> isn't to demand people not buy tvs with ubi, its just to make sure you can have the bare necessities and little else
'little else' = TV in your example, so these amount to the same thing
Because the cost of 'bare necessities' varies by region (housing prices in particular), the only way you'll make this work is if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula that gives you exactly the amount of money it takes to buy X amount of housing, food, etc.
But then you can always turn around and bunk with a friend and then spend it all on luxuries and video games, or secretly move someplace cheaper to live and pocket the extra money. So either you allow people to nakedly game the system, or the government is now in the business of monitoring where normal people live.
> if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula
There is, the government pays cost-of-living adjustments to its own employees on the GS pay schedule. But cost of living stats measure medians. Paying the median would be insufficient for half the population, and "too much" for the other half.
Yeah and once you get into that level of detail, what exactly is 'bare minimum housing' for a person?
Like, if the rule is you get median housing no matter what zip code you happen to live in, then there's no downside to picking the most expensive zip code in the nation and choosing to get UBI there. OTOH, if you define limits, then government has made some zip codes effectively UBI-free.
'little else' = TV in your example, so these amount to the same thing
Because the cost of 'bare necessities' varies by region (housing prices in particular), the only way you'll make this work is if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula that gives you exactly the amount of money it takes to buy X amount of housing, food, etc.
But then you can always turn around and bunk with a friend and then spend it all on luxuries and video games, or secretly move someplace cheaper to live and pocket the extra money. So either you allow people to nakedly game the system, or the government is now in the business of monitoring where normal people live.