Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords. There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear. If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.


> UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords.

No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.

> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear

That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.

> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.

A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.

(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)


As opposed to the current situation? Landlords are always going to try to squeeze the tenants, that's the nature of being middlemen.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: