This is an assumption, rooted in the belief that people are poor because they are lazy, and it is wrong. There are numerous studies which disprove this assumption and I have yet to see a study which supports it.
> 1. If you give everyone a basic monthly income, what’s stopping everyone else who provides services (i.e. housing) from just increasing prices by however much the income is, thus negating the free money in the first place.
While a UBI would raise the median income within an economy, if it was funded out of income tax then it would be neutral with respect to the mean available income, which is more what prices respond to.
> What would make more sense are price controls to bring down costs, like housing and utilities.
That's a really terrible idea. Free-market competition is better. Public ownership and provision of services is also better. Price controls on private markets, however, is genuinely the the worst of all worlds. It also does nothing whatsoever to help people at the bottom of the economic ladder, who don't have access to money at all.
This seems like an argument that breaks when one looks at the details of the markets involved. A landlord who owns low-income units doesn't care about average income. The landlord knows the income of their tenants and knows that they suddenly are able to afford more rent and so that landlord raises the rent to be able to take part in the windfall.
IE, your argument would only work is housing units has efficient, elastic supply and demand like candy or something, where rising income taxes for the wealthy would reduce their demand for low-income units in the central cites. But we know the wealthy's demand for such units already near zero and the demand of the poor for such units is going to be constant.
A compression of income distribution (raising the floor/median without changing mean) means that low-income residents are more likely able to afford to rent units at a tier higher if the price for value not of low-income apartments gets worse (now, if this happens a lot in practice, it drives up prices at the next tier, but the fact that it can itself is a constraint on price increases in the bottom tier.)
And this can be interated at each level until you reach the tiers with net payers, and realize that, yes, their decline in demand,even though it isn't directly the same units as the lowest tier, has enough effect on the lowest tier, through a chain of incone tiers with overlapping markets, even though the top tier doesn't overlap with the bottom.
Unless each tier goes up in value by an amount proportionate to what landlords expect the wind-fall to be. The effect of increased rent isn't just going to be at the lowest income but will happen as each landlord acts accordingly.
Landlord don't have to play by some fair rules of economics or something. Instead they optimize their income in the obvious fashion. Rents would rise in unit up to the level where taxes begin reduce total incomes (those would be mostly home and condo owners at that point I assume).
No, that's literally exactly what I addressed. Unless, by “the wind-fall” you mean the amount extractable not the amount of the net benefit to their current tenant base, in which cases yes, that's exactly what I addressed as to why it is not the full net benefit and why those who are not beneficiaries before considering induced rent increases are generally going to be net beneficiaries after such increases, too.
> Landlord don't have to play by some fair rules of economics or something.
Landlords aren't magically immune from economics, either.
The amount extractable is pretty much the net benefit. Maybe a little less but not that much (ie, your argument above is faulty). This is because landlords can raise prices immediately. the vast majority of tenants can't just jump to other apartment on a moments notice AND because there simply aren't a bunch higher-priced apartment available - these apartments are occupied by already by higher income tenant.
No, it's not.
> This is because landlords can raise prices immediately.
Assuming the absence of all of lease contracts and rent control and legal notice period for rent increase (e.g., California’s 30-day notice for an increase that would bring the rent to more than 10% higher than the lowest rent charged in the preceding 12 months) and available competitive units, sure.
> there simply aren't a bunch higher-priced apartment available - these apartments are occupied by already by higher income tenant.
Sure there are, except in the tightest markets. It's true that housing supply can be a problem, particularly in done local markets, but that's an issue with it without UBI.
The intent of most UBI supporters is that money be spent according to the perceived needs of the recipients. Centralized control of use is an explicit non-goal.
In fact, one big argument of UBI supporters is that aid recieved even in restricted form will often be redirected in that manner with overhead for the mechanisms of repurposing the benedits, in any case, such that attempts to control how aid is spent are often just expending extra public resources in administrative functions with the net effect of reducing the value of benefits without controlling their use.
Let people be people, the world has more than enough to take care of everyone even when they're doing whatever they want.
I would have phrased it differently, namely that people at the bottom of the economic ladder lack the education to wisely spend UBI and it will end up getting wasted or siphoned by predators. I've worked closely with poor people in my church, helping them learn to budget and such, and what I've found is that more often than not, they had hundreds of dollars each month tied up in services they didn't use, many of them very deceptive and predatory (i.e. the letter has red ink "amount due" stamped on it, even though it wasn't even a bill!)
one problem with this is that 1) free market with no regulation leads to monopoly when only one competitor remains and 2) efficient markets are purely theoretical due to impossibility of having perfect information in the real world.
This isn't theoretical; it can and does happen -- just not for every type of good or service, and rarely by accident. A well-functioning market has to be designed.
Analogy: the freest roads of all would have no lane markings or regulations. This would give you "freedom from" regulation, but wouldn't give you the "freedom to" do very much. Roads with rules and regulations aren't "un-free"; they just prioritize "freedom to" over "freedom from".
And in some places, of course, mass transit just works better. Markets, too, aren't for everything. But when government is going to intervene to control prices, without actually taking any responsibility for the provision of said goods and services themselves, then those price controls quickly become divorced from reality, and do little besides create deadweight losses in some places and black markets in the rest. That's a lose-lose proposition.
Free market competition is better for some things, not everything. It's terrible, for instance, for medical services, as one usually doesn't have much opportunity to shop around when there's an emergency.
You need no further evidence of what happens when you dump funny money into the market beyond looking at the rocketing cost of housing and education. The current result is what you get when everyone has access to a fixed amount of money.
It doesn't level the playing field, it just elevates it.
> It doesn't level the playing field, it just elevates it.
Raising the lower bounds of poverty sounds like a good outcome!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Economic_proper...
That's...actually what many proponents specifically intend, though.
> If you give everyone a basic monthly income, what’s stopping everyone else who provides services (i.e. housing) from just increasing prices by however much the income is, thus negating the free money in the first place.
Competition for market goods, the lack of incentive to do so (or for regulators to allow it) for public services including regulated public utilities.
There's way too much latent demand for housing in booming cities to just build your way out. Without rent control, there will be people not benefiting from the boom that are just bled dry by rising costs.
I just mean, there are lots of people that would move to SF if they could afford it. This mass of potential immigrants will counter an attempt to just build your way out.
Unless you mean a real substantive change to the city e.g. building 30,000 apartments/year.
Price control? Is this some sort of a joke?
No, UBI only works if you institute price controls, or if there is a mass migration to rural areas, Otherwise, it just sparks an inflationary spiral. The spiral is even quicker if UBI is 'adjusted' for regional cost of living.
There is good reason to think that a tax-supported UBI at any level would, in fact, lead to price inflation for goods disproportionately in demand at the low end of the income scale, such that the net benefit of a UBI to the lowest-income recipients would be less than would be expected by consideration of the nominal benefit and pre-policy price levels, sure.
The idea that it would just spark an inflationary spiral, OTOH, something that needs some support.
Fair point. My assumption is that any political movement that institutes UBI in the first place would add automatic indexing to CPI either in the initial bill or soon after the first inflationary surge. Even if (miraculously) resisted at the federal level, the pressure to automatically index in urban areas would be overwhelming and even a few major cities with local indexing laws would still spark the inflationary spiral.
I'm gonna go with "maybe" - there are a whole lot of details there and there may well be good plans in that space.
I'd like to get back to this when I have a bit more bandwidth.