The problem with a UBI is not the UBI itself, but the fact that landlords could just raise their price.
You need to solve the contradiction within the economy in order to make UBI works.
The current way our taxation policy work is to tax labor and capital, which is the basis of our economy, while flinching away from taxing land, which derives much of its value from the surrounding economic activity rather than an owner's effort.
By the way, the UBI is an old idea. In the 19th century, it was known as the Citizen's Dividend.
Just like in the US, there are a ton of homes in Ireland just sitting vacant. Supply isn't nearly as large a problem as affordability. Ireland introduced a vacant homes tax to try to help, but it seems they haven't gone far enough.
That's because, in the places where housing is expensive, it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there. It's a pipe dream that you can out build demand in these places. Reducing prices of housing in nice places to live (by any means, including building) will only result in more demand up until that insatiable demand is satisfied.
Nice places to live can't support all the people that want to live there.
Because demand is, for all intents and purposes, insatiable, the dollar value of housing/property isn't based on supply and demand because supply can't practically be increased to affect demand. Instead, the price is related to what a prospective buyer can afford to pay _every month_ and, thus, is related to interest rates. Interest rates go down, prices go up to the point where a prospective buyer's mortgage payment would be the same.
People who bring up the (un)affordability of housing are never talking about Oklahoma, they're talking about the Bay Area, Southern California, New York City, Seattle, Portland, etc. All places that are so desirable, they can't practically support everyone that wants to live there.
> it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there.
I can't figure out how to make the math make sense even if I were to build a house in the middle of nowhere. Time and materials is the real killer.
Some day, when AI eliminates software development as a career, maybe you will be able to hire those people to build you houses for next to nothing, but right now I don't think it matters where or how many you build. The only way the average Joe is going to be able to afford one — at least until population decline fixes the problem naturally — is for someone else to take a huge loss on construction. And, well, who is going to line up to do that?
"Built in 1954" doesn't sound like new construction. Of course you can buy used houses at a fraction of the cost. That's nothing new. Maybe you missed it, but the discussion here about building new to make homes more affordable.
If one was freely able to move about the entire world you may have a point. Especially given current events, I am not sure the country in which that house is located would take kindly to many of us moving there. In a more practical reality you're not going to find anything for anywhere close to that price even in the middle of nowhere, never mind somewhere where everyone wants to live. That is where earlier comments suggest building more housing would help.
Except it is not clear who can afford new construction either. It is even more expensive.
> What part of your idea was supposed to stop that happening
The part where people see their money burning away paying maintenance and tax on deteriorating assets.
Why are people holding assets unused?
Because they don't believe that the city will allow sufficient development to allow them to purchase like-assets in the future if they chose to reinvest and the carrying cost is minimal because council taxes are trivial relative to the value of the asset. If my research is correct, Kensington council taxes are under 10k USD per year.
Don't tax labor, or capital which helps assist labor with performing economic activity ,or at least tax as little as possible.
Instead, focus on taxing scarce resources, especially since we cannot make more of it. If it's natural resources coming out of the grounds such as minerals and oil, it becomes a severance tax.
If we're talking about occupying land, then it's a Land Value Tax.
You could also tax negative externalities like pollution or traffic congestion.This is known as a Piguovian tax.
We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, but that should be expanded into more roles and duties. That's one way to make society truly democratic.
In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on pollution and negative externalities.
My impression is that sortition is very much in vogue within Georgist circles.
> We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty,
...and even there, it's terribly corrupted. There are all kinds of bizarre ways that people are excluded from juries which bias the result. One commonly-cited example is that people who report moral objections to capital punishment are excluded from being empaneled on a federal jury, under the pretext that because capital punishment is legal under federal law, they'd be unable to carry out the gammut of their duties. Of course this has the convenient result of dramatically biasing juries in favor of the state.
There's also no commonly-implemented proof-of-randomness for selection. We're told that people are randomly selected and get a notice in the mail, but there's no public event where one can go and watch a number tumbler generate the entropy used to select names from the voter rolls, etc.
I just say "I believe in jury nullification and will use that power if necessary".
Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway, well, let's just say that if the law is immoral than the defendant is going to walk.
The last time I was called for jury duty someone said this during jury selection and we were all immediately dismissed and a new pool of jurors brought in.
I unironically want to be on the jury. It's the judges fault for refusing to let principled believers in nullification on. I'm unironically not trying to shrink civic duty.
Then be quiet and don't mention it, lol. EVERYWHERE one learns about jury nullification makes it clear not to mention it in the selection process if you're anywhere near interested in participating.
It's an extraprocedural consequence of how the system is designed to function, the same way the right to revolution is an extralegal option in the Union. Yeah, you can know it and apply it - but don't say it out loud if you want to show any semblance of virtuosity.
> Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway…
“Easiest out” is clearly you avoiding the responsibility. If you wanted to be on a jury you wouldn’t be talking about easy outs or the judge “forcing” you to be on the jury.
Well, and for grand juries in particular, you're told that (more or less) this will be your life for six months. I certainly opted out as best I could.
"Public funding doesn't get you great coders, it gets you coders who are great at filling out government forms."
Getting paid to deliver a software product that someone wants advances humanity. Getting paid to make your own personal project provides jobs for politician's cousins.
Just don't grade essay? Make it clear that eassy are optional and not required to get a grade, but it's a good way to learn. That will cut down the amount of work to be done too.
They failing exams because they don't do the work is on them.
Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.
This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.
But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.
> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords
Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.
Not necessarily? Not that we've had one recently at the federal level, but there are multiple studies that show that state or city level minimum wage bumps tend to show an increase in average rental price, by the same percentage, within sometimes as few as four months.
You have to live in or near the city to collect the higher minimum wage. With UBI you could live anywhere. Even outside the country maybe. They aren't comparable.
UBI doesn't fix this because whereever someone live will start the process of someone absorbing income, regardless if it's income or not. You need to break the chain between income of people and land ownership by taxing land ownership.
There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.
You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much.
These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.
Orienting policy around individual home ownership just ends up eventually with more people’s voting interests aligned with landowners, and is part of the reason why increasing property values and NIMBYism is so entrenched in American government structures
We could definitely stand to orient some policy around making sure that first time homeowners aren't typically buying their starter homes at age 40. Having voting interests aligned with landowners wouldn't be a bad thing if most people were landowners.
There's an argument that landlording gets entirely too favorable treatment from the tax code compared to any other type of business or investment. Seriously proposing eliminating property rentals is weapons-grade stupid.
> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market
Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.
The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.
Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.
Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?
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