There are lots of apartments available with no credit check. They're more often of lower quality, but if your situation is such that you want to spend less on rent and have more left for something else (like paying off your debts), why is it a problem for people to be able to choose that?
It's the status quo that screws them, because the government often pays out $1000/month or more in housing assistance but it's required to go directly to the landlord, and then if you have money problems but could live with family or are willing to take in a crappy low-rent studio apartment for a while, you can't take that money and use it to fix your situation instead because if you tried to do that the government takes it away.
> Or people who rely on what other people don't consider food for sustenance, for whatever reason (protein powder? multivitamins? supplies to grow/produce your own foodstuffs?).
Isn't this the opposite? If you give them a UBI then they can buy whatever they want. If you give them paternalistic micromanaged benefits like SNAP then they can buy carbonated high fructose corn syrup in a can but not vitamins or farming supplies.
Van life, couch surfing, living in hotels: these are the options available to them. And it's obviously not so simple as "roughing it" for a few months, as they're essentially forced to sell or abandon most of their personal property.
What you're talking about it taking people in those dire straits and forcing them to pay MORE money just to keep a roof over their heads, while millions of wealthier Americans own multiple properties where they and their family are the only residents. It's ridiculous.
>Isn't this the opposite? If you give them a UBI then they can buy whatever they want. If you give them paternalistic micromanaged benefits like SNAP then they can buy carbonated high fructose corn syrup in a can but not vitamins or farming supplies.
I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.
The core problem remains the same: consumption does not scale with wealth. If we limit taxes go a handful of goods and services, then demand is just going to shift to something else. Consumption taxes give billionaires the option to drastically reduce their tax burden by consuming less. The lifestyle of someone with a $20 million net worth is not that much worse than someone with a $2 billion net worth.
Planes are the things airlines buy, not the things economy passengers buy. If you're conceding that taxes corporations pay get passed on to consumers then what does that imply about corporate income tax?
Also, poor people don't generally buy a lot of air travel.
> Consumption taxes give billionaires the option to drastically reduce their tax burden by consuming less.
Isn't that what we want? An incentive for the money to go to creating jobs or charitable donations rather than private jets and third mansions?
Building jets and houses creates jobs though. A more likely outcome of a consumption tax is that wealthy people simply spend less.
Corporations can be shell companies. Whatever rate or tax you want to be applied to "the rich" has to be at least that high on corporations or "the rich" would just put their money inside a corporation and pay the lower tax. So it turns out all taxes are "regressive" at which point you might as well use the the simple, uniform, less distortionary ones (e.g. VAT) and then achieve different effective rates via transfer payments, the most efficient of which is a UBI.
> Building jets and houses creates jobs though.
That's assuming they're building houses instead of buying up the existing stock while restrictive zoning prevents more from being built. Moreover, jobs building private jets or satisfying other hedonistic consumption are less helpful than jobs building battery factories or growing food, even if they did employ the same number of people.
> A more likely outcome of a consumption tax is that wealthy people simply spend less.
The reason wealthy people don't spend most of their income is that they already buy whatever they want and then still have money left over. Bill Gates isn't going to buy an economy car instead of a luxury car over a sales tax.
