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.
Any UBI system worth it’s salt wouldn’t be providing a flat amount, it should be based on regional cost of living. So if prices all went up, UBI would have to go up as well.
I feel like that is neither universal or basic.
Is it not universal or basic to provide enough to meet the same standard of living wherever you go? If that’s to be the case it cannot be the same everywhere.
I don’t know how this answers the question, though.
I’m a landlord in city 1, UBI there is 100/mo. I jack my rental prices by 50.
I’m a landlord in city 2, UBI there is 200/mo. I jack my rental prices by 100.
City 1 responds by raising UBI to 200. Landlords follow suit. City 2 to 300. Landlords to 250.
OP is suggesting that capitalist class just says “uwu, for me?~~~ 👉😍👈”, regardless of the amount or location. OP is suggesting that in practice this is just another slice of pie to be extracted by the capital holders.
I don’t have a fucking clue if it’s true, but I don’t think this response addresses the question asked.
That would be a state of rampant inflation, so the fed would hike interest rates to slow it down.
That would discourage people from spending money (harder to borrow and the interest encourages people to leave their money in savings), which decreases demand and thus prices (loosely speaking).
The most pronounced spending effect that results from hiked interest is on housing. It would drive home ownership even farther out of reach for people who already can’t afford it. Further entrenching the divide between those who own property and those who do not. Further empowering landlords.
I think trying to implement UBI is hard, not because it’s an intrinsically difficult concept, but because what nobody wants to admit is without new legal levers, it will eventually devolve into what pretty much every social net turns into: a subsidy for the rich capitalist class.
Most people who recieve social assistance work, and work AT LEAST full time. Every dollar of social assistance is unpaid fair wages from their employers.
I’m not against UBI AT ALL, but exploitive labour practices and a failure to enforce antitrust laws are why there is even a problem at all.
Quite the opposite. A UBI will flatten differences in cost of living across different regions.
Or deliver the UBI as a basket of subsidized services and goods.
If, for example, we chose socialized medicine instead of a $5000/year UBI, a landlord can’t very well say “Your rent is going up 30 tablets of lisinopril this month.”