I'm not saying a universal basic income is good or bad, but notice the pivot you did there. You criticize programs that don't just spend all their money by giving it to the poor, then you say: "Which we could instead do directly with a universal basic income". That's a program which probably spends most of its money on something other than giving it to the poor, because lots of the money goes to people who aren't poor. Such a program could well have all kinds of perverse incentives too.

With the right tax structures, it would end up focusing on giving money to lower income individuals. You have an increased progressive taxation structure such that for upper-middle income people the UBI is a wash (IE, someone making $100,000 a year is getting and additional $12,000 from UBI but paying $12,000 more than they would have before).

The reason why UBI works well is because it's a cash handout (like the other person said, you're not specifying the needs of the individual), it's a universal and not means tested program (you don't have to go through a bureaucratic maze every time you become eligible), and it's instantaneous for people who have sudden changes in fortune (IE, the income stream is already set up).

> That's a program which probably spends most of its money on something other than giving it to the poor, because lots of the money goes to people who aren't poor.

A UBI is pure redistribution. There is no money that doesn't go to the poor, because where else would it go? Taking money from the rich and then giving them some of it back is just the same thing as only taking the difference to begin with, and the entire difference goes to the poor.

It's equivalent to a government benefit with a phase out rate equal to the tax rate.

Although I’m for universal income, one of my concerns is how do you prevent companies from abusing it, and inflating prices even more.

Drugs and medical treatments in the US are already very expensive compared to the same in other countries. If everyone suddenly has an extra $1k/mo, why wouldn’t the drug companies increase their prices even more?

To me (as a European) it seems like a better option is universal healthcare, to at least make life critical medicine and treatments available to everyone, no matter their financial status.

> Although I’m for universal income, one of my concerns is how do you prevent companies from abusing it, and inflating prices even more.

That's only how prices work for uncompetitive markets. In a competitive market anyone who raised prices would lose business to competitors.

Moreover, monopolies can raise prices in response to anything that causes the poor (or anyone else) to have more money. The problem isn't a UBI, it's the existence of uncompetitive markets.

> To me (as a European) it seems like a better option is universal healthcare, to at least make life critical medicine and treatments available to everyone, no matter their financial status.

Price controls are independent of single payer. If you had single payer and monopoly/patented suppliers without price controls then prices would be... high. So nobody does that. But you can also have price controls without having single payer.

The problem with price controls is econ 101 -- you get underproduction. And when the thing being produced is medicine and medical research, that isn't good.

The counties with single payer do it anyway, and thereby don't pay their share of the research cost and cause there to be less research than there would be. We could do the same thing, single payer or not, and pay less for medicine. But then there would be even less research.

A possible workaround is to subsidize medical research directly, but then you're not saving the money, you're just spending it on the same thing with different routing. Which method of funding research is more effective is open for debate, but you can't avoid paying for the research unless you don't want to have it.

>>forcing people to buy a specific amount of the subsidized thing instead of spending some of the money on something they might need even more.

Some of this is purposefully done for a reason. You want people to be buying more eggs, milk and bread. Not Candy and Jelly.

In some case this seems to be exactly what has happened.

> Some of this is purposefully done for a reason. You want people to be buying more eggs, milk and bread. Not Candy and Jelly.

Only it doesn't actually do that.

If someone has $5 from their job and $5 from the government and wants to buy $6 worth of bread and $4 worth of candy when you want them buying $10 worth of bread, saying they can only spend the government money on the bread changes nothing.

And is almost universally wrongheaded to begin with, because individuals know better than the government what they actually need. It's too easy to find the government telling a diabetic they can't buy a candy bar when they need it to avoid hypoglycemic shock.

>>because individuals know better than the government what they actually need.

Responsible individuals do. Not every one.

> Responsible individuals do. Not every one.

People make their own bed. If someone eats too much candy and dies of a heart attack, it was their choice. The government is not your mother.

It makes no sense to punish all the responsible people with crushing bureaucracy just to save a few fools from themselves.

Someone close to me was in a housing program for homeless youth. They set them up with an apartment in the city, not "low income housing" but just a unit in a random apartment building, one of many around town. Sounds like a great deal. A place to live to get life on track.

Except if you had a job, you had to give half of your income back to the program until your income was above 2x the grant's value per month. (something like $800/mo, not in the bay area)

When you started a job you had to get your management to fill out a form and submit it to the local government.

When you stopped a job you had to get your management to fill out a form and submit it to the local government.

You had to fill out and get your management to sign time sheets showing how much you worked.

You had to save half of your income (and because homeless youth, that usually meant half of a likely barely above minimum wage job) to pay back to the program.

If any paperwork was submitted late you got threatened with getting kicked out of the program.

If you earned too much money you got kicked out of the program.

If your management failed to send in paperwork you got threatened with getting kicked out of the program.

If your case worker who was responsible for submitting your paperwork didn't submit it on time, you got threatened with getting kicked out of the program (this was often the case)

So literally every single month there was a new crisis and the threat of being homeless again. Not an idle threat but an actual "you're going to get kicked out unless..." ... in a program designed to help youth homeless as a result of abuse.

So on top of dealing with whatever severe personal problems, you have to keep down a job that already has a reason to stigmatize you under a program that put you in an apartment which at minimum wage would cost well over 50% of a full time income, but you also have to manage the constant crises of misplaced paperwork and new requirements and poorly understood and explained rules.

It's just a recipe for failure for the most vulnerable people who are the least capable of dealing with uncertainty and stress ... and the very real and constant threat of returning to living on the street, or in a shelter (they're horrible places), going back to the abusive situation you came from, or very likely getting taken advantage of by someone new.

... because a set of well intentioned people with no idea what it is like to be in anything like that situation couldn't come to terms which were simple and straightforward for giving aid to those in need.