UBI is implemented tomorrow. Every citizen gets $1000 per month.
Landlord now knows you have an extra $1000 that you never had before. Why wouldn’t the landlord raise prices?
Now you have an extra $1000 a month and instead of eating rice and beans for a few meals you go out to a restaurant. The restaurant owners know everyone is eating out more so why not raise prices and maximize shareholder profit as always. The restaurant/corporation is on TV saying, “well, demand increased and it is a simple Economic principle that prices had to increase. There’s nothing we can do about it”.
Your state/country has toll roads. The state needs money for its deficit. UBI is implemented and the state/country sees it as the perfect time to incrementally raise toll prices.
Next thing you know UBI is effectively gone because everything costs more and billionaires keep hitting higher and higher all time net worth records.
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
I don’t see any need to abolish minimum wage. The pressures that you’re talking about would allow people to quit those horrible minimum wage jobs, but there’s no strong argument for saying that the minimum wage itself should go away.
The general argument for getting rid of minimum wage is that there is a whole bunch of work out there which is simply not valuable enough to be profitable if the labour must be paid at minimum wage prices, and so those jobs simply aren’t available right now.
The trade-off is that it guarantees laborers are able to afford a basic life with their jobs, which greatly reduces the ability of capitalists to prey on the working class. However with UBI that problem isn’t so big anymore, so there’s theoretically no need for a minimum wage.
I hear you. At the same time, minimum wage also ties into laws against wage theft. So maybe we shouldn’t take it off the shelf for a good long while, at least until wage theft can be cut to reasonably low levels. Good luck to us on that front, though.
I have a feeling that this is one of the reasons the billionaires will never let UBI happen.
Game theory, it’s in the interest of every landlord if prices go up a little, so the overwhelming majority will raise rent.
Fact is only so much stuff is made and only so much space exists and only so many people exist to make and build etc. Money is just an abstraction for allocating those resources. Broadly speaking the market would adjust and everything would remain the same for 95% of people. The HOPE of UBI advocates is that, after adjustments to prices, the UBI would have an impact on that last 5%.
Until one landlord defects to improve their occupancy rate.
The thing about real estate though, is that supply is inelastic. Your one landlord cannot just turn up production and pump out a million widgets of housing. They’ll sell out, fast. And you’re back to square one.
All the sophisticated (institutional) landlords modeled and realized that with higher prices and lower occupancy rates they still make more money, and they all use ONE company to set their price on each unit.