The kicker? This person herself was on welfare! In her mind, she doesn’t do drugs, so she is morally right in demanding others who do, don’t get any help from government - no matter how small the percentage is. And no matter the cost. Most people (including myself) have very little idea about basic economics.
We need to change our attitude towards work, towards helping others etc. somehow it is drilled into our heads that working insane hours is holy. In my opinion, working more than 35 hours per week solely for money is just plain stupid. While sustainability is the biggest question with ideas like UBI, people’s attitude towards work is also a huge hurdle
People are going to spend money in ways you don't approve of. Period, it is part of life. I truly believe that we, as a society, shouldn't let that take away something that can help a bunch of people.
Free public transport is the tragedy of the commons in inverse. Free roads mean public transport can barely compete against cars. The convenience of a car simply cannot be compared to a bus but the real question is, why is it so cheap to drive yourself? Shouldn't it be far more expensive? If people abuse free public transport that is actually a good thing.
>For example, what would be stopping land lords from hiking rent prices?
Nothing, nobody guarantees that you get to live in the most expensive locations on earth. Please move to a place where your UBI is enough instead of trying to drag down the most productive members of society (indicated by their ability to pay high rents) and by productive I just mean economically (nobody gets to tell how to live your life), which means they are the source of the UBI income in the first place so it is in your best interest to make sure they succeed.
>And what would happen to addicts who use their UBI to buy drugs instead of food and shelter?
They will rob less stores and houses to fund their drugs.
Yearly taxes on my car are higher than a yearly public transport pass, yet I still have a car. Public transport could be free, they could even pay me for each trip and I would still have a car, simply because my car takes me to places/times that public transport doesn't.
I'm all for public transport, and I use it regularly, but it is not a complete replacement for a car. In fact if you make it free people might even use the savings to buy a bigger car.
Exactly the same things that are stopping/not stopping them now?
UBI won't magically make everybody non-poor, no matter how you tweak the numbers. But it creates a gentle slope where everything means-tested creates harsh cut-offs full of bad incentives. It prevents many things (even if not all things) that make up the trap-like nature of poverty.
In this case (UBI) literally everybody knows 100% that you have more money than before.
This argument doesn't seem specific to UBI, but could be raised towards giving anybody money for anything.
Maybe some landlords would initially raise prices, but presumably competition or alternative housing options would push the prices down again.
If you do then, considering the overall cost of actual UBI, the claim that this saves on bureaucracy is like claiming that spending 100 to save 1 (both on a recurring basis to make it worse) is sensible since it saves 1. This 1 in potential savings is simply irrelevant (and in reality would be replaced by another bureaucracy anyway) because it is dwarfed by the overall additional cost. Or, what you call 'UBI' is just a single benefit to replace a number of existing benefits, like the UK did with "universal credit".
Also having gotten clued into modern monetary theory from The Deficit Myth lately I’ve come to question all the hand-wringing about cost. If the government can just print however much money it costs to pay out a UBI, then it’s more about controlling inflation with a significant increase in deficit spending, not about if a (monetarily independent) state can “afford” it. Taxes may be a part of that to drain money from the general supply and incentivize work, but it’s not necessary to pay for it.
I think everyone agrees that if we all got infinite amounts of free stuff that would be great. Failing that, finite amount of free stuff is good. There are good reasons that despite that we have a pay-as-you-use economy.
People keep trying to come up with financial perpetual motion machines where everyone gets lots of free stuff. Much like perpetual motion machines, there are broad principles the limit what is possible - people on average just don't do things if there isn't a reward for doing it, and we need people to first produce the stuff before it can be given away.
There are grave questions about whether a UBI can be simultaneously effective (ie, a meaningful amount of money) and also sustainable (ie, not catastrophically dis-incentivise working). It may be possible to do both at once, but that is really the only aspect of the debate worth talking about - otherwise it is a bit of a no brainier for everyone to get free stuff.
Now there's nothing wrong with that, but someone still has to work for the UBI to work.
As always the first question is: Why do you mean by UBI? It seems that everyone has their own idea.
If that means a benefit to ensure everyone has a minimum income to buy basic things then this is nothing new and exists in most Western European countries. In that case 'UBI' is just a new term for an old thing used purely within the US political debate (perhaps to avoid stating that this is what those 'socialist' Europeans have, I don't know).
On the other hand if UBI means what it is supposed to mean, i.e. "is a theoretical governmental public program for a periodic payment delivered to all citizens of a given population without a means test or work requirement" [1] then you can immediately see that the main issue is indeed feasibility and sustainability because unconditionally giving a meaningful amount of money to every person in a country is extremely expensive and the money still has to come from somewhere.
There isn't any negative emotion associated with free stuff. Free stuff is great.
The issue is that there is pretty solid social ... I don't want to say understanding, perhaps suspicion is the right word ... that giving out free stuff hasn't ever worked well.
So the political faction that likes the idea of free stuff comes up with a reason that this scheme will work - trying very hard to come up with a framework where people get to consume stuff without necessarily having to do the work to produce an equivalent amount of stuff.
Much like a perpetual motion scheme, the system gets more complicated to the point where eventually nobody can explain why this specific system can't work ... but there is a core relationship here that needs to be broken, and the debate needs to centre around whether it has been broken this time. It cannot be hand-waved away. The enormous costs associated with a UBI are an important factor and there are questions about whether it can be sustained long term.
If you want a higher income gap between those working and those not working, you can make the income tax negative at the bottom.
Having gotten clued into modern monetary theory from The Deficit Myth lately I’ve come to question all the hand-wringing about cost. If the government can just print however much money it costs to pay out a UBI, then it’s more about controlling inflation with a significant increase in deficit spending, not about if a (monetarily independent) state can “afford” it. Taxes may be a part of that to drain money from the general supply and incentivize work, but it’s not necessary to pay for it.
Your point seems rather close to:
* There would be high spending
* There would be high taxes
* The high taxes and the high spending would be linked
Those three things link together into paying for the spending with taxes. "Controlling inflation" is a series of measures that have all the properties of taxes, it is just a euphemism. Much like how the term is "quantitative easing" rather than the more easily followed "money creation".
It's a pretty distinct issue from redistribution.
On that level MMT isn't particularly troubling to me. The thing I don't like about it is when the proponents start implicitly talking about having politicians directly control the money supply. The status quo has the Fed - which ultimately is a creature of congress but there's at least a bit of inertia for congress to enact its will and the Fed has room to do things outside of that will.
Imagine we build self-sustained machines capable of producing and distributing enough food for twice the Earth's population. Does it still make sense for people to have to PAY for their food?
As a reminder, many of our ancestors gathered fruits that grew on trees or hunted animals -- they did not need to PAY anyone for food.
The idea of paying for food makes sense in a world where food is scarce and great effort is required to produce it. As the difficulty in producing in volume decreases, so should this artificial price we put on it.
We still don't have such food-producing machines. But that's a direction in which we're going, and we should shape our society with this kind of thing in mind.
But putting even all that aside, I disagree that payment isn’t necessary in a world of abundance. It’s not just a means of rationing limited supplies; a main point of capitalism is to incentivize people to do things (well) in the first place, and to coordinate action between different actors in society that may not be communicating with one another. Prices do that. I don’t think we as a society have worked it out how to coordinate and incentivize labor if payment isn’t part of the process.
It's also a funding nightmare, not because of inflation or free stuff or dis-incentivising working, it's because the sheer amount of money would rival the GDP but the vast majority of people will just get most of it taxed away so that it has a net zero effect.
If you are going to throw around money it would make more sense to just give people meaningful employment and if nobody employs these people they can get a temporary job from the government. After all, a minimum wage is completely worthless if you can't get a job because of it.
The purpose of minimum wage is (or ought to be) to ensure that no one who is working is unable to afford the necessities of life.
UBI establishes that floor without requiring a job, which inverts the meaning of the phrase "every wage is a living wage".
Therefore, UBI can eliminate the need for a minimum wage. In practice, transactional costs establish a floor below which it is impractical to pay for work (even piecework, ala MTurk), and UBI establishes a (probably higher) floor below which people won't put up with crap jobs, but both of those are probably lower than minimum wage.
It's also telling how the opposition against UBI formed (largely driven by one of his advisors). The argument were framed largely around lazyness, i.e. people become lazy. A significant motivation for the opposition is that some of the studies found that divorces increased (likely because women didn't feel tied to a relationship because of financial dependencies), which was ideologically incompatible with conservatives.
Another interesting point is that similar arguments to the "UBI is paying for itself" is used by conservatives when it comes to tax breaks. They are always assumed to pay for themselves because of increased economic activity. Both of these are likely wrong (well actually the tax one has been shown to be wrong many times).
But government benefits for poor people are not about providing poor people with the ability to live, it's about controling them - be it company towns or church poor-houses which gave free housing but banned people from say drinking or dancing, to a healthcare system which bans people from leaving their job because they won't get healthcare.
(Government benefits for rich people of course are completely different)