Jeff Bezos spent $600 million on his wedding. I think that we as a society can afford to pay people enough that they don’t have to worry about starving.
The issue is stopping Jeff Bezos from saying, oh neat, everyone in the country is being paid a free $500 a month. How do we increase our prices to dip into that without people noticing?
Landlords are going to be a bigger problem in this regard than old Jeff is. Everyone is getting a free $500 every month? Well rent will be increasing by $600 soon. Market forces, you know. Naturally they’ll all collude together to make sure nobody is getting left behind or more importantly, undercutting the competition; and we know this will happen because this already happens without the UBI even being involved.
Good point, in The Netherlands they increased the amount of money you can borrow when buying a house from 100% to 102% of the property value so people had a better shot at buying a house. Later research showed basically the only parting benefiting from this were the banks, the biggest losers were the people that bought their first house because they had to compete with others who all had 2% (of the property value) more to offer.
Jeff Bezos spent $600 million on his wedding. I think that we as a society can afford to pay people enough that they don’t have to worry about starving.
I completely agree
That’s not the issue though.
The issue is stopping Jeff Bezos from saying, oh neat, everyone in the country is being paid a free $500 a month. How do we increase our prices to dip into that without people noticing?
Landlords are going to be a bigger problem in this regard than old Jeff is. Everyone is getting a free $500 every month? Well rent will be increasing by $600 soon. Market forces, you know. Naturally they’ll all collude together to make sure nobody is getting left behind or more importantly, undercutting the competition; and we know this will happen because this already happens without the UBI even being involved.
Good point, in The Netherlands they increased the amount of money you can borrow when buying a house from 100% to 102% of the property value so people had a better shot at buying a house. Later research showed basically the only parting benefiting from this were the banks, the biggest losers were the people that bought their first house because they had to compete with others who all had 2% (of the property value) more to offer.