- Effect on crime
- Effect on drug addiction
- Effect on family outcomes
- Effect on education opportunities
I'd gladly pay more taxes if I could draw a direct link between UBI and a safer, happier society.
Currently it sounds like a blood from a stone situation: no one has any money, so requiring the park to install a sanitation system would simply cause it to file bankruptcy, likely with no change of any kind.
What you're describing is a special case of the exact sort of inflation that critics are afraid of (more money for tenants across the board just means more money that rentiers can extract).
If the argument is "we could use tax money (via a stipend to citizens, and then extracted as rent) to implement a law that required a trailer park to provide a functioning sewage system", then the easiest and most efficient way to do that would be use tax money to provide a functioning sewage system.
That's assuming the only objective was to fix trailor park sewage, when realistically there are thousands or maybe tens of thousands of similar problems that different populations. The federal government simply doesn't have the resources and logistical capabilities, to identify and address each need in turn. If they tried lots of needs would end up overlooked. So instead you provide the UBI and let the money get directed to the most pressing need.
We already made the assumption that they do, with the original claim " If every member of the park was getting some form of basic income, the state could require the trailer park to install a septic system".
Without that requirement, you're taking on the risk that the rentiers will extract the additional income and make no changes to the sewage system. That assumes a few things:
(1) The trailer park owners don't currently have the money to building a sewage system
(2) The lack of money is the only reason that the owners aren't building a sewage system
(3) The owners don't have other goals that they prioritize higher than providing a sewage system to tenants
(4) The amount that the rentiers would be able to extract from the stipend would be enough to cover a sewage system
I'm generally pretty sympathetic to the premise that allowing rational actors to choose how to spend their limited resources tends to produce results that ~everyone agrees are better than top-down planned efforts. But when you're talking about a situation in which the negotiating leverage of the two parties is so drastically imbalanced, and a problem which has such wide-reaching externalities as this one does, that's a really big leap of faith to take. Compare that to the alternative, where we've identified a concrete problem that we're looking to solve, and we use a normal process for budgeting and directing funds towards a targeted goal.
That said, you make a good point that landlords (in many cases) extract as much "value" from their tenants as they possibly can. If they knew each tenant was getting a fixed amount of additional income we could expect them to increase rents by approximately that amount and that would be bad.
My example was optimistic in that it presumed this would not be the case. I do think my basic idea is sound: if people had a basic income of a certain amount, then we could expect systems supporting those people to improve (to some degree) by a portion of that amount.
This sounds like something in between where there's a law requiring an increase in quality. I expect that wouldn't be necessary. People with (a little) more money have more options and can vote with their feet by moving to a better trailer park.
If, today, the trailer park owner is not required to provide adequate sanitation (which strikes me as heinous btw), why would UBI change that? Either the state couldn't care less or their are laws that are being flouted. Either way, it's not clear why a change in distribution methodology would change either.
The bit of your argument that I completely agree would occur is that the trailer park owner will charge the renters more. That's pretty much a given. Whether or not the renters will receive anything for that rent change is likely to be an orthogonal question.
My concern with UBI isn't that it won't work. It's that it's a right winger's wet dream.
I mean, imagine. With a great fanfare of fairness, we give everyone $x00/month. Dismantle all the means tested benefits for pensioners, disabled etc. Then watch as successive governments either ratchet it up or ratchet it down depending on their persuasion and the state of the economy. And as a target for when things get tight, it's a bloody big one.
The only really meaningful change from the status quo would be that the the truly disadvantaged would get royally stiffed.
Everyone gets an extra $1000/month. Great. That's extra money flowing into an economy which absolutely affects supply/demand for the things everyone needs (food, shelter). Food might be fine because there's a lot of competition, but landlords? Rental prices are almost completely set by market demand, not cost of service.
Its possible UBI could help sidestep this by allowing more people to purchase homes, but housing supply is constrained in many urban areas today; adding more capital to that market will increase prices. Granted, this isn't as bad a thing as money entering the renter markets, because that money just goes to build more developments and eat up more land that could be owned by people to build equity instead of corporations. But its still something to keep in mind.
Take a look at social security to see how this plays out. Why do you think so many retirees move to Florida?
No, it's not, in most proposals, since it's funded by a combination of new taxes and displacing other spending programs.
If you fund it by printing money, sure, it's new money, but that's not what is usually proposed with UBI.
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.
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.
There have been some studies, and from my recollection the takeaway is that most people, once their basic needs are met, strive to actually do something "useful". People on average do not become drug-addled sloths.
For many reasons it is difficult to do a comprehensive, long term study on this idea. The first, of course, is the cost. People or organizations with the money to spend on research tend to be motivated by profit, and thus far we've been taught (incorrectly, I would argue) that giving things away doesn't result in having more for yourself.
Because it's a huge change to society and it might have unexpected consequences. I feel this way, even being on the pro BI side.
GDP isn't everything. I can't say it better than Kennedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY