Hello, I’m not that informed about UBI, but here is my arguement:

Everyone gets some sort of income, but wouldn’t companies just subside the income by raising their prices? Also, do you believe capatilism can co-exist with UBI?

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    12 days ago

    better alternative, which is Universal Basic Services.

    Absolutely 100% worse. It creates an empire bureaucracy to distribute the subpar services under the same scarcity as subsidized housing today. 10 year+ wait in Toronto and other major cities, btw.

    Cash means you can choose affordable housing that meets your needs, while balancing budget for food or other interests. Government cheese may not be as necessary to you compared to milk and eggs, or “better cheese”. Housing is especially corrupt and inadequate to subsidized distribution. You need to add income/asset conditionality on who can qualify even if almost everyone would like to get the discount. Its a great recipe to create ghetto neighbourhoods that a politician may wish to make worse in order to oppress the ghetto harder. You can’t escape the ghetto because you’ve got a cheap housing option. It makes other housing more expensive because “good neighbourhoods” have a premium when there are bad neighbourhoods.

    UBS is everything that is wrong with our society, one step forward.

    What this looks like is publicly owned housing; a robust, fully-funded public education system that includes pre-K and higher ed; universal healthcare

    While universal healthcare is a proven cost saver, the other’s don’t need to be centralized/governmentalized. While the government/private sector can both build “soviet” style affordable housing, they can do so in a market system that provides affordable housing, while still providing a reasonable private profit margin, or government break even.

    Education costs can be market based, when you give each family a stipend they can use for education. Only desperation would force you to send your child to a coal mine instead of school, but parents could choose to adequately feed their children and spend less on home school, with computers and online learning, then force a child that doesn’t want to be in school into a public institution. Baltimore/DC school districts spend $30k per pupil, largely to make a school to prison pipeline with excessive security needed to control kids who don’t want to be there.

    UBI instead of UBS also means hope for young students who will be able to afford university if they are qualified, or otherwise afford surviving outside of a criminal gang support structure.