Hello, I’m not that informed about UBI, but here is my arguement:
Everyone gets some sort of income, but wouldn’t companies just subside the income by raising their prices? Also, do you believe capatilism can co-exist with UBI?
While I’d prefer to fully dismantle the whole capitalist system, I can accept UBI as the most realistic compromise we’re likely to get in our lifetimes.
I’d be happy to see our kids get it in their lifetime - I lost hope to see it myself with how backwards my country is
I’m a fan of UB I+S. Universal basic income AND universal basic services. Plus
highthigh taxes for the rich. And workplace democracy. And a massive shift of the economy to the nonprofit sector: if what yourcompanymultimillion corporation is providing is a utility, you can’t have making a profit be your fiduciary responsibility.Basically, fuck capitalism, I want socialism.
Exactly this. Beware of the Silicon Valley tech bros selling their version of UBI. It’s a Trojan horse they want to use to cut all social services.
Though i dont disagree in theory, beware of the utility part you mentioned. A plumber is providing a service and im not sure why he shouldnt make a small profit on top of his ubi in that world of yours. Can you elaborate?
I’m thinking more of the “commanding heights of the economy”, rather than small time professionals. So, I’m talking Amazon, Google, Walmart, that stuff.
I know what you meant, and i dont disagree with the core of it really. Just really think about your wording, as it hits more people than youd think :)
Got it. I edited for clarity.
In my mind, a UBI would replace a lot of welfare and retirement programs and would absorb much of their budget. What would we need the whole food stamps system for if we guarantee everyone an income? What would we need social security for if you have your Universal Basic Income?
Since it’s universal, we can do away with all those systems we have to make sure you “deserve” it. We can eliminate entire data centers, close entire offices. Those people (mostly office worker accountant types) can go work in some other part of the government like school systems, the FDA, the FAA, something that actually helps make society go. That should free up some budget.
Do an actual goddamn audit of the Pentagon, if we find some bullshit pet projects we don’t actually need costing taxpayers billions of dollars we bust a general down to recruit and find or invent a way for him to die for his country.
Capitalism may not be able to survive alongside a UBI but I think a largely free market economy can. I’ll always have my housing and food needs bet but I’d like to have an Xbox so I’ll go get a job to get money to pay for one.
Oh no, I can already hear the whining about “but (insert type of person the speaker doesn’t like) don’t deserrrrve an income!” If we can outvote the bootstrappers and rugged individualists, we can see this thing happen.
No, I don’t support UBI, but I support UBS - Universal basic services. Food, housing, water, education, etc should be free at a basic level. Basic level for housing for example will be ‘Housing First’ concept in Finland.
I’d be in favor of both. Universal services and some income.
A little bit of basic income would allow some flexibility just in case there’s something that UBS doesn’t cover on an individual level.
UBI that’s big enough to cover housing, food, clothing, education, etc would almost certainly get abused and exploited in every way possible to not be used on housing, food, clothing, and education…
I agree, and I think the best service we have but is being overshadowed by Amazon is the US Post service. It really needs a push to modernize.
I also think instead of UBI, anything that is a basic need will be taxed based on a progressive schedule instead of a flat percentage. That way if they try to make it more expensive then it will be taxed too much to be viable. We need to combat this inflation and make it so that a lower priced item is more profitable!
Trying to distort the market so that lower priced items are more profitable is quite challenging to do without unintended consequences. A progressive consumption tax would definitely be a worthy experiment
Only concept/idea that offers this benefit rn is just having a healthy competitive market that sees companies not form into a monolopy or structured in a way that allows for each one to set prices to higher amounts because everyone else is doing it. looking at how Intel is struggling rn to stay relevant and they are entering the GPU market with some very competitive mid range options that outperform Nvidia and AMD on common consumer tasks, while still offering their own blend of AI cores for new tasks that we will likely start having in the coming future. All this and Intel is offering these mid-range cards at 60% of the cost to the closest competition. While I enjoy seeing this, I am annoyed this is the only way we can see prices lower. We really need to come together as a community and push prices to more reasonable levels.
Inflation is insane right now and it is mainly what is annoying me the most about people thinking UBI would even help prevent it from being irrelevant once companies realize they can just charge more for the same identical/marginally improved product. I see the floor for prices steadily increase and UBI will just cause it to rise up to the point that the UBI benefit is worthless as the purchasing power is decreased to the point of a single dollar being worth less than what a penny used to be.
do you believe capatilism can co-exist with UBI?
UBI might be the only thing that can save capitalism.
Your theory about companies raising prices to offset UBI is actually undercut by historical and present evidence.
There was a time when the United States had welfare. The United States still has food stamps. But nobody is seriously pretending that these things did or do drive up grocery prices.
Similarly, over time various states have raised minimum wage, and if your argument were accurate, then the prices in those states would have immediately risen to match minimum wage, but they didn’t.
In other words, you’re repeating a conservative talking point that has been repeatedly debunked by reality. I think you could try to improve your argument by arguing that inflation happens across the board, to everything, and therefore it would also happen to UBI. But what we’ve actually seen is that’s not true.
The only counter to this argument I’ve seen play out in real time (at least to the best of my knowledge, it could be propaganda) is the fact that when the government offered tax credits for EVs, Ford raised the prices of their EVs to essentially absorb the tax credit and profit off of what was supposed to benefit the people making the switch.
I’ll see if I can find the article I’m remembering.
I think that’s a difference between subsidizing specific things vs subsidizing all the things.
So you’re saying just by sheer volume they would be less likely to do it?
Not so much volume, but just the different options available. Example, if food is subsidized, then food vendors can increase prices to soak up the excess. But if people just get money, and food vendors try to soak it up, people can spend their money on building a greenhouse and growing their own vegetables. If every industry tries to raise prices, at some point it becomes worthwhile for people to do things themselves, then trade with each other, undercutting the larger industries. Basically, the libertarians’ wet dream could actually happen with UBI.
my country has started a program a few years ago that gives a lot of money to couples that produce children, primarily to be able to afford buying a house. it has contributed to many problems, from convenience marriage, to parents literally not caring for their children, but maybe the worst of all is that it has raised property prices by the exact amount of aid received for producing 2-3 children.
Thank you for this argument. I had found that mentally I was getting trapped in this line of thinking about UBI.
My way around in my mental way if thinking it was Universal Basic Medicine, Universal Basic Food, Universal Basic Housing, and so on. That way, if some jackass landlord decided to raise rent too high, you’re not homeless. Also, in my ideal world, the health insurance industry should be “taken out”.
I am on principle because what the fuck is the point of all this industrialisation and technology development if we aren’t trying to break out of the cycle of scarcity?
As for how it can be properly funded: fuck knows.
Companies will raise their prices (to “what the market can bear”), but they will never be able to raise prices enough to offset the positive effects of UBI. It’s not like your internet bill is going to go up by $2000/month if they suddenly know you’re getting $2000/month in UBI. Your typical person makes purchases from dozens of different companies. An increase of “what the market can bear” won’t be all that much.
And afterward, the effective purchasing power of the vast majority of people will have increased - most noticeably for those who currently have nothing / very little. Least noticeably for those who are reasonably well off already. And for those who are currently doing extremely well off, their purchasing power will end up dropping.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about and I made all numbers in this message up.
Everyone gets some sort of income, but wouldn’t companies just subside the income by raising their prices?
As someone planning on starting a B2B company, I don’t see a problem with that. If companies make a ton of money, tax companies more and redistribute again. The curve can be made to fit.
But there’s a bigger reason for doing UBI: It’s cheaper and more effective than existing welfare. And more people will like it.
I support UBI.
But then we should also change the way job contracts work. Because currently, “work” is mostly considered to be some 40 hour stressful thing.
Yes-ish. While there are some good results from small scale tests, I’d argue that the effect it’d have on a macro level isn’t fully understood. I’m all for testing it out large scale so we can get some reliable data there as well. And if it turns out that it doesn’t result in inflation or corpos eating up the extra, then I’m all for it.
Yes… BUT I’d actually encourage people to consider an even better alternative, which is Universal Basic Services.
As you point out, giving people money is no guarantee that their spending power will be enough to cover their needs. I’ve heard it said that any UBI which is sufficient is unaffordable, and any that is affordable is insufficient. I think it’s still a policy we should experiment with, and I think even a small UBI could elevate poverty. But a more effective alternative is to try and provide essentials directly, free of cost.
What this looks like is publicly owned housing; a robust, fully-funded public education system that includes pre-K and higher ed; universal healthcare; and free food. Some of these – like housing and food – sound shocking and difficult, but to an earlier generation, so would the others. And we already have some of these programs for the very poor. The key to executing them is to bypass markets. Markets will always raise the cost of essentials because the demand is unlimited. Instead of paying private landlords for housing, the state or non-profit entities need to own the homes. There will still be costs associated with maintenance, but there need be no dividends or investor profits. Same with food. We might not be able to make everything in a grocery store free. But if you have well-run local gardens, they’ll actually produce a substantial amount of food that you can just put in baskets by the entrance and let people take from.
Unlike UBIs, which are inherently inflationary, UBS programs are deflationary. By offering free goods they create competition against market prices and make the stuff people still pay for (with a UBI) cheaper.
If you’d like to see how all of this works, go check out the tabletop RPG my friends developed at c/fullyautomatedrpg, or the world guide for the setting at https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/resources.
better alternative, which is Universal Basic Services.
Absolutely 100% worse. It creates an empire bureaucracy to distribute the subpar services under the same scarcity as subsidized housing today. 10 year+ wait in Toronto and other major cities, btw.
Cash means you can choose affordable housing that meets your needs, while balancing budget for food or other interests. Government cheese may not be as necessary to you compared to milk and eggs, or “better cheese”. Housing is especially corrupt and inadequate to subsidized distribution. You need to add income/asset conditionality on who can qualify even if almost everyone would like to get the discount. Its a great recipe to create ghetto neighbourhoods that a politician may wish to make worse in order to oppress the ghetto harder. You can’t escape the ghetto because you’ve got a cheap housing option. It makes other housing more expensive because “good neighbourhoods” have a premium when there are bad neighbourhoods.
UBS is everything that is wrong with our society, one step forward.
What this looks like is publicly owned housing; a robust, fully-funded public education system that includes pre-K and higher ed; universal healthcare
While universal healthcare is a proven cost saver, the other’s don’t need to be centralized/governmentalized. While the government/private sector can both build “soviet” style affordable housing, they can do so in a market system that provides affordable housing, while still providing a reasonable private profit margin, or government break even.
Education costs can be market based, when you give each family a stipend they can use for education. Only desperation would force you to send your child to a coal mine instead of school, but parents could choose to adequately feed their children and spend less on home school, with computers and online learning, then force a child that doesn’t want to be in school into a public institution. Baltimore/DC school districts spend $30k per pupil, largely to make a school to prison pipeline with excessive security needed to control kids who don’t want to be there.
UBI instead of UBS also means hope for young students who will be able to afford university if they are qualified, or otherwise afford surviving outside of a criminal gang support structure.
The issues that you’re pointing out are reasonable concerns, but I think you’re falling into a common mental pitfall that assumes that the implimentation must resemble the most similar past approach, while also decrying the irrationality of using those unsuccessful methods.
It doesn’t need to look like government cheese. It doesn’t need to look like “the projects”. All of those programs had systemic flaws that were specific, observable bad public policies.
Universal housing can look like the government acquiring existing apartments from disinterested landlords that are out of compliance and then granting them on a $1 lease in perpetuity to local neighborhood coops so long as they maintain it well. Universal food can look like mandates for grocery stores to provide non-profit collectives unfettered access to discarded items that are still perfectly edible instead of locking up dumpsters full of food that can feed people.
You can have a UBI too. I’m not shitting on the idea. But as you already pointed out, single payer healthcare is a great demonstration most people don’t even argue with. Implement a UBI, but where options exist for direct services, provide them and you won’t need nearly as large a UBI, and you can cut out tons of waste.
Free public transit is another great example. Do you want to have to include bus fare in the UBI? Or would it just make sense to make the buses and trains fare-free.
The university & school examples seem silly. Why give people a voucher instead of just reimbursing all accredited schools directly and let folks enroll anywhere without having to manage a budget? Just make them tuition free. Otherwise, you have to make a UBI large enough to pay all the administrators that exist just to process payments, and manage the size of vouchers… The UBI would go so much further if folks didn’t have to pay for things that don’t need market guidance at all. So many unnecessary middle-men.
UBIs make sense when you want to benefit from market guidance. They’re great for that, but for lots of things everyone uses or where consumer selection mechanics break down, there are tons of ways to make them free at the point of use. Is management and corruption a potential problem? Yes… regardless of which system you implement. So you might as well use the best tool for the given need and learn to do it well.
Universal housing can look like the government acquiring existing apartments from disinterested landlords that are out of compliance and then granting them on a $1 lease in perpetuity to local neighborhood coops so long as they maintain it well.
Not a complete fan, except that fines so large as the remedy is confiscation can be appropriate. No need to give away the confiscated property, though UBI would allow for tenant managed coops offering a fair bid. I’d rather see soviet style housing meant to provide a return for the builder, but affordable. UBI means there are no projects with “exclusive access” being for the troubled.
Universal food can look like mandates for grocery stores to provide non-profit collectives unfettered access to discarded items that are still perfectly edible instead of locking up dumpsters full of food that can feed people.
UBI is better. Nothing stopping grocery stores from taking advantage of non-profit collectives, compared to usual for profit alternatives. It’s in their interest to provide food quality/value.
Free public transit is another great example. Do you want to have to include bus fare in the UBI? Or would it just make sense to make the buses and trains fare-free.
Free public transit offers denser transit schedules, traffic reduction, better value for work and “touristy” outings. UBI solving homelessness helps avoid turning a “cheap shelter” into a “free shelter” for “undesirables” that may make transit uncomfortable to others.
Why give people a voucher instead of just reimbursing all accredited schools directly and let folks enroll anywhere without having to manage a budget?
Before university grades, you don’t need accredited schools as much as accredited testing. Internet/multimedia (30 years old revolution) has expanded education alternatives. Cash instead of vouchers. Spend as much as you want on education.
http://www.naturalfinance.net/2015/05/slashing-public-education-can-provide.html
Just make them tuition free.
For University grades, it is rationed, and there is a minimum aptitude level required to gain from the experience. Would Harvard be allowed to exist alongside a public tuition free abundant system? I support subsidizing post secondary education similar to Canada (maybe outdated) where a summer job could pay for tuition and books. UBI, though, is plenty to afford university dorm + tuition lifestyle, but perhaps, if you can get into Harvard, you might prefer additional student loans if you consider the education worth the tuition price. The magic of UBI, is that you get to consider the overall value of education instead of “student program” scams on the young and foolish.
To avoid an endless debate, I propose we agree that UBI is a good thing that we should test in more circumstances, and programs to provide more things free of cost (which do allow UBIs to achieve more spending power per dollar) are worth testing.
If such programs perform poorly in a trial, then it’s good that we tested them. And if some perform better than you expect, it’s also good that we tested them.
We need to test UBI the same way we need to test the abolition of slavery. It’s a delay to implementation, and some people wouldn’t like it.
I was talking about trials of universal services.
I gotta tell you: if you want to be the spokesperson for a movement, you need to learn how to build goodwill. You’re coming off as combative and needlessly hostile when I’m trying to find common ground.
At first, maybe. But that’s the neat thing about capitalism and the free market: the first to lower their prices again has a huge advantage. There’s always an incentive to operate at minimal profit.
Why wouldn’t UBI and capitalism be able to coexist? It makes MORE capitalism possible, as it were, expanding its principles of supply and demand to fields such as employment. Right now, people need a job, any job, and if there’s no job that fulfills your needs, tough - you take the shitty one and you’ll like it. With a UBI, you could shop around for the perfect job, choosing the best offer, or not “buy” at all right now because the market doesn’t offer what you want and it’s not like you’re going to starve without a job. Employers would be forced to make YOU an offer that YOU can accept and if they can’t operate under these circumstance, tough. Capitalism in a nutshell, really.
It makes MORE capitalism possible, as it were, expanding its principles of supply and demand to fields such as employment.
A better way to word this is that it makes the labour market free and fair. conditioning healthcare and starvation on employment is oppressive.
True, I just wanted to phrase it in the terms of capitalism.
UBI is the only solution to our corrupt politics. It disempowers the state and empowers individuals. You can stop relying on promises from fake heroes to help the poor, and completely eliminate poverty and crime.
AI and robotics is often cited as a catalyst for UBI. But it is deeply connected to political corruption. Our asshats will tell you that tech oligarchy deserves all our money, and nationalism means our weapons, oil oligarchs need to be given the rest of our money, and what little US manufacturing there is, needs to be protected so that you pay through the nose for stuff. All of this is BS. Let robotics/AI/China deliver us cheap stuff, and UBI afford not only to buy the cheap stuff, but let us have our time freed up in order to design/sell even more productively made stuff/tech that can improve the lives of those who will pay us for it.
UBI does not stop the rich from getting richer. It grows economy significantly, and all money trickles up to the rich. UBI does disempower the rich from stealing your money, through war and war posturing. AI, without UBI, needs to be weaponized as national security that includes the same media disinformation on your tolerance for warmongering empire that makes you/us poorer.
Every disgusting demonic evil inflicted on Americans by politicians is entirely the result of oppression and fearmongering to support unethical evil out of fear of homelessness, and healthcare access. You cannot support a sustainable world if society is on the verge of collapse and there is some war you idiotically are made to tolerate. Misery gives you no time to cure your stupidity. UBI frees us all into doing something useful instead desperately clinging to a job that does not produce anything worthwhile or competitive. 5 recruiter calls per day offering you a better job cures your stupidity.
UBI doesn’t mean everybody has more money. It comes from somewhere.
The poor will have more, the rich will have less, the middle will have about the same.
One of those three does not want UBI to be a thing, and they’re trying to convince the other two.
