K UBI to every resident of the US and UBI represents basically 100% of current federal tax receipts.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • xracy 4y ago
      It's interesting to me, because it doesn't seem that hard or wrong to tax stagnant dollars. And I suspect it would solve a lot of the inflation woes that might happen with UBI, as well as a lot of the US economic woes. Every time we look at fixing an issue like this, it seems like we're only looking at the half of the problem that involves creating the benefit, because paying for it is unpopular. But wealth accrual in this economy is a net drag. The tax side of trickle-down means that we're only ever working with a trickle to power major public benefits that could otherwise consistently run our economy, and provide robustness where we have a lot of weakness. You could pay for UBI by heavily taxing stock portfolios of the richest people. + 10% tax on the richest 1% of stock portfolios would raise about 2.3T (source CNBC). It would also take money from people who "can't spend it all" (something Bezos has literally claimed, he has trouble with), and give it to the 300M people who actually have something to spend it on, as evidenced by the huge boom in the economy created by the stimulus package. It's not that you can't find the money to tax this, it's that no one has the political will to tax anything.
• SequoiaHope 4y ago
  This is why I favor a libertarian Marxist analysis of economic change over UBI strategies. What I mean by libertarian Marxism is essentially what Richard Wolff advocates - that instead of an economy comprised primarily of top-down managed firms, we transition to an economy of worker owned cooperatives (still within a free market). This moves real economic decision making power to a broad base of the population rather than in minority hands. This fulfills the goal of worker ownership of the means of production in a fully voluntary system. The problem with UBI is that economic decision making stays within the hands of a small minority, who then tilt the whole economy in their favor. This is why worker ownership of the means of production (or as I like to say, community ownership of the means of production) is so important. What’s important to understand is that this is a mechanistic choice for how to run an economy. We can choose to do this voluntary because we recognize the value this arrangement offers to most people. It does not need to be done by force as attempted by autocrats in the 20th century. In any case, it requires less force than UBI!
  • harlequinn77 4y ago
  • fghfhgfhmmem 4y ago
    Has any country done this successfully? Marxism has led to mass famine and death
    • stjohnswarts 4y ago
      You're getting downvoted, but look at what happened over and over all over central and South America. I'm not saying that you have to be capitalistic as the USA, but social democracy seems like a reasonable solution in the middle.
    • SequoiaHope 4y ago
      No, authoritarianism has lead to mass famine and death. Marxism is just a way to operate an economy. If you implement changes to an economy by force, you’re probably going to hurt people. But we can still make voluntary changes to our world based on things we think are a good idea. Like advocating for and participating in worker cooperatives. And being a purely voluntary concept I’m suggesting, you don’t really need “a country” to do this. You could have just some groups within a country do this and they would see some benefits.
• asdff 4y ago
  This is why rent control is actually a good thing and not a bad thing. Rent control allows you to set the rate of acceptible rent increases for a given tenant. This means you can peg rent increases to the rate of wage increases, and prevent gouging. Couple it with zoning reforms and there would be no need to gouge anything; hard to gouge for water bottles someplace unless there is a lack of them available on the shelves, for example, and housing is no different. Zoning is the real source of a lack of supply in cities; these cities are built to the limits of zoned capacity even with rent control policies in effect, so that argument that rent control stifles development goes out the window in reality, since we see that every lot in a supply constrained city is typically already developed to the limits of what is allowed by these zoning laws, even if they are rent controlled. If you want to avoid ubi being eaten to these sources, you need to acknowledge what mechanisms are being used to gouge people of their needs, and ameliorate them by allowing new entrants to enter the market currently dominated by existing players (in this case existing landlords, who would prefer to have their prices march up and up without having to invest in redevelopment to add more rentable units on their lot, than to have more competition and pressure to keep prices at a minimum level). Just like with water during a hurricane, the government can use laws like rent control to prevent this gouging, and reforms like increasing the zoned capacity of a given area to meet the number of workers in the given area to incentivize "delivering more waterbottles" so to speak as the only way to increase the quarterly profit of your lot (versus leaving it relatively undeveloped compared to demand and taking advantage of the resulting supply dearth you've artificially created).
  • fghfhgfhjdjdnd 4y ago
    Rent control reduces supply of housing.
    • asdff 4y ago
      How? All it does is set the rate of rent increase to e.g. 4% a year, it does nothing about the zoning of the lot. For example, people always cite something like someone in greenwich village getting a deal on an apartment, and that is somehow constraining development, while ignoring that the neighborhood of greenwich village is built to over 90% of its zoned capacity, and you cant add very many more units there even if you could get away with renting them for a million dollars a month and had permission to level whatever building was on the lot previously. Plenty of cities actually saw significant downsizing to zoned capcity since the 1960s, when things were certainly more affordable by most accounts. Sometimes by factors of 4 or more fold reductions in zoned capacity when you account for population size. The city of LA itself for example is built to over 90% of its zoned capacity. 2. 1. http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC2009_State_of_New_York_Citys_Capacity_to_Grow.pdf http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC2009_State_of_New_York... 2. https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-with-los-angeles-housing-in-one-graph https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-with...