[mike_hearn]

> prices are dependent on demand/supply rather than how much money people have ... [UBI] might increase rental prices

Which is it? You can't have it both ways. The right answer is that if you print new money prices go up. If UBI is funded by taxes it's not a UBI (some people will end up giving back more in taxes than they "receive" in UBI, so it's net negative for them). If it's funded by borrowing it's not sustainable. If it's funded by money printing then prices will rise and the effect is eliminated.

> the people that are reliant on UBI tend to be on some sort of rent control mechanism

The argument for UBI is it lets you get rid of other means tested welfare systems. If you're going to introduce a category of people who really need UBI vs other people who don't really need it, and have special rules for the former, it's just a rebranded welfare system and those already exist.

[rich_sasha]

I guess the theory, really, is that it's funded by corporate taxes. The triad of key taxes is income, sales/VAT and corporate. Income, as you say, is out, so is sales (since it's paid by end consumers) so you're left with corporate. And I guess that's kind of what would happen if one day AI takes over. There will be masses of unemployable people, farms and mines and factories ran by computers, and we will all be funded by this.

Until that utopia comes around, I don't see any way to fund UBI, as you say.

[mike_hearn]

Taxes are all paid by people, ultimately, because it's people whose labor creates wealth. Corporate tax isn't some pool of money that would otherwise sit around not doing anything if not levied, as all profits eventually get paid out to individuals in one form or another. Corporate taxes are popular partly because people don't realize that (same reason governments love printing money), and partly because they're nice big static objects that find it harder to evade the tax man or move around.

AI doesn't change anything, no more than the internal combustion engine or computers did. There will still be plenty of jobs. AI has been around a few years now and hardly even impacted the job market! The effect will be like computers themselves, an uplift in the general welfare but give it 50 years and economists will be asking "where was the AI productivity boost?" just like they do with computers today.

What you find with UBI discussions is that the rationale for why it's going to be necessary constantly changes, and is always based on very dubious suppositions and extrapolations. UBI seems to be just a more respectable sounding version of /r/antiwork, when you boil it down.

[int_19h]

> If UBI is funded by taxes it's not a UBI (some people will end up giving back more in taxes than they "receive" in UBI, so it's net negative for them)

This is plainly nonsense. UBI means only one thing: you get a check for a certain guaranteed amount no matter what. It doesn't mean that the amount on this check is necessarily smaller than other taxes due. And yes, it does mean that, in effect, some people will end up paying into the system while others will receive money from it. That is precisely the intent - to provide a baseline for the lower end of the income spectrum such that nobody is ever below it.

[mike_hearn]

That isn't how UBI is advertised. If it was, it'd be no different to existing welfare systems and there'd be no need for any such name as UBI.

Of course, you can play silly accounting games in which you take $100 and give back $10 and say "look, you now have $10 in guaranteed income", but such word games have no merit and can't justify the claim to change to the economic system.

[int_19h]

This is exactly how it's advertised. I have no idea where you've got the notion that UBI is about printing an extra $X for everyone, because it was never about that.

[mike_hearn]

It was always about that, but I'm very curious what you think it's about. Because taxing someone $X and then giving them some of that money back as $Y is just word games - it's exactly the same as taking $(X - Y). We have that system already. If UBI just means higher welfare spending then call it that and stop running pointless trials.

[KaiserPro]

yeah its basically the state pension, but for non-core voters (Uk reference there.)