A UBI doesn’t necessarily result in inflation. The later is a combination of monetary policy and expectations. UBIs can be paid by means other than printing money.
Even if (printing and then) giving everybody $40K/yr caused, say, 40% inflation, anybody making under $100K/year would be better off. You actually wouldn’t need any taxes if the government just printed all money it needed, hopefully most of which is in the form of direct checks to all residents/citizens.
no, it's not a wealth tax. it's a cash tax. if you printed money and caused 100% inflation, that'll just cause every scarce asset (eg. houses, stocks, gold) to double in price. Since the rich hold most of their wealth in assets, not cash, I doubt it will be fair or progressive.
This used to be true before we had computers and free fractional share purchases of course.
Houses aren't really either, it's the land that is. Thanks Henry George.
That doesn't make any sense. Stocks ultimately represent ownership in an enterprise that consists of people, equipment, and intellectual property. Those are scarce. Just because the ownership units is infinitely divisible, doesn't mean they aren't scarce. If people only bought stocks so they could hang a fancy certificate on their wall, you'd be right. But people don't do that, they buy stocks to get dibs on a certain fraction of future production. That's the scarce part.
>Houses aren't really either, it's the land that is. Thanks Henry George.
1. seems like a nitpick? When people talk buying "houses", they generally talk about buying the combo of house + land it sits on.
2. houses are still scarce[1]. we can't will infinite houses into existence. they're more plentiful than original picasso paintings, but that doesn't make them not scarce (at least according to the economic definition).
> If people only bought stocks so they could hang a fancy certificate on their wall, you'd be right.
This is highly underrated as a reason. What's the fundamental improvement in Gamestop and Tesla causing their stock price to go up this year?
See
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-25/elon-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_stock
> 1. seems like a nitpick? When people talk buying "houses", they generally talk about buying the combo of house + land it sits on.
Many people don't seem to understand how to separate them, leading to beliefs like "luxury apartments cost more because they have granite countertops" and "gentrification can be prevented by not building new buildings". You can't build houses forever, but you sure can build many more of them than the US does right now.
If you're doing this in an above-board way, it's still scarce, because the whole reason why companies even issue new shares is to raise capital. When you're doing that, you're trading one scarce resource (capital) for shares, which means that the shares are also scarce. You can make an infinite amount of TVs given infinite raw materials, but TVs are still scarce.
>This is highly underrated as a reason. What's the fundamental improvement in Gamestop and Tesla causing their stock price to go up this year?
Any evidence that people bought exactly one share TSLA/GME just so they could hang on their wall and/or feel smug about it? In both cases it's far more likely they bought into it because of expectation of future profits (from greater fools or actual operating profits).
>Many people don't seem to understand how to separate them, leading to beliefs like "luxury apartments cost more because they have granite countertops" and "gentrification can be prevented by not building new buildings". You can't build houses forever, but you sure can build many more of them than the US does right now.
While there might certainly be people who think the housing crisis is caused by "developers only building luxury condos" or whatever, I doubt this is a popular view on HN. Any time a housing-related thread shows up on HN, that explanation almost never shows up, and the NIMBY/zoning explanation almost always does. I'm sure a decade+ member like yourself can see this. Therefore I don't really see much point in arguing this distinction, because you'd be preaching to the choir.
If the economy is running at capacity and you wanted a UBI taxes would have to increase to prevent inflation. This would end up being wealth redistribution.
All fiscal policy is monetary policy; government spending its own fiat is money creation.
UBI is expansionary monetary policy. (Of course, it can be offset with money destruction, e.g., taxation.)
In this case, what fool would make bread when they can get $1000 by sitting around and smoking weed?