[nostrebored]

Except your suggestions here ignore that the surplus given by UBI will be amortized into rent and staples costs. It's all well and good until you get into the weeds and realize that a lot of price fixing or pseudo price fixing needs to happen before UBI becomes realistic. If the argument is getting rid of legislative and bureaucratic bloat, it's definitely not quite so easy or quite so effective, choose one.

[bryanlarsen]

Why would you expect inflation to occur?

As long as UBI is payed for via taxes and not deficit spending than the money supply isn't changing. And as economists say, inflation is a monetary phenomenon.

Supply & demand aren't radically changing either. America's poor eat too much, not too little. And while there are homeless people in America, most sleep in shelters.

If anything, you might expect the price of the cheapest staples and crappiest housing to go down as UBI enables the poor to upgrade their food and housing.

[coldtea]

>And while there are homeless people in America, most sleep in shelters.

You'd be surprised.

https://www.npr.org/2012/12/06/166666265/why-some-homeless-c...

[nostrebored]

Money supply isn't the issue here.

If everyone has another x+12,000 dollars, the amount of money available for low income housing has strictly increased. Landlords are then in a position to raise prices proportionally.

The "America's poor eat too much" line is also not strong. You might argue that they eat the wrong things; this is the food desert/education argument that's commonly made. Regardless there is already artificial price fixing of many staple foods like milk and bread, which is a much better argument.

[dllthomas]

> If everyone has another x+12,000 dollars, the amount of money available for low income housing has strictly increased. Landlords are then in a position to raise prices proportionally.

Not really.

First, if landlords go to charge more they are increasing the attractiveness of using housing more efficiently. If everyone is getting an extra $1k/mo and landlords are charging an extra $1k/mo, then I'm saving an extra $500/mo when a friend and I decide to room together. For some people this will make the difference in their decision making, and this will increase the number of available units and put downward pressure on prices. From this dynamic alone, we should still expect prices to rise, but less (and likely much less) than the full amount.

Second, we're not really constrained on "supply of housing" at a national scale. We're constrained on supply of "housing where someone wants to live". "Where someone wants to live" comprises a lot of factors, many differing by the individual, but "sufficiently close to ability to make sufficient income" is usually a big part of it. A UBI directly increases our supply of "housing sufficiently close to ability to make sufficient income" which would now be competing against existing stock.

[idontpost]

> Money supply isn't the issue here. > If everyone has another x+12,000 dollars, the amount of money available for low income housing has strictly increased. Landlords are then in a position to raise prices proportionally.

You're contradicting yourself through sloppy thinking. If everyone has another x+12,000 dollars, the money supply has increased. That's the definition of money supply.

It's also a total strawman and not what UBI proposes to do. For example, my wife and I make about $150,000 combined. UBI would basically do nothing for us because of the taxes we'd pay to support it. If anything we'd have less money, not $12,000 more.

The only people who'd have $12,000 more are the totally unemployed and homeless.

The point of UBI isn't that everyone gets more money, it's that everyone is guaranteed to have the means not to starve or be homeless at a minimum.

People who support UBI (including myself) do so not because they would have more money (as stated, I personally would almost certainly lose money), but because they would have less RISK. That's what UBI really does. It lowers the risk of life choices and gives people the freedom to make choices that otherwise they could not have made.

If I'm one of the lucky (which so far, I have been), UBI does nothing for me. But if tomorrow I'm crippled in a car accident and can no longer work, UBI guarantees a certain minimum standard of living.

[mcguire]

You are correct; the money supply isn't an issue. However, inflation within a localized area of the economy is a thing (e.g. housing prices, health care).

UBI is a transfer of money from the wealthy, who would have used it to buy filet mignon or something, to the poor, who would likely use it to buy food and shelter. One should expect the prices of food and shelter to rise, relative to other products.

[idontpost]

And? That's not an argument against UBI. These things have equilibria and rising prices push up supply. The fact that prices may (I emphasize may, because there are other factors at play here that you conveniently ignore) rise doesn't change the utility of raising the floor on standard of living.

I already live a better, more comfortable life than any Roman emperor ever did. We have the means to ensure that no one in our society suffers in destitution, by a vast margin, and that margin increases continuously as automation of menial work proceeds over time.

Not doing so because it might not be "optimally efficient" according to some arbitrary metric is inhuman.

[bryanlarsen]

"If everyone has another x+12,000 dollars"

then you have a money supply issue.

[mcguire]

"If anything, you might expect the price of the cheapest staples and crappiest housing to go down as UBI enables the poor to upgrade their food and housing."

You do realize that is self-contradictory, right? More people buying X means the price of X goes up, not down. (Modulo a bunch of factors that probably don't apply to housing and staples.)

[dragonwriter]

People who are too poor to afford popular current housing also having more stable income reducing the risk of renting to them might well make serving that market with units that are less expensive than the minimum on the market profitable, reducing the floor price in private housing markets.