UBI will always be the best answer. MLK advocated for it as the best way to alleviate poverty. Even Milton Friedman believed in a pseudo-UBI through his Negative Income Tax.
Cost of living expenses after UBI = x + UBI.
The price of goods will always rise to what the market will bear.
If you inject money into a market with schemes like UBI, all you do is creating a forcing function for inflation.
Fundamentally, money represents a debt that society owes based on creation/consumption of goods and services.
If you create money (debt symbols) without the corresponding good or service, you devalue the debt. So, an apple that was worth $1 now becomes worth $2 because your symbols that represent debt have been artificially modified.
Then, first order thinking drives yet another "UBI+" solution to give more money, and the cycle continues until an apple is "one billion dollars". World history has many examples of this, but you don't really need to look harder than covid related inflation.
The best solution to human poverty and suffering that we've ever created is economic opportunity. When given the chance, humans will thrive and succeed.
The best way to create economic opportunity is to reduce barriers to success (like onerous income taxation, and excessive regulation) and to invest in infrastructure that enhances and supports economic activity.
Command economies have never worked in history, though lots of folks have tried [1].
It's good to learn from past mistakes.
It's also sort of a fun thought experiment. When you grant this power to the government, the sorts of things they can do. There's lot of obvious things like "make eggs cheaper!!", but the more fun thought experiment is with something esoteric like the sex industry.
Let's conceive of the correct pricing for a lap dance.
That's a bit complex, it's certainly not fair to charge the same amount for everyone - an attractive, skilled dancer would be forced to charge the same as someone who is unattractive and disinterested. We're going to need a rate table.
Hygiene, attractiveness, skill, friendliness. What else? Age? The body politic has decided that you're not allowed to factor age into a lap dance or to discriminate on what dancer you chose based on age. So we can exclude that from our rate table.
Going to need to create a bureaucracy to develop fair standards for all of those things.
Also, as a footnote, let's create another agency to advertise exotic dancing to the elderly as an excellent career opportunity.
Of course, we'd need to add more regulation that would require the dancers to register their weight and attractiveness with a government agency, and we'd need inspectors to verify that. We'd also probably need to watchers to watch the watchers because the inspectors may be tempted by some "extra services" to inflate their scoring, allowing a dancer to charge more. Probably also going to need to add some undercover officers to make sure that unenlightened customers aren't expressing an opinion on what age of dancer they receive.
Of course, all lap dances aren't created equal - so rates may vary based on how many people are involved, whether the patron is allowed to touch the dancer, and if so the minimum necessary security involved. We'll probably need some secret shoppers to go out and verify that the rates are being charged properly and in-line with dictates.
This would all be pretty costly though, so we'll have to increase taxes on the dancers to pay for it all. But we can't allow them to raise their rates, that would defeat the purpose.
Now we'll need a way to confront the unpatriotic, unwilling masses who have for completely selfish reasons decided that a non-lucrative career in exotic dancing doesn't seem very fun.
Regulation is the answer! Like the Soviet Union, let's decide what profession folks would go into at a young age. Perfect!
Hmm, quality is suffering. Strangely, forcing folks into a profession to meet the needs of our dictated economic constraints resulted in a sub-par experience. There aren't any customers anymore. Fine, mark the whole thing as a loss and outlaw it, certainly can't have an underground economy operating on market forces undermining what our enlightened leaders have decided for us.
(Psst. there's a reason why command economies fail, and freedom matters. Even China understands this.)
[1] https://helpfulprofessor.com/command-economy-examples/
(edited to try to make it more funny)
The economically desirable things that UBI or any other handout are spent on, should fall into two categories. Things the government pays for itself because it's going to be the only buyer or a major buyer. Things the government has limited debit card systems for (E.G. food stamps) because there's already a market and they won't be a major buyer.
Reducing taxes will not meaningfully increase economic opportunity for people in poverty, because they are not the causes of most people's poverty. Reducing regulation may help, but only because "regulation" is broad and includes things like onerous means-testing that makes it harder for people in need to get resources. Jobs help, and AFAIK there's not much regulation making it harder to get a job.
Those are the same thing.
Increasing taxes = raised prices.
Raised prices = inflationary pressure.
Inflationary pressure = higher UBI.
Rinse, repeat.
Bloat an already obese government by cranking taxes up to 100%, society collapses.
Put the government on the fasting cure, starve the beast, and most folks end up with more in their pocket and happier.
How about I add $100 tax to each apple sale? What happens to apple prices? I'd be forced to finally develop a taste for cherry pie.
How much and who to tax have been arm wrestled over since humans figured out that houses are nicer than caves.
Cities need both taxes and sewers to survive, but too much of either will stink enough to drive off anyone who can.
Take a peek at That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen [1]. Bastiat had his head screwed on straight for a Frenchman, and had it figured out in 1850.
Other notable things: America's historic tax rates (pre-Reagan), social democratic leaning countries. Higher happiness, somehow. Top marginal rate doesn't affect the vast majority of people, should go without saying.
But you changed the subject. We were discussing what relative tax changes may or may not do to inflation, not your libertarian dreams.
2. UBI can (and should imo) be funded through redistribution (taxation)
You seem to believe in markets. UBI allows us to have most of the benefits of a dynamic market system whilst avoiding the worst aspects - crushing poverty for those whose market value of labour is extremely low.
That isn't how negative income taxes work at all. Come on educate yourself on the topic before writing a comment like that. In a negative income tax system a break even point is set where you pay exactly as much as you are getting. For the average person this means nothing changes for them. It is only at the high end where people pay significantly more in than they get and at the bottom end where people get out more than they pay in.
The funding problem for UBI has been solved a long time ago. There is no inflation problem. Yes, the UBI will be small but who exactly expects a large UBI? It's not like you get generous welfare payments today.
Surely you're not just waving out the supply chain issues and reduced productive capacity of the whole world due to lockdowns.
Was inflation in the USA higher than inflation in countries that didn't do direct deposits to people? As far as I know, it wasn't. That seems like a more fair starting point on studying effects of direct deposits.
Clearly giving people two $500 checks over the span of two years is the problem
This is the central logical fallacy in your argument: you're equating UBI with inflation. UBI is different because it's funded through taxation, which holds the money supply constant.
The best solution to human poverty and suffering that we've ever created is economic opportunity. When given the chance, humans will thrive and succeed.
This is the central emotional fallacy in your argument: that a person's fate is decided by their actions. You're applying your own belief system, rather than using systems-level thinking to do the work of root cause analysis, meta analysis, epidemiological analysis around the psychological effects of wealth inequality, etc. That's why you feel very strongly about your solution, without having evidence to support it, and why people like me who have a different life experience don't subscribe to it.
If we study history, we see that technology was available after the Green Revolution, post WWII, to feed everyone in the world by the late 1960s. We see that so many measures of poverty like infant mortality are unnecessary symptoms, because modern medicine made birth control pills available and pregnancy safe, again by the late 60s. Same with basic measures of equality like the percentage of the workforce who are women, which was rising substantially by the 60s, but close to parity in the western world by the 1980s.
What's really going on is that a luddite backlash occurs every time that humankind overcomes adversity. For example, Nixon started the War on Drugs as a pretense to put US leftists in prison, by making the plant medicines they use to expand consciousness illegal. The Vietnam War, Oil Embargo, trickle-down economics, loss of unions, Savings and Loan Scandal, first Gulf War, Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, Dot Com Bubble popping, 9/11, Second Gulf War, Who Killed the Electric Car, outsourcing, Housing Bubble popping, 2016 election, 30% tariff on imported solar panels, and even the COVID-19 pandemic (I could go on forever) are a direct result of that fear-mongering and othering dividing us along ideological lines. Which all stemmed from Nixon's and Goldwater's Southern Strategy to enforce segregation.
Reports like this begin to make sense when one understands the sabotage and corruption that create wealth inequality:
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
And we see that if we cut taxes on the wealthy further, then wealth inequality increases. One person's definition of opportunity becomes another's definition of subjugation. If we continue on the path we're on, then the National Debt will succeed in finally taking away all self-determination and agency from US workers, forcing them to stay underemployed to survive. Taking away the very opportunity and choice which you so advocate.
With the arrival of AI and sustainable solutions to preserve the environment, we're again at one of these crossroads. We can embrace solutions like UBI and free humanity from forced labor, or we can double down on the failed solutions of the past century and move further into dystopia.
I hope that some of these breadcrumbs help you on your journey of discovery. If your first instinct is to outright reject what I'm suggesting, then I hope you take some time to think upon the events in your life which obfuscated the things I've said. I'll do the same, because your truth is valid to me and if we would listen more, I think that we could solve these longstanding problems and transition to a 21st century economy which works for everyone.
"First order thinking" is not a euphemism for "I'm right because I said so".
Society needs that sometimes. It can be paralyzed by Nth order thinking to the point where gross injustice is allowed to survive for much too long.
A response like "just add more regulation and price caps" as a solution to dealing with runaway inflation is definitely first order thinking, as is (in my opinion) "the solution to poverty is to just give people money (UBI)".
MLK having expressed a favorable opinion about it makes UBI less susceptible to "that's evil, naive communism"-style attacks.
Can't think of a single reason.