Instead of Universal Basic Income, how about Universal Basic Food Stamps?

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's two official currencies. Basic income would be paid in one, while all income from trade in the economy would be in the other.

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't have voted for. (Basically, the equivalent of pairing them up with a non-first-choice partner in the Stable Marriage Problem.)

This works fine at a theoretical level where every agent is participating in economy X without depending on 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 inelastic demand—taxing/fining people doesn't make them consume any less of those things, because they need to consume those things; and frequently inelastic supply—there just aren't options for places to live below a certain cost, because all the suppliers' prices are being "floated up" by said inelastic demand.

If, instead, we said something like:

• A new currency—"necessity dollars"—is allocated to people by the government each month to pay for a basket of goods with inelastic demand. The original currency persists, renamed "nicety-dollars."

• Necessity-dollars can only 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 "moral cleanliness" value (so cigarettes are just as applicable as bread†.) This is enforced by only permitting certain sellers to accept necessity-dollars, and only on certain transactions.

• At point-of-first-sale, necessity-dollars are actually sent off to the government and the seller receives nicety-dollars instead. There'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're just a thing individuals have and transparently give back to the government at payment-processing time.

• You can't tax or fine anyone in necessity-dollars. People just receive them, hold them in an account, and spend them voluntarily, and that's it: no other operations are valid. Importantly, banks aren't allowed to impose necessity-dollar fees on necessity-dollar accounts for holding them, and so forth. (They could impose nicety-dollar fees on fancy necessity-dollar accounts, but see the next point:)

• If you get taxed or fined or liened or collected on for anything in nicety-dollars, and you don't have enough nicety-dollars, this doesn't "spill over": you can't pay a nicety-dollar cost in necessity-dollars. You're not allowed. This means that if you run out of nicety-dollars, you're effectively bankrupt (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/annulled by your bankruptcy, without disrupting your ability to afford necessities.

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† Addiction causes need just like hunger does. You can't really economically disincentivize addicts from seeking a fix; that's basically definitional. Addicts under pressure commit crimes to get the money to pay for their fix, rather than going without. Just freakin' build the infrastructure to treat addiction, if you don't want people spending taxpayer money that way.