#‘UBI now’ would be a decent summary of this post

[aeolianblues]

it’s so blatantly obvious to me when I think about moving to a bigger city and I think about the doubled and tripled rents you can pay just to have to live where you are required to be (e.g. near a workplace, often). And when those workplaces don’t pay nearly enough to comfortably live there after rent, proportional to what they may have paid in the past, you’re left with no disposable income. You might make a few purchases willy nilly, but more often than not if you’re left over with a couple hundred bucks from your earnings in a month, you might think twice before spending it, because what if you don’t have a couple hundred bucks left over from next month’s income?

And so— what Marx said, and what that oft-quoted tumblr post said too: you cut down on anything that’s fun, anything that makes life colourful and less monotonous because it’s not 'needed'. You put less back into public sectors and art, culture, entertainment, donations, etc. All your money is going into 1. landlord’s bank (and we’re talking like 60% of your income often) 2. taxes (extremely fair enough. I’m very happy to contribute. Now DO something with that money!! All you’re doing is giving realtors licenses to build more buildings no one can afford. Class act.) 3. groceries and bus passes. That’s it! Now, here too. Bus services, happy to pay. Though if they’re public transit I’m not sure why my taxes don’t go to it. Still. Our bus service is still reasonably cheaper than, say, London’s. Fucking hell if you had to regularly travel often in a day you’d go bankrupt. Groceries. There are two major monopolistic grocers and they’ve been caught price gouging. My groceries shouldn’t cost THAT much.

But when your rent is a lot cheaper, or the fuckers price gouging groceries are forced to lower their prices, suddenly you’re left over with like 800 bucks of disposable income. Sometimes even more, 1000. 1200 some months. All of a sudden, even if you put away half of that you have some disposable income to spend.

Suddenly you’re saying, ‘let me go meet my friends for dinner one night.’ You keep in touch with people, you’re more socially connected, your mental health improves, you're less isolated and overwhelmed. People talk to you, and often, may even have answers to things you're trying to work out and may have only offhandedly mentioned because it's on your mind. Suddenly the village is raising you! You can afford to take a day off if you’re sick or stressed. The restaurant you ate at is also walking away with a healthy bill.

Suddenly you’re going to concerts more (or something else, maybe you’re going to a national museum or art gallery). You’re stopping after the show and even buying a CD or vinyl. Maybe a tshirt. The band can go back into the studio and afford to record more music. They can pay for rehearsal spaces. The rehearsal spaces can make up enough money to stay open another year. The band gets better because they’re rehearsing regularly and they get offered better and more frequent gigs because of this. Their growing stature means that all of a sudden, something clicks and Blame Brett catapults The Beaches into megastardom, a band who has been toiling away at it for 11 years previously.

Now people want to come and see The Beaches (neighbourhood) in Toronto where this famous band got its name from. Boom, tourism money! Suddenly your band is playing these huge tours across the country, and they can afford to take a proper road crew with them. They can give a few bands in different towns and cities the opportunity to open for them at a show where people will be there early. Money goes back into the industry and economy, and some more jobs are created. The band suddenly have more money to shoot a little documentary or a music video, suddenly a band like Kneecap can be breaking records for winning film awards with a little independently made film.

You have a bit of disposable income, suddenly you can pay for a monthly subscription to your local newspaper. Meta and Google in Canada have banned and restricted news organisations (including student journalism) across their platforms so that they don’t have to pay royalties for stealing their news content for free. The central news channels in Toronto aren’t going to cover local news happening in Bumfuck, Ontario. Local journalism gets a lease of life through your disposable income. There’s a 100 km gust of wind blowing through south-eastern Ontario today apparently, but that’s not Toronto’s problem (not in the south east). Local journalism.

Like I know this has been said before, but holy fuck, the economy does not work without people having disposable income!! Industries will shut down if people don’t have money to spend. All these seemingly frivolous things that billionaires see as wasted money, it still makes them billions in revenue! Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says music costs ‘barely anything’ to make these days, but it’s made HIM richer than the most successful musicians in history! Paul McCartney will never be as rich as Daniel Ek. The man’s a billionaire. There are like 3 musicians ever who have been billionaires. (Which isn’t to say I want more billionaire musicians, I want less—no—billionaire CEOs).

Where do I go with this. The arts are not disposable. There needs to be some sort of balance. People need to have money they can spend outside of essentials. Everyone can’t and should not be an engineer or a doctor or a banker or whatever. Some people should absolutely not be up burning buildings. We need ‘non-essential’ careers too. And these entire industries cease to exist if they do not have patrons. Given that Daniek Ek is not going down to his local pub to discover and support an unsigned, scruffy new band, it is us, the people that need to have that money. Artificially high rents, depressed wages and no money to spare hurts more than just one ‘replaceable’ worker you can’t see and don’t care about!