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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why UBI proponents aren't connecting the dots between "inflation has made everything more expensive so we need UBI so people can get by" and "printing money directly causes inflation".

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Assuming the unlikely scenario that no new revenue was collected, printing $x to give to every U.S. citizen would not cause every U.S. citizen to also lose x real dollars to inflation. The average citizen still ends up ahead.

Stable, positive, and modest inflation is actually a good thing! It's a major feature of being able to control the money supply: it is instrumental in preventing deflationary spirals, it circumvents the sticky wage problem, and it transfers wealth from debt owners to debtors.

This is not to say I am a big proponent of UBI before other better-tested solutions for the more pressing problems people face, but what you are suggesting is not, by and large, what is happening.

First, UBI doesn't have to be funded by money printing. Start there.

Your first comment directly stated that that would be a more optimal method of funding it than, say, raising taxes.

Raising taxes would not devalue the currency. I was trying to ask the question of whether unfunded UBI could solve the issue raised in the article, which stated that the Fed could loosen monetary policy to do so.

edit: Sorry. I thought I was in a different subthread.

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