To an audience that _does_ speak theoretical CS, your sprinkling in of its terminology weakens whatever point you're trying to make and comes off instead as silly and pretentious.
If you base UBI on cost of living, and cost of living depends on UBI, then you find yourself in a feedback loop. My use of turing complete was not really accurate, but it was the context my mind was in when writing this comment.
I make mistakes and sometimes speak unclearly. No need to be pedantic.
The main flaw, to me, is the 1:1 correspondence you draw between the magnitude of UBI-style benefits and cost of living. That may be true (at least under some simplified/idealized econ101 assumptions) if UBI was the sole source of money in the economy, but that's obviously not the case. The crux of the "UBI doesn't cause spiraling inflation" argument is that UBI accounts for a sufficiently small fraction of total incomes that its benefit (greater spending power for lower incomes, and the downstream economic benefits of that spending) outweighs its nonzero but noncrippling inflationary effect.
That is, though the $10 cash benefit you describe may of course increase COL, it does so by some amount between $0 and $10 that is influenced by all sorts of factors you're glossing over.
It just seems obvious to me that if you increase everyone's income by $10, price of goods will go up by $10.
> The crux of the "UBI doesn't cause spiraling inflation" argument is that UBI accounts for a sufficiently small fraction of total incomes that its benefit (greater spending power for lower incomes, and the downstream economic benefits of that spending) outweighs its nonzero but noncrippling inflationary effect.
How could you have greater spending power if we agree that UBI's inflationary effect is proportional to its amount. The moment you give the money out, the spending power goes down.
In my view, this will just lead to the rich getting richer, because companies end up providing the services people will pay money for, and these profits go into the pockets of the rich, who don't really need the money for life necessities, so instead use it as capital.
The poor are no better off and are incentivized to spend the money because of inflationary effects (saving the money results in it having less spending power when they want to sell it), while the rich have no incentive to spend the money since they're already wealthy.
> That is, though the $10 cash benefit you describe may of course increase COL, it does so by some amount between $0 and $10 that is influenced by all sorts of factors you're glossing over.
Can you identify, name, and explain those factors. You accuse me of 'glossing over' some factors in my 'simple' explanation, while you yourself do not identify any of the factors that supposedly would not cause COL to increase.
I'm not on here to argue with people and it seems you have some sort of ideological bone to pick, so this is going to be my last reply. All the best
If UBI is too hard to figure out, what's the alternative? more government housing? medicare for all? What's the least complicated way to ensure everyone gets housing, food, and healthcare?
All of them would, because with extra money, there would be more demand for these goods and services, but the supply of the good itself hasn't increased. Thus, companies will charge more. In sum, the total increase in charge will be $10.
If they do, how come? They shouldn't unless everyone gets UBI, it's black and white...right?
The fact is it won't go up, because it'll increase opportunities... there's a lot of alternatives lately to normal housing like land co-ops with tiny houses, yurts, etc... Pool 100k in resources, by some land and you can build a earth bag home that's pretty awesome for under 10k.
It's economical, ecological, and very well insulated.
In addition you are using turing complete in a completely nonsensical way as nobody is using cost of living to compute with.
Based on what you are saying any economic change would be completely unpredictable and the entire human race would be paralyzed by the decision on how to price a Taco. In reality we muddle through while making general predictions about the effects of our actions and reassessing as we go.
And yet, emergent behavior does indeed compute the cost of living. When the emergent behavior itself is based on a stat that itself is based on the cost of living, the emergent behavior will never converge.
> Based on what you are saying any economic change would be completely unpredictable and the entire human race would be paralyzed by the decision on how to price a Taco. In reality we muddle through while making general predictions about the effects of our actions and reassessing as we go.
No. I'm saying that if you raise UBI by $10, then the price of tacos go up by $10, so basing UBI on cost of living is non-sensical because it's a recursive loop.
> Why would it be by magic exactly correlated with the exact figure provided by UBI.
Because if everyone has $10 extra to spend, then there will be more demand for the same number of goods, so sellers will raise their prices. This is not just 'goods' either. There will be more demand for financial assets like stocks, and more importantly, foreign currencies. With the higher demand for foreign currency, it would take more dollars to buy pounds (for example), which means the dollar would lose value relatively. In other words, the dollar will be undergoing inflation.