UBI is pointless so long as there are landlords who can jack up rent. It is essentially a landlord subsidy, and it does nothing to address actual contradictions within capitalism.
The landlord problem is indeed a problem, but UBI isn’t mean to address that specific flaw in society, it doesn’t mean we can’t do it until we fix everything, it just means that certain landlords will get to enjoy an additional subsidy for a little while.
My landlord is a billionaire in Vegas, he owns thousands of properties, and you cannot convince me he contributes to any of them, only that you have brain damage or no connection to reality.
Fair point. But also it needles at capitalist pug fuckers to compare their bullshit to standard USSR bullshit, even if in this specific category the USSR was just completely fucking better.
I feel like its dead and gone and never cared about truth, so using it to piss off capitalists by making it sound even worse than it was (but still better than them) is the best memorial it could ask for.
parasitic grifter middle man exploiting everyone who needs it.
Giving someone who can’t buy a house, the ability to purchase a place to live without doing so, is exploitation? It’s literally just adding an option that person wouldn’t have otherwise, lmao.
The main question is if the rental price is less than the mortgage. I just recently experienced that a few months back when I was started looking for a house. The cost to rent it monthly was in some cases 3-400$ more than what the bank would have offered me for a mortgage. So my options were between trying to get a loan to get a house via mortgage and have something of value at the end of my loan. Or rent for equal or more expensive, get zero value back and have to deal with a middle man for every thing that ever goes wrong with the house fight that person every length of the way for any changes to the house. I think it’s obvious what my choice is going to be.
I’m thankfully in one of the better cases though, my family in Florida tells me about how it’s getting to the point where you can’t buy property there anymore, it’s all been purchased by people/buisness for use as Airbnb or rent out has a dedicated residence, which makes it extremely difficult for any of their kids to go out on their own because anything that’s decent has been taken and anything that remains is areas you would not want to live in. Their HOA is in the process of banning the practice thankfully but it’s apperently an issue.
Firmly believe that housing should be a “is this your primary residence? If not are you there at least once every 6 months?” and if you can’t answer yes to either of those questions it should be forced to be sold on the market. Remove the damn middleman from the equations.
A functioning social network will cover the rents. Still, this makes controlling rents even more important as otherwise the social network will become non viable or even a way of redistributing public wealth to said landlords.
Do you expect landlords en masse to change their ways based on isolated experiments? Why would the ramifications of UBI be felt in isolated environments?
“Yes, should the economic system in place stay exactly the same - UBI is great! Now let’s go ahead and give everyone UBI and ensure that the economic system does not stay exactly the same.”
Edit: hopefully my point is clear. You cannot expect landlords to adapt to UBI in any other way.
I think its main function is to redistribute wealth from taxes on the rich and to decrease the wealth gap. So it would fundamentally alter the dynamics of the economy.
I know, that’s my point, which means that landlords will adapt in response to the surplus of cash. Unless something is done to prevent it, the landlords will absolutely adapt with the shifting economy. The bottom line is the same: you need someplace to live, they want your money.
What’s the impact on mobility though of lower socioeconomic people?
Suddenly you have hundreds of millions of people who don’t need to be in economic centres for work and can move wherever they want without affecting their income.
I’m making the point to the person I was replying to as I’m not sure they had considered that if people move locations that would affect rental prices meaning that landlords would be limited in how much they could charge for rent.
Has there been a case of UBI being tested at large scale yet, ie. everyone in a given city or province getting it? If you know that literally everyone who lives where you’re renting a property has suddenly been given $1,000-$2,000 more a month, it’s a lot easier to pull off raising rents across the board and knowing you won’t just have mass evictions compared to a test situation where you have a relatively small number of individuals throughout the community being given the same amount.
Out of all those linked, only the programs in Namibia and Iran actually seem to apply to everyone in the designated area. Even then, I don’t think the folks in the Namibian village are really worried about paying rent for their shanty town shacks, from the way it’s portrayed in the cited article. I don’t know enough about Iran to comment there. That aside, the remaining examples are pretty limited in their scope and mostly target poor people.
Recivitas has been running a privately funded basic income for a small, impoverished rural community in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil for three years now. Recivitas was founded and is run by Bruna Augusto Pereira and Marcus Vinicius Brancaglione. The project pays 30 Brazilian Reias (about US$15) per month to people in the community of Quatinga Velho, Sao Paulo, Brazil. This amount of money sounds very small to people from industrialized countries, but it has a large impact in a rural area of Brazil.
Sounds impressive, but not so much when you actually look it up to see only 67 people were getting paid under the program. Even less impressive when you consider Quatinga as a district has a population of 3,762 people, and the whole district consists of the town of Quantiga and two smaller settlements.
Mincome likewise wasn’t universal, just targeting lower-income residents in the test sites.
The remaining cases more or less list out their restrictions on the page you linked to.
It’s a significant for would-be scummy landlords. If everyone in the UK were to start receiving an unconditional £1,000/month, or everyone in the state of New Jersey gets $1,600/month, landlords would know that everyone has the money to pay if they raise the rent to cover the majority of this payment. If it’s only poor people getting it, this becomes harder to be able to pull off and not just wind up with vacant units. Especially when you’re talking about miniscule payments like R$ 30. Even in the sticks in Brazil, that’s not putting a real dent in anyone’s rent. Granted, it’s not apples to oranges, but R$ 30 in São Paulo gets you a plain hamburger. Like, it doesn’t even get you halfway to buying a pizza.
Yes, I am familiar with price elasticity. Are you familiar with the last several decades of parasitic behavior from landlords and the real estate industry? Everyone needs a place to live, and unless there are regulations put in place to limit their anti-social behavior, these group would certainly do their best to bleed us dry of as much as they could if they knew everyone suddenly had increased income. We aren’t building housing at anywhere near the rate we need to, especially housing that would be affordable to the working class. They know they have us over a barrel for this in many ways, and will abuse us in every way they can without running afoul of legal repercussions.
also employees don’t need to have a shitty job to survive.
Now people have to decide between “doing a shitty job” and “starving”. With UBI people can choose between “doing a shitty job” and “chilling at home”. So if employers want their shitty job to be done, they will actually have to make it worth it (either by increasinge wages, or by making the job less shitty).
in other words: good jobs will get subsidized by UBI. Shitty jobs will compete with UBI
There may be some holes I’m not seeing in your logic, but at face value, there’s no fat in that argument and I would vote for that policy, or something close to it.
It’s also important to note that there are plenty of valuable jobs that simply aren’t getting done because there’s no economic incentive for it. I could definitely see someone on UBI making it their “job” to generally help out poor pensioners in their neighbourhood, just as one example.
Basically, everything falling under the banner of volunteer work could be done full time, if people are passionate enough about it.
Yes. Except UBI is a collective systematic improvement subsidizing everyone, including employers, while tipping is an individual act that keeps wages depressed and subsidizes employers only.
The difference with tips is, to be paid tips depends on having a job at a waiter, and that is what makes tips effectively a subsidy; the value accrues to and is ultimately under the control of the business owner, even if they are never the ones holding the money. The draw of a restaurant job is wages+tips, and therefore the labor is paid for with tips.
With a UBI, the whole idea is that the payment does not depend on or have anything to do with employment status. If your job pays terribly and you want to quit, having a UBI makes quitting more attractive and plausible, not less.
How? If the employee isn’t forced to work or starve or be on the streets, they can tell the shitty paying employers to get fucked. If you have no employees who want to work for your offered wage, you either raise your wage, go out of business, or have a closed shop with a No OnE wAnTs To WoRk sign on the door.
If you have basic universal income, all products and especially rent becomes more expensive overnight so still not much of a safely net. Increase UBI to keep trend with the prices and you have some serious inflation.
No, it’s a valid concern that MUST be addressed by any UBI plan. If it is ONLY giving people money, there is quite literally NOTHING STOPPING THEM from making the extra income moot.
The fact you do not understand that is fucking pathetic. They’re not saying the plan is useless. They’re saying the plain, basic concept has some blind spots that would have to be addressed in any legislation. You CANNOT “simply give people money” to fix the economy. Period. Ever.
So you can insult and call me pathetic all you want. It doesn’t really help your argument.
How do you address the fact that every other time someone has claimed the same thing about any systemic economic change ruining the economy they have been proven wrong?
[Edit]Oh I didn’t read usernames before replying. I should know better than to expect anything other than insults and boring old tropes from you.
Boo. I am in favour of UBI but I would like to disavow this line of reasoning. “You must be wrong because people like you have been wrong in the past” is just ad hominem with extra steps.
No one has been proven wrong about anarchy because it has quite literally never existed in recorded history. Holy fuck your confidance in ignorance truly is pathetic.
I only say the basics because you goons still don’t understand the basics.
Something that I find odd about this argument is that you’re supposing an increase in prices will subtract from income to counter out the UBI, but it can only divide if you think about it. So it still has a levelling effect.
If we have a social safety net, Universal Basic Income, then we can finally eliminate the need for a minimum wage.
UBI is pointless so long as there are landlords who can jack up rent. It is essentially a landlord subsidy, and it does nothing to address actual contradictions within capitalism.
The landlord problem is indeed a problem, but UBI isn’t mean to address that specific flaw in society, it doesn’t mean we can’t do it until we fix everything, it just means that certain landlords will get to enjoy an additional subsidy for a little while.
I would argue that killing all the landlords requires nothing else, abd we just need to execute in the right order
Landlords needed to die anyway though. Basic pre-req for human dignity and flourishing.
lol, y’all are too much.
Nah. Rent should be free
Nobody needs to grift out a cut.
My landlord is a billionaire in Vegas, he owns thousands of properties, and you cannot convince me he contributes to any of them, only that you have brain damage or no connection to reality.
This deserves no reply beyond “lmao”
Sure, everything needs a parasitic grifter middle man exploiting everyone who needs it.
I forgot we live in the fucking USSR.
Funny that you’re using this as an insult when home ownership is one of the few things the USSR unmistakably did better than the west.
Fair point. But also it needles at capitalist pug fuckers to compare their bullshit to standard USSR bullshit, even if in this specific category the USSR was just completely fucking better.
I feel like its dead and gone and never cared about truth, so using it to piss off capitalists by making it sound even worse than it was (but still better than them) is the best memorial it could ask for.
Giving someone who can’t buy a house, the ability to purchase a place to live without doing so, is exploitation? It’s literally just adding an option that person wouldn’t have otherwise, lmao.
The main question is if the rental price is less than the mortgage. I just recently experienced that a few months back when I was started looking for a house. The cost to rent it monthly was in some cases 3-400$ more than what the bank would have offered me for a mortgage. So my options were between trying to get a loan to get a house via mortgage and have something of value at the end of my loan. Or rent for equal or more expensive, get zero value back and have to deal with a middle man for every thing that ever goes wrong with the house fight that person every length of the way for any changes to the house. I think it’s obvious what my choice is going to be.
I’m thankfully in one of the better cases though, my family in Florida tells me about how it’s getting to the point where you can’t buy property there anymore, it’s all been purchased by people/buisness for use as Airbnb or rent out has a dedicated residence, which makes it extremely difficult for any of their kids to go out on their own because anything that’s decent has been taken and anything that remains is areas you would not want to live in. Their HOA is in the process of banning the practice thankfully but it’s apperently an issue.
Firmly believe that housing should be a “is this your primary residence? If not are you there at least once every 6 months?” and if you can’t answer yes to either of those questions it should be forced to be sold on the market. Remove the damn middleman from the equations.
No. Its taking a cut of that option. Why does everything have to be fucking owned?
A functioning social network will cover the rents. Still, this makes controlling rents even more important as otherwise the social network will become non viable or even a way of redistributing public wealth to said landlords.
Fuck that, abolish rent.
It’s important to have smart goals.
Bottom feeder moment.
It’s worked pretty good in most experiments.
Do you expect landlords en masse to change their ways based on isolated experiments? Why would the ramifications of UBI be felt in isolated environments?
“Yes, should the economic system in place stay exactly the same - UBI is great! Now let’s go ahead and give everyone UBI and ensure that the economic system does not stay exactly the same.”
Edit: hopefully my point is clear. You cannot expect landlords to adapt to UBI in any other way.
I think its main function is to redistribute wealth from taxes on the rich and to decrease the wealth gap. So it would fundamentally alter the dynamics of the economy.
I know, that’s my point, which means that landlords will adapt in response to the surplus of cash. Unless something is done to prevent it, the landlords will absolutely adapt with the shifting economy. The bottom line is the same: you need someplace to live, they want your money.
What’s the impact on mobility though of lower socioeconomic people?
Suddenly you have hundreds of millions of people who don’t need to be in economic centres for work and can move wherever they want without affecting their income.
And this is a problem, because…???
It’s not a problem to me.
I’m making the point to the person I was replying to as I’m not sure they had considered that if people move locations that would affect rental prices meaning that landlords would be limited in how much they could charge for rent.
Oh. Got it!
In places where UBI has been tested, this effect has been extremely minor.
My hypothesis as to why: supply and demand for rental space are both somewhat elastic.
Has there been a case of UBI being tested at large scale yet, ie. everyone in a given city or province getting it? If you know that literally everyone who lives where you’re renting a property has suddenly been given $1,000-$2,000 more a month, it’s a lot easier to pull off raising rents across the board and knowing you won’t just have mass evictions compared to a test situation where you have a relatively small number of individuals throughout the community being given the same amount.
Yes, on a city/province level. Are you familiar with elasticity as it pertains to supply and demand curves?
Out of all those linked, only the programs in Namibia and Iran actually seem to apply to everyone in the designated area. Even then, I don’t think the folks in the Namibian village are really worried about paying rent for their shanty town shacks, from the way it’s portrayed in the cited article. I don’t know enough about Iran to comment there. That aside, the remaining examples are pretty limited in their scope and mostly target poor people.
Sounds impressive, but not so much when you actually look it up to see only 67 people were getting paid under the program. Even less impressive when you consider Quatinga as a district has a population of 3,762 people, and the whole district consists of the town of Quantiga and two smaller settlements.
Mincome likewise wasn’t universal, just targeting lower-income residents in the test sites.
The remaining cases more or less list out their restrictions on the page you linked to.
It’s a significant for would-be scummy landlords. If everyone in the UK were to start receiving an unconditional £1,000/month, or everyone in the state of New Jersey gets $1,600/month, landlords would know that everyone has the money to pay if they raise the rent to cover the majority of this payment. If it’s only poor people getting it, this becomes harder to be able to pull off and not just wind up with vacant units. Especially when you’re talking about miniscule payments like R$ 30. Even in the sticks in Brazil, that’s not putting a real dent in anyone’s rent. Granted, it’s not apples to oranges, but R$ 30 in São Paulo gets you a plain hamburger. Like, it doesn’t even get you halfway to buying a pizza.
Yes, I am familiar with price elasticity. Are you familiar with the last several decades of parasitic behavior from landlords and the real estate industry? Everyone needs a place to live, and unless there are regulations put in place to limit their anti-social behavior, these group would certainly do their best to bleed us dry of as much as they could if they knew everyone suddenly had increased income. We aren’t building housing at anywhere near the rate we need to, especially housing that would be affordable to the working class. They know they have us over a barrel for this in many ways, and will abuse us in every way they can without running afoul of legal repercussions.
zzz
yes.
also employees don’t need to have a shitty job to survive.
Now people have to decide between “doing a shitty job” and “starving”. With UBI people can choose between “doing a shitty job” and “chilling at home”. So if employers want their shitty job to be done, they will actually have to make it worth it (either by increasinge wages, or by making the job less shitty).
in other words: good jobs will get subsidized by UBI. Shitty jobs will compete with UBI
There may be some holes I’m not seeing in your logic, but at face value, there’s no fat in that argument and I would vote for that policy, or something close to it.
It’s also important to note that there are plenty of valuable jobs that simply aren’t getting done because there’s no economic incentive for it. I could definitely see someone on UBI making it their “job” to generally help out poor pensioners in their neighbourhood, just as one example.
Basically, everything falling under the banner of volunteer work could be done full time, if people are passionate enough about it.
Yes. Except UBI is a collective systematic improvement subsidizing everyone, including employers, while tipping is an individual act that keeps wages depressed and subsidizes employers only.
The difference with tips is, to be paid tips depends on having a job at a waiter, and that is what makes tips effectively a subsidy; the value accrues to and is ultimately under the control of the business owner, even if they are never the ones holding the money. The draw of a restaurant job is wages+tips, and therefore the labor is paid for with tips.
With a UBI, the whole idea is that the payment does not depend on or have anything to do with employment status. If your job pays terribly and you want to quit, having a UBI makes quitting more attractive and plausible, not less.
How? If the employee isn’t forced to work or starve or be on the streets, they can tell the shitty paying employers to get fucked. If you have no employees who want to work for your offered wage, you either raise your wage, go out of business, or have a closed shop with a No OnE wAnTs To WoRk sign on the door.
Or Walmart is subsidized by the current programs?
Of course they are.
Any employee that receives foodstamps or any other form of welfare is a subsidy that Walmart is, in a way, receiving.
Put another way, if Walmart were paying a fair wage, the employee wouldn’t need or even be eligible for welfare programs.
Even better – the employees end up spending most of their paycheck and benefit dollars…at Walmart.
Like tipping culture but the govt funds the tipa
Minimum wage is intended to guarantee workers have a livable income. If everyone already has a livable income, why would we need minimum wage?
But think of how many businesses profit off the poor!!
If you have basic universal income, all products and especially rent becomes more expensive overnight so still not much of a safely net. Increase UBI to keep trend with the prices and you have some serious inflation.
This is the same tired argument that’s been used by the wealth hoarding class since like the 1800s. The facts don’t support it.
8 hour work days will kill the economy - nope
5 day work week will kill the economy - nope
Minimum wage will kill the economy - nope
<Insert the same argument for UBI> - nope
No, it’s a valid concern that MUST be addressed by any UBI plan. If it is ONLY giving people money, there is quite literally NOTHING STOPPING THEM from making the extra income moot.
The fact you do not understand that is fucking pathetic. They’re not saying the plan is useless. They’re saying the plain, basic concept has some blind spots that would have to be addressed in any legislation. You CANNOT “simply give people money” to fix the economy. Period. Ever.
So you can insult and call me pathetic all you want. It doesn’t really help your argument.
How do you address the fact that every other time someone has claimed the same thing about any systemic economic change ruining the economy they have been proven wrong?
[Edit]Oh I didn’t read usernames before replying. I should know better than to expect anything other than insults and boring old tropes from you.
Fuck off.
Boo. I am in favour of UBI but I would like to disavow this line of reasoning. “You must be wrong because people like you have been wrong in the past” is just ad hominem with extra steps.
No one has been proven wrong about anarchy because it has quite literally never existed in recorded history. Holy fuck your confidance in ignorance truly is pathetic.
I only say the basics because you goons still don’t understand the basics.
Please try to make your point less acerbically so that we mods don’t have to deal with reports and your arguments don’t get removed 🙏
For real. You’re not gonna fix the economy with a single policy. UBI would probably do a lot of good, but not by itself.
Yea exactly, UBI doesn’t fix it.
Good Lord, is nuance really that hard?
Something that I find odd about this argument is that you’re supposing an increase in prices will subtract from income to counter out the UBI, but it can only divide if you think about it. So it still has a levelling effect.