Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.
UBI can change that by making it feasible for underemployed people to live in those cheaper areas. If there's no economic reason (good for society) to have them work at all, then there's no economic reason for them to live in the scarce housing in the economically most active areas - and they will revitalize the cheaper areas by bringing their spending there.
Markets work best when lightly regulated, when there's corrective action to smooth out the ups and downs of overshoot and collapse tendencies. Something I see lacking is the will to ensure sufficient supply so that demand can have choice, instead of captivity and vulnerability.
If UBI transfer payments are paid out of a consumption or income tax, then landholders and mortgage companies will simply be able to charge all residents higher rent. If residents experience an increase in housing costs associated with savings which must be put away for purchases, rent, and mortgage payments that is in proportion to the increase income they receive via UBI, then UBI will not have made them better off. UBI will only have redistributed money from workers and entrepreneurs to landholders and banks invested in mortgages.
Under a land value tax, landholders cannot charge higher rent due to an increase in land values brought on by public spending on public services. If they want to increase their profits, they have to invest in real property improvements, such as by expanding the stock of available housing. If UBI is paid out of taxes on labor rather than taxes on land, they will be able to charge higher rent.
It seems like a viable contribution to the discussion.
Detroit or Baltimore are pretty affordable already, and some counties will give away free land if one agrees to settle there.
That did not seem to spur much economic development.
UBI would mean that the underemployed people could move to Detroit if they wanted to. That would effect a transfer of money towards Detroit - as money would be taxed elsewhere, flow through these people and get spent in Detroit, spurring economic development.
Widespread remote work could achieve a similar result, having people live and spend in Detroit but earn money elsewhere; but currently it is not widespread and so doesn't make a meaningful impact.
Healthcare, yeah, that also needs addressing, regardless of the UBI decisions.
And there's plenty of housing, just not really in places that are convenient to jobs. If you didn't need a job, that becomes less of a problem. So giving people enough money for a secure housing and food situation--somewhere, anywhere--strictly decreases suffering.
However, the reason UBI works is because it allows people to spend their life doing things that are valuable but wouldn't make a living wage.
The US is incredibly sparsely populated, there would be billions of residents if we were as dense as Western Europe.
We do have limited supply of housing in artificially low dense cities that have good jobs, but that's politics and not economics.
I'll give you housing though. One of the reasons housing is expensive, though, is because it is closely tied to job opportunities.
There isn't some sinister cabal of teachers, that restricts supply, for the purposes of keeping their wages high. There isn't a grotesque system of receipts payable, and the user not paying the real price of service, and hidden, unitemizable fees at my local high school (Two of those do, however, start appearing when you go to university.)
There is more then enough education to go around. The problem is that it's not evenly distributed. I'm not talking about sending every kid to Harvard, here.
Healthcare certainly has people restricting its supply, but also has the exact same problem. We have the budgets for it, we have the doctors, and nurses to provide it - but we don't provide it very evenly.
Public spending on infrastructure and services raises land values, as parks, police, and fire departments make locations more attractive to live in. This subsidizes landholders and allows them to charge higher rent whenever these services are paid for by a tax on labor rather than a tax on land.
With a land value tax, landholders have to privately invest in improving the private property on their land, such as expanding the supply of housing units, in order to increase their profits. Without a land value tax, landholders can earn greater rent and profit without actually privately investing in improving their property. They simply have to lobby for higher public spending paid for via taxes on income or consumption and then they can raise rents without competing to improve their supply.
This sounds like how the property tax works today.
At municipal level, where a property tax bill is comprised of (a) land value, (b) improvements and (c) special assessments, which are voter-approved voluntary taxes to pay for things such as new tram line or a pump for the water district.
The land value periodically gets reassessed to account for improvements, public services, and general real estate prices in the area.
How does your system differ from the property tax status quo?
There would be no sales, earnings, payroll, income, excise, personal property, tariffs,state, or federal taxes for residents. Residents in land tax counties would only pay the single land value tax to the county assessor. The county would then pay negotatiated state taxes on behalf of its residents, and ideally the state would also pay negotiated federal taxes on behalf of its counties.
What tax rate are you proposing will genenerate $5.3 Trillion off of taxing the rich?
They already do http://www.oshpd.ca.gov/Chargemaster/
> ban insurance companies
So lose the negotiating advantage and be forced to haggle on prices on a case-by-case basis?
Private healthcare is extremely expensive.
So that "somehow" already has a known solution.
The net result is that you don't need to fund UBI payments for nearly the entire population.
If UBI is funded via taxes on labor and capital rather than taxes on land, it will subsidize landowners and banks and allow them to charge higher rent and make more from mortgages. If the price which a family pays for shelter, rent, and mortagages increases in proportion to the rate which their income increases from UBI, then will not actually be any wealthier.
Society will actually be much poorer, as we would be redistributing money from productive workers and entrepreneurs to unproductive landholders and lenders who were able to capture the increased public spending through higher land prices and rent.
I could see a future where people use UBI to bootstrap an education. Move to a low cost of living area, take some online courses and work on some projects. Once they have built up a small portfolio, attempt to re-enter the workforce etc...