Doesn't UBI equate to lowering the prices for everything? Isn't it more feasible to pursue the latter?
Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around.
With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.
If everyone should have access to water, federalize water utilities and don't charge anyone. You will them have to deal with access rights though. How much water is enough for everyone to have access to? How do we avoid water rights issues even worse than what California has?
Defining certain resources as a fundamental right while still forcing them to operate as a free market is a risky game of chicken. If prices are still able to fluctuate in response to market supply & demand then we really aren't saying we truly believe everyone should have water, shelter, etc. A UBI is only an agreement that some amount of money is a fundamental right, nothing more.
Conveniently, money can be used to acquire resources.
Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
Second, the value, even to the end recipient, of vast majority of education and healthcare is dubious at best. Similarly to the study on which OP is commenting, there was a famous Oregon Medicaid health experiment and the benefits of healthcare services expansion were minimal. Same for education with various headstart initiatives.
That's fair and totally 1000% reasonable. However:
What if (whether through sudden injury or the accumulated injuries of aging) you become utterly unable to work, you've burned through your savings, all your family is dead, and you're an unlikable cunt [0] so those around you are supremely disinclined to provide assistance? Should you be cast out into the wilderness to starve?
What if you were born permanently unable to work and utterly unsympathetic? Should your fate be to die of exposure?
[0] I cannot stress hard enough that if you think I'm making comment about your character, please do remember that I absolutely am not. I don't know shit about you, so I cannot comment on your character. However, injury, illness, and prolonged bad periods can absolutely turn someone into an unlikable cunt... driving away a predicated-on-tolerability material-and-emotional support network just when one needs it most.
UBI is welfare.
You aren't, individually, but shouldn't we, collectively?
A government that governs a nation is arguably responsible for every human in it.
Does the mob respect property rights?
If a citizen cannot get access to those needs (and remember - 5% unemployment is optimal), then why would anyone expect them to keep following their country' laws, and not steal and murder?
People don't need the heavy hand of governments and laws to stop them from stealing and murdering, as if that is the base state for all humans. If there were no laws, would you move right on to both of those acts?
In absence of police-like force enforcing rules, crime happens often, so people naturally create police-like forces like neighbourhood watches to prevent crime.
Countries, laws and governments aren't un-natural - they're just more complex and powerful versions of institutions that naturally appear in any organized group of people.
If you were in a tribe whose hunters were hoarding meat for their fat sons, would you starve to death to avoid stealing because stealing is wrong?
How so? Wouldn't that, at the very least, solve homelessness?
Do you expect them to respect your right to have those things? IMO, your line of thought leads to violent revolution.
One of the goals of UBI, as I interpret it, is to reduce the cost of living closer to zero.
And that's the literal cost of living - not the macroeconomist's use of the term. That phrase, once you contemplate it, is a ludicrous reflection of how our society has gone wrong.
Why should it cost to live?
(You can consider the answer in terms of > 11kya anthropology, or in terms of our current, advanced food production capabilities + other technologies - take your pick.)
Because that's how life works. With sufficient energy input into a system, the system can sustain complexity. Sun -> single-celled life -> plants -> animals. The food chain is an economy of energy. Money is a proxy for many different kinds of energy. It will never be cost-free to live, not for single-celled life, not for us.
A Universal Basic Income absent substantial other changes in our economy, would be a disaster because we no longer have a closed economy. It would simply flow out to other nations. UBI + open borders + bureaucratic dictatorship sends us right back into serfdom...
There used to be restrictions on the number of serfs allowed for a single geography, because the lord was expected to provide for them (schools and hospitals... etc.). We're replacing an oligarch with a bureaucracy which is just a transitive oligarchy as the bureaucracies ultimately get captured (Big Tech, Big Oil, Big you-name-it). All good intentions erode over time to neglect and malice, especially in systems where nepotism and dynasty rule instead of merit.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."
You're right, it does tend toward medieval when the serfs have less agency than the landed gentry.
>Why should it cost to live?
We would have to get out our slide rules, or maybe go back to them ;)
Well if previous generations productively built the richest country because of the most widespread opportunity (without taxing income) in historical times, and prevailed handily like no other when challenged by financially devastating world-wide conflict, with plenty of time to invest the surplus wisely and let it appreciate, you would expect by now everybody would be able to coast, but Nooo . . .
The government dropped the ball and it was already big enough to take away everything you had.
In complete defiance of what all those generations had in mind for us now, and everything every American had ever worked for.
That's why the cost of living is not lower, if not zero, or even negative, if only slightly better choices would have been made. Compounded over all this time !! And that's with only better stewardship of the percentage taken out of laborers' pay once that got going, without even considering the wealth of the citizens that had been built up before the quest for revenue did a 180 and turned on internal targets.
First, no UBI proponents are suggesting that it be
a) combined with a bureaucratic dictatorship, and
b) implemented absent significant concurrent social and financial changes.
Your phrasing makes me think you're based in the USA, and so I can understand some of the societal norms that might have led you to believe we can't have a better quality of life, a better society, simply because amoeba have to hunt their prey to survive.
We -- intelligent life forms with breathtakingly advanced technologies (compared to what we would need to just live) -- can do much better.
But also, not it's not more feasible either. One is the government taxing money and distributing it by law, the other is a deep and complete intervention on the economy in ways that people don't even can't predict completely.
Even considering an alternative to UBI like forcing all prices lower, i.e. price deflation, requires first taking that assumption as true.
The government never could allow prices to lower anyway though. Price deflation would make our national debt that much worse.
UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove.
Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.
Such a program is way too complex to model out and reliably predict what the impact will be. We simply don't know how much UBI is the "right" amount for specific outcomes, and we definitely don't know what the impact will be on any subset of the economy.
According to the OP author, we can't even test UBI programs before a full rollout. If we can't reliably model or predict the outcome, and we can test it, how are we supposed to actually implement it?
As to being impossible to model, there’s a great number of countries in the world eventually one will likely try the experiment on its entire economy without impacting 99.9% of the global population.
That said, you can turn individual safety nets into UBI lockstep with changing the tax code and see what happens. The fear is people would spend ‘food’ money on drugs, or people in subsidized housing would move, or all the things which created these programs instead of handing out cash. That’s a political question not an economic one, are we trying to act as a parent or do we want people to have freedom to make their own choices.
Someone will try it, totally agree there. I don't see any problem with that either, countries should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. I wouldn't tell France they shouldn't try it, but I am absolutely saying I don't want to try it here in the US.
I’m saying social safety nets are already wealth redistribution. Changing the form of that safety net to UBI is an allocation of resources based on individual decisions and thus free markets where Food Stamps/Housing Subsidies/etc is allocating money based on bureaucratic decisions.
Basically nothing says UBI needs to cost more than existing social safety nets.
That said, my argument against a UBI isn't even that it's too expensive. Anyone claiming that a UBI will be too expensive is falling into the same trap those arguing for a UBI fall into. The impact when making such a massive change to our social and economic system is impossible to accurately model and predict. The OP author actually seems to agree with this by pointing out that a UBI program can't be tested. Oddly, though, the author's solution to that is to YOLO a UBI program into our entire country without being able to understand what the likely impacts will be.
At least for single people how SNAP sunsets with income is almost 1:1 with the discount for the lowest tax bracket.
Thus changing SNAP to a low UBI could have almost zero impact.
SNAP for a single person is $291/month - total income * 0.3 so they get nothing at 11,640 per year of annual income and 291$/month at 0$ annual income.
2024 income brackets for single people are: 10% $0 to $11,600, 12% $11,600 to $47,150, 22% $47,151 to $100,525, ... Maximum tax bracket is 37%.
Hand everyone 260$ per month, but change things so the highest tax bracket 37% applies $0 to $11,600 and everyone making 12,000+$/ year sees zero change in their take home pay. And people making 0$/year get 260$/month.
Those numbers aren’t quite identical, but it’s surprising how close it ends up. At 30%, $0 to $11,640 it’s off by less than 1$/year.
If so, how is that universal? Or a basic income covering some of the basic resources UBI is argued to cover, like shelter or food?
UBI means everyone has an income of at least x$/year. If you’re making more than x$/year in take home pay that’s an income > x$/year.
Behind the scenes the advantage of the government handing out money every month is redundancy. Even if that same amount is normally removed from a paycheck, people aren’t suddenly left with 0$ if their paycheck bounces etc. Thus a single deposit of $10,000 per month is slightly worse than a deposit of $10,000 - $x and an independent deposit of $x.
With limits so low I'm not totally sure how it would make a meaningful difference compared to the various welfare and entitlement programs we have today in the US. We already have multiple programs attempting to give needs-based funding to the public. How is such a limited UBI as you describe it any different, or different enough to justify the massive political battle it would entail?
Proponents suggest bring more programs into a single UBI could significantly lower operating costs. A single check each month could replace some or all of: Housing assistance, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), including Pass through Child Support, General Assistance (GA), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), etc.
Healthcare in the US is similarly split across Medicaid, Medicare, VA benefits, ACA health insurance subsidies, Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), plus a host of things you haven’t heard of like Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program. There’s a massive opportunity for cost savings by simply reducing administrative redundancy.
WIC and the CA are great examples. The population helped by both programs is purposefully smaller than the total population. If the funds currently spent only on mothers or veterans is spread across everyone it seems reasonable that efficiencies of moving to a single program wouldn't make up for the increased number of beneficiaries.
For a government to build and maintain a UBI program they will have to be able to predict where prices will be and how much money everyone needs or deserves to cover the basics. Assuming the country runs on a fiat currency and partskes in monetary policies meant to control the cost of money, a UBI adds another complex layer onto that puzzle making it even more challenging to predict and control markets.
I'd be particularly interested how you would see a program on the scale of a UBI working sustainably if the government can't predict the outcomes. Or, alternstively, if you think the government can predivt the outcomes I'd be curious if you disagree with the OP author that a UBI can't be tested before a full rollout.