Basic Errors? Winston Churchill Deconstructs Andrew Yang’s UBI

“The outcome of Andrew Yang’s UBI would be higher rents and, most likely, a property bubble.”

How would you spend the Universal Basic Income (UBI) currently being proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang? Hard to say? Well, how do you spend your current income? What is your biggest expense? Rent? Mortgage? Probably. Or maybe you live with family members because real estate is too expensive. You could find your own place with a UBI. Whatever the case, it’s fair to assume that a large proportion of a UBI would be spent on real estate.

In 1909, Winston Churchill, who was a member of the Liberal Party at the time, formed the Budget League in order to counter the newly formed Budget Protest League. In British politics, the budget does not normally provoke such extreme reactions, but that year’s “People’s Budget” was different because it proposed a new principle of taxation: land value taxation (LVT), which was seen by many liberals as the key to abolishing poverty. The People’s Budget was ardently opposed by many conservatives who saw it as levying unprecedented levels of taxation on wealthier members of British society. Between July and November, the Budget League held nearly 4,000 meetings and distributed 17 million leaflets and posters, and Churchill spoke persuasively on the need for land value taxation at a speech given at King’s Theater in Edinburgh:

“…[Previously] I attempted to draw a fundamental distinction between the principles of Liberalism and of Socialism, and I said Socialism attacks capital, Liberalism attacks monopoly. It is from that fundamental distinction that I come directly to the land proposals of the present Budget…