UBI is implemented tomorrow. Every citizen gets $1000 per month.
Landlord now knows you have an extra $1000 that you never had before. Why wouldn’t the landlord raise prices?
Now you have an extra $1000 a month and instead of eating rice and beans for a few meals you go out to a restaurant. The restaurant owners know everyone is eating out more so why not raise prices and maximize shareholder profit as always. The restaurant/corporation is on TV saying, “well, demand increased and it is a simple Economic principle that prices had to increase. There’s nothing we can do about it”.
Your state/country has toll roads. The state needs money for its deficit. UBI is implemented and the state/country sees it as the perfect time to incrementally raise toll prices.
Next thing you know UBI is effectively gone because everything costs more and billionaires keep hitting higher and higher all time net worth records.
Landlords only have control over you, because you have to find a place where there are good income sources. If you have an UBI, you have a lot less pressure to move to a city with high-paying jobs.
All of a sudden, you have a bunch of new options. You can move to a rural town. You can move to places with lower average incomes. Hell, you can just buy a lot of land in the middle of nowhere and build a house.
With consumer goods, it’s a bit different, because their prices are less about artificial scarcity and more about production costs. However, as noted in some of the other comments, if you just don’t print money but finance it with taxes, it won’t be that much of an issue.
sounds nice but I seriously doubt UBI would be more than $1,000 per month. Enough for groceries and a car payment. NOT enough money to move out of town and buy land and build a house.
Long term, why would it be limited to $1000?
This is honestly an issue about the long term prospects of our species. More and more production is becoming automated, resources owned by a small proportion of the population, and complex work likely going to AIs. This causes a fundamental breakdown of our current system - people working is largely “redundant” in a world of automation; people are less and less of a “resource” and capitalism begins to make less and less sense.
We’re playing with the idea of UBI now, but we’re going to need solutions to this problem. Whoever owns the robots, AIs, land/resources owns everything. Either we let this be concentrated in the hands of an arisocratic class of billionaires, or we rebuild the system and accept capitalism is over. If people can’t “sell” their time through work, then how are people going to live. UBI is not a single solution in itself - it could allow a utopia or it could be a dystopia to that enables more control by those who want to own everything.
I know it all sounds very science-fiction but this is the reality our world is sleep walking into. Instead of coming up with plans to face this, our politicians are unsurprisingly pissing about focusing on nonsense and tinkering at the fringes of the problem at best.
Do you honestly think the government is going to pay every citizen a full living wage to sit around and do nothing for the rest of their lives? Keep dreaming.
“No it’ll be so people can go be artists, and be writers and be…”
There are legit people who believe that.
And it’s not like this money appears magically the government will need to find ways to pay for this, we still haven’t solved that problem but even if we did, we’ll see that 1000 doesn’t change everyone’s situation. Stupid people will still be poor because they spend too much money. The rich will save their money, but the middle class and lower middle won’t change much because ultimately, 1000 dollars will eventually be factored into the new price of everything.
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Land in the middle of nowhere really doesnt cost anything. But Yeah, you couldnt really build a house with all the modern nice things we have learned to expect. More of a small cabin
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You don’t know rural places
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And you cant get a plot of land with a 1000$/mo budget?
How are you going to buy a bunch of land with a small amount of UBI?
I found plots of land for 1-2k$ in the country I’m from. Cost of living is comparable to the US. It’s just literally in the middle of nowhere
That makes more sense then. Still would need a house, but could manage that with planning/tiny home over time.