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Hi Ed!

I'm a big fan of the idea of a basic income. Something I'm curious about, though: How would a basic income accommodate local variations in cost of living?

As an example: I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is one of the most expensive places in the country. There is currently a lot of unrest regarding social welfare supports, as the cost of living (primarily rent) has increased very, very quickly, and priced many long-term residents out of the area.

If a basic income was adopted on a national level, how would it account for something like this? I have the following questions (in convenient point-form).

• Would a basic income be a single one-size-fits-all dollar amount across the entire country, or would it attempt to take local cost-of-living variations into account

• If it was intended to be a one-size-fits-all dollar amount, it would likely be insufficient to provide the expected reasonable baseline quality of life in very expensive areas like SF. Would this just be accepted as a limitation of the system? (eg. "if the basic income is not enough to live on, move somewhere cheaper"). Additionally, if that is accepted as a limitation, do you think it would be a difficult thing to sell politically ("move somewhere cheaper" is decidedly not an effective political slogan in local SF Bay politics)

• If local cost-of-living variations are to be taken into account, this is likely to mean paying out substantially higher amounts in places like SF. Is there any worry that some enterprising poorer folk would move to a more expensive area, just to get a larger payout? Related, is there any worry of people fraudulently misrepresenting where they live in order to get more money

• If local cost-of-living variations are to be taken into account, is there worry that it would be politically difficult to sell this to the rest of America? I can imagine someone in, say, Kansas, making the argument that "Why should my hard-earned tax dollars go to pay for the poor in California when our own poor don't even get that much money?"

• And finally, as a related implementation detail of this system: Do you see this being run by the federal government, or being more like a federal mandate with implementation details left up to individual states? I can see that as being a reasonable solution to the 'accounting for local variation' problem, as well as being a reasonable and sensible thing to devolve to a more local government. But I could also see that playing out like Obamacare, with many states making a political point of refusing to implement these programs. Your thoughts?

Thanks in advance for your response

If you couldn't find work in SF, and had to live on your UBI, maybe you should consider moving to Oklahoma City where the cost of living is a lot lower and your UBI would go farther.

This would be my preferred answer, and makes me optimistically wonder about some unintended consequences of a UBI. Perhaps, given an income guarantee, you'd see large scale movements of artists and creative types to previously-run-down areas of the country. Kind of like spreading the gentrification out from the few trendy cities that are bearing the brunt of it right now.

Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the worst problems with gentrification (the inability of long time residents to afford to live in the area anymore, combined with the inability of poorer long time residents to easily afford to move) would be solved if they had a reasonable guaranteed income

access to all the cultural things people claim to want

I might be a little optimistic here, but think for a second where cultural things come from: People doing things. As soon as you give people a basic guarantee that they can survive without worry, that gives them a lot more freedom to do more things, ie. create more culture.

The entire reason (as I understand it, anyway) that SF is a cultural mecca, is that a bunch of counterculture and social outcast types came here to get away from everything else. They came here, instead of somewhere else, because of cheap rents. They they did what they wanted to do, and 50 years later boom, rich cultural history.

The way I see it, a UBI would allow anyone to move anywhere inexpensive, without having to worry about bootstrapping themselves. I would expect this to create more cultural things, not to lose access to them.

closing tax loopholes

"Closing tax loopholes" is a convenient scapegoat that politicians refer to all the time, but it seems like there is very little agreement on which loopholes to close, or for that matter what counts as a loophole. Would you be willing to go into details over what specific tax code changes you would like to see?

Thanks! :D I'll have to check it out