The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

> I heard one answer more than any other: the government should introduce universal basic income. This would indeed afford artists the security to create art, but it’s also extremely fanciful.

Until we start viewing "fanciful" ideas as realistic, our problems will persist. This article is another in the long series of observations of seemingly distinct problems which are actually facets of a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high. It's not just that musicians, or actors, or grocery store baggers, or taxi drivers, or whatever, can't make a living, it's that the set of things you can do to make a living is narrowing more and more. Broad-based solutions like basic income, wealth taxes, breaking up large market players, etc., will do far more for us than attempting piecemeal tweaks to this or that industry.

Except that socialism has failed already.

Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

> Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

It's pretty easy to justify morally. I mean at least as easy as any other welfare.

The net payments for UBI plus (income) taxes don't have to look to different from what many countries already do today. It's just the accounting that looks a bit different.

UBI means giving money to people, which means that money has velocity because it would be promptly spent.

We did this during Covid as furlough payments, and the result was high inflation. Wages didn’t significantly increase to match, so in my country anyway people feel that the cost if living is significantly worse post-Covid.

Anywhere that implemented UBI would also have to implement rent controls, otherwise Landlords would just see it as money on the table. But you couldn’t have controls for all prices, so inflation would still result.

This is what most people miss when they criticise UBI - for most people, it will be immediately spent, taxed, and put back into the economy. As long as the velocity is there, it's not an entirely bad idea as long as inflation can be kept under control.

> as long as inflation can be kept under control.

Nice trick if you can pull it off.

So for the 1GBP you print, you recoup up to 20p in VAT, or less for foodstuffs.

And more money chasing the same goods and services means…?

Are you suggesting that UBI should be paid out of freshly printed money?

I don't think that's how people commonly understand how UBI should be financed.

I can only speak for the UK. But given the fiscal headroom for the foreseeable, I don’t see where else it would come from? If they don’t have it, they either borrow or print it?

For any meaningful scheme, you would be talking about hundreds of billions.

That's were things such as wealth tax kicks in.

The money that just sits untaxed on the vaults of the extremely wealthy should be taxed to finance this.

This is trickle down economics done right. Remove money from the wealthy and redistribute it to benefit society.

No one has money "sitting in vaults"

They keep money in bonds (lending money to people, corps, govs that need it), stocks (raise the value of companies that are valuable thus letting them borrow more etc) or they consume which pays for all the poor peoples salaries

The immaturity of people when it comes to economics is a problem

You're broadly correct.

Don't let the uneducated messenger distract from UBI itself though. Proposed seriously, it's about reducing asset values and high incomes to redistribute that value to everyone who isn't losing more value than the UBI. The real argument is that it would mean short-term economic costs to build a more robust system with a bigger pool of people with the safety net and risk appetite to start/join companies.