[_heimdall]

UBI equates to an assumption that the government can predict and control markets completely, effectively destroying markets that resemble anything like a free market.

Even considering an alternative to UBI like forcing all prices lower, i.e. price deflation, requires first taking that assumption as true.

The government never could allow prices to lower anyway though. Price deflation would make our national debt that much worse.

[Retric]

It’s the opposite. Currently governments subsidize housing, food, internet access, etc for the poor through various programs. There’s no free market interaction when government bureaucrats are deciding where to build affordable housing etc.

UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove.

Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.

[_heimdall]

If you don't like how the government subsidized certain markets today, I'm not quite sure why a good solution would be to subsidize the entire economy.

Such a program is way too complex to model out and reliably predict what the impact will be. We simply don't know how much UBI is the "right" amount for specific outcomes, and we definitely don't know what the impact will be on any subset of the economy.

According to the OP author, we can't even test UBI programs before a full rollout. If we can't reliably model or predict the outcome, and we can test it, how are we supposed to actually implement it?

[Retric]

Subsidizing the economy is a meaningless idea, it reallocates resources.

As to being impossible to model, there’s a great number of countries in the world eventually one will likely try the experiment on its entire economy without impacting 99.9% of the global population.

That said, you can turn individual safety nets into UBI lockstep with changing the tax code and see what happens. The fear is people would spend ‘food’ money on drugs, or people in subsidized housing would move, or all the things which created these programs instead of handing out cash. That’s a political question not an economic one, are we trying to act as a parent or do we want people to have freedom to make their own choices.

[_heimdall]

Literally any economic decision is reallocated resources, that term is much too broad to be meaningful. Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?

Someone will try it, totally agree there. I don't see any problem with that either, countries should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. I wouldn't tell France they shouldn't try it, but I am absolutely saying I don't want to try it here in the US.

[Retric]

> Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?

I’m saying social safety nets are already wealth redistribution. Changing the form of that safety net to UBI is an allocation of resources based on individual decisions and thus free markets where Food Stamps/Housing Subsidies/etc is allocating money based on bureaucratic decisions.

Basically nothing says UBI needs to cost more than existing social safety nets.

[_heimdall]

Social safety nets today are needed weslth distribution. A UBI needs to cover everyone. With the same funding a UBI would have to provide less benefit than the programs we have today.

That said, my argument against a UBI isn't even that it's too expensive. Anyone claiming that a UBI will be too expensive is falling into the same trap those arguing for a UBI fall into. The impact when making such a massive change to our social and economic system is impossible to accurately model and predict. The OP author actually seems to agree with this by pointing out that a UBI program can't be tested. Oddly, though, the author's solution to that is to YOLO a UBI program into our entire country without being able to understand what the likely impacts will be.

[HPsquared]

If the current spending on safety nets is spread evenly over the whole society, won't the current recipients not have enough to live?

[diffeomorphism]

It sounds like you are talking about some very different thing also abbreviated "UBI"? Here it stands for universal basic income.

[_heimdall]

No that's also what I'm talking about. If implemented, a UBI will subsidize every single market in the economy with federal dollars. For every dollar a consumer spends on any product, a portion of that money is directly from the government.

For a government to build and maintain a UBI program they will have to be able to predict where prices will be and how much money everyone needs or deserves to cover the basics. Assuming the country runs on a fiat currency and partskes in monetary policies meant to control the cost of money, a UBI adds another complex layer onto that puzzle making it even more challenging to predict and control markets.

[diffeomorphism]

No

[_heimdall]

Helpful, thanks. I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have anything worth sharing.

I'd be particularly interested how you would see a program on the scale of a UBI working sustainably if the government can't predict the outcomes. Or, alternstively, if you think the government can predivt the outcomes I'd be curious if you disagree with the OP author that a UBI can't be tested before a full rollout.