It seems like roughly the same economics as rent control: if I, as a landlord, own rent controlled units, then I want to make as much money off them as if they were not rent controlled. Unless I can get them reclassified, the only way to do so is to raise the monthly price so that over the course of an average tenancy, the numbers add up to what I could have rented the unit for without rent control. What you end up with is effectively a Ponzi scheme.
On the other hand, let’s run the experiment the other way. We currently have significant numbers of people working with no hope of financial stability in their future. Will taxing them to fill the coffers of the rich improve their situation? Given the current situation of increasing wealth inequality seemingly exacerbating existing problems, I can’t imagine that this is a promising approach.
Since UBI is essentially the most generalized form of a benefits program, I really have to hope that it works. If it doesn’t, that seems damning to other benefits programs which are inefficiently (and IMO ineffectively, due to perverse incentives) means-tested. If it doesn’t, and if anti-UBI is virtually axiomatically a bad idea, then I’m not sure what’s left.
We really do need to be building a lot of stuff, and or fixing stuff we have already done. That work is a direct stimulus, can pay pretty well, and benefits everyone public and private alike. Additionally, the returns from it can pay down all of the expensive bombs and non returned items that we currently spend or have spent on. An example is the interstate highway project. Our current president once the toll that, which is really stupid, but similar kinds of projects will deliver similar kinds of returns. The interstate highway project is still paying us great dividends years and years after it was created. Last figure I knew was 6/8 maybe 10 times the dollar spent.
The post office still getting a lot of bad press right now, is actually exemplary and its performance in return to the public. It is entirely self-funded, doesn't take any tax dollars at all, pays good wages, has a lot of value to the public, and the benefits are worth working there.
Other self-funded public works could work the very same way. Those that use it pay for it, and we all will benefit from the economic development. An example might beat networks, another example might be first line Healthcare, there are many to choose from.
One that I've been thinking about lately is energy. Well distributed public investments in energy of all forms, managed on a higher level through something like a post office, might really pay us off, and deliver a lot of options making energy competitive and well distributed.
The key thing to understanding all of this is government has agency, it's for us, by us, and we need to employ it to our mutual good. Yes, this will compete with Private Industry, but they should be competed with, otherwise they'll accumulate wealth stuff in the bank, and complain about the lack of opportunities to invest and make returns. There's nothing wrong with any of that, but it's a stalemate. One we don't need.
I knocked this out really quick on Google Voice. I apologize in advance if this is a bit of a mess. Hopefully the gist comes through.
I do not mean the current social service programs. I mean new, improved ones, along with Public Works people building things of real value that will deliver real returns for very long periods of time.
A very large UBI could. But there's no way that's ever going to happen.
This is not true. UBI doesn't create money out of nowhere. It redistributes existing money. Poor people can afford more, and rich people can afford less, because taxes increase.
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This might be the unintended consequences of a wage/ price spiral.
First hand experience here that seems to escape the engineering brethren that have never glimpsed into sales: The same exact product is sold to every customer at a different price. Yes sometimes there is a higher demand which might push price a tad but most of the time there is not. I always enjoy when people on HN complain that so-and-so doesn't publish pricing on their website. Of course not, because then they would lower their revenue. It also removes leverage, sometimes it makes sense to sell something at a lower cost today to negotiate some terms, and then down the road either sell at volume or raise the price. Sometimes you just like someone and give them a discount. Oh its the government? Yea raise the price a LOT. etc etc.
This was pitched as an alternative to income taxes, which deincentivie labor and reduce income and thus the ability for people to be self-reliant instead of dependent on charity or government programs, and sales taxes, which fall disproportionately on poorer people who have to spend a larger share of their income on basic needs. Even Milton Friedman, no friend of taxes, thought if George’s Single Tax proposal as “the least worst tax,” because it would (theoretically) have the least depressing effect on economic growth.
Theoretically, your landlord could not raise rents to avoid their tax burden, as the increase in rent would directly correlate with their tax burden.
George also suggested that Single Tax revenues could provide for a UBI, although the size and scope of government was much smaller in 1880.
Speaking as a junior white-collar worker whose only significant capital is held in a retirement account, the idea of a tax on economic rents (and an assumed cut in my income/payroll/sales taxes) is very appealing, far more than a paltry UBI check each month.
How that actually plays out in a market like ours hasn't (can't) been fully tested, but it seems a promising idea.
This is one of the reasons why a local UBI doesn't really work.
If you have a national UBI, people can move. That landlord may try to capture the surplus in California, but with a UBI you can simply move somewhere cheaper.
People in the middle class forget that simply moving is expensive and requires a remarkable amount of cash up front.
However, with a looming jobs crisis, the assumption of being able to go out to earn more remains to be seen.
Just because somebody has an extra 2000 dollars in their pocket every month doesn't mean they can earmark all of that money for rent; they surely have other bills that they need to pay as well. If the apartment was rentable at $X+2000, then why wasn't the landlord renting it at that price before everybody got the extra cash from UBI? Why do you think that somebody would say "Yes, now that I'm getting an extra two thousand dollars a month, my apartment is definitely worth an extra two thousand dollars a month" instead of saying "welp, rent is too high here, guess I'll move to some place else that's charging closer to what I used to pay"?
I'd have a much nicer van down by the river...
But it brings up the point that a UBI will not solve all of our problems. An extra $2000 a month doesn't help you if you don't have medical insurance and get a $500k bill from a terminal disease, for instance.
What a UBI does is removes a lot of bureaucracy around welfare for recurring costs (rent, clothes, food, gas, etc) and it addresses the scaling problem we're having with inequality. It's an imperfect solution, of course, but I haven't heard many other viable (by capitalist standards) options.
Housing is special in that everybody needs to live somewhere, and you can't take it with you anywhere. If I want to work in a certain geographical area, I simply have to live near there as well. The vast majority of the population does not have the option of remote work.
Since landlords know this, they know that if they're not already offering subsidized housing, that their tenants can afford more, so they do the rational thing and raise prices.