this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Those billionaires aren't paying rent. Rent increases are what most people are worried about with UBI. If the lower earners suddenly have more money that the landlords know about, they are definitely going to hike up rent until we are back to square 1. Those billionaires will just claw that money back. UBI doesn't make sense until we have more regulations in place for price control.
It seems like a reasonable expectation, but do you have any studies or other evidence that it happens? The studies I've seen generally say things like "Evidence has not appeared for commonly hypothesized potential adverse social and economic consequences of UBI."
Even if that did happen, why not tax the additional billionaire income and create subsidized or public housing?
Just because the first step isn't perfect doesn't mean status quo is better than progress.
I agree with universal basic income and also believe it will cause issues. The only way it works is if regulations are put in place to avoid making it useless. The rich can spend large amounts to find loopholes so basically the government will have to provide a bunch of guidelines and when the government steps in people get mad. Even if the pool of money is the same, the pool of money in each market may not be. Stocks and Yachts (extreme example) may go down and investment in rent or cheap food would go up, therefore demand and therefore prices. An alternative would be to make UBI use a separate commodity but it wouldn't really fix the problem as it would likely mean that the commodity could only be spent in select stores and there not provide the freedom it should.
Unfortunately, its a matter of needing real investigation into the market as there's a chance it could drastically backfire.