I don’t know how relevant this is now, but here’s a link to another post where I expressed my thoughts on what kind of pitfalls you might most likely face – https://lemmy.world/post/36867409
By the way, what is this phenomenon on Lemmy? Let’s say people are reluctant to read and comment on old posts published just a couple of days or a week ago, but with new ones, it’s a completely different story. What kind of psychology is this? Or it seemed to me?
Broadly speaking, UBI is a good idea for a bad system.
Public housing, public health care, public grocery stores, public transit, and public education are a good idea for a better system.
The government giving you a fixed stipend to play your hand at the free market carries a whole host of secondary challenges, particularly as we enter a 70s-era inflationary spiral. The private sector having an incentive to create tiered levels of service to capture UBI money while delivering the smallest possible economic benefit to the consumer is a huge problem in the existing market.
The fundamental problem with UBI is that landlords will still evict your ass as soon as they find a way to squeeze more rent out of a unit. You have money, but you don’t have any kind of civil right to housing.
As an initial stopgap on the way to a socialist economic model, its got merit. But as a panacea, it - much like minimum wage and child tax credits and other forms of government mandated economic floors - falls depressingly short of the end goal.
The government really needs to either implement rent controls or buy up many of the private apartments to turn into public housing. It really doesn’t make a ton of sense for the product being leased for profit to be … property? In what world does it make sense for where you live to be a for-profit venture for someone else? Nah, the government could own it and rent out units at more reasonable rates/subsidizing the costs.
UBI is still great imo, but it’s not the end step like you said. We should have Universal Healthcare and public transit as well. I feel that UBI could pay for groceries, but grocery stores/food producers should have more regulations on the fillers and junk they put into these ‘food’ items they sell. I believe education K thru College should be free. It just makes sense for society to subsidize the education costs for the people that will help create value to our economy through their higher education.
queuing up The Internationale
It’s a Market Socialist band-aid for what is - at its heart - a problem of rent-seeking and logistics.
I do think it’s possible at the state level to have the government step in to have a more hands on role for real estate among other things. Federally I think that’s a long shot, unless other states see how successful the progressive programs are in Blue states.
I don’t disagree that UBI is in many ways a band-aid. I see it as not too complex for your average person to understand though. The rent problem to me is one that needs to be tackled at the same time that UBI gets implemented.
People still get their freedom of spending their UBI as they desire, although some of their existing expenses could be deducted before they receive UBI payment (e.g., child care payments). From a policy selling perspective UBI looks very attractive, especially when you start receiving payments of it for a while. So much so that people would not stand it going away.
So if you’re working and get a UBI on top of your pay, then you have more money to invest in better versions of the things you have. If you’re living on the street, suddenly you have a government that cares about helping you to get off the ground and help put food on your table.
I don’t think specific help programs should go away mind you; I hear that sometimes but I disagree with that perspective. Maybe some of the UBI could be in a currency that’s only spendable on food (like food stamps), so in those rare cases the money potentially still goes to buying food.