No Stupid Questions

Landlords only have control over you, because you have to find a place where there are good income sources. If you have an UBI, you have a lot less pressure to move to a city with high-paying jobs.

All of a sudden, you have a bunch of new options. You can move to a rural town. You can move to places with lower average incomes. Hell, you can just buy a lot of land in the middle of nowhere and build a house.

With consumer goods, it's a bit different, because their prices are less about artificial scarcity and more about production costs. However, as noted in some of the other comments, if you just don't print money but finance it with taxes, it won't be that much of an issue.

With what leverage? If you have no-strings-attached income, you are not facing destitution at the loss of your job, and it becomes a lot less risky to walk away from a job and move somewhere else. If all the landlords in one area do that, employers in that area will probably have to pay more.

But imo, some type ubi system should be paid for with a vat tax that just pulls it's income directly out of economic activity, which would make it harder to avoid paying for. The result would be higher prices anyway which would probably offset the income, but new situation would be that workers have a lot more leverage in their employment and living situation.

My other hot take is that with a ubi, minimum wage should be abolished. Basically, with ubi the need for it would be lessened and more people might be willing to work jobs that they might not have been able to live off of without a ubi. But again, these are basically my hot takes

When the first COVID stimulus check came in, Walmart sold tvs for, after tax, the exact amount the check was worth.

Bottom line is you'd have to freeze price increases, or reduce them somehow. It's a mess of a problem.

I mean... kinda?

I think you're putting too much evil intent behind the motivations though. Supply and demand isn't some made up excuse. If the prices were to stay the same and everyone had more money, then there would be shortages. It's not as if a factory can instantly increase production and the supply chain can instantly get the products on the shelves over night. There are real world factors involved in increasing production.

So what happens is prices increase for many products and this results in inflation. Nobody wants inflation, not even the wealthy. So the central bank will want to tamp down that inflation and the lever they use for that is increasing interest rates. So you wanted to put that UBI towards a mortgage or a car payment? Well a lot of it will be going towards the increased interest on the money you're borrowing.

And the thing about inflation is that it doesn't really get reversed. So the inflation from the initial shock to the economy would take a bite out of UBI (and also the income besides UBI). Your employer may be less likely to give you a raise to offset that inflation because you have UBI. and the fix for the inflation will mean paying more interest on a mortgage.

So yeah, UBI wouldn't gain people much. It's mostly just a poison pill promoted to kids by wealthy people like Andrew Yang so you don't push for an increase in minimum wage. An increase in minimum wage would be a direct transfer of wealth from businesses to employees. They don't want this so they promote UBI which isn't actually feasible to distract from minimum wage increases (which almost everyone supports) and make taxing the wealthy less likely (which is also supported by most, but not when it's to pay for UBI).

In your hypothetical, the market just jumping in cost like that creates opportunity for competition in the market. Because everyone who could not establish a biz charging X can get into the game charging between X amd X+Y, undercutting the gougers and driving prices lower over time. Theoretically.

It's the same argument behind stimulus checks tbh. You give people money so that they can spend it on necessities and that money goes right back into the economy. Since our economy is based on growth and spending, more people spending money overall helps the economy, not hurts it. In addition, you're spending less money on solving societal issues. Well fed sheltered people cause less problems.

I believe in UBI, but the Captain Laserhawk show made me aware of how much it could get twisted in fucked up ways. “Don’t watch this show? -$100 from your stipend this month.” I used to think things like that were fear mongering, but the world is all kinds of weird today.