| Great question. This is THE show stopper for UBI as presented by any proponent today. The only way to implement it is by stopping the runaway rent inflation by implementing a counter-force to rent price increases. One such technique is battle tested Land Value Tax which was responsible for massive successes of Asian Tiger economies such as Singapore. This problem has been understood more than 100 years ago by then popular economics movement following economist Henry George who almost made it to mayor of New York and whose book (Progress and Poverty) coined the term Progressives (in the original anti-trust meaning). They realized that after you curb the ever inflating rent prices, people can finally be freed up of all excess income being eaten away by land monopoly (city landlords) and other monopoly businesses of that era. Once you have the money necessary to fund UBI through Land Value Tax for example (which is able to raise more than current tax system with ZERO negative impact to the economy), you then realize that the main problem you were designing UBI for (massive rents eating away your paycheck) went away. So as a government you then reinvest the so to be UBI money into eg. infrastructure, such as city development, roads and networks so that private business can thrive on top of that. Congrats you've now become the economy #1 in the world (this is how asian tigers got so successful). The only country successfully implementing this at scale today seems to be China, although more so for their expansion in Africa than domestically
(eg. acquiring prime city land by helping constructing subway systems in key metro areas). |