How to build a well-designed national basic income program – at half the cost
How to build a well-designed national basic income program – at half the cost
A new PBO report shows Canada could halve basic income costs using the economic family model while reducing poverty significantly.
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Hi friends I didn’t actually click the link so my skepticism may be unfounded. But I have a few concerns open to criticism or validation lol
In a primarily private sector “market” supply chain etc does basic income not just put downward pressure on wages in the form of a pseudo business subsidy ick.
Or if everyone has the same level of income before labour income **without pricing control **we end up just raising the floor on the cost of living? Sure there are long tails where only nice to have things get more expensive but in aggregate.
I’m 100% for wealth redistribution and believe heavily in public goods so please don’t at me as a capitalist pig 🐽. Maybe I’m missing the mark but adding more money into our under served areas of society without thoughtful discussion about financial literacy and about where that money inevitability ends up we’ve already lost the plot on the program lol
Thank you if you made it to the end of my poorly punctuated run on mess ❤️
There have been experimental deployments of Universal Basic Income, one of which lasted five years and involved an entire town, and none of those things ever materialized.
Thank you for your comment. I’m confident a towns economic capacity is of no consequence to the interconnected nature of national economics unfortunately. But am also woefully ignorant lol
You're not woefully ignorant, you're correct.
This is the thing people keep missing with those prior experiments; their limited nature insulated from the negative consequences of the devaluation of money because neighbouring communities were meta-stable under the current strategy.
The second we have universal basic income, money will devalue until the significance of that money essentially trends towards zero in terms of impact.
In other words, we'll make the "free" money worthless, which will cause hyperinflation or require extreme market controls that traditionally haven't done much but stifle economic activity.
Thank you for the validation!
Do you have any recommendations on equitable policy we should champion? Would love to hear your thoughts!
I'll admit that nothing I've come up with was something I couldn't immediately poke gaping holes in.
The problem with any economic system is that there are always weaknesses that knowledgable people can exploit if they're not concerned with those who are hurt by the strain that exploitation adds to that system. Ultimately, the battle is the attempt to impart a near-universal understanding of the negatives and positives of greed and how to best control it to our mutual benefit.
Capitalism is failing in this goal because it requires the promise of endless growth, but can't meet this promise in the physical world, so now it must grow in the virtual/abstract sense. People's control over their own lives and their access to society are quickly becoming a tiered subscription, instead of a goal we work towards of our own volition.
Cynical capitalists might argue that this was always the case, but it was previously a consequence of a natural system instead of one engineered by an "owner class" to extract value for a select few that don't have to participate to enjoy the rewards. Once we had passed the tipping point in which new businesses rarely grow to match existing mega-firms before being bought or crushed, we had essentially locked in the next generation of nobility.
Really, we should be doing what we did in the beginning of the previous century; tax the hell out of the rich and get capital moving again (this, of course, solves nothing long-term).
What’s your take on our current markets trajectory when considering a globally aging population with a disproportionate share of wealth / participants heading towards being net beneficiaries rather than contributors?
Personally I’m leaning toward inevitable collapse before you even attempt to factor geopolitical stability into the equation lol
The land grabs and foreshadowing with focus on extractive and tangible economic development gives me a sense that some state actors also see similar writing on the wall .
Curious on your thoughts :) thank you for the responses!
Unfortunately, I think you're right. As long as property can be owned indefinitely with inconsequential payments into the system (property tax), the race to own useful land will be the last chance for people to establish their own rent-seeking behaviour.
Eventually, the bottom of the pyramid gets crushed or gives up trying to hold the rest of it up. Guess we'll find out soon enough :(
When you think about the percentage of corporate evaluations that are construed of intangible assets it gives me some hope that it’ll topple more like jenga than the bottom of a pyramid 😅
Not super well informed on the subject, but the idea is that money looses it's value the more you have. If you're struggling to make ends meet, even a small amount of additional income helps a ton, but if you're already stable, that same amount is inconsequential.
Now for the increase in prices, again "cost of living" is not a single thing, so it can't increase uniformly across the board and affect everyone the same way. The various products have to stay competitive with each other and your local farmer doesn't suddenly need more income either. So I dont expect essentials to get a massive price bump. The one thing we have to be careful with is rent, and that's already an issue.
We need to ban (or tax out of existence) the concept of owning a house you don't stay in. Landlords should be illegal, what value they provide to society is so marginal and so minimal that it would be an overwhelmingly net positive.
That tackles one of the largest worries against a universal income.
Rental housing makes sense for people who aren't intending to stay where they are in the long term (young single people or people whose situation is in flux in some way). If you're expecting to move on, lumbering yourself with an expensive asset that will take years to pay for and may require months to unload when you no longer need it isn't smart.
It may make sense to restrict rentals to multi-unit buildings, and also restrict the number of buildings or units under the same owner, but having none at all causes more problems than it solves.
Sure, we can allow some small percentage of the overall housing to be owned by businesses whose sole purpose is providing a good rental housing experience for those in transit. But that's fundamentally different than parasitic landlords whose only job is owning a property and periodically scheduling the cheapest maintenance workers to do actual work they can.
This isn't your governments legislation branch, I'm not proposing a 100 page documentation. I'm simply suggesting a policy direction which is housing should be for housing, not for investment or for rent collection. If someone makes money off of someone they should provide a meaningful service and I think if housing wasn't an investment vehicle the entire system would look so radically different people can't imagine what a system without some landlords existing would look like.
Imagine everyone owned their house, it wasn't expensive, selling one was like selling a car, but you could sell to the government if need be at no meaningful loss and the government sold them back to people like a service for just such a situation.
Idk man, it's not that hard.
Housing is one of the most expensive purchases most people will ever make. Are you saying everybody must be able to commit to that to have a place to live?
Imagine if owning a house was the same price as buying a car. That a loan was a 3 year ordeal not a 30.
60 years ago a janitor salary could buy a house in their 20s. Landlords only making house more expensive, not less - and exponentially so.
That’s an issue, but it’s not the whole issue. You’re not going to get a reasonable home down to the price of a budget vehicle. It’s not just home prices alone that have gone up over 60 years, it’s most essential goods combined with stagnating wages that means people need to spend a greater portion of their of their income on basic essentials and don’t have as much left to save for future big purchases.
Don’t get me wrong, homes need to be more affordable, but arbitrary reductionist ideas like let’s ban landlords don’t really work.
Some other ideas might be to increase minimum wages, yes this increases inflation but the people at the lower end of the wage scale still come out ahead. Have a crown corp for housing, even if it needs to be subsidized. Give people affordable and reasonable quality options and make private industry have to compete against that. Some better benefits for tradespeople, like lower the exemption on the trade tools tax credit to make construction more affordable. Though there’s a weird thing that happens where companies bring in big crews of apprentices for cheap labour and then lay-off the journeypeople so they don’t have to pay Journeyperson wages. I guess this keeps costs lower, but it’d be nice to see something combat this so there’s better job prospects for people that complete their apprenticeships.
You're saying a large complex issue has many ways of tackling it to improve it? And that some random 3 paragraph response suggesting we improve the system by trying anything isn't a full write up on the exact policy choices we should implement down to the letter of the law?
/s
Yes, obviously improving wages would help people afford things. Yes, helping construction workers improve their process would help make housing costs cheaper. There's a thousand easy to implement ideas that would help the problem. ONE of those is "don't treat housing like an investment vehicle akin to stocks". Housing should be for housing, not for the wealthy to make a steady stream of income off of relatively poorer people. Landlords serve no function except for in a society where owning and trading homes is an expensive, slow, and bureaucratic process. Landlords are simply a means for money to transfer from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. They are an unnecessary cost that inflates the price of housing to the benefit of an extremely small number of people.
To be extremely clear, this is not the only solution. This may not even be a silver bullet. I am not listing the 1000 page legal proposal you can implement in your country tomorrow. My goal is to simply shift the common perception of landlords from "they totally have to exist and wow I love giving them money every month for absolutely nothing - boy owning things sure seems like a burden, thankfully I'll never have to worry about that because I couldn't afford to own something even if I wanted to" to "of course landlords are bad for society." Or even "landlords are by and large capitalistic parasites that slow progress towards a more equitable society by draining people with less wealth of their means of becoming wealthy. Society doesn't need them, even if you can think of reasons to have temporary housing there are better means than some rich person raising the rent every year on you."
When you look at housing as a cash flow expenditure that most people pay in perpetuity the only defining factor being who’s name is on the mortgage the whole thing is criminal lol
I would argue that landlords provide a service in providing a relatively predictable monthly cost of housing. On any given month a homeowner(and/or landlord) could have anywhere from $0 to thousands of dollars of unexpected expenses, things like a major appliance failing or plumbing/electrical issue. Plus there’s intermittent expanses that can be planned for, things like replacing shingles or proactively replacing an appliance approaching its end of life.
It also seems like a market with relatively free competition, given that the cost of purchasing a rental property can be relatively low compared to opening another kind of business. It’s relatively low risk since most of the expense is an appreciable asset, but also relatively low return (historically and over an extended period) than other market investments. Many would actually come out ahead by renting their home and putting the equivalent of what would go to toward their home’s equity into something like a mutual fund.
I think the biggest issue is just lack of good options at the lower end of the housing market. So much new construction is above the average home pricing because that’s where the builders are able to make a reasonable return. The more affordable properties are usually older units, often with significant issues. The Canadian government seems to be on the right track to getting more affordable units built. We don’t need more 1500+ ft^2 units, we need more units in the 500-700 ft^2 range. Something that a single person or young couple with minimal possessions can use as a starter home to build equity. Even if it gets bought by someone to use as an investment property, it can still have a relatively affordable rent while still providing a landlord a reasonable return on their investment.
More affordable units also reduces demand for the currently available units, bringing down prices for the mid-range market as well.
Its a valid argument but discounted when the general public has a high enough financial literacy to budget for “unexpected” expected expenses it’s not really unexpected when you’re 25 year old roof leaks or your 10 year old water heater fails.
The idea that rental property is historically a safe investment is the mentality that reinforces the speculative inflationary cycle that real estate is experiencing. Housing as an investment instead of a basic right is a failure capitalism has burdened us with in the sense we can’t correct it properly without ruining the equity of every homeowner unwittingly complicit in ownership.
It’s true supply and demand cause inflationary pressure on property but it doesn’t include perspective on what drives the demand. Huge influxes of immigration to fill gaps in the labour market primarily exploited by companies offering minimum wage creating a class of workers doomed to be reliant on the rental market or pool resources to purchase a property.. the amount of homes I see with multiple families or extended family or rooms rented in these communities is a whole different can of worms but that’s the point of the universal income rant it sounds good in a vacuum but there are too many variables that it doesn’t account for
Sure, but to some extent you could say the same about any necessity. Groceries, clothing, healthcare, etc.. Then we could extend that to the things that are required for those necessities, transportion, natural resources, sections of the labour market, etc.. Maybe housing does actually have a larger gap between input costs and market rate, and it's probably the single largest expense for most and particularly those at the lower end of the income scale so it's good place to start making changes.
If we trusted most people to manage their budgets we wouldn't need things like EI and CPP, people would just be setting aside enough to cover that. People also need time to build those emergency or planned upgrade funds so telling someone who's only been on their own to make sure they have enough se aside to cover a major repair isn't very practical.
Agreed it is a huge bag of worms and financial literacy in the form of education is the only meaningful prescription.
Just important to acknowledge our systemic shortcomings rather than frame our situation as one where land lords add any real value to the equation. They profit off of other persons ignorance. Which is fine when that’s your choice and simplicity is valued but when it becomes the default because housing for an entire generation has been over levered and over financialized to the point it’s out of reach for most without a privileged start.
Sorry if my passion plays tone deaf I just can’t drink the business as usual coo-laid at this point 😅
I understand the principle behind the concept but believe it lacks depth and is a bandaid for a systemic problem. If you’re struggling to make ends meet there’s been a failure giving you more money isn’t going to solve.
You’re 100% right the cost of living is far to broad to make assumptions about which areas it would impact at scale but the net idea of you increase monetary supply and capitalism does what it does best.
It sounds good in a vacuum but when you take a step back and think about it in aggregate at national scale with monopolistic national supply chains that are poorly regulated I might add see fixing the price of bread 😂 it’s going to be something we can pat ourselves on the back for but is a big nothing burger :(
In a primarily private sector “market” supply chain etc does basic income not just put downward pressure on wages in the form of a pseudo business subsidy ick.
The freedom to say no to job offers, or unfair working conditions, suggests a higher pressure on wages. Getting 5 recruiter calls per day would also raise your wages.
OTOH, people liking their society and wanting to give back might motivate them to work a few hours for beer money. The previous dynamic can mean eliminating minimum wage. You might be happy to work in a library for $3/hour if you feel it is helping educate society, and it doesn't happen to be illegal, as an example.
Can you reword your response to the scale of a country rather than an individual?
Primarily how basic income would increase competition for labour? Stating an anecdotal scenario where you have more opportunity is a nice thought but does little to support or dispose the proposal
I can appreciate the sentiment of wanting to give back to community when you’re grateful and many people do donate and volunteer their time for such causes.
Your point that it could remove the need for minimum wage is a scary thought when you consider the corporate obligation to maximize investor returns.
UBI directly creates economic growth by having more people able to afford more things. That means needing more people to make and sell the things. The freedom to say no to work makes it easier for people who want jobs to get better jobs.
Your point that it could remove the need for minimum wage is a scary thought when you consider the corporate obligation to maximize investor returns.
Your fear is that corrupt markets are the normal inescapable form of markets. That we are all just slaves desperately hoping for the kindest of asshole master to pay us for work. UBI fixes the power imbalance (corruption) in labour market. It also means power redistribution to the people.
Please refer to our aging population and labour shortage for the pain points of people choosing better jobs like it sounds good in a vacuum but it really doesn’t hold up as a silver bullet.
It’s not so much they’re corrupt it’s just how markets are designed to flow from consumers to businesses.. they are relentlessly efficient and exploit human ignorance by design any increase in demand will drive increase in labour wanted if they can’t get someone here to make it what have they done so far? Go elsewhere to do it cheaper lol
imports or automation or immigration is a path to lower cost of stuff and provide improved quality of life as a result. There is still employment/income potential from selling the stuff. Influencer is such a job.
Fair labour market would require that labour is not made desperate by structural threats of homelessness and starvation. Structural supremacism of capital/business policies is corruption of labour markets.
Imports and immigration are just passing the burden of the shit jobs onto other undeserving populations capitalism still grinds away just out of sight.
automation is viable but when it’s implemented in a way that reduces manufacturing cost to increase shareholder value it fails to improve standard of living for those who don’t share in the value.
It really boils down to our reliance on private equity to support our open market economy. private equity’s goals don’t align with public good and ubi doesn’t make that go away
automation is viable but when it’s implemented in a way that reduces manufacturing cost to increase shareholder value it fails to improve standard of living for those who don’t share in the value.
That won't be stopped. UBI does improve standard of living of everyone, and is a better policy than subsidizing/fighting for overpaid jobs for a select few.
I don't think it would have to be any different than people getting a bigger tax return at the end of the year. Or like the HST rebates Ontario has been doing where they pay it out I think quarterly?
As it is right now, I've seen the occasional "tax return sale" because businesses know people just got paid a chunk of money and might be impulsive with it. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, the demand for everyday items won't change, and people will try and save money regardless of income level.
Please reconsider your example of tax sales with the perspective of a pressure sales tactic designed to extract the extra income from “consumers” lol
Who are woefully undereducated in how to manage their money. When you think about those who are most vulnerable financially your proposal misses the point of the value of a basic income program :(