With basic income, wouldn't the economy adapt to the fresh money supply and rents and other costs raise to account for it? It would effectivly be additional currency inflation by a different name?
EDIT: Fixed parens
It's basically a way of making sure that people don't starve to death while unemployed, but without having to put any kind of bureaucracy in place.
Not entirely sure the system would work, but it seems more viable than the current efforts ("Let's do X again, but this time we'll call it Y!"). Great article.
If people are working for a combination of extra cash and personal satisfaction (as opposed to "not eating catfood under a bridge"), you could safely eliminate minimum wage and some jobs would probably be priced at close to or near $0. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a bookstore or even library and had to fight my brain telling me to rearrange all the books in the correct order. Given unlimited free time, you'd have to pay someone to stop me.
On the other hand, I'd expect unsatisfying or unpleasant jobs to pay more, since people could fearlessly tell their bosses where to put it.
If I had to guess, though, you'd also have an uptick in part-time jobs, especially the shitty ones. Maybe most people don't want to be a garbage man 5+ days a week, but if the pay is good you might find quite a few people who are willing to be garbage man once a week or once a month.
The problem that BI advocates see with that is that there is much greater overhead in managing a default shelter program, food plan, non-food-non-shelter-necessities-of-life-plan, etc., than just establishing and managing a single universal cash allowance plan.
Also you can always increase BI (and if everybody gets it, that is going to be a fairly popular campaing promise), but people can only eat so much food.
It has a higher overhead even with a much smaller number of people using it, because the overhead is involved in enforcing the conditions which don't exist for unconditional basic income. (That is, the overhead in existing social welfare programs is largely costs expended to prevent people from using them, either at all or in the incorrect amounts for their particular qualifications. A fixed universal unconditional entitlement doesn't have that overhead because it doesn't have that function.)
> Also you can always increase BI (and if everybody gets it, that is going to be a fairly popular campaing promise), but people can only eat so much food.
People can recieve and derive utility from virtually unlimited amounts of food (just like money), even if they can only eat a limited amount, as food is a commodity.
And as much as the point you make about the politics of raising BI is frequently made about any social benefit, I don't think there's much reason to believe its true of BI. There are quite a lot of people who are already aware that benefits have costs (both personal and social), and the people who have the most interest in focussing on the personal cost also have the most resources to bring the social costs to the public eye.
That being said, there's no reason BI levels couldn't be managed by a politically insulated group (something like the Federal Reserve), and plenty of reasons why a legislature might prefer to leave those kinds of decisions to such a body.
Food: who decides who gets what? Vegan options OK? Food allergies? Only organic?
Whenever personal decisions are left to the government, things get bad.
You can go look up economics papers on Google Scholar or SSRN about the benefits of direct payments versus in-kind payments. You might worry that someone will use their direct payment and spend it on hooch, but you can't stop that: if you give them food stamps they will trade that for money and then spend it on hooch.