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Comment by cmiller1 | Hacker News Reader

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3920748

> Egger et al. find that there was less than 1% price inflation on average

> Alaska has had a universal basic income via the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, which has provided each resident between $500 and $3,000 per year funded by state oil assets, since 1982. Since implementing that program, Alaska has had lower inflation than the rest of the United States

So let me guess, you just "feel like" it will cause inflation and based your opinion on your feels instead of data?

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So there are several notable differences.

Alaska payments have been about the same for the last 40 years (1-1.5k/yr). This means that payments are going down in real dollars.

For inflation from Alaskan UBI would have to look at the difference before and after it was started in the 1970.

Alaskan UBI is funded by real tax revenue, not printing currency or debt spending.

Alaskan "UBI" is ~$1000/yr, not ~$1000/month, so you would expect the impact to be quite small on overall inflation, even if inflation used up %100 of the UBI

It’s not even really funded by tax revenue per se, it’s the capital gains from investments made with revenues from corporations paying government land leases for natural resource extraction. It’s not tax revenue raised from civilians via something like a state income tax or sales tax–neither even exists in Alaska.

Fair point.

It is revenue but isnt tax revenue.

My point was that it is payed with dollars already in circulation that come out of the pocket for whoever is paying the interest or dividend.

this is starkly different than money which is printed into existence and expands the currency in circulation

Oh I only wanted to add more context to show how it’s not really comparable to Canada’s proposition. I think your point is sound, should’ve explicitly stated that.

A non peer reviewed white paper by an “independent” author written in first person. And horribly written.

Looking more into it the independent author is this person (Joshua Miller)

“Joshua's research focuses on macroeconomic impacts of universal basic income. He also hosts the ThinkCritical Podcast and runs a blog called InTheAggregate. Joshua is a high school senior in New York.”

https://www.ubicenter.org/about/our-team/

Good for him for being a motivated high schooler. However, posting his essay as some kind of authoritative proof with Alaska as a generalizable example is absurd. There’s not enough data for stratification or identifying confounders. Alaska is not a typical American state in any way.

UBI supporters, especially on that website, look like young academics living in wealthy urban areas in England and the US. That’s nice and all but maybe they should get out of their bubble. They’re just a bunch of stereotypes.

Alaska does not have a universal basic income. Alaska has a state, and therefore resident, owned oil resource that pays dividends to it's shareholders, the Alaskan population. There's no money being created, no tax paid to find it, there is only revenue from real production, that money is paid to the state by consumers of it's oil. You may want to conflate the two concepts but they are qualitatively and fundamentally different beasts. Alaska's dividend is more like a corporation paying dividends to shareholders, in fact it's exactly like that.

Do you think Alaska is a representative sample? Or might the conditions there differ from Canada's conditions today?

> between $500 and $3,000 per year

Which is quite a bit below the figure mentioned in the article (16k-24k CAD per annum).

It should be more than obvious to everyone that at the very least it will further inflate housing prices because supply is heavily restricted (something that doesn’t apply to groceries and most other goods).

Rent increases are capped and our housing market is already super inflated. I honestly don't know if the timing is right for ubi but I'm glad we are looking forward to it, as I think it is a logical step in our modern societal evolution

In Canada there are quota limits for a lot of commodities, obviously not most groceries but many of them.

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