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Originally Posted by PepsiFree
I disagree. Living in a non-shared accommodation is no less a need than living in a house with three other people. The base need is shelter, everything above that is essentially a "want" if that's how you choose to look at it, which includes basically anything above a drop-in shelter.
You also need to clarify what you think the government should base the funding level on. Two people? Three? Four? Five? It's nice in theory to allow the government dictate how many people you need to live with to survive, but that's not how it should be calculated.
Say you arbitrarily set the amount at $500, and say this covers a shared accommodation expense with an average of three people. The availability for affordable housing units in Calgary is already low, with many low-income people struggling to find homes they can afford, so what are you going to do? Spent the money to build more? Or just say "here's an amount that could get you into affordable housing, now, there may not be any affordable housing for you to get into at that amount, but that's not our problem." It defeats the purpose of a UBI, does it not? If it's not enough to live because it your limits your options further than just "luxury vs non-luxury" down to "having a place to live or not"... it's not enough, is it?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
I guess I would say that the funds for having your own place vs living with a roommate could (generally speaking) come from the income from working vs the government program. There needs to be a limit somewhere.
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Both good comments. And this may boil down to a cultural issue. In Canada the directive that forces people to co-habitate to survive might work, as Canada has a much stronger belief in the collective good, but here in the US this would never sell because of the staunch belief in individuality, liberty, and freedom. I guess that's the point about this whole UBI discussion. What is the base expectation as that will ultimately determine if people will support such an idea. If you're going to remove all societal support for the individual to achieve their own path, give them a payment that then still forces them to rely on someone else to afford anything, then this is dead on arrival. People want self-determination and a half baked program that inhibits that is not going to sell in the US. Its been a couple decades since I lived in Canada, but I can't believe people would accept that there either.