UBI has a lot of practical problems. Why not start at universal health care or wider affordability of affordable housing and education? Without that any UBI will immediately be eaten up by rising prices in these areas.
Of course, your concern is still totally valid if UBI will indeed be pointless without the other problems solved. I just wanted to point out how easy it is to say "start with universal health care and affordability of housing and education". That's a huge thing to "start with", and in fact we're already deep into the fight for them.
As opposed to socialized healthcare, which has a long track record and a variety of implementations in every industrialized nation to use as inspiration? We would literally just have to expand programs that we already have (such as the VA or Medicare/Medicaid) to start. Healthcare free at the point of service also takes no effort to explain - the "Medicare For All" marketing is actually designed to explain how easy it would be to implement.
If you can't solve these issues, UBI simply can't work. It's basically a distraction from urgent problems that should and could be solved now but may cost money. Considering that UBI is often pushed by billionaires I wonder if that's the secret plan.
It's easy to throw one or two economic terms around, but its a lot more complicated than 'people have more money == prices rise'.
In a free market there's no way to distinguish 'UBI money' from any other kind. Try jacking your price up - somebody else will have a sale and eat your lunch.
Economics is complicated. Playing dot-to-dot across the space with cherry-picked examples is not very useful.
Not in housing, not in health care and not in education. In other sectors, yes.
Now they may be over-regulated and broken; no argument there.
He alluded to how those systems being over-regulated and broken prevent the usual economic factors from working. E.g. if you don't allow people to build new houses in certain places then that makes it quite easy for housing prices to go up in those areas
For what it's worth, of all of these solutions, UBI is the one that requires the least overhead, by far. Housing requires actually building houses. Education means making broad structural changes to many different levels of the whole system
UBI, as it has been mainstreamed, is literally just playing a trick within the money/accounting/tax system to lift people out of poverty. This will have a positive spill-over effect into other stuff
Not even. But it's not worth arguing about this, it's basic macro and if s/he doesn't want to educate themselves, that's up to them.
Try foundational macroeconomic principle. But it wouldn't even get that far, the Fed would just raise rates to offset the would-be increase in aggregate demand.
I believe in markets with scarce goods and no alternatives this is the case. In healthcare you have no alternatives. And as long as housing supply is short, you have no alternatives there either. So people end up paying whatever is being asked for.
In other markets more money won’t raise prices because the purchase is optional and there are competing alternatives.
More people enter and participate in markets, which makes markets work better.
Markets behave better with more participants than with fewer participants. UBI is a net positive on this point.
What would really happen is that the Fed would raise rates, which would increase the barrier to market participation and we would be back to where we started.
Mental health & physical health are problems easier solved with money.
Most major cities have rent control of some sort, if not, it's not that hard to start new towns with nation wide UBI. There are other places in this country other than SF, LA and NY
Facing reality without cherry-picking problems the rich create while ignoring the problems the poor create would undermine his ability to people please the poor and get elected.
It's all bullshit - I don't know how many Obamas and Yangs it'll take for people to realize that there is no benevolent politician that can make the problems of the poor go away without having the poor change their ways, the same way there is no trainer that can make you get in shape without you working your ass off.
UBI or not - smart/creative people would rather not live among or deal with self destructive, dangerous dummies. Self destructive, dangerous dummies are being very actively replaced by robots who don't have the downsides of human beings.
The only bargaining chip the dummies have, is that they are still necessary for the infrastructure to function. This power will be eroded away, until one day, the dummies' only argument will be that of a street beggar - won't you spare some change? And the smart/creative class will throw some change their way, they'll call it UBI.