[spamizbad]

> I think the eviction moratorium wasn't thought out very well. You can't just stop evictions while not compensating landlords

Sounds like something that's impossible to administer. How would you prevent widespread fraud - landlord's claiming their tenants aren't paying rent when in fact they are?

The US really doesn't have the bureaucratic infrastructure to handle such matters - or at least couldn't spin one up on short notice.

[wongarsu]

Yes, it's a real hassle to prevent fraud. Just giving everyone the same and without conditions is much simpler, hard to game and fairer. That's why universal basic income is such an attractive solution compared to more traditional safety nets.

[Chris2048]

How would that relate to landlords? If everyone has UBI, then everyone has more money to compete for the better rental properties. The landlord would have to get their UBI directly, and that might still not be enough.

[wongarsu]

If everyone has UBI, then people still have some money with which to pay rent (or at least pay a portion of the rent). That makes it much less likely that you need an eviction moratorium, and lessens the impact of having one.

And of course the assumption "if everyone has UBI, then everyone has more money" isn't right, since UBI as "proposed" my comment would replace other safety nets like unemployment benefits. Many people would get basically the same, just with less bureaucratic overhead. And to pay for the rest of UBI you wouldn't just print money but instead raise taxes, so you would expect the money of someone earning median income to not really change at all (depending on the exact tax scheme).

[Chris2048]

> people still have some money with which to pay rent

And as a result, money will devalue, and rents will go up. So long as UBI recipients are competing with each other over housing, that's how it will work.

> since UBI as "proposed" my comment would replace other safety nets like unemployment benefits.

If UBI is universal, why would unemployment benefits be cut? wouldn't that mean the unemployed get comparatively less?

> to pay for the rest of UBI you wouldn't just print money but instead raise taxes

The problem with this is that tax rates now follow from UBI.

Previously we might say "The tax people pay is X% of income".

Now we pay a fixed sum $Y to everyone and we need to make up for $Y * P ; where P is the size of the population.

that means the average tax payed needs to be $Y per person. This obviously can't be equally distributed (otherwise Y = 0) but now the relative tax rate depends explicitly on population size. You've just moved the goalpost by making income less relevant, and citizenship more relevant; Now every new immigrant making less than average wage, increases the tax rate for everyone making more than average wage. Instead of opposing tax rates, the wealthy will oppose immigration rates.

The benefit of not guaranteeing tax-derived UBI, is that no one has to care who enters the country, b/c it doesn't have any effect on them.

[gruez]

>If everyone has UBI, then everyone has more money to compete for the better rental properties

But people are only competing for rental properties because they need jobs, because cities are where all the jobs are. If getting a job isn't a requirement, they can move to oklahoma or something and get a cheap rental there.

[danaris]

In the short term, UBI—even a proper one that actually provides a bare minimum to live on—isn't likely to make lots of people leave their jobs for long enough to move expecting to live only off UBI. That's more likely to be a long-term process as people gain more bargaining power and the money distribution becomes more equal across the country.

[Chris2048]

I suppose this depends on whether UBI is supposed to be a form of welfare, adding a buffer against unemployment, and greasing the wheels of the economy; or if it's supposed to be a star-trekkian form of post-scarcity neo-economy.

Assuming the former; I see a big problem in that the desired outcome: "people gain more bargaining power" as unlikely so long as UBI is only a monetary pay-out.

power is relative. Universal anything can't fix that. It's like saying "everyone should be above average". If everyone got more money, money will just become less valuable. The only effect will be to piss off those with mostly monetary assets (who aren't in a position to sell-off before the change), and increase the value of non-monetary investments.

Instead, the focus should first be on the pinch-points, i.e. the scarce assets that money is intended to buy. Government housing projects, for example: leverage the large amounts of capital the government has by buying large lots of land and rapidly developing it. Create a large supply of basic housing w/ amenities, and allow this to apply market pressure naturally.

AFAIK, this is the kind of approach China is taking: large social projects for core infrastructure, high-speed national railways; entire cities built cheaply from scratch in remote areas. The large amount of capital pays off when these cities develop into more desirable locations, and unemployment/poverty is decreased.

[danaris]

Yes, power is relative. But with UBI, people gain power against corporations—because right now, corporations have massive power, and people have very little specifically due to our need to keep working in order to live.

With a genuine will-let-you-survive-indefinitely UBI, corporations lose that leverage over us.

[Chris2048]

With respect, the original post was only "universal basic income is such an attractive solution compared". You've now added a whole new element: "If getting a job isn't a requirement".

If not needing to live in the big city was the case, then that would indeed change the desirability of various properties across the market. This would be the case, with or without UBI. There's also no guarantee that "Oklahoma or something" would stay cheap if demand went up.

But big cities are desirable in other ways too (lots of common resources), plus UBI isn't necessarily so that people no longer need to work; If people move somewhere with cheap rent, but low business prospects, they'll get stuck in that situation, and a different kind of UBI-dependant poverty class with arise.

To TLDR this: this feels like the "Parable of the broken window" - The mechanics of the economy are too complex (and unintuitive) to be captured in a few speculative anecdotes, especially ones as drastic as "UBI making having a job unnecessary" - this is effectively the economic equivalent of a "toy project" - a toy argument so simple if fails to capture the complicated and significant side-effects that such a proposal with have; Needless to say, the road to hell is paved with good intensions, some of the most drastic socialistic changes have been disastrous.

[vorpalhex]

The same way you crack down on other forms of fraud? Ask for proof, bank statements, etc.

[spamizbad]

You're asking them to show proof of a null, which is tricky. For example, a landlord could tell their tenants to make the check out to their spouse, deposit rent checks into their account, then turn around to the government with their usual tenant bank account and say "They're stiffing me on rent!"

The government doesn't have perfect information.

[derekp7]

The government would still go after the tenant to potentially pay back the money that the gov fronted to the landlord (or a portion of it based on means testing). Then the tenant would have incentive to provide proof to the gov that those checks were written out. And the landlord then gets thrown into federal prison for government fraud.

[root_axis]

They could catch you retroactively when you report the rental income. Of course you could simply not report the income and hope you don't get audited but at that point you're now also guilty of tax fraud with the intent to conceal your wire fraud, and tax fraud is the type of thing the IRS can sniff out even years after the fact. There will be no plausible deniability possible since the unreported income will correspond to the defrauded payments, it'll be an open and shut case.

[Simulacra]

We don't exactly prosecute for fraud very much in this country. Otherwise we would see a lot more business owners going to jail for immigration fraud, tax fraud, and wage theft.