$1k/month worth of UBI wouldn't even cover average rent for a single person in any of the ~20 most populated cities in the US.

$1k/month doesn't quite even cover the cost of child daycare for a single child, in most of the US.

$1k/month of UBI is barely even ~50% of the current minimum wage in much of the US (a minimum wage that currently is so low, that it doesn't even cover bare-minimum cost of living either). The UBI is so low, it doesn't even give people the freedom to leave the lowest-paying legal job a typical person could have.

$1k/month doesn't cover average rent in the most populated cities because the most populated cities have the highest rents and its purpose is not to make you average, it's to provide a floor. Supplying enough for the lowest rent in the lowest cost of living place is sufficient for that, and if you want more you can go get a job or find some other way to make money -- which the UBI continues to supplement, so it doesn't even have to pay very much.

It's not supposed to make it so you can live a happy life for a hundred years without ever working. It's just supposed to take starving and freezing to death off the table, and give you a lot more runway when you're trying to start a new business.

My point is that $1k/month does not do this. Hell, minimum wage is approximately 1.5x to 2x greater than UBI (depending on the area), and even it does not quite take "starving and freezing to death" off the table.

"Working Homelessness" is a thing - https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel... and https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless...

You can live a spartan life on $12,000/year in many places in the midwest and not die of poverty.

I live in the Midwest, and this is simply not an accurate description of Midwest finances. These people who live on $12k/yr are either already asset rich (i.e., own their own house/car/etc) or are having their friends/family/roommates or the state pick up some of their living expenses, in one way or another. If they don't, they are literally dying of poverty.

According to the US Census Bureau, a $12k/yr income would put you below the poverty line, even for a single adult with no children living in the Midwest (Michigan).

The federal poverty line for the lower 48 states is $12,490. Is your objection only that you want to make the UBI $12,500 instead of $12,000?

Notice that you could also make up the other $500 by working a minimum wage job for less than two weeks out of the year.

Yes it is.

> it's insufficient local housing

Insufficient housing given wages and insufficient wages given housing costs are the exact same thing. If you have one you, ipso facto, have the other.

California has insufficient low-end wages (and poverty support programs) given the prices (not just for housing, though that's a particularly significant aspect of the issue) created by the wealth of California's high-end workers and capitalists.

They're not. If you need housing for two million people and you have housing for one million, and you refuse to build any more housing, you don't have enough housing. It doesn't matter how much money people have because whoever has the most would just bid up housing prices so they can have it and there would be people left at the bottom without it.

Whereas if you had enough housing for twice as many people as actually live there then housing would be very inexpensive and even people not making very much money would be able to afford it, because getting a unit wouldn't require outbidding someone with a lot more money than you.

California has several times as many unoccupied housing units as homeless people. California doesn't have a hard shortage of housing units, certain people that need housing in California have insufficient material means to convince the people that own existing unoccupied housing units to rent or sell to them.

It also fails on the other end because there are many alternatives to local housing other than homelessness, like selecting less local housing with an unreasonably long commute or living in units designed for fewer occupants in violation of the fire code. You essentially have unaccounted for over-occupancy. People having more money doesn't solve any of those problems without more housing for the money to buy, and interferes with solving homelessness as well because higher wages in general could cause people in those situations to move to existing unoccupied units before the existing homeless do.

No, what you get is more and more people who will say „srew you, why should I go and do stuff when I get money for doing f* all”. The people here on HN and those millionaires / billionaires are an outlier. An average shop clerk, security warden will not go and start their own business after saying „screw you”.

I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.

Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes), that will only give an equivalent of a minimum wage to everyone (ok 20% above national minimum wage but some states have it higher)... how far does that get you?

You can get a one bedroom in Austin for less than $800/month, to say nothing of arrangements that involve roommates or shared facilities or couples who would then have a second UBI.

> I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.

You're forgetting the possibility for supplemental income. Combine the UBI with a part time job and you could live just outside of New York City and spend the other half of your time on the business for as long as it takes until it makes enough for you to quit the part time job.

There is also a whole lot of work that really doesn't care about location at all. You can do software development in Kansas if you want to, as well as anything else that involves selling your product over the internet.

> Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes)

The marginal rate isn't what causes revolts, it's the effective rate. Middle class people don't care about paying $12,000 in tax if they also get a $12,000 UBI. Upper middle class people aren't going to revolt over a difference between the two of an amount similar to what they pay already for the existing welfare system we would no longer need.

And the whole point of using VAT is that billionaires and international corporations can't avoid it.

... because there is currently no program in Austin whereby residents each get $1,000 of free money month.

But if everybody in the country gets the same UBI then people are going to move from where to where exactly?

If the answer is from places with higher housing costs to places with lower housing costs, I think you're going to find that there's more than enough empty space in the middle of nowhere to satisfy all of that demand without significant rent increases.

The entire reason people are setting up shop in Austin is that it's so much less expensive than San Francisco. If landlords in Austin tried to raise rents then people would go to Kansas City or Buffalo or Louisville.

Some of the landlords would figure out that it's more profitable to have tenants at lower rents than higher rents and no tenants.

In the real world, most people can't just relocate their life on a whim, and the majority of citizens are more-or-less locked into a specific area for long periods of time, for a whole bunch of reasons. (Employer, Spouse, Children, Extended Family, Networks, etc)

It's not impossible to relocate or anything. But most people can't do so, and the few who can usually can't do so easily. It's not like window shopping for cars or clothes, these markets are effectively soft-Monopolies.

If landlords in Austin raised rents, most people would just have to eat it, unless it got to dystopian levels that forced them to relocate.

There are a thousand local landlords. If they all decided to double rents, maybe only 5% of the local population would move out, but then 5% of the landlords would have empty properties. They're individually better off to get someone in there at a lower rent than have an empty unit, so they advertise a lower rent and take one of the tenants from a landlord across the street. Now that landlord has the empty unit and they do the same thing.

Which means Kansas City is competition for Austin even if 95% of the people there would never actually move. (Assuming cities where the job market, amenities and so on are similar.)

Also, when rents are higher, there is incentive to build new housing to capture the profits.

Rents only get high when they're not just eager to arbitrarily raise rents but somehow colluding to constrain supply, which is hard for thousands of landlords to do except through zoning. But that's completely independent from how much money the local people have. There are cities that have the same median income and higher rents because the local government imposes housing supply constraints.

If everyone in the US was given $1 million per month, do you think that rent in Austin would go up in absolute terms?

If yes, by what mechanism can you imagine this effect is caused?

If no, I don’t know what to say.

The implied way to do it is, of course, by printing the money. Which would indeed cause inflation in not just rents but everything. But how does that apply to the real case when the money doesn't come from printing it?

This is not accurate. Rent prices have little to do with supply and demand, and are primarily driven by how much money tenants have (or more accurately, how much tenants can be bled for before they give up and leave).

This is why rent rises even when supply is greater than demand, and why rents rise even in places where demand is falling dramatically.

That's demand.

How else do you explain housing costs being lower in Austin (available land, less restrictive zoning) than New York City despite Austin having a higher median income?

Providing a "cash injection" doesn't require the UBI. It only requires taxing the rich. But the rich - yes, they mostly CAN actually leave the country to escape taxation, and operate from elsewhere, they can move their assets - increasingly virtual such as intellectual properly - onto offshore entities too... So there's really no option of taxing the rich.

I'll rephrase in case I've been unclear.

How, or have, you considered that if everyone gets an extra $1k/mo that a huge swath of Americans will just spend it every month? When they spend that money it does not disappear. Some goes to taxes and gets redistributed there. Some gets taken by the service providers (grocery stores, gas stations, cable/cell companies, etc) some gets vacuumed up into the murky world of private equity, some flows into the black market, etc, etc, etc. That money keeps flowing and keeps generating tax revenue. This is economic velocity.

The question I have is how have you examined this effect and found it to be unlikely to spur an increase in quality of life for tens of millions of Americans?

... except that part where $1,000 per month per person in the US comes out to about $4 trillion, which is 100% of all taxes collected.

There is no universe in which this much money can be given to every citizen in the US without creating new money.

Doing the accounting in a naive way is also misleading with a UBI, because it's effectively a tax credit. If you paid $15,000 in taxes and received a $12,000 UBI, you're really in the same situation as if you paid $3000 in taxes and had no UBI. The fact that you're nominally paying $12,000 more in taxes doesn't actually affect you because you get all that back.

Wrong. UBI financed by monopoly taxes makes rents go rock bottom. High uncompeted markup prices - Rents - are by definition caused by some kind of monopoly situation, because they are not competed away. You need to tax monopolies and not call it tax but a 'privilege fee' and reinvest the money into infrastructure or resistribute as dividends - which is UBI basically.

There is NO WAY anything like UBI would ever work without curbing monopoly pricing because any money raised by income tax, VAT or any other means freely given to people will end up rising up rents and monopoly prices even higher.

Probably better to just get rid of the monopolies, e.g. by relaxing zoning restrictions on density so that housing supply can respond to demand.

To me it feels both politically impossible, morally unjustifiable, and socially bullshit. "Get too many people very angry for no benefit at all".

Reducing housing costs helps the indigent elderly at least as much as it does the average person. Who it hurts is the affluent elderly who own a big mansion and would get whacked harder than usual by a reduction in its value, but I'm not sure why I'm supposed to have a lot of sympathy for rich people trying to profit from artificial scarcity.