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Comment by annoyingnoob | Hacker News Reader

Where does the UBI money come from? How do we pay for UBI?

In year 1, Bob has extra money. By year 3 Bob's rent goes up. Did Bob's UBI go up proportionally to his rent? After a few years, Bob ends up in the same place - unless we keep injecting more money over time, which creates inflation.

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Actually, inflation is not as simple as you have described it. There is a great NPR's Planet Money episode touching the waters of why the inflation does not behave as we think it is [1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/01/20/958854717/modern-monetary-the...

The newer episode, which I linked to in the grandparent of your comment, is also fascinating.

The money, as always, is made by a combination of the machines which actually do all of the required production, and the treasury, which prints little game tickets you can use to make other people dance for you.

Like most social-engineering plans the solution is more social-engineering - price controls, standardized rent, etc.

You avoided the questions.

well those are simple questions to answer. MORE TAXES!

Turtles all the way down?

In theory, the cool thing about UBI is that you can dismantle all that other stuff and just have the one safety net that covers everybody, replacing the piecemeal safety nets that are supposed to catch people in certain situations.

Yeah, it lessens the risk of falling through those nets and is probably cheaper, per dollar dispensed, to administrate.

The people you're talking to literally believe you can print value.

> The money, [...] the treasury, which prints little game tickets you can use to make other people dance for you.

They think there's a printer somewhere, and some jerk sitting next to it who just won't print enough money. If only he'd print more, we'd all be billionaires!

inb4 gov tract housing without landlords to increase rent? Now that would mess up the real estate market

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