>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets,
Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
(I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
If you want UBI without massive inflation then you have to suck back in most of the money you've produced.
Of course, you can then do that pretty sensibly so that you don't have cliff edges like we do at the moment.
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help.
If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land.
Were you under the impression that it would be the opposite?
Oh, people don't want affordable food but a 20-buck burrito and a 100k truck of ridiculous size?
Please tell me what's different than what I am seeing right now without UBI?