Ubi should never be about owning anything. It should be about providing housing, food, healthcare, clothes, and nothing more. It should be for all citizens, including children. This way you can have a family. But if you want a tv, phone, car, you're going to have to work. Since people are living to their 70s plus, lounging around isn't a big deal. I think you'll find people become very creative too, or focus on high level education.
You can drive many TVs (~$250), phones (~$150), and sometimes even cars (~$3000) through the regional, situational, quality level, and market timing variations in the prices of housing and healthcare (I've lived in a $600/mo sublet and a $2500/mo 1-bedroom in the same 6-month window; I've gone for years without seeing a doctor, and then had emergency surgery).
A direct, fixed cash transfer will never, ever have the properties you suggest. It's sort of the point of money that people can allocate it according to their priorities. You'll have a hard time stopping someone from taking a 100 fewer sqft apartment in exchange for a smartphone. Or colluding with the landlord to kick back part of the rent reimbursement in exchange for a smaller apartment.
To get what you're talking about, the government would have to directly issue housing, food, and clothes, or run another one of its extremely complicated and unintended-consequence-laden means-testing systems to tailor the amount of cash transferred for your exact situation a moment-to-moment basis, if it wishes to give you exactly enough cash to buy the things on your list and no others.
Once it's playing this game, you've lost the small government/simplicity/low overhead aspect which caused many to favor UBI over the existing welfare state. A UBI like you suggest is really not UBI, it's just government-issued basic necessities, an idea with substantially less traction.
The point isn't to demand people not buy tvs with ubi, its just to make sure you can have the bare necessities and little else. If you can also buy a tv, good job. If done right, it should be hard to do that. Basically exactly like how welfare is now, just do that, but without any of the weird requirements that differ state to state. As fir medical care. All insurance should be made redundant. Universal healthcare works just fine.
The weird requirements are there to satisfy impulses like yours: make sure that we only give welfare to the truly needy, and to make sure that their lives on welfare are not too good. The whole idea of UBI is to replace that with an unconditional transfer of a fixed amount of cash to every person.
If it's a fixed amount per person, people who choose less desirable housing will have more purchasing power for luxuries. I claim that any attempt to counter this effect will quickly devolve into another system of "weird rules," probably subvertible, and certainly with unintended consequences. For example, what if I am cohabiting and want to stop? Do I need to justify to the state that it must now house me and my partner separately at twice the expense? What if I'm faking the separation in order to rent out "my" apartment on the black market and keep living with my partner? What if I'm being abused? What if I'm sick of exurban Iowa and my "grandmother" "needs" me to take care of her in Haight-Ashbury?
The insight of UBI is that the government's attempt to untangle questions like this is doomed to fail, and attempting to do so is an unacceptable degree of interference in private life, so it should not try.
From what you're saying, I'm pretty sure you actually oppose UBI, and just want changes to the existing means-tested, strings-attached welfare system.
> what if I am cohabiting and want to stop? Do I need to justify to the state that it must now house me and my partner separately at twice the expense? What if I'm faking the separation in order to rent out "my" apartment on the black market and keep living with my partner?
In what way is this anyone's business? In a UBI system, you get, say, $600 a month. That's it. It's cash. No one is asking what you're spending it on. If you want to stop living with someone, you just... do it. Like you do currently. Can't manage it? Get a part-time job on the side to pad your wallet enough to do what you want.
Not trying to bash you, but I think you're misunderstanding the basic concept and assuming a level of government attention that isn't part of the equation.
> isn't to demand people not buy tvs with ubi, its just to make sure you can have the bare necessities and little else
'little else' = TV in your example, so these amount to the same thing
Because the cost of 'bare necessities' varies by region (housing prices in particular), the only way you'll make this work is if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula that gives you exactly the amount of money it takes to buy X amount of housing, food, etc.
But then you can always turn around and bunk with a friend and then spend it all on luxuries and video games, or secretly move someplace cheaper to live and pocket the extra money. So either you allow people to nakedly game the system, or the government is now in the business of monitoring where normal people live.
> if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula
There is, the government pays cost-of-living adjustments to its own employees on the GS pay schedule. But cost of living stats measure medians. Paying the median would be insufficient for half the population, and "too much" for the other half.
Yeah and once you get into that level of detail, what exactly is 'bare minimum housing' for a person?
Like, if the rule is you get median housing no matter what zip code you happen to live in, then there's no downside to picking the most expensive zip code in the nation and choosing to get UBI there. OTOH, if you define limits, then government has made some zip codes effectively UBI-free.
In theory, making UBI only provide 'essentials' is a good idea, but in a large country like India (or the US, or China), the cost of living in different localities varies wildly.
A person receiving UBI who lived in San Francisco proper and got free housing would essentially get 5x - 10x effective benefit than someone living where rent is $500 / month. Cue the inevitable conflicts over who gets to live where, and caps on what level of UBI will be provided.
But conversely, if the UBI benefit were a fixed monetary amount, then you'd be consigning UBI beneficiaries to never live in an expensive area where urban professionals work, so you would create a geographical and social divide where UBI recipients are consigned to live in low-income slums.
I don't see any way to resolve these dilemmas that would make all people happy, unfortunately.
A location based value would never work.
If people could choose to live in a more developed area for no cost at all, they will most certainly move there, increasing the demand for goods there and thus increasing the cost of life there which would result in a snowball effect.
A "low-income slum" is not a problem so long as people can live decently. It's "universal" so everyone receives it, what differentiates people in low-income areas will be that they inherited no capital and have no means of acquiring capital which is a problem that already do exist, so I don't really see your point.
I would favour a fixed amount in a fairly large geographical area.
Areas that are expensive to live in also have a need for jobs like cleaning the streets. If people have the choice of living somewhere cheap on UBI then the pay for lower skilled jobs in these expensive areas will have to rise to get people to take them. I would expect the cost of this to have to come from higher property taxes in these more expensive areas which could act to bring down the difference in costs between the different areas.
> Adding children is pushing it - because the parent controls the child's money, so there is a conflict of interest.
I absolutely agree. I'd push it further though. Not just children but anyone who is not in a capacity to freely spend the money. To make a contrived example, someone may not simply kidnap a person and take their universal basic income.
I go farther to say that local/state/federal government may not take the money for people in their custody. There ought to be some way to protect it from being garnished as well.
I think we should not oversell this. There might be a lot of people who are perfectly content with being able to survive and get by. If they do not want to participate further in the economy, I think we should say that's fine. The ax I have to grind in this is that maybe if people are not scared of starving to death after leaving a job they don't like doing, maybe we will have more people doing jobs they do like doing and maybe just maybe me and others will have a better shot at doing what we love doing even if it is at a slightly lower (after taxes) pay than before.
It's not about what people need though, it's about what they want. I'm not saying the children will starve, I'm saying the parents will want a lot of stuff all of a sudden.
