"Living wages suck, Yang."
"I'll give you $1,000 so you can pay the rent! (But not give you a living wage)"
$1000 a month + $8.75/hr job comes out to $15/hr, which is not much higher than the minimum wage right now. It might even be better than a minimum wage increase because it doesn't destroy a bunch of vulnerable jobs and it also helps people outside the workforce, discouraged workers, the involuntary homeless, and so on. I'm sorry that you didn't do the math or think about this very hard but that seems to be characteristic of your posts in general.
with UBI as a flagship proposal but not the magic solution to every problem.
Then he should fucking admit that and propose more shit beyond U.B.I. because that's all he's known for.
No, that's all
you know him for. Don't blame others for your own ignorance.
"I'll give you $1,000 a month to fuck off."
Landlords: "THANKS FOR THE $1,000 A MONTH FROM OUR RENTERS, YANG! *raises rent*"
I'll make this as brief as I'm able to.
Rent is rather reasonable (on par with mortgages) outside of major metropolitan areas. Inside metropolitan areas, rent is a catastrophe because zoning laws and other reasons severely constrain supply. In a market, price is determined by the upper end of demand, not the lower end (i.e. the price is just high enough to clear the market for housing units but no higher).
Consider any reasonable distribution of income in, say, Brooklyn. Add $1k a month to everyone's income. At the upper end of the distribution people are normally paying a third to half of their income in rent (for other people, they are paying more than that, because housing is a non-negotiable need). For someone making $100,000, let's say this is like $3,500 a month (42% of their monthly income). If they're making an extra $1000 a month in UBI, that's a 12% increase in nominal income, and it only amounts to less than a third of their rent... since everyone's incomes went up by the same amount, in order to maintain their previous claim on supply, they merely need to keep paying
whatever proportion of income they were paying before. 42% of their new monthly income is $3849 a month, a $300 rise in rent. Thus, their incomes still rose even though they were the price setting income earners. For people way lower on the income scale, families crammed into small apartments, or sharing units with three other people they barely know, they're paying the same increase in rent but their incomes went up way more than 10%. For a migrant family it's conceivable that their household income just went up 50% or 75%. Their lives are suddenly livable, even in New York.
So, yes, I agree with you that rent will rise because housing is supremely inelastic and a basic necessity, and that's just the nature of how rentiers can set prices. But they won't just suck up the exact amount of the basic income. And in any other place in the country where the housing market doesn't look like the lifeboat scene in
Titanic, rents won't raise nearly as much. Basic income would decimate poverty as we know it.
