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How to build a well-designed national basic income program – at half the cost
(policyoptions.irpp.org)
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
54 points (95.0% liked)
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Hi friends I didn’t actually click the link so my skepticism may be unfounded. But I have a few concerns open to criticism or validation lol
In a primarily private sector “market” supply chain etc does basic income not just put downward pressure on wages in the form of a pseudo business subsidy ick.
Or if everyone has the same level of income before labour income **without pricing control **we end up just raising the floor on the cost of living? Sure there are long tails where only nice to have things get more expensive but in aggregate.
I’m 100% for wealth redistribution and believe heavily in public goods so please don’t at me as a capitalist pig 🐽. Maybe I’m missing the mark but adding more money into our under served areas of society without thoughtful discussion about financial literacy and about where that money inevitability ends up we’ve already lost the plot on the program lol
Thank you if you made it to the end of my poorly punctuated run on mess ❤️
There have been experimental deployments of Universal Basic Income, one of which lasted five years and involved an entire town, and none of those things ever materialized.
Thank you for your comment. I’m confident a towns economic capacity is of no consequence to the interconnected nature of national economics unfortunately. But am also woefully ignorant lol
Not super well informed on the subject, but the idea is that money looses it's value the more you have. If you're struggling to make ends meet, even a small amount of additional income helps a ton, but if you're already stable, that same amount is inconsequential.
Now for the increase in prices, again "cost of living" is not a single thing, so it can't increase uniformly across the board and affect everyone the same way. The various products have to stay competitive with each other and your local farmer doesn't suddenly need more income either. So I dont expect essentials to get a massive price bump. The one thing we have to be careful with is rent, and that's already an issue.
We need to ban (or tax out of existence) the concept of owning a house you don't stay in. Landlords should be illegal, what value they provide to society is so marginal and so minimal that it would be an overwhelmingly net positive.
That tackles one of the largest worries against a universal income.
Rental housing makes sense for people who aren't intending to stay where they are in the long term (young single people or people whose situation is in flux in some way). If you're expecting to move on, lumbering yourself with an expensive asset that will take years to pay for and may require months to unload when you no longer need it isn't smart.
It may make sense to restrict rentals to multi-unit buildings, and also restrict the number of buildings or units under the same owner, but having none at all causes more problems than it solves.
Sure, we can allow some small percentage of the overall housing to be owned by businesses whose sole purpose is providing a good rental housing experience for those in transit. But that's fundamentally different than parasitic landlords whose only job is owning a property and periodically scheduling the cheapest maintenance workers to do actual work they can.
This isn't your governments legislation branch, I'm not proposing a 100 page documentation. I'm simply suggesting a policy direction which is housing should be for housing, not for investment or for rent collection. If someone makes money off of someone they should provide a meaningful service and I think if housing wasn't an investment vehicle the entire system would look so radically different people can't imagine what a system without some landlords existing would look like.
Imagine everyone owned their house, it wasn't expensive, selling one was like selling a car, but you could sell to the government if need be at no meaningful loss and the government sold them back to people like a service for just such a situation.
Idk man, it's not that hard.
Housing is one of the most expensive purchases most people will ever make. Are you saying everybody must be able to commit to that to have a place to live?
Imagine if owning a house was the same price as buying a car. That a loan was a 3 year ordeal not a 30.
60 years ago a janitor salary could buy a house in their 20s. Landlords only making house more expensive, not less - and exponentially so.