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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

I don't have analysis but I expect rents and mortgages will just go up by the amount of UBI. The rest of the economy will get scraps.

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So you index the UBI to inflation so that when the capital owners raise prices we just extract more money from them in taxation.

That's just inflation and inequality spiral. You'd need to extract taxes more efficiently from landlords.

My idea for that is progressive property tax.

The more property you own, the higher percentage of its value you pay each year as a tax.

I think additional taxation needs to happen regardless. Right now and a UBI future. We're already in a spiral.

Remove the profit incentive to build, manage, and maintain housing, in the midst of a housing "crisis"?

It's so crazy, it just might work!

The main incentive to build and to maintain should be to have a place to live. Building and buying to rent is cancer of housing.

Also a lot of housing is empty because it's more profitable to keep it empty rather than sell.

It's going to be much more complicated: think of the people that no longer want to work for low wages. That, plus the housing will push the inflation so much that the basic income might no longer be sufficient. And that's just one effect.

So, I have no hopes that UBI can succeed. But to call other forms of support UBI, like the article does to handing out $500 to support a few thousand, is a disgrace. There should be a safety net for poverty, a sufficient minimum wage, and socialized/nationalized health care. Lotteries and other utilitarian approaches from people who would like to call themselves benefactors are ridiculous.

It can succeed if it's introduced along with progressive property tax. The more property you own, the higher percentage of its value you pay each year as a tax.

I don't see how that can stop inflation, or even rent increases. Progressive taxes still leave a positive net income on every extra dollar/euro/whatever you earn. It might spurn property owners to increase the prices even more.

It could help with inflation thorough tanking real estate prices. Housing prices increase is a large part of inflation.

Exactly. I share this opinion, and open to arguments about why it would not happen.

I don't think it'll happen at 100% as long as there's some reasonable form of competition for housing prices to stay somewhat lower. The problem in the US with our markets is that we have horrific situations for markets that lead to collusion, regulatory capture, etc.

How UBI is funded matters more to me than UBI itself so most studies now mostly focus upon allaying the fears of the "but the poors will inefficiently use their UBI" projection / conjecture that is basically not supported by any evidence thus far across the globe. For example, national LVT to fund UBI is nothing like a national VAT. I'm not a silver bullet solution kind of person but LVT along with changes to how we fund and develop infrastructure along with our insane, inefficient transportation policies seems to be a large part of the problem with many cross-cutting concerns into real estate value and therefore rents.

The housing shortages are in strong job markets. If living on UBI is an option, some people will move into lower cost areas where the vacancies are.

Thank you. That makes sense.

I wonder how much the scale would be different from the current remote work, plus at which point (if reached) those lower cost areas would start increasing in price. It is interesting too to think about second order effects of having most UBI and not working people live more in some areas.

Yeah, UBI of a certain amount makes it possible for lower income folks to move further from areas they normally wouldn’t. I saw some poor native person break down the costs of how they wouldn’t need to live near a major metro anymore off of solely $12k / year. Healthcare is important of course but you can’t buy food and shelter with your healthcare unless you go to an emergency room. Hell, I’ve heard stories of some people that will go to emergency rooms and fake some symptoms just to get a bed and a meal. That’s just so damn sad and wildly inefficient uses of systems already overloaded. And really, so many problems in health for poor people come from lack of hope and/or money which BI trials have shown are drastically improved. Long-term I have few doubts that (U)BI will improve health outcomes in aggregate even without any adjustments to the rather shitty US system.

Having a lot of the poor simply leave these metro areas can reduce some demand for lower income housing as well as increase wages for the lower skill jobs of a region - it’s been shown repeatedly throughout the past few years in every country basically and how the stimulus checks didn’t do anything to rents either. When our poor don’t stomp on each other they can get some better market leverage through indirect collective action.

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