There have been some pretty extensive studies that indicate that when you give poor people money, they become less poor. When you give poor people enough money to live on, they stop being poor. It’s a radical concept, but it’s also the truth.
I read a study arguing that each time someone utters the letters U, B, and I, currency devalues itself by one thousand fold, chunks of the sky rain down on metropolitan centers, and everyone instantly becomes fat, lazy, and uninterested in any activities except playing video games.
I never said you didn’t. Money is a great way to barter labor for luxury when you exist in a system where you can never starve. Nobody is saying the government should cover Wagyu beef for every meal, or free yachts for people.
Agreed! This thread is specifically following that “cash in hand” is not what guarantees people quality of life - housing and food are. If someone has all a reasonable quality of life provided for free, “extra cash” is less urgent.
I mentioned elsewhere that I think a government run supermarket would do a lot of good for grocery pricing. My thought was that we’d all get EBT (no means-testing) and the government could save money by running its own supermarket, while simultaneously forcing down the prices of private supermarkets. That is a good compromise that lets us keep a cash basis for food stamps (like everyone seems to prefer over vouchers) while still preventing any concerns people have with EBT affecting prices.
I’m fairly confident that corporations would argue that corporations are people, and therefore should get their allotment of UBI at a rate of one full income per stock share, and they’d probably win that argument too, considering the state of our legislature. Then they would argue that actual people getting their share of UBI is harming corporate profits and get UBI cancelled for everyone except the largest corporations. We still have land reaping subsidies not to grow crops from the New Deal, and all that land has made its way into the hands of the wealthy.
There are real risks of a badly-designed UBI, and it unfortunately locks us more into capitalism instead of less, but innovators giving up on innovation is not one of them.
A badly designed instance belonging to any class may be bad, regardless of the class.
I advocate for UBI, and also, I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Whether the working class seeks to leverage its advantages to depose capital depends on the will and resolve of workers as a class, but in the meantime, advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism.
A badly designed instance may be bad, regardless of the class of designed entities to which the instance belongs.
Not many “designated entities” cost more than quarter of a nation’s GDP, nearly the entire current tax burden of that nation and wouldn’t meet most people’s economic burden. The problem with a UBI is how much of a systematic overhaul it really is. The cost to simply feed, clothe, and house all Americans is an order of magnitude cheaper than a modest UBI. About the only win UBI might have is by “tricking” the Right into supporting it when they’d go nuclear against something reasonable… But the loss UBI might have is by “tricking” the Left to support it when it secretly reads like a Right Wing fantasy. Pro-capitalism, excuse to remove or hobble other protections. And “personal responsibility” BS when an addict uses the UBI check to buy alcohol or fentanyl instead of food.
I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Got an example? I used to be a HUGE fan of UBIs, but every time I read one, I struggled with these massive gaps. The three biggest issues I see with UBIs are:
In the US at least, the primary taxpayers are also the highest cost of living. Many of those in poverty in places like Manhattan or Boston are likely to have their economic position unaltered from UBI (and in the case of Yang’s plan, would have to opt out of UBI). The common answer I see to this is “move to a Red state”. I don’t want to tell a poor minority they need to move away from their family to Arkansas to make ends meet.
Many UBIs are inordinately financed by the poor and/or middle-class. This is not a win to me me.
I’m of the position that the biggest problem with the economy is “market inefficiency”, or to be specific, the profit margins of businesses. The reason the “everyone has housing and food” cost would be $2T, but a conservative UBI would be $4T is the $1T going in the pockets of an entire chain of middlemen, wholesalers, and resellers. If we fix that, UBI becomes less important because we’ve already started socializing. If we don’t fix that, I don’t see UBI being effective.
advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism
You overplay here. I actually agree that the one unquestionable benefit of a UBI is worker leverage. But I think questioning a MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR plan that might do nothing but create worker leverage among one class of workers is extremely reasonable, far from apologia. And on the contrary, I think a UBI plan could itself be accelerationism.
And I say “one class of workers” because I mean it. The farther someone gets from their State’s minimum wage, the less leverage a UBI would provide. I’m not talking people making $1M/yr, but people making $45,760 (the US Median Wage). Someone making that much money doesn’t get much (any?) labor benefit from a UBI, but they are likely to be contributing to it in their taxes. See my problem?
EDIT: I’d like to re-summarize. For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange. There is no other kind of asset suited for universal distribution that would empower everyone to access the essential commodities distributed through markets.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value. It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
Before replying to your points, I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia. Yang’s isn’t it. I’m not against the concept of a UBI. I’m against every version I’ve ever seen, and YES the price of every version of it.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange
That’s simply untrue. Medicare is proof of that (approximately 143% higher per capita cost for equivalent benefits). Social Infrastructure that does not seek profit will consistently beat infrastructure that does by a large margin. Every day of the week. No need for marketing costs, for wholesale costs, etc. No need for stock prices or a happy board. Hell, I just have to compare the price of my wife’s garden-to-table tomato sauce vs the price of buying a jar. $5 in tomato seeds and 5hrs total of her time makes us about 100 jars of sauce. Even including the price of the jar and transport, there is a gap between material+labor cost and retail cost larger than the cost itself. UBI continues to feed that gap, but socializing can whittle it down. There was once a day that capitalism was about “we can be more efficient at scale, so it’s cheaper to buy groceries than make them yourself”. B2B still works that way. But consumer purchases do not, and never will again.
We could feed every American a balanced diet for approximately $25B/yr with socialized groceries. We can house every American for approximately $100B/yr (extrapolated cost to end homelessness by the homelessness rate) by making government housing something “not just for the poor”. Universal healthcare is conservatively estimated to cost about $1T/yr in the net (progressive estimates argue it’ll overall be a net societal gain within a year or two due to how much money the government has to subsidize various parts of the healthcare industry anyway)
Combined with incidentals, that’s less than $1.5T. Where a $1k/mo UBI would cost $4T and nobody honestly estimates it will solve the above problems.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value
With all due respect, I don’t know what you’re trying to argue now. Of course UBI is not the creation of a new resource or asset. It’s just a plan that taxes America to redistribute wealth blindly. And the fact that Jeff Bezos will probably get a larger check from UBI than he is taxed is on nobody’s radar.
It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
I’ve yet to see a UBI that would cost oligarchs even a penny, and nowhere in the UBI philosophy would it hit corporations at all. And it’s not “simply” anything. The “simply” political declaration against oligarchs is a strong millionaire tax. The whole goal of UBI is to fund people, so I find it interesting that you just described it in terms that didn’t even mention that.
I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia.
You are framing discussion around an appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
Why are you going this direction? Can we please keep to good-faith?
My complaint is that UBIs don’t work, and my citation are UBIs that are genuinely terrible. I keep offering you the opportunity to show one that isn’t terrible so I can effectively steelman UBI instead of strawmanning it. If there were a good UBI, I wouldn’t resist it.
Your tactics are not supportive of productive discussion.
Not really. Trying something that you can’t quality for 10X the cost of a confirmed solution is absolutely worth resisting. We have a clean, price-tagged way to solve all but 1 of the problems that UBIs actually try to solve. How exactly does it “not support a productive discussion” for me to invoke that fact? Are you looking for a “yes man”?
You have also attempted to negate conceptual relations that are essentially beyond controversy through statistics and Gish gallops.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ve been fairly consistent, but for the sake of dismissing your accusations of gishgallop, let me summarize my points.
For the sake of solving the needs of the many, UBI is demonstrably proven more expensive than socializing. I gave reasons and numbers. THIS is the bullet point that made me stop supporting UBI. Socialism, even light-socialism, is just dramatically better at achieving the goals with less societal disruption.
For the sake taking money from the rich, UBI is irrelevant. To quantify better than I have before, it’s irrelevant because it is a mechanism to distribute money, NOT to fund it. The “how to fund” part of UBI would more effectively be used to inject money into non-means-tested social programs that are targeted at problems to solve.
UBI is vaporware. This is not an argument from ignorance. I am actually proposing that a reasonable large-scale UBI might well be entirely impossible. The MINIMUM cited cost for a bare-bones $1000/mo UBI wouldn’t just rise to being the single most expensive social program in US history, but it will be 5x the cost of our military spending and at least 3x more expensive than our current welfare spending. Again, for a barebones UBI that simply isn’t enough money for many households to survive.
Those are my bullet points. Please feel free to show me any point above where I seem to have moved away from that, and I will either concede them or defend why they are relevant. One thing I agree is that neither side should be gish gallopping.
And more importantly, if we’re going to toss around accusations. I keep challenging you to define your UBI. And I continue to do so. Are you pushing for a UBI that guts Welfare, that takes that $1.2T welfare pile to help fund? Are you on-board with “pick food stamps OR UBI” strategies? Are you pushing for a specific tax on the rich? What is your reasoning that the distribution would go smoother to put $1000 in a homeless person’s pocket than to give them a house and food without being shamed? Does you have any plans/answers for drug addiction?
I have spent a lot of time educating myself about UBI because I care about the redistribution of wealth and the QoL of all Americans, and also because I CARED about UBI. I’m genuinely open-minded that I could go back to supporting UBI, but I need more than accusations that I’m gishgallopping by someone who isn’t actually engaging at all.
So please, give me the benefit of good-faith like I’m giving you. Engage me with reasons.
EDIT: And let me ask you another question I should’ve asked earlier.
Is UBI the goal for you? Sometimes I end up in discussions where end goals differ. Maybe you don’t care about the quality of life of the poor nearly as much as the idea of everyone getting that $1000 check. Obviously if “I want UBI” is your end goal, it’s going to be hard for us to have a discussion. My goals are quantitative and flexible. If yours are qualitative and inflexible, of course we’re not seeing eye to eye.
And that’s OK. I have to admit that I would prefer Universal Socialized Healthcare even if it wasn’t as efficient as the ACA. To me, the goal is Socialized Healthcare whether or not it’s better for individuals. I have few philosophies where the plan is more important than results, but I can respect them.
To be clear, I have no issue with most people working while others do not and live off the system. I think most people will still want to do that something.
UBI isn’t going to do that.
You can point to a handful of small scale studies that show more money works, and yes, on a small scale that is exactly what you’d expect to happen.
This does not work when everyone has that same income. It’s not a matter of 99% of people making smart choices, because I concede that the vast majority of people with sudden access to additional income would spend it wisely.
The issues are twofold.
A) when the people who’ve made it their career to suck every penny out of every possible person know that there are suddenly more pennies to be had, they’re going to raise prices. It’s frankly foolish and shortsighted to expect prices to remain the same or only raise a little. This issue is not raised with small scale experiments. So regardless of their obvious success, they’re not telling the whole story.
2). UBI does absolutely nothing to address the problems it’s actually trying to solve. All it does is print a check every month as a bandaid for some serious problems that will certainly persist. You can’t fix housing without building housing. Individual healthcare will still be tied to your job. College education will be prohibitively expensive and require staffing a lifetime of debt, and we’ll still throw away an obscene amount of food, and people will still go hungry. The only thing that will probably get better is more children will have a secure diet.
And none of that assumes prices would inflate the way they absolutely will. Because even if UBI happened, the people who want all the money the working class has aren’t suddenly going to think it’s ok to leave dollars unspoken for.
The cost of college will steadily increase by about the amount kids are expected to have been able to save by the time they get there. Rent prices will go up to accommodate the new found freedom of spending. And that’s the stuff you have a choice on. You think Comcast will see people with so many extra dollars a month and think “well our customers don’t have another option but we’ll let them keep all that money?”
UBI is just a ticket to absolute dependency on a government check for 99% of Americans, and less financial freedom.
Address the actual problems, don’t just slap a half baked bandaid on it
The claim of UBI leading to runaway inflation is a myth given by reactionary propaganda.
UBI would represent a major advance for the working class. Advocating against it seems impossible to reconcile with any attitude that is not accelerationist.
Much of your commentary seems to reproduce mythical tropes such as of the “welfare queen”.
Seeking meaningful contribution to society is a robust human tendency. Doing so under constant threat from greedy employers is not necessary.
I responded to the text of your comment, and my concern about your opening sentence is not its lacking truth, as much as the litany of untruthful claims you later made in contradiction.
I would think UBI would be implemented to track inflation. I also assume it would be funded by progressive taxes, not just spinning up the printing presses (which would cause inflation). Effectively, it would be a wealth redistribution program cycling money from corporations and the rich down to the poor.
I really don’t trust the government (which is pretty much captured by corporations) to implement it well though. They’d probably give everyone just enough money to barely survive, without health care, in a van down by the river or something.
If you check my post history everywhere, I’m pretty anti-UBI. But the reasons you pitched are both problematic to me.
You “A” point… I don’t like capitalism, but when there isn’t a monopoly, increased customer-base doesn’t have the effect you’re thinking without scarcity. More people able to afford more means more businesses can compete for business. The price increases would come from paying for the increased worker leverage, and those wouldn’t be drastic.
The opposite effect is true in some sectors. Studies suggest (consistently) that UBI cause so-called “wealth-flight”, which reduces the value of housing and reduces the cost of living… But also reduces quality of life by reducing availability of things. The thing is, a little bit of socialism would counteract wealth-flight, as would a situation where the wealth is not in a position to leave freely.
Your “2” point is false. There are a lot of MAJOR cons to UBI, but studies suggest UBI would have a positive effect on housing affordability and worker leverage. Other than healthcare, your concerns don’t seem to match the models and the studies. My add-on concern, however, is addiction. Poverty starvation isn’t a risk under most UBI plans, but addict starvation still is.
When “what can I afford to pay” is one of the dominant market forces on anything but luxury, capitalism becomes dangerously fragile and businesses know it. They want to maximize profit, but they do so against demand and competition.
And none of that assumes prices would inflate the way they absolutely will
Most economists don’t think UBI would cause all that much inflation. Increasing a customer-base is not the same as increasing demand. There’s no addition of scarcity. Food prices don’t go up if we don’t run out of food - and we have so much food going to waste that isn’t going to happen. Same with housing and rent. The question isn’t “how much can the sucker afford to pay me”, it’s “how much can we get for this?”. Affordability is only one factor in that, and generally considered a “problem” to all parties when that factor applies. So long as businesses are not MORE consolidated (see above UBI concerns) prices are still market-driven - driven by competition and acceptability.
It’s valid to not LIKE capitalism. I hate it. But we should still understand it before criticizing things.
The cost of college will steadily increase by about the amount kids are expected to have been able to save by the time they get there
This is simply not factual. One thing people miss is that college profit margins have been on a slow decline (and in the single-digits since 2016). They’re NOT charging more based on how much they think they can sucker out of people. They’re charging what they do based on the friction of “making enough money to thrive” and “charging low enough that people are willing to come here”. Yes, cost of college might go up slightly, but not in the way you’re talking. Again, the issue is that “affordability” is a terrible market force and rarely the one these types of businesses care about.
UBI is just a ticket to absolute dependency on a government check for 99% of Americans, and less financial freedom
There is no study or model that says UBI will give us LESS financial freedom. The real argument is that it won’t give more financial freedom to most Americans, and the cost is prohibitive for that limited gain.
Address the actual problems, don’t just slap a half baked bandaid on it
Short of “no questions asked unemployment benefits for life”, there aren’t really any solutions to many of the problems on the table. Ultimately, all Americans, all humans, deserve a life of all necessities AND some luxuries.
At this time, nobody is seriousliy trying to solve for luxuries except UBI, and nobody is seriously trying to solve for organic worker-leverage except UBI (unions will never be the full answer).
Yeah UBI would solve this. This might be a criticism of contemporary capitalism, but it isn’t a critique of capitalism more broadly because in principle, capitalism can have a UBI.
More fruitful anti-capitalist critiques emphasize workplace authoritarianism, the employer’s appropriation of the whole product of a firm, monopoly power associated with private ownership especially of land and natural resources, and inability to effectively allocate resources towards public goods
Good news is that a UBI doesn’t provide enough for most people to keep striking.
What would really kill them if if that money were focused on unemployment. Actually incentivize people to not work (permanently if they want) so they have free automatic leverage. You wouldn’t mean minimum wage anymore because companies would be begging you to work.
I prefer “plans for all” in most things, but I actually think housing+food+healthcare for all but Basic Income for unemployed only would be ideal.
Imagine if one day every minimum-wage worker woke up and was told they’d make $30k/yr by putting in their resignation. Bet you workplace quality would skyrocket and companies would start offering living wages yesterday.
Course, that’s why that won’t happen either, I guess.
This could have negative effects similar to what has been seen in communist countries where vendor lock-in leads to weakened quality control if not every company can accept those food vouchers.
It’s good to allow people freedom of choice.
UBI would be at its best as a static lump sum of money.
How about any small business? If the process of being able to accept food stamps has bureaucracy, you’ll end up locking out small companies unable to meet requirements or who cannot afford it.
Food stamps at scale could also lead to stores opting for the cheapest alternatives. Salaries will ultimately scale down through supply and demand to a point where people will have less money, but now they’ll have stamps. This in turn can hurt innovation and competition as newer products tend to cost more and people will need make stamps suffice for daily food.
A money-based UBI is safer as you’ll ultimately see smaller salaries, but the amount of money you’ll have per month will remain static. This gives freedom of choice. Not to mention people also need homes, clothing and other daily goods in exchange for money.
Any business selling food can accept food stamps. There’s no barrier to accepting them. I’m not sure why you think any food-selling business would be left out.
I actually think if we added universal EBT/SNAP we could have the same effective pros of vouchers by having government-run supermarkets pop up. The “public option” would actually work for groceries, unlike healthcare (which should be universal).
EBT would save money building their own retailer and negotiating their own prices (or even enforced price regulation for them), which would force for-profit grocery stores to permanently compete against a non-profit-seeking competitor they would never be able to run out of business.
EBT is a flat 200 a month at most and the ongoing application process is humiliating Kafkaesque bullshit I wouldn’t wish on anyone after experiencing it, so I think it would work just fine to shut it down and fold it into a UBI, would be nice and simple and without complications. Health insurance on the other hand, cost varies wildly by circumstance but is generally more expensive, and because of incentives, price negotiations, all the bullshit involved with the system would be way more efficient and cost effective to have a universal healthcare program instead of giving out money to buy into a private insurance industry.
Fortunately, this seems to be recognized in most serious discussions about UBI. Almost everyone quickly acknowledges that the idea of replacing healthcare programs in particular with UBI is stupid. The UBI proposals I’ve seen that got any attention were explicit that it does not replace those. I don’t think it’s realistic they would actually try to replace Medicare with UBI.
SNAP benefit in my state can easily exceed $1000/mo for a single mother. Nobody has a UBI plan that pays for children (at least full). Housing subsidies in my state average around $750/mo. We’re nearing twice what a typical UBI plan gets you. And that’s the stable stuff. If UBI is replacing welfare, some people are either screwed or have to opt out, while still being on the hook for paying for it in their taxes.
The problem isn’t just about healthcare, unfortunately. UBI has many fatal flaws unless you put it on top of universal-life (housing, groceries, necessities, health). But once you have all those other things for free, there are valid arguments that society has paid at least part of its due to you. So sure, a $100-200/mo UBI so everyone can afford some luxury. I’d be into that.
The core issue, btw, is that cost of living is inconsistent. In some areas, $12,000 is Middle Class. In others, $48,000 is “living wage”. So under a UBI, some poor people get rich, sure, but some poor people get poorer.
Nobody has a UBI plan that pays for children (at least full)
The partial ones are all more than SNAP benefits for a single child.
Housing subsidies in my state average around $750/mo.
Who is getting a free 750 for rent? I’ve never heard of anyone getting a deal like that, I sure never got government assistance with rent, I assume whatever that’s for is hard to qualify for, and there are many many people who need/deserve that kind of help but won’t get it. One of the biggest issues with any government benefits program is that, if you know the people who need it most and what they’re capable of, and know what it takes to go through the process, it’s clear they’re never getting it. The system is designed to keep them out.
On the other hand, housing subsidies in particular could synergize very well with UBI, because the biggest mandatory expense for most people is housing, and anything incentivizing the creation of new housing will bring costs down, thus decreasing the necessary amount to allow people to live off it. So it would work better to have those kinds of programs in tandem instead of replacing them, although I would also like a direct focus on new construction and crashing the housing market.
The core issue, btw, is that cost of living is inconsistent. In some areas, $12,000 is Middle Class. In others, $48,000 is “living wage”. So under a UBI, some poor people get rich, sure, but some poor people get poorer.
Unfortunately this one is a pretty tricky issue, because any regionally targeted benefits induce market distortions. It is impossible for everyone who would like to live in NYC for example to be free to live in NYC, access is gated by money currently, and must be gated by something due to the impossibility of fitting enough people to satisfy demand. Giving everyone the ability to live most places regardless of income is itself a massively good thing, even if it doesn’t enable everyone to be in their preferred location (which currently the vast majority can’t anyway, people get priced out of regions constantly). Ultimately I don’t buy the idea that there’s a significant population of the poor that would be getting poorer, I think the majority of people now struggling financially are not really getting much help outside of healthcare.
The partial ones are all more than SNAP benefits for a single child.
Except not really. I have a friend who used to work in SNAP. I picked a lot of random “anonymous” family samples and a surprisingly large number of them would be forced to opt out of Yang’s UBI. That’s actually what got from from all-in on UBI to “show me one that works”.
Who is getting a free 750 for rent?
For eligible families, Massachusetts Section 8 housing subsidizes 100% of the difference between 30% adjusted family income and the FMR of the household. The highest FMR in Massachusetts is $3,608 (Suffolk County 4BR… probably need 3 kids to qualify). If you make $48,000/yr in Suffolk County that means you are eligible for approximately $2,600 in Section 8 rent assistance.
Note, Section 8 makes an apartment 100% means-priced, so anyone can move in to any apartment in the state so long as it’s section 8 approved and their income is under the somewhat generous thresholds. Here’s a summary.
And the thing is, while that’s the highest, numbers at or above $1000 are typical Section 8 figures. There are a lot of cons to Section 8, but for those who utilize it, it is always going to blow Yang’s UBI out of the water. Which means if declining all welfare is a requirement to accept UBI, nearly 100% of poor people in Massachusetts would find themselves opting out of the UBI. But most of them would still be taxed for it.
hard to qualify for, and there are many many people who need/deserve that kind of help but won’t get it
Not really. But it’s hard to qualify landlords for. It’s one of those rare situations where landlords have to prove they’re a viable residence, and many don’t have any interest in Section 8 because they’ve been burned by the increased risk of renters damaging things. But there’s always available rentals.
EDIT: To clarify, it’s still means-tested with red-tape. I am a strong advocate to remove all means-testing and the stigma around welfare, to grow it to a QOL baseline instead of a safety net. Importantly, even without means-testing it has certain advantages like guaranteeing apartment quality and holding landlords to task.
Unfortunately this one is a pretty tricky issue, because any regionally targeted benefits induce market distortions
Exactly. This is why I’m a huge fan of regionally independent benefits, like classic-EBT subsidized food. It can get complicated, but it can cut across the country and prevent someone from getting rich by living in Mississippi while renting a closet in NYC. Something like Section 8 would do a great job of this if it wasn’t means-tested because then anyone would be able to afford to live anywhere they chose. Obviously rich people in Martha’s Vineyard wouldn’t like that.
I use that reference because there IS Section 8 housing available on the Vineyard, and the rich people aren’t dying over it :)
Ultimately I don’t buy the idea that there’s a significant population of the poor that would be getting poorer
Fair enough that you can feel how you want. You probably don’t live on one of the many areas where the math is so clearly one-sided it’s depressing. $12,000/yr is genuinely pocket change in many parts of the US… But those areas happen to have the highest homelessness rates in the country.
$12,000/yr is genuinely pocket change in many parts of the US
I’ve had income less than that most my life so yeah, idk, it seems like a lot to me.
But there’s always available rentals.
Is that really true? So if you’re poor you can basically live in Massachusetts for free? Has to be some catch. So many desperate people around who would want that. And if the answer is that most of them just don’t know about it, that not-knowing must be a part of how it’s able to be sustained.
Ultimately for me the whole issue is about freedom. If someone is trapped in a job or relationship they don’t want, finances shouldn’t be any barrier to saying no. Not understanding how welfare systems work, not being willing to subject yourself to the process or being too ashamed or whatever, should not be a barrier to getting help. People shouldn’t have to be paranoid about anything that might make them more money because they’re going to have to go through a lot of paperwork as a result and maybe end up worse off. It shouldn’t be possible to use someone’s struggle to survive as leverage to make them work.
$12,000/yr is genuinely pocket change in many parts of the US
I’ve had income less than that most my life so yeah, idk, it seems like a lot to me.
Let me just confirm with you. Is the topic making “chicken” rich, or about reducing poverty? The places with the highest homeless rate are the places where $12,000 won’t buy you out of the gutter. My niece just got her first tiny little apartment with a roommate. Rent alone is $2,400 a month, and it’s the cheapest thing money would buy, and 2 friends splitting a 1-bedroom is a tight squeeze. She’ll be ok and doesn’t need any aid, but there’s nothing around cheaper than that. A lot of labor jobs are making $15-18/hr (sounds like a lot to you, but that is well under our poverty line here) and they are living with parents or 3-5 people in a 2-bedroom slum. I’ll explain Section 8’s why below.
Is that really true? So if you’re poor you can basically live in Massachusetts for free? Has to be some catch
Yes. Yes. And… Yes :-/
There’s a few catches. But before the catches, understand that section 8 is “tier 2”, for people with some income. Tier 1 are projects. They give Section 8 to people they find more “stable”, and families/elderly, and send the rest to projects.
The first is that Section 8 won’t protect from foreclosure and people with low income often have volitile income. A section 8 landlord is often a beast when it comes to evicting you
The second is that we are trained from childhood to be disgusted by people who live Section 8. Of every 10 poor people I’ve known in MA, 8 are unwilling to apply for housing subsidy. They’ll live on a friend’s couch, or with family, or find the worst slum apartment they can before being on Section 8.
The third is paperwork. We have a lot of homeless in MA, but most of it is because people are unable or unwilling to maneuver the red tape
There are currently about 150,000 Mass residents in Section 8 or Projects. Unfortunately, there are still 15,000 homeless in Massachusetts. Of those, 93% live in shelters (no questions asked). That’s about 1,000 people sleeping on the streets, and that is not ok. But a vast majority of those 15,000, and nearly 100% of those 1000, have severe issues - mental and/or drug-related - that are preventing them from taking the steps necessary to get into the housing they need.
The real scary problem is that THIS MONTH an article came out that the shelters finally hit capacity, and are waitlisting homeless people :(. A $1000/mo UBI isn’t going to get even one of them off the street. Yes, it would give them money for food, drugs, or alcohol. Hopefully the former because Yang would make those homeless people opt out of EBT and (possibly) Masshealth. The UBI wouldn’t significantly help any of the 150,000 people in subsidized housing who would have to opt out of it under a plan like Yang’s.
Ultimately for me the whole issue is about freedom. If someone is trapped in a job or relationship they don’t want, finances shouldn’t be any barrier to saying no
I agree. And you nailed it. The issue isn’t money, it’s freedom. A person being able have a decent place to live and food, no questions asked, is what they really need. And we can do that for about 1/5 of the cost of a $1000/mo UBI. I used to walk by a homeless guy every morning on the way to work in Cambridge. It was terrible. He always had an empty bottle of something cheap next to him. He couldn’t ask for help. He’s the kind of person I see when I think about supporting the poor. What would $1000/mo give him, that homeless guy in Cambridge? Not much of anything. He’s not going to catch a bus to Mississippi where $1000/mo is Middle Class (as much as the more corrupt politicians wish all the homeless would do, but that’s another story). He’s going to sleep on that sidewalk.
If someone walked up to him and said “we have an apartment for you. Don’t worry about paperwork. Here’s the key”. Well THAT would do something.
This is what scares me about UBI. Yang’s plan was going to hurt (or just not benefit) a lot of families in New York, Massachusetts, California, and other net-producing locations. The list of those least-benefitting from a UBI matches the list of areas with the highest poverty and homelessness rate. That, to me, is unacceptable.
The moment you have a UBI plan that poor has to contribute to and then opt out of, you just have another system that’s screwing the poor.
South American experiments with printing money make the studies hard to believe. You can’t simply give people money without causing a devaluation in said money. You have to take it away from the market somehow (so, tax the shit out of the rich)
You can’t simply give people money without causing a devaluation in said money.
The government surely can.
The government has the power to levy taxes.
The government has comprehensive powers for regulating the value of currency, through control over the money supply.
At any rate, the government printing money for workers cannot possibility be worse for workers than the government printing money for businesses, as it is doing now.
I suppose, though, you might take comfort in how inflation now is being so effectively prevented, instead of causing needless human suffering.
Ok, this time I am following you. Because I feel really strongly like there’s a lot more we’d agree on than disagree.
In this case, I agree 100% with everything you said.
And I think one common factor in both of our goals is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the government stepping in and preventing capitalism from grinding our poor into dust. We should be fighting for a government that cares more about the well being of its people than the Nasdaq.
Can’t agree with this enough. It drives me crazy when people think the Government should be run like a business. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard, and really shows that people don’t use their critical thinking skills.
False analogy? People get free money all the time with lotteries and welfare. UBI is another word for welfare. We clearly know what people do with welfare. The lottery is like a big welfare check. And we know what they do with that too.
BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T EARN THE MONEY. This isn’t hard. There are numerous articles, papers, and podcasts on the topic. When you don’t earn something, you don’t respect it. I thought your question was rhetorical because it’s so asinine.
Are you aware of any cases of unearned income or wealth that would not strongly support your generalization, particularly any that may relate to the themes mentioned in the post?
There have been some pretty extensive studies that indicate that when you give poor people money, they become less poor. When you give poor people enough money to live on, they stop being poor. It’s a radical concept, but it’s also the truth.
I read a study arguing that each time someone utters the letters U, B, and I, currency devalues itself by one thousand fold, chunks of the sky rain down on metropolitan centers, and everyone instantly becomes fat, lazy, and uninterested in any activities except playing video games.
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Without capitalism, we don’t really need UBI because we can just go more socialist.
You don’t need “more money” if society guarantees your quality of life with no strings attached.
You still need a system of currency as individuals should be allowed to use their skills to barter.
I never said you didn’t. Money is a great way to barter labor for luxury when you exist in a system where you can never starve. Nobody is saying the government should cover Wagyu beef for every meal, or free yachts for people.
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Agreed! This thread is specifically following that “cash in hand” is not what guarantees people quality of life - housing and food are. If someone has all a reasonable quality of life provided for free, “extra cash” is less urgent.
I mentioned elsewhere that I think a government run supermarket would do a lot of good for grocery pricing. My thought was that we’d all get EBT (no means-testing) and the government could save money by running its own supermarket, while simultaneously forcing down the prices of private supermarkets. That is a good compromise that lets us keep a cash basis for food stamps (like everyone seems to prefer over vouchers) while still preventing any concerns people have with EBT affecting prices.
I’m fairly confident that corporations would argue that corporations are people, and therefore should get their allotment of UBI at a rate of one full income per stock share, and they’d probably win that argument too, considering the state of our legislature. Then they would argue that actual people getting their share of UBI is harming corporate profits and get UBI cancelled for everyone except the largest corporations. We still have land reaping subsidies not to grow crops from the New Deal, and all that land has made its way into the hands of the wealthy.
There are real risks of a badly-designed UBI, and it unfortunately locks us more into capitalism instead of less, but innovators giving up on innovation is not one of them.
A badly designed instance belonging to any class may be bad, regardless of the class.
I advocate for UBI, and also, I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Whether the working class seeks to leverage its advantages to depose capital depends on the will and resolve of workers as a class, but in the meantime, advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism.
Not many “designated entities” cost more than quarter of a nation’s GDP, nearly the entire current tax burden of that nation and wouldn’t meet most people’s economic burden. The problem with a UBI is how much of a systematic overhaul it really is. The cost to simply feed, clothe, and house all Americans is an order of magnitude cheaper than a modest UBI. About the only win UBI might have is by “tricking” the Right into supporting it when they’d go nuclear against something reasonable… But the loss UBI might have is by “tricking” the Left to support it when it secretly reads like a Right Wing fantasy. Pro-capitalism, excuse to remove or hobble other protections. And “personal responsibility” BS when an addict uses the UBI check to buy alcohol or fentanyl instead of food.
Got an example? I used to be a HUGE fan of UBIs, but every time I read one, I struggled with these massive gaps. The three biggest issues I see with UBIs are:
You overplay here. I actually agree that the one unquestionable benefit of a UBI is worker leverage. But I think questioning a MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR plan that might do nothing but create worker leverage among one class of workers is extremely reasonable, far from apologia. And on the contrary, I think a UBI plan could itself be accelerationism.
And I say “one class of workers” because I mean it. The farther someone gets from their State’s minimum wage, the less leverage a UBI would provide. I’m not talking people making $1M/yr, but people making $45,760 (the US Median Wage). Someone making that much money doesn’t get much (any?) labor benefit from a UBI, but they are likely to be contributing to it in their taxes. See my problem?
EDIT: I’d like to re-summarize. For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange. There is no other kind of asset suited for universal distribution that would empower everyone to access the essential commodities distributed through markets.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value. It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
Before replying to your points, I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia. Yang’s isn’t it. I’m not against the concept of a UBI. I’m against every version I’ve ever seen, and YES the price of every version of it.
That’s simply untrue. Medicare is proof of that (approximately 143% higher per capita cost for equivalent benefits). Social Infrastructure that does not seek profit will consistently beat infrastructure that does by a large margin. Every day of the week. No need for marketing costs, for wholesale costs, etc. No need for stock prices or a happy board. Hell, I just have to compare the price of my wife’s garden-to-table tomato sauce vs the price of buying a jar. $5 in tomato seeds and 5hrs total of her time makes us about 100 jars of sauce. Even including the price of the jar and transport, there is a gap between material+labor cost and retail cost larger than the cost itself. UBI continues to feed that gap, but socializing can whittle it down. There was once a day that capitalism was about “we can be more efficient at scale, so it’s cheaper to buy groceries than make them yourself”. B2B still works that way. But consumer purchases do not, and never will again.
We could feed every American a balanced diet for approximately $25B/yr with socialized groceries. We can house every American for approximately $100B/yr (extrapolated cost to end homelessness by the homelessness rate) by making government housing something “not just for the poor”. Universal healthcare is conservatively estimated to cost about $1T/yr in the net (progressive estimates argue it’ll overall be a net societal gain within a year or two due to how much money the government has to subsidize various parts of the healthcare industry anyway)
Combined with incidentals, that’s less than $1.5T. Where a $1k/mo UBI would cost $4T and nobody honestly estimates it will solve the above problems.
With all due respect, I don’t know what you’re trying to argue now. Of course UBI is not the creation of a new resource or asset. It’s just a plan that taxes America to redistribute wealth blindly. And the fact that Jeff Bezos will probably get a larger check from UBI than he is taxed is on nobody’s radar.
I’ve yet to see a UBI that would cost oligarchs even a penny, and nowhere in the UBI philosophy would it hit corporations at all. And it’s not “simply” anything. The “simply” political declaration against oligarchs is a strong millionaire tax. The whole goal of UBI is to fund people, so I find it interesting that you just described it in terms that didn’t even mention that.
You are framing discussion around an appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
Your tactics are not supportive of productive discussion.
You also have attempted to negate conceptual relations that are essentially beyond controversy through statistics and Gish gallops.
Why are you going this direction? Can we please keep to good-faith?
My complaint is that UBIs don’t work, and my citation are UBIs that are genuinely terrible. I keep offering you the opportunity to show one that isn’t terrible so I can effectively steelman UBI instead of strawmanning it. If there were a good UBI, I wouldn’t resist it.
Not really. Trying something that you can’t quality for 10X the cost of a confirmed solution is absolutely worth resisting. We have a clean, price-tagged way to solve all but 1 of the problems that UBIs actually try to solve. How exactly does it “not support a productive discussion” for me to invoke that fact? Are you looking for a “yes man”?
I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ve been fairly consistent, but for the sake of dismissing your accusations of gishgallop, let me summarize my points.
Those are my bullet points. Please feel free to show me any point above where I seem to have moved away from that, and I will either concede them or defend why they are relevant. One thing I agree is that neither side should be gish gallopping.
And more importantly, if we’re going to toss around accusations. I keep challenging you to define your UBI. And I continue to do so. Are you pushing for a UBI that guts Welfare, that takes that $1.2T welfare pile to help fund? Are you on-board with “pick food stamps OR UBI” strategies? Are you pushing for a specific tax on the rich? What is your reasoning that the distribution would go smoother to put $1000 in a homeless person’s pocket than to give them a house and food without being shamed? Does you have any plans/answers for drug addiction?
I have spent a lot of time educating myself about UBI because I care about the redistribution of wealth and the QoL of all Americans, and also because I CARED about UBI. I’m genuinely open-minded that I could go back to supporting UBI, but I need more than accusations that I’m gishgallopping by someone who isn’t actually engaging at all.
So please, give me the benefit of good-faith like I’m giving you. Engage me with reasons.
EDIT: And let me ask you another question I should’ve asked earlier.
Is UBI the goal for you? Sometimes I end up in discussions where end goals differ. Maybe you don’t care about the quality of life of the poor nearly as much as the idea of everyone getting that $1000 check. Obviously if “I want UBI” is your end goal, it’s going to be hard for us to have a discussion. My goals are quantitative and flexible. If yours are qualitative and inflexible, of course we’re not seeing eye to eye.
And that’s OK. I have to admit that I would prefer Universal Socialized Healthcare even if it wasn’t as efficient as the ACA. To me, the goal is Socialized Healthcare whether or not it’s better for individuals. I have few philosophies where the plan is more important than results, but I can respect them.
To be clear, I have no issue with most people working while others do not and live off the system. I think most people will still want to do that something.
UBI isn’t going to do that.
You can point to a handful of small scale studies that show more money works, and yes, on a small scale that is exactly what you’d expect to happen.
This does not work when everyone has that same income. It’s not a matter of 99% of people making smart choices, because I concede that the vast majority of people with sudden access to additional income would spend it wisely.
The issues are twofold.
A) when the people who’ve made it their career to suck every penny out of every possible person know that there are suddenly more pennies to be had, they’re going to raise prices. It’s frankly foolish and shortsighted to expect prices to remain the same or only raise a little. This issue is not raised with small scale experiments. So regardless of their obvious success, they’re not telling the whole story.
2). UBI does absolutely nothing to address the problems it’s actually trying to solve. All it does is print a check every month as a bandaid for some serious problems that will certainly persist. You can’t fix housing without building housing. Individual healthcare will still be tied to your job. College education will be prohibitively expensive and require staffing a lifetime of debt, and we’ll still throw away an obscene amount of food, and people will still go hungry. The only thing that will probably get better is more children will have a secure diet.
And none of that assumes prices would inflate the way they absolutely will. Because even if UBI happened, the people who want all the money the working class has aren’t suddenly going to think it’s ok to leave dollars unspoken for.
The cost of college will steadily increase by about the amount kids are expected to have been able to save by the time they get there. Rent prices will go up to accommodate the new found freedom of spending. And that’s the stuff you have a choice on. You think Comcast will see people with so many extra dollars a month and think “well our customers don’t have another option but we’ll let them keep all that money?”
UBI is just a ticket to absolute dependency on a government check for 99% of Americans, and less financial freedom.
Address the actual problems, don’t just slap a half baked bandaid on it
The claim of UBI leading to runaway inflation is a myth given by reactionary propaganda.
UBI would represent a major advance for the working class. Advocating against it seems impossible to reconcile with any attitude that is not accelerationist.
Much of your commentary seems to reproduce mythical tropes such as of the “welfare queen”.
Seeking meaningful contribution to society is a robust human tendency. Doing so under constant threat from greedy employers is not necessary.
Something is not propaganda because you disagree with it.
I also make it clear in literally my first sentence that people living off the system without working is fine, but that most people probably won’t.
I’m not sure you actually read the post you’re responding to.
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There’s scientific facts, economic reality, and then there’s the pipe dream that suddenly corporations will be less greedy just “cuz” under UBI.
I have heard many different opinions about UBI.
I have never heard anyone suggest it would make corporations less greedy.
Perhaps your objection is directed at a strawman.
I responded to the text of your comment, and my concern about your opening sentence is not its lacking truth, as much as the litany of untruthful claims you later made in contradiction.
So no, you didn’t.
I did. Your comment is littered with mythical tropes. Even the opening is suspect, due to the suggestion of people wanting to “live off the system”.
Most want simply that their lives be not dominated by systems that are abstract, absurd, or inhuman.
Even if some cope differently than you, perhaps consider not judging so narrowly.
I would think UBI would be implemented to track inflation. I also assume it would be funded by progressive taxes, not just spinning up the printing presses (which would cause inflation). Effectively, it would be a wealth redistribution program cycling money from corporations and the rich down to the poor.
I really don’t trust the government (which is pretty much captured by corporations) to implement it well though. They’d probably give everyone just enough money to barely survive, without health care, in a van down by the river or something.
If you check my post history everywhere, I’m pretty anti-UBI. But the reasons you pitched are both problematic to me.
You “A” point… I don’t like capitalism, but when there isn’t a monopoly, increased customer-base doesn’t have the effect you’re thinking without scarcity. More people able to afford more means more businesses can compete for business. The price increases would come from paying for the increased worker leverage, and those wouldn’t be drastic.
The opposite effect is true in some sectors. Studies suggest (consistently) that UBI cause so-called “wealth-flight”, which reduces the value of housing and reduces the cost of living… But also reduces quality of life by reducing availability of things. The thing is, a little bit of socialism would counteract wealth-flight, as would a situation where the wealth is not in a position to leave freely.
Your “2” point is false. There are a lot of MAJOR cons to UBI, but studies suggest UBI would have a positive effect on housing affordability and worker leverage. Other than healthcare, your concerns don’t seem to match the models and the studies. My add-on concern, however, is addiction. Poverty starvation isn’t a risk under most UBI plans, but addict starvation still is.
When “what can I afford to pay” is one of the dominant market forces on anything but luxury, capitalism becomes dangerously fragile and businesses know it. They want to maximize profit, but they do so against demand and competition.
Most economists don’t think UBI would cause all that much inflation. Increasing a customer-base is not the same as increasing demand. There’s no addition of scarcity. Food prices don’t go up if we don’t run out of food - and we have so much food going to waste that isn’t going to happen. Same with housing and rent. The question isn’t “how much can the sucker afford to pay me”, it’s “how much can we get for this?”. Affordability is only one factor in that, and generally considered a “problem” to all parties when that factor applies. So long as businesses are not MORE consolidated (see above UBI concerns) prices are still market-driven - driven by competition and acceptability.
It’s valid to not LIKE capitalism. I hate it. But we should still understand it before criticizing things.
This is simply not factual. One thing people miss is that college profit margins have been on a slow decline (and in the single-digits since 2016). They’re NOT charging more based on how much they think they can sucker out of people. They’re charging what they do based on the friction of “making enough money to thrive” and “charging low enough that people are willing to come here”. Yes, cost of college might go up slightly, but not in the way you’re talking. Again, the issue is that “affordability” is a terrible market force and rarely the one these types of businesses care about.
There is no study or model that says UBI will give us LESS financial freedom. The real argument is that it won’t give more financial freedom to most Americans, and the cost is prohibitive for that limited gain.
Short of “no questions asked unemployment benefits for life”, there aren’t really any solutions to many of the problems on the table. Ultimately, all Americans, all humans, deserve a life of all necessities AND some luxuries.
At this time, nobody is seriousliy trying to solve for luxuries except UBI, and nobody is seriously trying to solve for organic worker-leverage except UBI (unions will never be the full answer).
Yeah UBI would solve this. This might be a criticism of contemporary capitalism, but it isn’t a critique of capitalism more broadly because in principle, capitalism can have a UBI.
More fruitful anti-capitalist critiques emphasize workplace authoritarianism, the employer’s appropriation of the whole product of a firm, monopoly power associated with private ownership especially of land and natural resources, and inability to effectively allocate resources towards public goods
A strike can last much longer if workers are not worried about their bread and roof.
Even without organization, a secure worker can bargain harder for higher wages and better conditions.
Aaaaand there it is, the reason they fight so hard to keep you from that security.
Nonviolence won’t solve this.
I hope that the worst kinds of conflict prove avoidable, but historically, there is always someone who fires the first shots.
The Haymarket affair illustrates the matter quite well.
Rights are won with blood, not money; those with money need no rights, and those who need rights have no money.
Good news is that a UBI doesn’t provide enough for most people to keep striking.
What would really kill them if if that money were focused on unemployment. Actually incentivize people to not work (permanently if they want) so they have free automatic leverage. You wouldn’t mean minimum wage anymore because companies would be begging you to work.
I prefer “plans for all” in most things, but I actually think housing+food+healthcare for all but Basic Income for unemployed only would be ideal.
Imagine if one day every minimum-wage worker woke up and was told they’d make $30k/yr by putting in their resignation. Bet you workplace quality would skyrocket and companies would start offering living wages yesterday.
Course, that’s why that won’t happen either, I guess.
Even a UBI specifically for food- food stamps for all- would make a massive change and improve millions of lives.
This could have negative effects similar to what has been seen in communist countries where vendor lock-in leads to weakened quality control if not every company can accept those food vouchers.
It’s good to allow people freedom of choice.
UBI would be at its best as a static lump sum of money.
Every supermarket already accepts food stamps. Expanding the program wouldn’t change that.
How about any small business? If the process of being able to accept food stamps has bureaucracy, you’ll end up locking out small companies unable to meet requirements or who cannot afford it.
Food stamps at scale could also lead to stores opting for the cheapest alternatives. Salaries will ultimately scale down through supply and demand to a point where people will have less money, but now they’ll have stamps. This in turn can hurt innovation and competition as newer products tend to cost more and people will need make stamps suffice for daily food.
A money-based UBI is safer as you’ll ultimately see smaller salaries, but the amount of money you’ll have per month will remain static. This gives freedom of choice. Not to mention people also need homes, clothing and other daily goods in exchange for money.
Any business selling food can accept food stamps. There’s no barrier to accepting them. I’m not sure why you think any food-selling business would be left out.
I think they don’t actually understand SNAP and they think you’re talking about literal vouchers like it’s an alternate physical currency.
I actually think if we added universal EBT/SNAP we could have the same effective pros of vouchers by having government-run supermarkets pop up. The “public option” would actually work for groceries, unlike healthcare (which should be universal).
EBT would save money building their own retailer and negotiating their own prices (or even enforced price regulation for them), which would force for-profit grocery stores to permanently compete against a non-profit-seeking competitor they would never be able to run out of business.
In principle, and even in it’s intended general practical application, I agree with you.
But in America, I can see both parties getting on board with a UBI, only because they’ll use it to gut all other social welfare programs.
UBI can’t pay for both at once? Tough shit. We abolished EBT and Medicare to pay for UBI.
All must be won by struggle. Elites never surrender privilege only by being asked.
EBT is a flat 200 a month at most and the ongoing application process is humiliating Kafkaesque bullshit I wouldn’t wish on anyone after experiencing it, so I think it would work just fine to shut it down and fold it into a UBI, would be nice and simple and without complications. Health insurance on the other hand, cost varies wildly by circumstance but is generally more expensive, and because of incentives, price negotiations, all the bullshit involved with the system would be way more efficient and cost effective to have a universal healthcare program instead of giving out money to buy into a private insurance industry.
Fortunately, this seems to be recognized in most serious discussions about UBI. Almost everyone quickly acknowledges that the idea of replacing healthcare programs in particular with UBI is stupid. The UBI proposals I’ve seen that got any attention were explicit that it does not replace those. I don’t think it’s realistic they would actually try to replace Medicare with UBI.
SNAP benefit in my state can easily exceed $1000/mo for a single mother. Nobody has a UBI plan that pays for children (at least full). Housing subsidies in my state average around $750/mo. We’re nearing twice what a typical UBI plan gets you. And that’s the stable stuff. If UBI is replacing welfare, some people are either screwed or have to opt out, while still being on the hook for paying for it in their taxes.
The problem isn’t just about healthcare, unfortunately. UBI has many fatal flaws unless you put it on top of universal-life (housing, groceries, necessities, health). But once you have all those other things for free, there are valid arguments that society has paid at least part of its due to you. So sure, a $100-200/mo UBI so everyone can afford some luxury. I’d be into that.
The core issue, btw, is that cost of living is inconsistent. In some areas, $12,000 is Middle Class. In others, $48,000 is “living wage”. So under a UBI, some poor people get rich, sure, but some poor people get poorer.
The partial ones are all more than SNAP benefits for a single child.
Who is getting a free 750 for rent? I’ve never heard of anyone getting a deal like that, I sure never got government assistance with rent, I assume whatever that’s for is hard to qualify for, and there are many many people who need/deserve that kind of help but won’t get it. One of the biggest issues with any government benefits program is that, if you know the people who need it most and what they’re capable of, and know what it takes to go through the process, it’s clear they’re never getting it. The system is designed to keep them out.
On the other hand, housing subsidies in particular could synergize very well with UBI, because the biggest mandatory expense for most people is housing, and anything incentivizing the creation of new housing will bring costs down, thus decreasing the necessary amount to allow people to live off it. So it would work better to have those kinds of programs in tandem instead of replacing them, although I would also like a direct focus on new construction and crashing the housing market.
Unfortunately this one is a pretty tricky issue, because any regionally targeted benefits induce market distortions. It is impossible for everyone who would like to live in NYC for example to be free to live in NYC, access is gated by money currently, and must be gated by something due to the impossibility of fitting enough people to satisfy demand. Giving everyone the ability to live most places regardless of income is itself a massively good thing, even if it doesn’t enable everyone to be in their preferred location (which currently the vast majority can’t anyway, people get priced out of regions constantly). Ultimately I don’t buy the idea that there’s a significant population of the poor that would be getting poorer, I think the majority of people now struggling financially are not really getting much help outside of healthcare.
Except not really. I have a friend who used to work in SNAP. I picked a lot of random “anonymous” family samples and a surprisingly large number of them would be forced to opt out of Yang’s UBI. That’s actually what got from from all-in on UBI to “show me one that works”.
For eligible families, Massachusetts Section 8 housing subsidizes 100% of the difference between 30% adjusted family income and the FMR of the household. The highest FMR in Massachusetts is $3,608 (Suffolk County 4BR… probably need 3 kids to qualify). If you make $48,000/yr in Suffolk County that means you are eligible for approximately $2,600 in Section 8 rent assistance.
Note, Section 8 makes an apartment 100% means-priced, so anyone can move in to any apartment in the state so long as it’s section 8 approved and their income is under the somewhat generous thresholds. Here’s a summary.
And the thing is, while that’s the highest, numbers at or above $1000 are typical Section 8 figures. There are a lot of cons to Section 8, but for those who utilize it, it is always going to blow Yang’s UBI out of the water. Which means if declining all welfare is a requirement to accept UBI, nearly 100% of poor people in Massachusetts would find themselves opting out of the UBI. But most of them would still be taxed for it.
Not really. But it’s hard to qualify landlords for. It’s one of those rare situations where landlords have to prove they’re a viable residence, and many don’t have any interest in Section 8 because they’ve been burned by the increased risk of renters damaging things. But there’s always available rentals.
EDIT: To clarify, it’s still means-tested with red-tape. I am a strong advocate to remove all means-testing and the stigma around welfare, to grow it to a QOL baseline instead of a safety net. Importantly, even without means-testing it has certain advantages like guaranteeing apartment quality and holding landlords to task.
Exactly. This is why I’m a huge fan of regionally independent benefits, like classic-EBT subsidized food. It can get complicated, but it can cut across the country and prevent someone from getting rich by living in Mississippi while renting a closet in NYC. Something like Section 8 would do a great job of this if it wasn’t means-tested because then anyone would be able to afford to live anywhere they chose. Obviously rich people in Martha’s Vineyard wouldn’t like that.
I use that reference because there IS Section 8 housing available on the Vineyard, and the rich people aren’t dying over it :)
Fair enough that you can feel how you want. You probably don’t live on one of the many areas where the math is so clearly one-sided it’s depressing. $12,000/yr is genuinely pocket change in many parts of the US… But those areas happen to have the highest homelessness rates in the country.
I’ve had income less than that most my life so yeah, idk, it seems like a lot to me.
Is that really true? So if you’re poor you can basically live in Massachusetts for free? Has to be some catch. So many desperate people around who would want that. And if the answer is that most of them just don’t know about it, that not-knowing must be a part of how it’s able to be sustained.
Ultimately for me the whole issue is about freedom. If someone is trapped in a job or relationship they don’t want, finances shouldn’t be any barrier to saying no. Not understanding how welfare systems work, not being willing to subject yourself to the process or being too ashamed or whatever, should not be a barrier to getting help. People shouldn’t have to be paranoid about anything that might make them more money because they’re going to have to go through a lot of paperwork as a result and maybe end up worse off. It shouldn’t be possible to use someone’s struggle to survive as leverage to make them work.
Let me just confirm with you. Is the topic making “chicken” rich, or about reducing poverty? The places with the highest homeless rate are the places where $12,000 won’t buy you out of the gutter. My niece just got her first tiny little apartment with a roommate. Rent alone is $2,400 a month, and it’s the cheapest thing money would buy, and 2 friends splitting a 1-bedroom is a tight squeeze. She’ll be ok and doesn’t need any aid, but there’s nothing around cheaper than that. A lot of labor jobs are making $15-18/hr (sounds like a lot to you, but that is well under our poverty line here) and they are living with parents or 3-5 people in a 2-bedroom slum. I’ll explain Section 8’s why below.
Yes. Yes. And… Yes :-/
There’s a few catches. But before the catches, understand that section 8 is “tier 2”, for people with some income. Tier 1 are projects. They give Section 8 to people they find more “stable”, and families/elderly, and send the rest to projects.
There are currently about 150,000 Mass residents in Section 8 or Projects. Unfortunately, there are still 15,000 homeless in Massachusetts. Of those, 93% live in shelters (no questions asked). That’s about 1,000 people sleeping on the streets, and that is not ok. But a vast majority of those 15,000, and nearly 100% of those 1000, have severe issues - mental and/or drug-related - that are preventing them from taking the steps necessary to get into the housing they need.
The real scary problem is that THIS MONTH an article came out that the shelters finally hit capacity, and are waitlisting homeless people :(. A $1000/mo UBI isn’t going to get even one of them off the street. Yes, it would give them money for food, drugs, or alcohol. Hopefully the former because Yang would make those homeless people opt out of EBT and (possibly) Masshealth. The UBI wouldn’t significantly help any of the 150,000 people in subsidized housing who would have to opt out of it under a plan like Yang’s.
I agree. And you nailed it. The issue isn’t money, it’s freedom. A person being able have a decent place to live and food, no questions asked, is what they really need. And we can do that for about 1/5 of the cost of a $1000/mo UBI. I used to walk by a homeless guy every morning on the way to work in Cambridge. It was terrible. He always had an empty bottle of something cheap next to him. He couldn’t ask for help. He’s the kind of person I see when I think about supporting the poor. What would $1000/mo give him, that homeless guy in Cambridge? Not much of anything. He’s not going to catch a bus to Mississippi where $1000/mo is Middle Class (as much as the more corrupt politicians wish all the homeless would do, but that’s another story). He’s going to sleep on that sidewalk.
If someone walked up to him and said “we have an apartment for you. Don’t worry about paperwork. Here’s the key”. Well THAT would do something.
This is what scares me about UBI. Yang’s plan was going to hurt (or just not benefit) a lot of families in New York, Massachusetts, California, and other net-producing locations. The list of those least-benefitting from a UBI matches the list of areas with the highest poverty and homelessness rate. That, to me, is unacceptable.
The moment you have a UBI plan that poor has to contribute to and then opt out of, you just have another system that’s screwing the poor.
South American experiments with printing money make the studies hard to believe. You can’t simply give people money without causing a devaluation in said money. You have to take it away from the market somehow (so, tax the shit out of the rich)
The government surely can.
The government has the power to levy taxes.
The government has comprehensive powers for regulating the value of currency, through control over the money supply.
At any rate, the government printing money for workers cannot possibility be worse for workers than the government printing money for businesses, as it is doing now.
I suppose, though, you might take comfort in how inflation now is being so effectively prevented, instead of causing needless human suffering.
Ok, this time I am following you. Because I feel really strongly like there’s a lot more we’d agree on than disagree.
In this case, I agree 100% with everything you said.
And I think one common factor in both of our goals is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the government stepping in and preventing capitalism from grinding our poor into dust. We should be fighting for a government that cares more about the well being of its people than the Nasdaq.
Can’t agree with this enough. It drives me crazy when people think the Government should be run like a business. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard, and really shows that people don’t use their critical thinking skills.
Businesses shouldn’t even be run like businesses. Employees should never have to be just numbers on an xls file.
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Have you considered the actual reasons, to such a degree that you could share with us how you understand as meaningful the comparison with UBI?
Alternatively, are you simply deflecting thoughtlessly with a false analogy?
False analogy? People get free money all the time with lotteries and welfare. UBI is another word for welfare. We clearly know what people do with welfare. The lottery is like a big welfare check. And we know what they do with that too.
You wrote, “Why do most big lottery winners end up broke?”
I asked, “Have you considered the actual reasons?”
You have not answered.
So, have you considered the actual reasons, why most big lottery winners end up broke?
What are the reasons?
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The conversations often feel like spinning tires in mud, but it’s still fun to see how much gets kicked up.
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BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T EARN THE MONEY. This isn’t hard. There are numerous articles, papers, and podcasts on the topic. When you don’t earn something, you don’t respect it. I thought your question was rhetorical because it’s so asinine.
Are you aware of any cases of unearned income or wealth that would not strongly support your generalization, particularly any that may relate to the themes mentioned in the post?