6d ago

Do you have strong opinions about universal basic income?

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I wouldn't say it's a strong opinion, but I've never seen a convincing argument that "inflation" (read "greedy bastards") wouldn't immediately wipe out the extra income - which would be very bad if the UBI were to replace other forms of welfare.
- Inflation happens when demand increases faster than supply can keep up. The pandemic supply chain disruptions are a large recent example: none of the supply bottlenecks would have been difficult to solve, but the solutions would take two to five years to spin up. Absent some kind of regulatory rationing or allotment system, increasing prices let customers self-select on who really wanted the stuff that year and who did without.
  As long as UBI was rolled out incrementally over years, supply would have the time it needed to expand, thereby preventing inflation. As a real example, the Alaska Permanent Fund has been going for decades, and I've never seen an argument it has increased inflation.
  
  Okay, but at least where I live, prices that increased due to covid haven't come back down. Supply is now high enough to satisfy demand, but prices aren't dropping. Of course, why would they? It turns out that customers have self-selected that they really don't want to starve or be homeless. Even if it wipes out most of their income.
  
  No, prices don't come down. That's not how economies work. People get raises. In a healthy economy, wage gains outpace inflation. Purchasing power goes up even though prices haven't dropped.
  Our current US economy is not healthy - it's "K-shaped" with the higher-earning consumers (top 10-ish percent) doing so well they overwhelm the average across the entire economy to make the overall numbers "good" even though people in the bottom half or so are struggling. So most people aren't seeing the purchase power increases that they should. But if things were healthy, it would be wages increasing faster, not prices coming down.
- but I’ve never seen a convincing argument that “inflation” (read “greedy bastards”) wouldn’t immediately wipe out the extra income
  i have one for you
  in 1960s people were well off (one house, two cars, three kids, based on a single income). why didn't "inflation" wipe out the surplus income immediately?
  
  Back then there wasn't just three rich tech bro losers that owned the means of all the labor.
  
  Okay, why wouldn't UBI effectively get wiped out by inflation over 65 years, as has apparently happened to the prosperity in the '60s, then?

176 comments