The difference will be there are more consumers in a safe position to make purchasing decisions.
How do you deal with monopoly businesses? What prevents them from rising prices to pocket sudden excess of UBI money?
I guess that those monopolies would be split to ensure that the market is competitive.
Second, you still have to deal with aggregate monopolies - ie when one societal class has monopoly pricing power over another. You cannot break up these as they are already broken up.
The prime example is real estate and land market. Landlords have monopolistic pricing power over tenants. Price for rent is not governed by landlord's costs but by what the tenant can bear.
If you inject UBI to the economy then tenants can suddenly bear more and landlords can and will rise rent prices convincing others that their cost increased so it's justified.
It's not the inflation of produced goods which would kill VAT or similarly funded UBI but rent and monopoly good inflation which by definition can't be competed away.
Therefore before you can implement UBI you have to deal with monopolies first.
Hint1: Fix it by implementing monopoly based taxes such as Land Value Tax and natural resource auctions. You will raise more than you need and will also abolish labor taxes stiffling productivity.
Hint2: Georgists (economical movement after guy named Henry George in 19th century - who coined the term "Progressive") were discussing UBI ideas already pretty extensively and understood these implications. They realized the monopoly problem and made it central to their teaching. Only instead of UBI they called it a Citizen's Dividend.
Could you expand on this a bit more? Network and utility companies can clearly be broken up. The actual infra can be owned by municipalities.
> Price for rent is not governed by landlord's costs but by what the tenant can bear.
Citation needed. There is competition amongst landlords as long as housing supply is not severely limited. If supply is limited, that is a failing of zoning policy. The flat I just started renting a few months ago was priced on supply-and-demand, not on how much I earn (otherwise the landlord did a pretty terrible job of gouging me because relative to my income I got a good deal). You can look to Japan as a country where zoning policy isn't totally nuts like it is in parts of the US.
We are dealing with monopolies, the current administration notwithstanding. Andrew Yang in particular has a number of thoughts on these issue:
https://www.yang2020.com/blog/regulating-technology-firms-in... https://www.yang2020.com/policies/net-neutrality/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/zoning/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/financial-transaction-tax/
> The flat I just started renting a few months ago was priced on supply-and-demand, not on how much I earn (otherwise the landlord did a pretty terrible job of gouging me because relative to my income I got a good deal).
A single example doesn't prove or disprove anything. You haven't mentioned cases for example of many others who are living on level of bare sustainability in the same city. You cannot apply micro analysis to understand this problem by citing individual cases. You need macro analysis for this.
Zoning is not enough of a solution because it doesn't deal with the underlying problem - city land supply.
Maybe tech workers will no longer need to live in the cities after covid crisis. That still doesn't make it a casr for the rest of the society and cannot serve as a basis for ignoring the issue.
Cherry-picking only some monopolies which are currently under scrutiny doesn't fix the problem either. Land monopoly is the biggest one out there and is not mentioned. Fixing the others without considering this one is merely applying a bandaid on a blister while the patient's artery is bleeding.
The land supply is finite. Housing supply is not.
> At a certain point equilibrium will be met and someone will come along with cheaper toilet paper.
Yes, from overseas, where they have no UBI. That's one of most insidious parts of all of this.
UBI is central planning of the economy, where the government decides the market value of you simply existing is worth $1000 a month or whatever. Whenever the government thinks they are smart enough to set prices for things, historically people end up dying of hunger. The value of the dollar will collapse unless other countries also adopt UBI, but of course that wouldn't be possible since UBI in America would hinge on cheap overseas labor. Only WE are allowed to be lazy bums! At some point the dollar would disconnect from intrinsic value and no longer represent money, because people are being given it simply for existing. One day we we would show up to the Chinese or Mexican port asking for a ship full of All The Things We Need To Survive and they throw us away because they don't want our monopoly money. That's when the music stops and the real panic begins.