Instead of Universal Basic Income, how about Universal Basic Food Stamps?<p>It feels like, rather than a basic income, we need two orthogonal currencies: one for necessities (food, rent, utilities) and one for niceities. Everyone would just have two numbers in their bank account, for each of the country&#x27;s two official currencies. Basic income would be paid in one, while all income from trade in the economy would be in the other.<p>Economists liken money to votes for demand in a decentralized allocation scheme. They liken taxes and fines to punishing people by taking away their voting-weight in said scheme, relegating them to suboptimal options that they wouldn&#x27;t have voted for. (Basically, the equivalent of pairing them up with a non-first-choice partner in the Stable Marriage Problem.)<p>This works fine at a theoretical level where every agent is participating in economy X without <i>depending on</i> economy X (e.g. an economy consisting wholly of foreign investors), but falls apart when people are expected to also eat and live in some of the things they vote for, because those things have <i>inelastic</i> demand—taxing&#x2F;fining people doesn&#x27;t make them consume any less of those things, because they <i>need</i> to consume those things; and frequently <i>inelastic</i> supply—there just aren&#x27;t options for places to live below a certain cost, because all the suppliers&#x27; prices are being &quot;floated up&quot; by said inelastic demand.<p>If, instead, we said something like:<p>• A new currency—&quot;necessity dollars&quot;—is allocated to people by the government each month to pay for a basket of goods with inelastic demand. The original currency persists, renamed &quot;nicety-dollars.&quot;<p>• Necessity-dollars can <i>only</i> be used for goods and services with inelastic demand (as found by the BLS during CPI calculation), though they are not restricted to goods with any particular &quot;moral cleanliness&quot; value (so cigarettes are just as applicable as bread†.) This is enforced by only permitting certain sellers to <i>accept</i> necessity-dollars, and only on certain transactions.<p>• At point-of-first-sale, necessity-dollars are actually sent off to the government and the seller receives nicety-dollars instead. There&#x27;s probably some exchange-rate involved, that the government can manipulate to some interesting end. Thus, companies never hold necessity-dollars, or pay out in necessity-dollars; they&#x27;re just a thing individuals have and transparently give back to the government at payment-processing time.<p>• You can&#x27;t tax or fine anyone in necessity-dollars. People just receive them, hold them in an account, and spend them voluntarily, and that&#x27;s it: no other operations are valid. Importantly, banks aren&#x27;t allowed to impose necessity-dollar fees on necessity-dollar accounts for holding them, and so forth. (They could impose <i>nicety-</i>dollar fees on fancy necessity-dollar accounts, but see the next point:)<p>• If you get taxed or fined or liened or collected on for anything in nicety-dollars, and you don&#x27;t <i>have enough</i> nicety-dollars, this doesn&#x27;t &quot;spill over&quot;: you <i>can&#x27;t</i> pay a nicety-dollar cost in necessity-dollars. You&#x27;re not allowed. This means that if you run out of nicety-dollars, you&#x27;re effectively <i>bankrupt</i> (in all the current meanings of that word—all the same machinery kicks in), while still being able to afford necessities. Your niceity-creditors get chased off&#x2F;annulled by your bankruptcy, without disrupting your ability to afford necessities.<p>---<p>† Addiction causes need just like hunger does. You can&#x27;t really economically disincentivize addicts from seeking a fix; that&#x27;s basically definitional. Addicts under pressure commit crimes to get the money to pay for their fix, rather than going without. Just freakin&#x27; build the infrastructure to <i>treat</i> addiction, if you don&#x27;t want people spending taxpayer money that way.