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0 pointsk-mcgrady9y ago0 comments

>> "eliminating tax credits, disability benefits and housing benefits will net another £110bn, but also render a lot of poor people poorer or even homeless, which is the opposite of what BI is generally proposed to do)"

I don't see how that's true. Isn't the UBI supposed to replace ALL of those programmes with a single number for everyone that is sufficient for everyone? If the UBI provides enough for food and shelter you shouldn't need housing benefits. Disability may be different I suppose but if you cannot meet your needs with UBI due to a disability I think that's something you could probably roll into the NHS where equipment you need but cannot afford is provided to you by them (I haven't really thought that through though it's a very good point you've brought up).

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notahacker9y ago

Sure, as I acknowledged in my above post, if you're comfortable with a situation where everybody living in social housing in London is forced to relocate to a different part of the country and severely disabled people are substantially poorer in pure cash terms than before, then you can replace all those programmes with a flat subsidy of £550 per month (or slightly less than the average London room rental in a shared house) and find some way of recovering the remaining additional £140bn cost through increases to gross taxes that leaves lower middle class single people at least no worse off.

Otherwise you need a flat subsidy much higher than £550 per month to properly replace the existing subsidy in all parts of the country, which would cost an awful lot more in taxes and make it a very comfortable living in other parts of the country.

k-mcgradyOP9y ago

The disability part is definitely an important issue I had not considered before. As for the housing cost I worked out the amount based on food and a room for one person in London. It's doable at £550. You won't be incredibly comfortable but you will have enough food and decent shelter at no cost to you. If you have a partner (so two UBI's to work with) finding a 1 bedroom apartment within that budget is also doable in Zone 4/5/6. And of course we're talking about the most expensive part of the UK. I know someone who has bought a 2 bed apartment in Manchester with a mortgage of around £600pm. Easy for 2 people on a UBI of £550 to manage. Generally I'm very against the idea of poor people being forced out of a city due to it becoming unaffordable but it seems like a fair trade off for a UBI. You can take that and live anywhere else in the country without working or if you want to stay you don't need a high income job, just an average wage to supplement the UBI. It would also be interesting to see how a UBI would effect the cost of private rentals in a city like London. I'm sure a lot of people who don't need to live in London for work anymore would leave and landlords would be less interested in income and more interested in good long-term tenants.

notahacker9y ago

Zoopla's average London room rental is £552 per month. That's without adding bills, council tax, food etc. I'm well aware better value for money options exist (I have one) but you can't use that as a basis for assuming the average turfed-out social housing tenant is going to find them. Needless to say, the housing and other expenditure figures generally used in "Living Wage" calculations are much higher than that.

Of course, there's an argument that subsidising people that clearly couldn't afford to live in the area they grew up in isn't a particularly good use of funds (compared with subsidising gap years, early retirements and stay at home partners?) but I can't see the left buying it. Or anyone on the right being keen to find the extra gross £140bn pa you still need to find even once you've reduced disability and housing spend to zero.

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notahacker9y ago

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