Comic Strips

They just announced that they're raising water and sewage in my area by 300% by the end of the year. No reason given, just because they can. It should be fucking illegal. They're also planning on putting in a few data centers, which are currently being hotly contested, because they're supposed to make everyone's electric bill go up about 300% as well. I'm terrified as to how I'm going to afford my electric bill. Water and sewage is included in my rent, I can't wait to see how much that increases when my lease is up this winter and I also have no idea how I'll afford it, but I also don't know if I could find anywhere to move that would be cheaper and not give me a commute that negates any savings.

This isn't theoretical. UBI has already been tested in real life, and rents do not increase as much as incomes do. This is because supply and demand are not perfectly elastic.

Rent caps are a great idea and would help, but they aren't strictly necessary for UBI to be a net gain.

I mean, broadly speaking, you want staples and basic lifestyle needs provided at-cost by a public functionary. Leaving groceries and housing and health care and education to the free market has created enormous amounts of waste, a maze of barriers to entry, and ballooned administrative overheads.

Countries with much lower cost of living tend to be where utilities are owned and operated by the state as a social amenity, while luxuries and economic frontier advancements are left to private experimentation and entrepreneurship. But even then, the intention is to glean the wheat from the chaffe, incorporating the best of the frontier into the interior with an eye towards efficiencies of scale.