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?
While I’d prefer to fully dismantle the whole capitalist system, I can accept UBI as the most realistic compromise we’re likely to get in our lifetimes.
I’d be happy to see our kids get it in their lifetime - I lost hope to see it myself with how backwards my country is
Here’s a good breakdown: https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/unboxing-universal-basic-income/
As for my thoughts, yes there would be a noticeable impact at first, but UBI would help stabilise and strengthen the economy in the long term because purchasing power and demand will increase. If supply can keep up, prices won’t go up. Companies can’t just raise prices as that’s called price fixing. Antitrust laws should be there to prevent that, but your mileage may vary depending on your country. That means that if some companies decide to raise prices because of more purchasing power, some smart company is going to charge less to gain more market share. So we’re still doing capitalism, but there’s a social safety net.
Also, people will still go to work to find purpose. Except “work” in this case could mean the freedom and flexibility to contribute locally, or take higher risks like entrepreneurship or becoming an artist.
That means that if some companies decide to raise prices because of more purchasing power, some smart company is going to charge less to gain more market share.
Here is how this turns out in reality: Company A raises prices because they are greedy bastards. Company B is then impressed with the sheer display of dominance by A and raises prices accordingly to “keep up”.
Your thinking is correct and that’s how it should work, maybe it even did in the 60s, but it just isn’t the case anymore.
You’re forgetting “customers see how much prices are up, and just stay home” or “company C, looking to break in, undercuts A and B and changes the market.”
A real UBI is a great fix for capitalism, since it makes “f it, I’ll just stay at home” possible.
Your first example only works for goods that are completely optional, which is very rarely the case. For example, smartphones. Nobody technically needs one, but almost everyone in western countries has one. If every company that makes a smartphone increases their prices, people will still buy them because they basically need them. I believe this is the principle of inelastic demand (or low elasticity) – car fuel is a more traditional example.
Your second example doesn’t work when the cost of entry into the market is really high. This is very common in high tech. Take semiconductors for example. There’s basically one big name in chip manufacturing (TSMC) and a few runner-ups (Samsung, Intel, etc.). The latest node is infamous for being very expensive and low capacity. Why aren’t there new competitors constantly breaking in to the market?
UBI is a great idea and will help things, but it’s not perfect so we shouldn’t expect it to just completely fix capitalism. The best way to fix capitalism is to get governments (which are all in charge of capitalism) to fix it with regulations. UBI will be a major regulation/step in the right direction.
Company A raises prices because they are greedy bastards. Company B is then impressed with the sheer display of dominance by A and raises prices accordingly to “keep up”.
When there’s a dozen manufacturers, they won’t all do it. As I mentioned, this is price fixing and illegal in a lot of countries.
Secondly, what’s stopping someone from creating another company to undercut all of those greedy bastards to corner the market?
When there’s a dozen manufacturers, they won’t all do it. As I mentioned, this is price fixing and illegal in a lot of countries.
They can’t coordinate together to fix prices, but there is nothing legally stopping them from watching each other’s public behavior and adjusting their pricing to match.
All B has to do is not raise their prices as much as A.
Ita already working like that post pandemic.
My pie in the sky hope for UBI is that it would be large enough so that you don’t need to work to live, maybe with some frugality.
At that point I’d be fine with scrapping minimum wage altogether. Companies would have to offer a job/salary that attracts people who aren’t desperate.
It would be much easier to quit a job. And I think it would broadly increase the value of labor. Automation would increase, but that wouldn’t be a problem, because its no longer a problem to be unemployed.
Exactly, UBI (or direct payments from the gov, whatever works ig) to support everyone’s basic needs. Housing properly sized to each family, food, water, electric, heating/cooling, healthcare and yes even internet. Maybe even a little extra disposable so people can have recreational activities and you know, live.
If you want luxury items, like the latest, greatest most expensive iPhone or whatever thats where you need to get a job to earn extra above the UBI
I love the idea but how would it be paid for? Quick back of the envelope sums says if you pay every adult the government living wage in the UK, it would cost around 950bn… uk government expenditure for everything is just under 700bn a year at the moment…
I don’t know how it would be paid for. It’s probably prohibitively expensive. But I think it would be cheaper than the product of UBI*population. Poverty is very expensive for a country, and would be reduced by like 80% (made up number).
I’d draw money from my other pie in the sky policies, like ~100% marginal tax on wealth above $500M, and on incomes above $5M/yr. Realistically, I think this would cause wealth flight, so it would have to be global to work.
I don’t expect any of this to happen in my lifetime. A more realistic hope is a UBI that you can’t survive on, but that keeps you from poverty. Maybe a UBI that equals the poverty line. But then I’d want to keep the minimum wage.
Let’s say 50k is average income
Basic income is 10k
The average person would get 10k in UBI but pay 10k more in taxes
They will have 50k dollars
Someone that makes 100k would get the 10k in UBI but would have to pay 20k more in taxes.
They will have 90k dollars
Someone making 15k (federal min wage) would get 10k in UBI and pay nothing in taxes
They will have 25k dollars
This is simplified, but the idea is that all three people still made 165k combined. Just the person at the bottom got some help.
UBI does not increase the total amount of money in the economy. Just moves it from the rich to the poor.
The average person is still going to have the same spending power
UBI only exists to solve a problem of capitalism. Other systems could have a UI like communism. But it’s the flaws of capitalism that needs it to correct itself.
Social programs exist in capitalism and have existed for years. They are just a complex way of solving a basic problem. “How do we get poor people money?”
Personally, I’d be for UBMI (Universal Bare Minimum Income). Everyone should be provided bare minimum from the society. Food, water, shelter, etc. If you can afford to pay it back, great, if you can’t, that’s fine too. But when people talk about UBI it’s always “how much??”. And it should be the bare minimum to survive and not be forced to run the capitalism rat race. If you’re content to sit in a small shelter and eat 3 meals a day, the government should give it to you. The government gives it to people who break the law and are no where near as deserving
UBI only exists to solve a problem of capitalism […] moves it from the rich to the poor.
I’m not sure I agree that UBI is the best way to solve this, but we are in agreement about the massive flaw in capitalism. When the richest man extracts the final dollar from his rival, capitalism is over. Money has no meaning because no one has any except for that one guy. That’s an impossible extreme, but it demonstrates the fundamental flaw that without money circulating, there is no economy.
Putting money into the hands of the poor stimulates the economy. It gives them some ability to participate beyond the simple need for shelter and sustenance. Anyone with no discretionary income has no role other than demand for basic necessities (that’s not intended as an insult, that’s the reality of a wealth-based society)
That being said, handing money out to everyone has an inflationary effect, so there would have to be some thought put into countering that. And I guarantee payday loan places would find a way to keep the poor impoverished.
Anyway yours was a good comment I thought I’d piggyback into. There are flaws with UBI, but unfettered capitalism is unsustainable and it certainly one way to address the issue.
Would this communism have money? If so, what’s the purpose of the money?
If people are choosing to buy things, that’s a free market and it’s not communism. If people are forced to buy specific things, it’s not really buying.
If people are free to buy certain things but new people aren’t allowed to enter the market with new products, that’s just worse than capitalism.
If so, what’s the purpose of the money?
Barter and trade will always be part of humanity unless we somehow manage post-scarcity. Money is so far the best way we’ve found to manage and track the value of things for that system.
If people are choosing to buy things, that’s a free market
No, it’s just a market, and even then that’s not a guarantee at all. It could be that people just trade money for valuables amongst themselves, or other systems I’m too stupid to conceive of
If people are forced to buy specific things, it’s not really buying
Yes, it is? Its only not buying if you don’t trade money for it, ie the government sending it to everyone for free
If people are free to buy certain things but new people aren’t allowed to enter the market with new products, that’s just worse than capitalism.
Good thing that’s not anyone’s suggestion
In my mind, a UBI would replace a lot of welfare and retirement programs and would absorb much of their budget. What would we need the whole food stamps system for if we guarantee everyone an income? What would we need social security for if you have your Universal Basic Income?
Since it’s universal, we can do away with all those systems we have to make sure you “deserve” it. We can eliminate entire data centers, close entire offices. Those people (mostly office worker accountant types) can go work in some other part of the government like school systems, the FDA, the FAA, something that actually helps make society go. That should free up some budget.
Do an actual goddamn audit of the Pentagon, if we find some bullshit pet projects we don’t actually need costing taxpayers billions of dollars we bust a general down to recruit and find or invent a way for him to die for his country.
Capitalism may not be able to survive alongside a UBI but I think a largely free market economy can. I’ll always have my housing and food needs bet but I’d like to have an Xbox so I’ll go get a job to get money to pay for one.
Agreed! I feel like public discourse often forgets these efficiencies when talking about UBI. Include social security and education financial assistance and the numbers really add up.
The COVID-era stimulus checks and PPP “loans” proved its possible to provide a package this large, would just need to offset the spending with increased taxes on the wealthy to make it sustainable long term.
Oh no, I can already hear the whining about “but (insert type of person the speaker doesn’t like) don’t deserrrrve an income!” If we can outvote the bootstrappers and rugged individualists, we can see this thing happen.
My stance on this is that if a machine can do the work of a hundred men, then ninety-nine men should be able to retire early with pay. Anything else is theft.
So, yes, I support UBI, and no, I don’t think it would break capitalism. It’s the same amount of money being put into circulation, just for less work.
No, I don’t support UBI, but I support UBS - Universal basic services. Food, housing, water, education, etc should be free at a basic level. Basic level for housing for example will be ‘Housing First’ concept in Finland.
I’d be in favor of both. Universal services and some income.
A little bit of basic income would allow some flexibility just in case there’s something that UBS doesn’t cover on an individual level.
UBI that’s big enough to cover housing, food, clothing, education, etc would almost certainly get abused and exploited in every way possible to not be used on housing, food, clothing, and education…
Those basic services all have a cost associated with them… that’s why people support UBI to cover those basic services…
Why are you under the impression that UBS will not pay for those services?
The US Post service is the biggest UBS that most Americans pay with taxes. Those who can’t afford or can’t make money to pay taxes or otherwise still benefit from it as “free”
You seem to think it doesn’t exist or will not work. Yet it does. Libraries exist, public transportation exists. People needs can be met.
When I say it should be free, it means that there is no cost to be paid by individual
I agree, and I think the best service we have but is being overshadowed by Amazon is the US Post service. It really needs a push to modernize.
I also think instead of UBI, anything that is a basic need will be taxed based on a progressive schedule instead of a flat percentage. That way if they try to make it more expensive then it will be taxed too much to be viable. We need to combat this inflation and make it so that a lower priced item is more profitable!
Sure, eliminate billionaires to pay for it
This is completely unrealistic.
A UBI of just $10,000 a year, and only to all working age Americans, would still cost several trillion dollars, every year.
Even if you could wave a magic wand and convert the combined net worth of all of the US’s billionaires to cash 1:1, that cash wouldn’t fund even that meager amount of UBI for more than a couple of years.
Sorry we don’t allow simple math in lemmy.
At first, maybe. But that’s the neat thing about capitalism and the free market: the first to lower their prices again has a huge advantage. There’s always an incentive to operate at minimal profit.
Why wouldn’t UBI and capitalism be able to coexist? It makes MORE capitalism possible, as it were, expanding its principles of supply and demand to fields such as employment. Right now, people need a job, any job, and if there’s no job that fulfills your needs, tough - you take the shitty one and you’ll like it. With a UBI, you could shop around for the perfect job, choosing the best offer, or not “buy” at all right now because the market doesn’t offer what you want and it’s not like you’re going to starve without a job. Employers would be forced to make YOU an offer that YOU can accept and if they can’t operate under these circumstance, tough. Capitalism in a nutshell, really.
It makes MORE capitalism possible, as it were, expanding its principles of supply and demand to fields such as employment.
A better way to word this is that it makes the labour market free and fair. conditioning healthcare and starvation on employment is oppressive.
True, I just wanted to phrase it in the terms of capitalism.
You explain this as if you’re not just describing basic UBI lol
I don’t follow?
Yes… BUT I’d actually encourage people to consider an even better alternative, which is Universal Basic Services.
As you point out, giving people money is no guarantee that their spending power will be enough to cover their needs. I’ve heard it said that any UBI which is sufficient is unaffordable, and any that is affordable is insufficient. I think it’s still a policy we should experiment with, and I think even a small UBI could elevate poverty. But a more effective alternative is to try and provide essentials directly, free of cost.
What this looks like is publicly owned housing; a robust, fully-funded public education system that includes pre-K and higher ed; universal healthcare; and free food. Some of these – like housing and food – sound shocking and difficult, but to an earlier generation, so would the others. And we already have some of these programs for the very poor. The key to executing them is to bypass markets. Markets will always raise the cost of essentials because the demand is unlimited. Instead of paying private landlords for housing, the state or non-profit entities need to own the homes. There will still be costs associated with maintenance, but there need be no dividends or investor profits. Same with food. We might not be able to make everything in a grocery store free. But if you have well-run local gardens, they’ll actually produce a substantial amount of food that you can just put in baskets by the entrance and let people take from.
Unlike UBIs, which are inherently inflationary, UBS programs are deflationary. By offering free goods they create competition against market prices and make the stuff people still pay for (with a UBI) cheaper.
If you’d like to see how all of this works, go check out the tabletop RPG my friends developed at c/fullyautomatedrpg, or the world guide for the setting at https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/resources.
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.
Yes.
Companies will raise their prices (to “what the market can bear”), but they will never be able to raise prices enough to offset the positive effects of UBI. It’s not like your internet bill is going to go up by $2000/month if they suddenly know you’re getting $2000/month in UBI. Your typical person makes purchases from dozens of different companies. An increase of “what the market can bear” won’t be all that much.
And afterward, the effective purchasing power of the vast majority of people will have increased - most noticeably for those who currently have nothing / very little. Least noticeably for those who are reasonably well off already. And for those who are currently doing extremely well off, their purchasing power will end up dropping.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about and I made all numbers in this message up.
UBI is the only solution to our corrupt politics. It disempowers the state and empowers individuals. You can stop relying on promises from fake heroes to help the poor, and completely eliminate poverty and crime.
AI and robotics is often cited as a catalyst for UBI. But it is deeply connected to political corruption. Our asshats will tell you that tech oligarchy deserves all our money, and nationalism means our weapons, oil oligarchs need to be given the rest of our money, and what little US manufacturing there is, needs to be protected so that you pay through the nose for stuff. All of this is BS. Let robotics/AI/China deliver us cheap stuff, and UBI afford not only to buy the cheap stuff, but let us have our time freed up in order to design/sell even more productively made stuff/tech that can improve the lives of those who will pay us for it.
UBI does not stop the rich from getting richer. It grows economy significantly, and all money trickles up to the rich. UBI does disempower the rich from stealing your money, through war and war posturing. AI, without UBI, needs to be weaponized as national security that includes the same media disinformation on your tolerance for warmongering empire that makes you/us poorer.
Every disgusting demonic evil inflicted on Americans by politicians is entirely the result of oppression and fearmongering to support unethical evil out of fear of homelessness, and healthcare access. You cannot support a sustainable world if society is on the verge of collapse and there is some war you idiotically are made to tolerate. Misery gives you no time to cure your stupidity. UBI frees us all into doing something useful instead desperately clinging to a job that does not produce anything worthwhile or competitive. 5 recruiter calls per day offering you a better job cures your stupidity.
Yes.
The whole competition for who has more money because that means they are more successful and thus far be superior over others is… Stupid
Your theory about companies raising prices to offset UBI is actually undercut by historical and present evidence.
There was a time when the United States had welfare. The United States still has food stamps. But nobody is seriously pretending that these things did or do drive up grocery prices.
Similarly, over time various states have raised minimum wage, and if your argument were accurate, then the prices in those states would have immediately risen to match minimum wage, but they didn’t.
In other words, you’re repeating a conservative talking point that has been repeatedly debunked by reality. I think you could try to improve your argument by arguing that inflation happens across the board, to everything, and therefore it would also happen to UBI. But what we’ve actually seen is that’s not true.
