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I strongly doubt it will even provide us with a roof over our heads. In an unconstrained market, the pressure to extract as much as possible from the UBI will be enormous. The amount of UBI will probably always lag years behind the actual amount required to create a liveable situation, and increasing its amount will be a constant political struggle.

UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.

Fair and progressive taxation and proper social systems are far more efficient. UBI is just an excuse to get rid of social systems and leave everyone individually stranded with problems no one can solve alone.

This is the most concisely-expressed version of the actual concerns for UBI that I've ever seen, thankyou.

> UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.

How? It’s going to be a better situation than the current situation where people just become homeless and live on the streets. Yes, rent and food will cost more but there will always be vendors willing to make a reasonable margin.

If you're talking about introducing it somewhere where there's currently no social safety net, sure. Where I live if you were to replace the existing safety net with say £1k a month (the level of our state pension, which is widely considered a time bomb of unaffordability), that's like a million instant homeless people.

UBI could be done a lot of different ways, but it's a natural fit with progressive taxes. A UBI funded by taxes makes taxes more progressive. It's somewhat like the standard tax deduction, except you still get it if you don't pay any tax.

It keeps the wolf from the door, but you still need to save enough to retire on.

The US standard tax deduction amounts to about $1300 a month. Suppose that were instead paid out automatically? For the employed, the government check and increased paycheck withholding (if the standard deduction were removed) would largely cancel out. But if you lose your job, you still get the government check.

You could also see this as a reworking of unemployment benefits so that everyone always qualifies for them and they don't run out.

Making a good progressive tax scale is a task which a freshmen can do in a hour. The problem is not a better tax scale, the problem is how to find actual shit to tax. Doing nothing, we have the modern state of economy, when there are poor people having small to no tax basis, then "middle(lol)" class exposing all their assets and funds fully to the tax office and paying maximum taxes on this planet among everyone because of that, and then passing middle class we have people becoming richer and richer but "somehow" paying fewer and fewer taxes, culminating in billionaires who legally have zero assets, zero saving and zero income. You tax tax such a person 5%, or 50% or over 9000%, the end math will always be zero. Good luck funding UBI from taxing billionaires :) . And salaried people actually paying max bracket taxes already can't fund the whole planet by themselves, math is not mathing here.

One thing that might help is closing loopholes around unrealized capital gains. Suppose that, as an alternative to taxing capital gains on its stock, a startup could deposit 20% of issued stock into a sovereign wealth fund? For a company with all its growth ahead of it, this is roughly equivalent and can’t be avoided later (not even with buy, borrow, die) because it’s already been paid. And yet, shareholders would probably find it attractive because they don’t pay the tax themselves.

Taking 1/5 of every startup from the beginning is a great way to get every entrepreneur to found their company in another country.

Let’s say it’s voluntary and it only applies to whichever class of stock you designate, which can be non-voting. You use it for employee stock or to sell stock to investors who want a tax-free investment.

I think investors would pay more for the shares.

If other countries were that friendly to startups, people would already be doing it.

Startups get done in the US because of the network effect: this is where the other startups are, and where the people who fund startups are. It's hard for them all to de-camp at once to a different country, especially since most of the countries they'd want to go to already have higher taxes than the US.

There's probably some limit beyond which people would leave anyway -- presumably, lower than 100%. I don't know if they'd leave over 20%. But I bet you could demand a 5-10% stake, and get many threats but few actual departures.

Yeah there has been a weird belief here for a long time that if something bad happens to us then extremely generous welfare benefits will materialize.

Ask the people who used to work in the auto plants if that's how it goes.

No one will get a dime unless they organize and fight for it. Otherwise things are more likely to go in the other direction, what safety net exists now gets reduced.

American voters are way too resistant against any sort of welfare and/or social assistance; UBI will NEVER get approved here.

Even during the great depression FDR was only able to get work for pay programs approved that assigned jobs like Conservation Corps, Public Works and WPA rather than just handing out cash. And to get that passed we needed widespread bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any/all government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility. There is a widespread false narrative that any sort of government help is leftist socialism and communism.

People on HN throw out UBI like a viable option... lol please. We can't even fund social security, SNAP or paid parental leave. UBI is a non-starter.

I don't understand UBI.

Let's say a burger costs $10. Then UBI is implemented. But not just like $1K/month UBI... $1M/year UBI... for everyone! There's no way that the burger is still $10 now. Right?

Won't the economy just soak up all the extra UBI money? So a burger will cost $1000 in world where everyone gets $1M/year? And like $20 when everyone gets $1K/month? Isn't it all just a wash?

I think of it as closer to $500/month, with supply-side government subsidies of food and housing, and then increasing taxes such that the mean person nets 0$.

Markets have a bid and an ask.

If you have robust supply and real competition, the ask should trend towards cost plus some profit, not whatever maximum price people will pay out of desperation.

what does robust supply and real competition look like when everyone gets a million a year? If everyone makes a million a year, you need a lot more than what we pay today to convince people to come into work. If you want to sell a burger, you have to sell it at a profit. Ergo, you must pay more for a burger if everyone makes a million a year. You have to convince the whole supply chain to keep working. The only way we know how to do that at scale, outside of force, is money.

Now the burger cost goes up, and working people have even more money than "normie" millionaires. I imagine people are going to be more free with their money, so they pay more for the burger. And this will settle, per the law of supply and demand.

That part is obvious.

What is not clear to me is how the new price would work out. Maybe it would work out to pretty much the same relative cost it is today, but in inflated dollars. And the rest of the market is doing the same thing. And landlords know you have the money. The squeeze comes back. Cue Econ 101/102.

This discussion sort of involves magic AI doing a lot of the work. That should be cheap.

Tight control of scarce resources is certainly something that would still be an issue. Hopefully we find ways to solve it with politics instead of violence.

UBI in a world where everyone makes roughly the same amount of money per year would be a wash. You'd just be redistributing money to people in roughly the same percent that is was taxed from them. But we do not live in that world.

And even if it does end up as a complete wash, that still seems like it would lead to a better economic outcome. You'd end up with trickle-up economics. The kind that has incentives for companies to appeal to consumers, and consumers that have money to spend on goods and services.

> The kind that has incentives for companies to appeal to consumers, and consumers that have money to spend on goods and services.

Note that this presumes a functioning market (free or otherwise). The company store knows it is the only game in town, so it doesn't have to appeal to anyone.

I think you're right, and when we talk about UBI it should be expressed in what it can provide not some arbitrary number. Can it provide all required needs (housing, food, transport, entertainment, etc) or not?

Only if the government funds it by printing money. If it's funded with taxes on the rich there's no reason for any inflation.

Not necessarily. The government controls prices, the government assigns _everyone_ some work no matter how meaningless it is; so instead of one street sweeper we would get 10. Everybody is paid just enough to live and have work assigned to not slack (I don't believe in utopia where money is paid for doing nothing because this utopia sounds extremely dystopian). I know just a place where people lived like that for 40-something years - Soviet Union! It wasn't terrible for majority, it wasn't great either. Also, it didn't last that long because it was unsustainable.

Our AI overlords think that they will be able to just prompt their LLMs to optimize this regime and make it last but their stupid LLMs can't yet figure out whether to take a car to the carwash or to go by foot, so they are not even close to that.

What's bad for us is that they are now wealthy enough to keep dragging us into this dystopia for a while until something changes.

A true UBI might be hard to fund today, but it's not inherently hard to fund in principle.

Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x more annual growth in money supply would counter the positive supply shock to keep the purchasing power of a dollar stable; the fact that more dollars would exist would simply reflect the reality of having more stuff to go around.

Whether and how it may be possible to achieve such supply growth, however, is another matter entirely. While I'm personally optimistic about the technological trajectories of AI, solar/fusion, and humanoid robotics, optimizing/liberalizing Western economies and adjusting to a post-labor-scarcity world will both be at best politically turbulent.

The incentive for the wealthy to go along with such policies is that it would be a practical necessity in order to continue selling their stuff. If 90% of the population lacked a survivable income, that wouldn't be a functioning economy, it would be a precursor to civil war. Even so, private corporations won't want to voluntarily employ people they don't need, because that's just a textbook prisoner's dilemma. On the other hand, publicly funding such capital distribution puts the corporations on a level playing field relative to one another while enabling business to continue as usual.

It probably won't be a straight up cash, but something like what Cuba does: Cuba does not have a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Instead, the Cuban government guarantees basic survival through a socialist welfare system, consisting of state-controlled employment, heavily subsidized utilities, free universal healthcare and education, and a monthly ration book (Libreta de Abastecimiento) for basic food items.

For UBI to work, the precondition is Universal Billionaire Income, so it will look something like this when its implemented: The Secretive Conglomerate That Controls Cuba’s Economy: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/16/world/america...

Personally, I'm not entirely opposed to UBI, but what I'd rather see is a system of guaranteed jobs and educational/training stipends (with part-time and/or remote options). The reason for that is primarily fault tolerance: in the event that a major disaster renders our AI/computational infrastructure inoperable (or adversarial), it's imperative that humanity itself act as a redundant store of all the information necessary to preserve or reboot civilization.

That being said, I do think UBI (with some guardrails) is still preferable to making everyone consume services provided exclusively by government monopolies. Not because anything provided by the government in particular is going to be magically low-quality, but because any monopoly is inherently insulated from long-term systemic incentives to compete on price and quality.

My suggestion would be to drive the policy the other way around: whenever there is deflation measured in the previous year, it automatically triggers a UBI "deflation dividend" scaled to create price stability, distributed equally to everyone.

If they've eliminated all the jobs then presumably the economy has the idle productive capacity required to either produce the goods demanded by ubi recipients or produce the (real) capital required

Agreed. 90% of UBI would go to rent and 10% to food. That isn't some kind of artificial demand; people have always needed food and shelter.

As for higher taxes, they're trying to get ahead of the pitchforks.

If we actually had UBI most people would supplement their income with stuff they enjoy doing. There’s going to be a lot of art, music, literature. Human made creative content is always going to cost a premium and people will keep paying for it.

My total tax load is well above 50% if I include employer share he pays for me. That's a on very conservative bottom quartile IT salary. Far far from the USA ones. And then there is VAT which I won't even tray to include. I'm so thrilled to start paying 100%+ tax for OBI (Other's Basic Income) :) .

> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.

And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.

If the rich have control over the communication networks and over highly intelligent AI systems then it follows that they would use that control to prevent the masses from organizing into a cohesive political unit, and keep them fighting amongst each other for scraps.

This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the golden apple to shame.

People will just… form communities and communicate offline?

One might think so, but looking at the trajectory of human communities and communication under current technologies, I'm guessing that it will be a niche-enough phenomenon that the surveillance state (or corporation) will easily be able to crush any IRL dissent.

People are already struggling to form offline communities as easily as was done in the past, I can only imagine it will get harder as more AI-powered entertainment seeps into the cracks of the social mind.

The rich already have control over the government, as exemplified by the fact that it’s impossible to tax them. Amd also over large part of the media (as they own it and are concentrating the outlets). The poor (all of us HN reader) have some control over small to mid sized towns and somehow new york, except where someone wants a data center constructed and the city can’t afford the lawyer to defend against it.

> it follows that they would use that control to prevent the masses from organizing into a cohesive political unit, and keep them fighting amongst each other for scraps

I think the mistake they're going to make is that they already have most of us fighting for scraps

But they want all of us fighting for even smaller scraps

There's always a limit to how far this can be pushed

> There's always a limit

That's true, but the limit isn't fixed, it depends on their ability to keep things under control. AI is poised to increase that ability if we allow it to develop entirely under the control of private interests.

“Figure out”? Pretty sure it’s a solved problem. It’s only social and psychological issues standing in the way. I suppose that’s what you meant.

At _current_ prices. The idea is that labor and energy prices would be close to zero before this would happen. So it wouldn't be that "expensive" to provide basic food, clothes, etc. A lot of goods and services would be automated.

It could perhaps work economically if AI automation also reduces the price of goods. What about automation-backed universal basic necessities? Mass-produced tract housing in the Midwest? Sounds awful but better than spending 90% of income on rent. Bread and circuses; subsidized mobile homes and Netflix.

But it won't work if necessities are captured by special interests, e.g. doctors ban AIs giving any medical info, even if it is technically capable of replacing them, so they can keep their own jobs.

> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.

That sounds very nice. I would finally be able to work full time.

This is also what I was thinking... how did this article get so many upvotes when it has some glaringly weak points?

Made harder by the fact that we make it illegal and hostile to build housing

"It's not illegal, you can still do it if you jump through the mile long list of rules we've come up with to theoretically advance noble goals but in reality they're all like 10% noble goals and 90% driving business to parties we've liked all the years with the end result being massively raising the cost floor and minimum viable development"

-people who've never tried to do anything involving real estate or land development

And then these idiots have the gall to complain "why isn't anyone doing infill development" and "why isn't anyone putting apartment buildings on small lots?" etc, etc. IDK, maybe because your dumb ass made it illegal to do those things in a way that makes them have a snowball's chance in hell of being in the black. And that's just residential. Commercial is even worse because you get fucked by all the rules that apply to structures and then you get fucked again by all the rules that apply to your use. And don't get me started on how much of this is inherited from the feds in the form of "to qualify for grants the state shall adopt..." type rules which the states then roll downhill onto the municipalities. This is why every "new X" site plan looks damn near the same regardless of what state it's in. They're all designed to comply with rules that were written to satisfy the same requirements.