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Didn't Finland also try it, and found the same thing?
I really think UBI has no downsides.
I believe a province in Canada was also trying it with promising results until a right-wing politician got elected and scrapped the trial program.
Yup, Ontario had it for a small community and the people on it were doing great. They're still just running these programs in other areas to try and find the one with negative results so every country can point to that as their reason to not do it longterm.
That's why you keep seeing 100 of these "trials".
The downside is less money going towards the rich
Still not hearing any downsides
Yes, they did. Sadly the body that's studied the effects said the sample size (a couple thousand unemployed people) was too small... Gee, I wonder who would've designed the experiment in such way?
It's money that has no value if it's truly universal. If it's not universal, but only a select group gets it, yep pretty much no downsides.
Saying money is worthless if everyone has it is asinine. Gatekeeping shit is an idiot's idea of intelligence. The money won't change spending at the top levels because they already spend that much daily on services alone. But at the lower income brackets it generates lots of purchases on products and goods. It boosts manufacturing which in turns buoys stock market valuation and guarantees value for the investor.
UBI is so good for everyone, even the super rich, that it's insane not to participate. But without the threat of lifestyle shock, the wealthy don't have leverage to make exasperated workers try to achieve more for less. It will literally help people with the stress of living paycheck to paycheck.
If it's universal then it guarantees a minimal capital throughput at each nexus of value and the market. That's extra income at all levels from spending, taxes, and the buyer's unspent capital - it's huge and is a means to jumpstart any economy and keep it running for as long as the UBI flows.
Okay, humour me. Everyone suddenly gets $100 per month. Now, some big grocery chain knows that every single one of those customers has an extra $100. What do you expect to happen? They'll be like, "cool people will buy more stuff" or they'll be like "that's an extra $100 we can extract by making the most common things people buy more expensive," which do you think is more likely?
If there's only one grocery store, maybe. But that's a monopoly, and that's going to be shit no matter what. Ideally you have multiple grocery stores that compete, and if one raises prices the other will take their customers. (If they all coordinate to raise their prices, that's a cartel and that's also bad.)
So you're not really exposing a problem with UBI, but rather with unregulated capitalism.
We live in a real world, not a hypothetical scenario. There are multiple stores and they're all either in a cartel or just blindly copying each other in extracting the maximum value out of their customers.
This brings them more money, they pump more into marketing and voilà, only the shitty stores remain. If a newcomer joins, you can enjoy a few pretty good years until they inevitably join the shitty cartel or cease to exist.
So yeah, that's a problem of capitalism but that doesn't mean it's not a problem preventing UBI actually ever being implemented.
I don't think "This other, largely unrelated, problem is bad so we shouldn't do this thing" is good reasoning.
I don't think in the real world, in all places (or even most places) all the stores are in a cartel. Where I live, there are several large supermarkets and a handful of smaller groceries all within walking distance. They are not a cartel. They compete. You're just making stuff up for some weird dark fantasy of yours.
Furthermore, if there was a monopoly, and we have the political might to implement UBI, I dare say we'd also have the political power to do a tried-and-true popular move of breaking up monopolies.
But we’ve already seen this without UBI. So worst case, nothing changes. Best case? There’s more opportunity for change.
I'll humor this, even though I'm tired of answering this same question. I'll do you a favor and give you the short version, first: Inflation has nothing to do with how currency is distributed and everything to do with the supply of currency in circulation. Now that we've established the basic concept, let's break some of it down. If there's $100 in circulation, it doesn't matter if one person has all of it, or 100 people have $1. The value of $1 is the same. If $1000 is in circulation, then $100 is worth less than if only $100 is in circulation, even if one person has $901 and everyone else has $1. Why is this so difficult to understand? Why do you believe that money is somehow worth more if its distribution is unequal? If people buy more stuff, that's called a healthy economy. If people buy 'too much milk and the prices go up' then someone will sell milk for less to undercut the competition in a healthy economic system. If you can't sell it for less, you innovate. If you can't innovate, or sell for less, then you can't compete and you lose. Everyone being able to afford more milk doesn't cause $1 to be worth less. Of course, this example isn't realistic anymore, but that's due to capitalism failing -- the underlying principals of the example still hold true.
The problem is in markets with little to no real competition. So, housing. But really that is a separate problem that also should be fixed and could be but for some reason is apparently politically unpopular to do so.
We literally fixed this exact problem before.
Tell me you don't understand income inequality without telling me you don't understand income inequality.
Well, definitely more than you understand economy, it seems.
Aka the same line companies used when some places tried and succeeded in raising wages. Turns out the prices didn't go up, only the spending power of those with those wages, who bought more stuff. Some people have a beef against the idea of any sort of welfare net because it might be abused. Then try to make it less abusable, or better yet, try it and see what works, don't say "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
Yeah, if by "abused" you mean working-class people getting "uppity" because they actually manage to get ahead for once.
Just a side note, if you want people to even consider your point of view, don't call them idiots. Off to blocklist you go! Bye.
LOL, says the guy whose previous comment was nothing but a personal attack. You're just throwing a tantrum because you have no rebuttal.
Artificially inflating prices to cancel out UBI would create economic incentive to undercut those corporations in a free market.
Government intervention could also be used in a less free market to ensure subsistence items aren't artificially inflated, after that who cares if some company inflates their price? Go work if you want a new shiny thing.
You know what's really good? Having a safety net to prevent the lowest suffering class of our society dying from things that we've been able to prevent for decades.
Having reduced crime because people aren't fighting over scraps.
Having more mobility in society so people can pursure careers and education that aligns with their own self fulfilment goals.
Stop fighting against a better world for all of us please.
That hasn't worked historically for any reason and UBI is not so magical that the whole of capitalism will sit on its ass and stop doing what it's doing.
Pretty much the same response as above, good luck with that.
Fully agree, I don't see how that relates to UBI, though.
I'm not, I'm just trying to explain that while UBI sounds good on paper, it can't work and never will. It's free money for everyone who owns capital, be it landlord or huge chains. They'll have your UBI, you'll have nothing and you'll pay for it from your taxes, because rich don't pay their taxes, definitely not the amount they should. So, where in that is your better world?
I get the point youre trying to make but a UBI is still a step in the right direction, I'd rather take the gamble and pay my taxes on it than have what we do now.
At the very least it would expose a lot of the systemic issues you've mentioned to the broader public, and hopefully that would lead to meaningful change.
I'd prefer a world where people are guaranteed the basics to survive without having to capitulate to the system, we have the technlogical progress and productive capabilities to do this we're just not there in terms of societal progression.
And I'm going to continue advocating for that world, whether it's UBI or unbiased infrastructure and systems to provide people with basic needs
I get that and I agree, but I don't think giving everyone money that can be stolen by the usual suspects is the solution. Safety nets are the way to go, not UBI.
If someone some day proves me wrong, I'll be happy to admit I was wrong, though I'm not gonna support UBI until that happens, because of the issues I outlined.
Seems like you don't actually want to communicate
I did want to and as you can see in a sibling thread, we actually did discuss with someone who didn't decide that calling people idiots just because you don't have anything smarter to say is appropriate.
If everyone is getting it but only the poorer are using it, it most certainly has value.
Oh, so you're putting unrealistic constraints on it. Then yes, it has value. But no, the rich are using it, too. And because for them it's such a small amount, they're extracting your UBI as well.
Let's say it's set at $10k/year. To someone on $20k that's a 50% boost. To someone on 100k, it's only 10%. At a million a year it's down to 1%.
If it's accompanied by a 20% tax, it would significantly rebalance income inequality, and provide a reliable financial buffer for the poor to negotiate from.