We might also see the same thing that's happened with minimum wage and student loans. (where basic income no longer covers even the basics)

Right, that's IMHO the biggest problem with BI schemes, and it gets little attention: we don't have a good grasp on the dynamics behind why (certain) prices go up to gobble up every gain in income or government grant.

It's illustrated well in Churchill's story about the do-gooders who bought out a bridge and lifted the toll, only to find that rents went up by the exact cost of regularly crossing the bridge.

http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/winston-...

(Search for "bridge".)

If rents just advance to capture the BI, all you've done is give a big subsidy to landowners.

> we don't have a good grasp on the dynamics behind why (certain) prices go up to gobble up every gain in income or government grant.

We actually do, both when it is driven by rational (e.g., shifting money into a monopolized market) and irrational (encouraging time-deferred costs that people are known empirically to discount) forces.

> If rents just advance to capture the BI, all you've done is give a big subsidy to landowners.

But they can't, because UBI is a redistributive scheme; without price discrimination based on income before both UBI and the taxes funding it, you can't adjust rents to capture it.

>We actually do, both when it is driven by rational (e.g., shifting money into a monopolized market) and irrational (encouraging time-deferred costs that people are known empirically to discount) forces.

"It's driven by rational and irrational forces" isn't an explanation.

>But they can't, because UBI is a redistributive scheme; without price discrimination based on income before both UBI and the taxes funding it, you can't adjust rents to capture it.

So you're saying the bridge scenario didn't and can't happen?

> "It's driven by rational and irrational forces" isn't an explanation.

Nor was it posed as one, it is your condensation of my description (which also includes specific examples in each category) of broad classes of sources which we understand very well that produce the described effect.

> So you're saying the bridge scenario didn't and can't happen?

I was not saying anything about the bridge scenario, which is structurally unlike a UBI and thus a non-useful analogy. Though, sure, I would say that the bridge example reads a lot like more like a parable than a historical account, and politicians constructing such parables with weak, if any, factual basis is about as uncommon as ocean spray containing salt. More to the point, it's exactly about one f the specific examples I gave of effects we understand quite well.

The bridge example is economically equivalent to not buying out the bridge but giving everyone the amount necessary to pay daily tolls. Why wouldn’t rents go up (in either scenario)?

Do you deny generally that rents go up with public infrastructure? Or that lifting a toll would raise rents (because it now becomes a more desirable place to live)? Or, which supply/demand curves do you think differ here from the UBI case?

> The bridge example is economically equivalent to not buying out the bridge but giving everyone the amount necessary to pay daily tolls. Why wouldn’t rents go up (in either scenario)?

They would go up; but, absent a perfect monopoly (which real property available for rent is usually not subject to in even the short term), it would be unlikely to go up the exact amount of the subsidy (considering only the effect of the subsidy).

> Or, which supply/demand curves do you think differ here from the UBI case?

The difference is that its a lot more plausible for residential rental property in a particular locality to be effectively monopolized than for that to be the national norm. And, to the extent the effect is under consideration is real, it is explicitly a monopoly effect.

From my point of view, people who push for basic income also tend to push for things such as rent control. They see wealth/capital consolidation as a bad thing to ban.

Yes, well, as long as it covers the basics somewhere. Someone living on only basic income won't be able to afford to live in Manhattan. They'll have to move to rural Alabama.

But that's the thing: you can do that today: live minimally for a year at big-city wages, then buy a trailer in rural Alabama. If people don't consider that a viable option now, neither will they with any feasible basic income level.

Maybe you still can't live in Manhattan but I don't really see the point in a UBI so low that you can't afford to live in a city at all.

I think helping with the economic development of smaller areas would be a huge benefit in and of itself. But basic income opens up really revolutionary ideas beyond this. Imagine you get 10,000 people together and the income is set to something quite low - $1000 a month. That's $10 million a month that, if a moderate sized group of people were willing to coordinate and work together, could be used to build new cities and developments from the ground up.

In a way a basic income can almost be seen as a decentralization of government as it enables citizens to direct government funded spending at their discretion.

I had never thought about it like this. This makes so much sense.

Good point. Another for the mix that I think someone may have already touched on, and that is if you're low income, and if business, etc. knows the government is giving you a basic income, then they'll just raise prices to offset that income. Kind of like the arguments against raising the minimum wage.