Free Stuff is Good, Actually

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That's how it's always worked. My state pension is based on national insurance contributions which are kept track of and it's paid in real time to someone else who has already worked and is now retired.

When it's my turn to retire, my past payments effectively become my pension entitlement. Yeah it's "free" money but not really. It's just a delayed "IOU" for decades of labour.

The funds are still tangible and are linked to prior tax payments. Genuine free money is linked to thin air.

A private pension is also not free money. If it's linked to stocks then the money put in has circulated around the economy for years.

Pensions are not free and are linked to years of productive work and investment in stocks.

The "genuine" free money would be linked to someone else paying. Same as a pension. It is a transfer, from working stiffs to non-working stiffs.



In the USA, very few private employers provide pensions any more, unless the workers have a strong union. But, in the old days, when companies did provide pensions, there was the risk that the company would go bankrupt and not be able to pay the promised pension.

The stock market can also collapse, rendering worthless the years of your money circulating around the economy.

The stock market can also, boom, making you rich.

But, the stock market is an elaborate ponzi scheme. It is dependent upon workers being willing to save by buying stocks, which, in retirement, they sell to people still in the work force.

It still operates as a transfer, from working stiffs to non-working stiffs.

That's not how inflation works. A considerable portion of the inflation we got was corporations taking advantage of the inflationary expectations as cover to raise their prices. If you exclude that, the inflation was a bit above normal, but not that much. An offsetting tax would have discouraged that and reduced the inflation to something that was more or less normal.

A UBI does not create inflation on it's own and will not create inflation if the policymakers are competent. It's just a form of trickle up economics where you put the money in the hands of people who are likely to spend it and allow it to work it's way through the economy to those at the top where it gets taxed back out of existence.

It's mostly people with political motives from rich donors that claim otherwise. The whole point of taxes is to offset the inflation caused by government activities and pretty much nothing else.

Are you saying that the source of money doesn't even matter anymore?

Pensions are not free money. They are IOU's after years of working or saving and investing.

Either way, it is still a transfer.

https://www.ssa.gov/history/age65.html

From workers to non-workers.

But in the UK at least, the pension you get depends on how much you contribute to the economy. It's an IOU for labour given. UBI isn't remotely the same. Many people here specifically work longer to add up their pension credits including my dad.

By transfering money now, people get entitlement to have money transferred to them in the future when they become too old to work. This is healthy while UBI seems to have no tangible source of income that doesn't include hammering companies or slightly well off individuals.

It often happens that people who work extra years to earn a bigger pension end up dying soon after they retire anyway.

There probably wouldn't even be a discussion about something like UBI if the business community actually put employing people ahead of seeing business as a "get-rich-quick scheme," and paying their workers just as an inconvenience.

One problem with UBI is that it will lead to higher rents, making property owners the ultimate beneficiaries.

We've seen the same thing with agricultural subsidies. The landowner knows that a farmer who wants to rent his land to grow crops will be getting a government subsidy, and raises his rent accordingly. It also gets factored into the price of farmland when it goes up for sale.

Since agricultural states vote heavily Republican, Republicans aren't going to advocate reducing the farm subsidies.

Most of the government subsidies go to the wealthiest landowners, which has put a squeeze on small-scale farms, and made it more difficult for people who would like to take up farming.

£20k UBI is probably too high.

£12k would be more like it. Just enough to just about live on.

This would replace the personal allowance, so you'd widen the tax base. The very first pound you earn, 20% goes to the tax man. You'd probably also bring in a 30% band at £10,000, or something like that, with the aim of the policy as a whole being revenue neutral.

There are countries where it could work. Right now, the UK isn't one of them. Our public services are suffering and our public finances are stretched very thinly. Places like Monaco or Singapore that don't have to prop up unproductive regions would be better suited to it.

Unproductive regions and unproductive people will have to be a thing of the past for UBI to ever take off.