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by kojus
2136 days ago
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Why not simply reducing working hours for everyone? The risk of UBI is that rent-seekers might just engulf this guaranteed income by raising their prices, and then we will rapidly be back to square one. Working 40 hours a week is not a natural law, peasants in the Middle Age worked less hours annually than us today. Reducing work hours would also have a positive environmental effect. Otherwise, I wholly agree with your diagnosis of the situation. |
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Because either that reduces total wages for everyone, or it makes more people permanently unemployable by raising the cost floor per unit of labor value.
Also, you can't reduce working hours for everyone, only the currently employed, and in practice reliably only the near-full-time-employed-on-hourly-wages.
> The risk of UBI is that rent-seekers might just engulf this guaranteed income by raising their prices
Not really, since UBI funded by progressive tax increases compresses post-policy incomes rather than raising them uniformly. You'd need ironclad market segmentation that survives income distribution compression to “capture” any groups increase in post-policy income, and if you have that, you can just take all of that groups income anyway, which is a problem that needs addressed independently of whether UBI is adopted.