The simpler solution is to just impose a tax of a given rate and pay out all the money it generates as a UBI. As economic productivity increases over time, more revenue is generated and we can pay out a bigger UBI, which satisfies the intuition that minimum standard of living should increase as overall productivity improves.
If that amount is below some standard of living we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies then we can worry about it (i.e. raise the tax rate). If it's somewhat more than that but nonetheless we have a reasonable tax rate, so what? If the economy is doing better in ten years and that allows someone living on a UBI to be able to afford broadband when they couldn't before, is that supposed to be a problem?
The problem is UBI simply becomes the new $0 per supply-and-demand. If you didn't have to work for $UBI, and everybody has $UBI it has no value. Yes, the math is more complicated than that; upshot is a limited supply of essentials will be priced to take into account that EVERYBODY has $UBI. If I'm poor, limited housing means rent goes to $rent+UBI. If I'm sufficiently above poor, $UBI goes to $0 because I paid for $UBI (xN) in the first place, getting back some of what I paid in taxes.
Someone who couldn't afford broadband before UBI wouldn't be able to afford broadband after (beyond a brief blip where the market sorts pricing out) because rent & broadband just increased price according to everyone now having UBI. If anything, more won't afford essentials and near-essentials precisely because overall prices will rise.
It's the same reason why minimum wage really doesn't work: prices increased to match a baseline income for low productivity, coupled with an increased population unable to earn at all because they simply don't produce $minwage value (and are now marked "poor" and routed to get their needs provided by a bureaucracy).
That would only be true in a world where supply of necessities is immutable. In practice when there is more demand for stuff we can generally make more stuff. It is possible to build additional housing rather than forcing everyone into a zero-sum auction over the existing supply.
Hence "Yes, the math is more complicated than that". The practical tweet-sized outcome is about the same though.
The other thing missed by UBI advocates: money is merely a representation of value, it is not value itself. Someone living on $UBI (and I expect a great many would) has all their basic needs met without their effort ... except that those basic needs are not provided without effort. This badly distorts supply-and-demand. $1 costing a UBI recipient nothing, prices rise by $1 - knowing that the $1 cost nothing to obtain; to wit "easy come, easy go".
> Hence "Yes, the math is more complicated than that". The practical tweet-sized outcome is about the same though.
Only if we do nothing about housing supply constraints and nobody decides they'd rather move to areas without those constraints given a UBI. But we should do something about housing supply constraints, and people would move away from high housing cost areas either way, but moreso if we do nothing about housing costs. Either one invalidates your premise.
> Someone living on $UBI (and I expect a great many would) has all their basic needs met without their effort ... except that those basic needs are not provided without effort.
We already do this for people with disabilities etc. It's not a problem unless the number of such people is large.
Meanwhile most people are not satisfied to live in a studio apartment and eat nothing but rice and beans forever. Anyone with more ambition than not starving to death would still have plenty of incentive to go out and do productive work, so the majority of people would continue to do so.
This is also another reason to fix the amount of the tax. If hypothetically too many people started to live off the UBI and not work, the tax would generate less revenue, the UBI amount would decrease and fewer people would be inclined to live off it.
> This badly distorts supply-and-demand. $1 costing a UBI recipient nothing, prices rise by $1 - knowing that the $1 cost nothing to obtain; to wit "easy come, easy go".
Giving everyone $1 doesn't cause prices to rise by $1. Some people would buy things with elastic supply whose quantity rather than price increases with increasing demand, some people simply wouldn't spend all of the money. (The second is more commonly done by corporations, but it's still very common, and the economic effect of the money being removed from circulation after being spent one time isn't that much different than zero.)
Also, that still only happens if you print the money. If it comes from someone then it doesn't cause price changes unless the two people would have bought different stuff -- which is not the case if they were both buying housing.
If that amount is below some standard of living we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies then we can worry about it (i.e. raise the tax rate). If it's somewhat more than that but nonetheless we have a reasonable tax rate, so what? If the economy is doing better in ten years and that allows someone living on a UBI to be able to afford broadband when they couldn't before, is that supposed to be a problem?