I'm not opposed to this program or dispute the results. But it would be much more broadly effective to remove one digit from housing prices, chiefly by removing the artificial supply restrictions that have caused them to inflate so much over the last 5 decades.
Programs like Down Payment Assistance siphon off public money from worthier causes and dump it into the housing pyramid scheme. I'm afraid a lot of UBI money might be destined for the same fate. The same goes for tech salaries in places like here in the Bay Area.
I'll dispute the results.
Actual study here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fdc101bc3cfda2dcf0a2...
One very obvious problem is that they had two groups: one that received $1,000 a month and another control group that received nothing.
Their results are based on surveys completed by two groups. The incentive for filling out the survey was a $50 gift card.
Unsurprisingly the control group saw significantly more attrition in terms of survey response than vs the people being given $1,000 / month.
People who were even marginally better off in the control group were less likely to respond since the hassle of meeting someone in person to fill out a survey isn't worth the $50 to them. So the control group was essentially concentrated down to the respondents who were worse off vs the broader spectrum of the experimental group they were sampling.
In a brilliant example of motivated reasoning the people conducting the study saw this difference in attrition as a sign that the payments were having a positive effect as opposed to concluding that people are more likely to show up to fill out your survey if you've given them thousands of dollars because humans have a fundamental sense of reciprocity.
The actual study design itself is extremely questionable but even if you take the results at face value they were just comparing the people who got money with people who got nothing. As opposed to for instance comparing money with no strings attached to the efficacy of existing social welfare programs.
I'm unfamiliar with the Center for Guaranteed Income but they seem like a political advocacy group more than a serious research team.
> But it would be much more broadly effective to remove one digit from housing prices
How would you in the real world reduce prices by one order of magnitude?
e.g. a $1M house would cost 100K tomorrow?
Building that house has more than 100K in just parts and labor. Even if the land were free, which it is not.
It depends on how overpriced the local market is of course. The one-digit rule is not far from where SF and LA would fall, and works well for emphasis.
New construction costs in much of the country are $100-200/sqft [1], but that partially reflects 5 decades of restrictionist overinflation. The price of land should be nominal in most places if you can go vertical without restriction, since the cost per sqft decreeases as the number of stories increases until you hit the dozens or thereabouts. Basically everywhere outside Manhattan and maybe a couple other zipcodes.
[1] https://www.newhomesource.com/learn/cost-to-build-house-per-...
Any attempt to open up building restrictions needs to ensure it doesn't just turn itself into an air drop for real estate investors, otherwise it's unlikely to benefit those most in need of housing.
They can invest in $100-300K houses and condos and rent them out for $400-1200/mo all they want. Or even Airbnb or keep them as vacation homes if they'd rather. If there are no supply restrictions, it's not gonna affect the availability of housing for everyone else.
Which of course means they won't bother. The whole con is capturing working people's wages by raising rent and rent-derived prices. Conceptually it's similar to the nominally high-paying job in a company town, where almost all your wages get siphoned off by living expenses for company-owned housing and services. The only difference is the payer and the siphoner are different entities.
There would have to be an absolute deluge of supply to keep those with capital from buying up, thereby driving up, housing inventory. Like the kind of deluge that keeps building supply stores full of empty shelves for months and bankrupts home owners nationwide as the price of homes plummet.
Personally I feel the solution is to clamp down on real estate investors. Also, your rent estimates are off by at least 3x.
We need to build enough to make housing depreciate with age. Speculative investors are only in the market because artificial supply constraints make it a good bet that prices will go up. If the market becomes free to produce supply, they will find higher-return places to park their money.
Housing is notoriously inelastic. If you assumed a strict rule of 1 person to a bedroom, you can theoretically get wild price swings around the zone where the number of people in a neighborhood is about the same as the number of bedrooms.
You don't need to go crazy with oversupply at all to get the correct prices. Look at much of Texas today or at the rest of the country pre-1970 to see what a healthy housing market looks like.
I'm sorry, but I have no tears left for those who participated in the pyramid scheme, claiming ignorance or that their peers were doing it too. If their investments bottom out, they usually have enough political clout to screw the taxpayer anyways (see 2008.) We need to fix the market once and keep it fixed. We should bring it back to where it should have been all along. If there are people who have valid claims after that, we can always use some of the humongous "peace dividends" to settle them.
But real estate investors can already buy property. What is your objection to lifting restrictions on building property?
don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Simply restrict hard asset purchases to US citizens. See how that works.
if the real estate broker lobby doesn't like it , you are probably on the right track
Right, but just citizens, no companies. Every separate piece of real estate needs to be owned by a specific person. What a fun world would that be. Or maybe just funny.
There's no magic mechanism where investors build a lot of housing and it becomes expensive because of who owns it.
You build more of something and it becomes cheaper. Even if you only build luxury housing or whatever you fear, it becomes cheaper. Richer people will buy the new housing rather than bid up old housing, as they currently do.
Investors have "air dropped" into consumer hardware and ai. Have the prices gone up or down?
Competition drives prices up. Individuals and investors are both competing for the same inventory, but with dramatically different incentives. Remove, or dramatically reduce, the ability of investors to access that inventory and it removes competition.
Absolutely agreed. There should be a multipronged approach.
Step I: Ban institutional investment in single family homes. I.e. individuals/couples can own 3. After that, disincentives begin to kick in. Any non-individual/couple has strong disincentives against buying single family homes.
Step II: Make it easier to build multi-family, denser housing, with a bias towards owner-occupied over renting. Up to and including removing local control over saying "No."
Step III: Carve out a very specific space (and zoning) for what rentals (i.e. non-owner-occupied) should look like.
To the person who's paying an exhorbitantly overpriced rent, it's little consolation if they're paying it to someone who owns 2 units rather than 200. They're still being effectively enserfed via the artificial housing shortage.
Conversely, if there is no lack of housing, it might actually be more efficient to have a few large landlords than many small ones.
If something is wrong and immoral, it doesn't matter much if it's perpretrated by a small-time crook or an industrial-sized one.
> If something is wrong and immoral, it doesn't matter much if it's perpretrated by a small-time crook or an industrial-sized one.
No, it makes all the difference.
If you only have small-time operators, by definition you have lots of them. Thus no single one has much power at all. You can move easily, change landlords and negotiate everything every time.
OTOH if you have two or three megacorporations who own all the housing in your city (and you bet they collude), then you're playing with someone who holds all the cards and you have zero negotiating power. What are you going to do? Move to a different unit? They also own it.
> Thus no single one has much power at all.
Property owners are effectively cartelized - that's how they got the supply restrictions passed in the first place. You can't "move your way" out of the market rent, and the market rent is the cartel rent. It's set to the same level as the monopoly rent.
It's even higher than if there were only two enormous landlords that did not benefit from the collusion built into the supply restriction system. A landlord duopoly would not have the political power to get the restrictions passed in the first place.
> Competition drives prices up.
Competition doesn't drive prices up. Competition with restricted supply drives prices up. Competition is just the means of price discovery.
Look up what happened in Minneapolis, MN when significant supply was added. In the presence of discovery, prices went down.
Sure, and I do agree we should tax more if people owns 3, 4 or 5 homes.
But in most cases those investors are just renting out again. So they don’t reduce the pool of housing. So they might increase the purchase price, but they contribute to more rental being available. At the end of the day the same amount of housing is available. So investors aren’t the cause of housing shortage.
But real estate investors can already buy any property they want.
The post was about removing restrictions on building properties.
Maybe start holding back all the state money to a county if that county's average HUD wait is (say) longer than 3 months. Should really kickstart fixing zoning, fast!
That's why any UBI should be financed by a tax on real estate ownership. Preferably progressive one to prevent concentration of real estate ownership.
How much of real estate any entity and person owns should be easily traceable because ownership of real estate directly and ownership of entities that can themselves own property is already tracked.
So you want a still artificially-undersupplied market, but with novel ownership covenants and a different taxation regime, and an experimental one at that. Whereas if we just got rid of the artificial undersupply all these problems would vanish.
That's not to say a UBI isn't a good idea. But if the lowest rents were around $100/mo (as they used to be even after adjusting for inflation) a large fraction of people who need help today would be able to get by on their own.
> chiefly by removing the artificial supply restrictions
Building housing without restrictions gives you slums. Nice housing has lots of surrounding support - electric, gas, water, sewage, Internet lines; schools, parks, swimming pools, transport, not to mention industry, retail, and employment. Half the reason for the restrictions is to ensure that new housing can be supported by the surrounding infrastructure. People who are comfortable living somewhere without the surrounding support are already free to purchase housing at much cheaper cost in rural areas.
The problem isn't artificial restrictions, it's a country that can't build anymore, that can't get the inherent and necessary bureaucracy streamlined, quick, and responsive; that can't raise sufficient money for public works construction which has no immediate profit potential; that can't persuade its young men to enter the construction trades instead of going to college.
Ensure mixed zoning to reduce car and transit dependence, but also ensure every 1+ br apartment gets 2-3 parking spots to fight against the creep of European cycle-philic anticar building practices.
That’s absurd. Why would a 1 br apartment need 2-3 parking spots? That creates a car centric city by default.
If there’s no dangerous cars around, and everything is close by, you don’t need more than a bike, and therefore no parking spots.
I'll agree on no parking, but only because the future is the transit agency-owned robo-taxi.
There you have it, 3 people, 4 opinions. If only the housing cartel was 1/10th as disorganized.
I mean, I have no stake in this game. I live in Tokyo where we already have everything I described. If people like the way their country works I’m all for it, I’ll just never stop evangelizing the opposite when they complain they don’t have enough housing.
It’d be nice if someone figured out how to do the same with houses that are 2x bigger though.
These polemics are stirring and feel true. It's a purple prose version of east coast 2010s YIMBY. But they're not true.
> it's a country that can't build anymore,
See above.
> that can't raise sufficient money for public works construction
Infrastructure spending is at an all time high; massive $300B infrastructure package was passed a few years back.
> which has no immediate profit potential
What form of public works construction would have immediate profit potential?
> that can't persuade its young men to enter the construction trades instead of going to college.
Nah. Young men college graduates are consistently decreasing since 2020 for men.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
Construction has added ~1 million jobs since December 2020.
Sorry, but these are pretty much some of the falsehoods that have been effective in fooling voters and putting the supply limits in place.
The bureaucratic red tape is one of the artificial restrictions.
Public works are impeded by the same mechanisms and for the exact same reason.
People do go into the trades for the right salaries. Their salaries did rise. They are among the prices of goods that must be provided locally ("non-tradables") and are therefore determined by local rents. There are also union rules in many cities that require that only local labor be used - another one of said restrictions.
> The bureaucratic red tape is one of the artificial restrictions.
My point being that bureaucracy does not inherently need to be so bad as to be perceived from the outside as slow and inefficient. Chinese rail and construction were built while dealing with Chinese bureaucracy; yet, they were able to build much more, much faster, for much cheaper.
The reasons why the bureaucracy are too slow usually boil down to some combination of: too many stakeholders with veto rights, stakeholders granted too much time to review, too many stages of review. Lots of these issues are emblematic of a lack of strategic direction at the public level, where coordination of all the elements needed for good-quality housing are set up for developers who are then sold charters for the actual construction and then public governance gets out of the way; instead of forcing developers to come up with all the elements themselves and overcome all the stakeholder vetos.
> People do go into the trades for the right salaries. Their salaries did rise.
And with the rise in compensation, so did the cost of construction (because "non-tradeable", but I disagree that it is inevitable as such, because labor can be imported) and therefore the cost of housing. Net loss. Like it or not, affordable goods and services are usually built on the backs of cheap labor; leadership can decide to either import labor or build cultures that glorify labor, American leadership (outside of agriculture) largely decided to sit on its hands and do neither, with large compensation rises (and concurrent cost rises) as a result. Where labor is neither imported, glorified, nor adequately compensated, there are currently major hiring crises in America, specifically teaching and policing.
> My point being that bureaucracy does not inherently need to be so bad
Indeed, and my point is that it's this bad on purpose. The nominal reasons are the ones you listed and more, but they're just a front.
> And with the rise in compensation, so did the cost of construction (because "non-tradeable", but I disagree that it is inevitable as such, because labor can be imported) and therefore the cost of housing
This is pretty much exactly what I wrote, minus the fact that it's non-tradable because of another restriction.
Here's how it works algebraically. Let C_x be the coefficient for the amount spent on x by consumers and P_x by producers:
Rent = RentTrueCost * RentOverpriceFactor
LocalSalary = Rent * C_Rent + TradablesPrice * C_Tradables + NonTradablesPrice * C_NonTradables
NonTradablesPrice = TradablesPrice * P_Tradables + NonTradablesPrice * P_NonTradables + LocalSalary * P_Salary
NonTradablesPrice = (TradablesPrice * (P_Tradables + C_Tradables * P_Salary) + RentTrueCost * RentOverpriceFactor * C_Rent * P_Salary) / (1 - P_NonTradables - C_NonTradables * P_Salary)
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The program gave money to "who were pregnant or had at least one child, lived at or below the federal poverty level and experienced hardship related to COVID-19. Participants were randomly selected from about 50,000 applicants".
There were probably a million people eligible to apply for the program. 5% of them did. So when considering how well the program would scale, remember that the current results come from those in the 95th or higher percentile of motivation to improve their life.
> the current results come from those in the 95th or higher percentile of motivation to improve their life.
That's a big assumption. eg I could have participated in hundreds of class action against the manufacturer of one of my medical devices. I don't participate in all of them, for practical reasons of time and notification. Then they fell into a selection based on other characteristics like likelihood of success (judgement or settlement), if there were shared legal costs, exclusionary criteria...like not participating in other cases or a limited number, etc. I missed out on millions of dollars, relative to my success case, by being unlucky.
There were multiple practical factors involved in the selection, beyond "you could have participated". This oversimplification is not the basis for a conclusion, imo.
A lot of effort and money has been spent on trying to make this program sound more successful than it was. They put together a long, design heavy packet to spin the results for media: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fdc101bc3cfda2dcf0a2...
When you look at the details, the results aren’t as good as the headlines. There are major selection bias problems with how both the control group and the $1K/month group were selected and retained.
Even the results that differ between groups aren’t all that amazing and feel like they were cherry picked to be easy wins in a study like this. Of course giving people $1K/month results in that group self/describing as feeling like they’re in a better position to handle an unexpected $400/month expense because you’re literally giving them 2.5X that per month. It’s like the study authors handed themselves a guaranteed win and then congratulated themselves on it.
The claims about employment aren’t really supported by the data, either. The PR piece claims this:
> Guaranteed-income recipients also were more likely to secure full-time or part-time employment, or to be looking for work, rather than being unemployed and not looking for work, the study found.
But when I look at the data on page 57 of the report it shows the treatment group ($1K/month) had higher unemployment at 18 months.
If this was a study about a psychology paper or some social sciences hypothesis then the comments would be all over the glaring dishonesty of how these results are being spun. Something about UBI type research causes a lot of people to assume it’s positive and ignore the issues with the research, though. The numbers in this study do not support the enthusiastic headlines at all.
The study doesn't show any "transformative" results. In all parts of the study the treatment group (the group receiving $1k per month) performed about the same or worse than the control group except in 2 cases: access to food and experiences of physical abuse.
The interpretation of the results in the first part of the study sounds like they were written by a PR person with a biased agenda in mind. Read the actual study in the remaining 83 pages [1].
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fdc101bc3cfda2dcf0a2...
Unrelated, but I recently had an interesting idea about taxation.
Everyone since forever is trying to tax profits. But profits are very easy to manipulate because you can invent costs out of thin air to avoid paying taxes for specific income in specific places.
There were some attempts at taxing corporate income (and it's prevalent way of taxing poor individuals) but it has a problem of stifling industries that have high incomes but also high costs.
What if we taxed costs instead?
If you are spending the money it means you have money to spend. Why not let country skim that a bit instead?
There are some things in taxation that work like that. For example VAT which is ostensibly a tax on value added but in practice is a tax on consumption on the final consumer. Similarily sales tax. Energy taxes. Surprisingly also social security fees. Those are effectively taxes levied on corporations for spending money on labor. That's why they are insanely effective because while corporations can very easily hide profits they can't hide what they pay their workers for the labor they need.
There's strong moral opposition to income taxes because people see them as a punishment for being successful or working hard. It would be way harder to spin taxes on costs this way. Those would be a punishment for not being able to do more with less.
So you basically need to tax buyers of everything. Products, services, rights, licenses, assets, rents, raw labor. Those taxes can be collected either form buyer or the seller, whoever is easier to scrutinize and collect.
The issue with this scheme is there's incentive for buyers to ask sellers to hide the sale to save on tax. Currently also sellers have an incentive to hide sales to hide profits that are also taxed.
So by removing income taxes we diminish this incentive. Sellers also have slight disincentive to hide the sale, for example because if they have a cost in the future they could be cross-checked if they had enough money to bear that cost.
To give them further incentive their income could even award them tax credit towards taxes on costs. Sort of a reverse VAT system. This might be prone to fraud as all tax deductions are and possibly unnecessary (unless for subsidizing those heavy cost, high profit industries) but profits are way harder to fake than costs.
Honestly looking at the paper there are enough statistically significant benefits to make this societally worthwhile and even more statistically insignificant but uniquely important to each participant that this seems like a no brainer to continue.
"GI recipients were significantly more likely to secure full-time employment than to remain unemployed not looking for work, compared to control participants across the duration of the pilot."
"The treatment group demonstrated a significant decrease in food insecurity and an increase in health-promoting behaviors."
"Far more GI recipients reported that their children participated in enrichment activities, such as sports, lessons, and clubs, than control participants. At Baseline, approximately 44% of the treatment group (vs. 40% control) had their children in at least one enrichment activity"
Secondary effect of positive life conditions for dependents isn't even quantified in any of the research or other comments in this thread, that starts to compound the benefit.
Of course, giving anyone money in a vacuum can have transformative results. However, when you apply that to the wider system of economics, it is utterly destructive. If a business knows that you are getting extra money from the government, they would be leaving money on the table by not increasing prices to get for that money. The same goes with real estate, iPhones, healthcare, and everything else. They know you have the money. I equate this with telling a car dealer exactly how much money you have to spend.
Which is why UBI/GMI policies must be paired with confiscatory taxation on economic rents.
Those price-fungible goods and services you name capture surplus value to the seller. A Georgian tax on such goods captures that surplus value, limits price growth, and could further finance UBI/GBI and other public welfare projects.
> Those price-fungible goods and services you name capture surplus value to the seller. A Georgian tax on such goods captures that surplus value, limits price growth, and could further finance UBI/GBI and other public welfare projects.
Big oof. This rapidly turns into market participants leaving the market because the returns associated with the "price-fungible goods and services" (whatever precisely those are) are poorer than those not denominated in the currency.
Mass distribution of currency only leads to devaluation of currency. The entire premise of Georgism isn't about fixing wealth inequality: it's about forcing resources that are physically finite with no replacement (namely land) into productive use.
There's zero downsides from large scale capital leaving housing real estate rental market. That's exactly what is needed for housing to return to acting like housing.
The downside is that you cannot build units (especially apartments) without large scale capital. To effectively build, you need people (developers) to finance the construction of many units, especially multifamily whether townhomes, apartments, or condos.
The issue is heavily constrained supply. Even if it is profitable to build a smaller, lower-cost unit land use restrictions effectively limit the production of housing units from land.
My favorite source of financing of any UBI is progressive tax on real estate. The more you own (either directly or through subsidiaries) the higher percentage of real estate value you owe periodically.
You’re basically implying that if you give everyone in the US $1,000, no matter what, inflation will happen and people are back to where they started.
Giving these people in isolation $1,000/month, probably no.
Giving everyone $1,000/mo, you could expect that money to be captured as economic rents, if not literal rents.
If you currently spend $2,000/mo on your apartment, which is probably low for many areas (such as the California Bay Area), then people currently living further away to pay only $1,000/mo can now afford your $2,000/mo apartment. So the price has to go up.
I say all of this as a somewhat proponent of UBI. In particular, I like the idea that UBI could replace many assistance programs, would be destigmatized, would not have the administrative overhead of those programs, would not be a welfare trap, and would be fundamentally fair.
But giving it to everyone would also tend to be inflationary, and would likely be captured by rent-seekers, unless such rents are controlled somehow. But rent controls are also distorting.
It's all very theoretically problematic, and a small scale study just can't be predictive of the distortionary effects that full scale UBI would have.
The quintessential example is US college tuition.
The US government shoveled free / low-cost money into sending people to college, university tuitions increased to capture that additional funding while still keeping their enrollment numbers.
Let's not do that with housing?
This fact is what scares me most about economic populism in the USA. I'm not concerned about higher taxes: I'm concerned people look at the college market and see the problem as lack of subsidy, not about excess capital availability.
The problem is that you can only subsidize a for-profit entity (including non-profits that act as such) by simultaneously controlling prices (or scaling supply supra-demand).
Anything else, including any personal contribution, and the prices just raise to include the subsidy.
Which is exactly what you'd expect a market rate to do!
* The sole exception seems to be if the subsidies are targeted and few enough in number so as to not influence the broader market rate, but then you're not helping as many people.
The fact that subsidies provided to improve affordability of rents generally increases those rent costs is long-recognised. Winston Churchill in 1906:
Some years ago in London there was a toll bar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted of so large a proportion of their earnings offended the public conscience, and agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the taxpayers, the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week, but within a very short time rents on the south side of the river were found to have risen about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted!
<https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-churchill-said-...>
Tax those rents.
We already ran this experiment several times during the pandemic and inflation did, in fact, happen.
Money supply increased but lots of money went into corporations. Not just into individuals pocket.
It's obvious that simply printing money and handing it out won't solve anything. If it did, let's just give every individual $10 million via direct deposit. Cool now we're all rich and can retire, right?
But, if that money (which is a claim against future economic output) was diverted from somewhere else, it could have an effect. The total US GDP is $25T and the total population is 330 million, meaning if it were cut and divided equally we'd each get... $75k per year.
So I guess in a hand-wavey sense it's true we generate enough economic activity to have everyone capable of living a decent middle-class lifestyle. Of course that level of redistribution would require some extreme form of socialism / communism which just wouldn't work out.
Absolutely. That is exactly right. That's economics. Love it or hate it, the market will always equalize. The only way to stop that is to put price controls on huge amount of commerce, and barring a complete revolution in the American system of commerce, that is never going to happen.
Nation who keeps trialing successful thing asks, why does nothing work?
Who's asking why does nothing work? I don't think anyone but the most ridiculous contrarians would argue that basic income doesn't work _at all_, that getting a free $1k/month somehow provides 0 benefit to the family that receives it. The basic income debate is largely between people who think it's worth the cost and people who think it isn't, so figuring out exactly what the benefits are is an important input.
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The only reason we dont have policies that give people money directly is because it doesn’t allow for the people who have money, to control what the people who get it, do with the money
Why, cause what people typically do with money like in UBI situations, is get out from under the control of people with money.
As the system exists, all the money resides with people who don’t want other people to get it. It’s overwhelmingly clear the majority of people with more than living wage amount of money, want to spend it exclusively on their own consumptive pleasure with no positive externalities.
So they’re not going to support or implement policies (via the government they’ve captured) to make it easier for people to be less dependent on existing power structures
Where is any of this confusing at this point? It’s all very specifically explicitly understood to work like this. What’s baffling?
None of that makes sense.
The primary driver of economic health in the US is frequency of domestic spending. It goes in self fulfilling cycles in that when the economy is healthy people make more money and thus can spend money more frequently. When the economy is unhealthy people make less money that drives down spending, which puts other people out of work thus further driving down the economy.
If the wealthy people want to become even more wealthy they will work to increase economic health to ensure the regular people earn higher wages which then drives spending and thus drives up the wealthy people’s stock value.
In that regard the wealthy people have only a negligible increase of power compared with regular people who vote with their spending. There is no conspiracy to this.
> The primary driver of economic health in the US is frequency of domestic spending. It goes in self fulfilling cycles in that when the economy is healthy people make more money and thus can spend money more frequently.
Sure, but money doesn't grow on trees.
If you're paying UBI, that money comes from somewhere - tax, debt, etc. That has a negative economic impact in and of itself.
There is no free lunch.
Money grows in central bank ledgers.
There is no intrinsic limit to the money supply.
There is intrinsic limit to what that money supply can buy. But that's an entirely different question.
And adjustments to the money supply will have effective redistributive effects depending on where and to whom that new money is distributed. Which tends to prompt "money doesn't grow on trees" commentary from those adversely affected or politically aligned with those, whether for or against their own interests.
See generally: MMT.
> See generally: MMT.
MMT was proven false by the run up in inflation since Covid.
> Sure, but money doesn't grow on trees.
You know, it is funny that this slogan is only ever used in this context. For all other things no one ever talks about where money comes from.
It's created out of thin air, mostly by private corporations. It is no more than a unit of accounting. You can create as much of it as you want as long as something of equal value is created. This may be for example a signature for a lone if one is credit worthy or on the larger scale a disaster or war effort. If quality of life or employability is worth something to a nation they would want to spend on it.
We could also ask where the tax is coming from if people cant figure out how to find or hold a job.
This is the well debunked “trickle down” theory and capitalist economic health measures don’t say shit about thriving. Look at GINI.
There’s no need for a formal conspiracy when it’s considered just “how the system works” instead of embedded unethical incentives
In reality “work” isn’t how wealthy people grow their money. So you make the mistake of believing the wealthy telling you there’s a ladder to the moon they pay you to keep building.