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0 pointsjdejean12d ago0 comments

I find it hard to believe shifting spending from welfare to cash won’t result in inflation. It’s about accessibility and how liquid the assistance is. It’s also about how evenly that’s distributed.

To the parent comment’s point, if UBI is evenly distributed across everyone (“Universal”) and exists as liquid spending power (“Income”), there’s no way that doesn’t result in a rate of inflation that perfectly counteracts the existence of UBI.

Prices are only low when the seller wants to scale/reach more buyers. If low/no income buyers disappear, why would prices stay low? If there were an infinite number of high income buyers, cheap products wouldn’t even exist in a freely capitalistic system. Instead we have a limited number of buyers in a wide range of income levels, which drives a wide range of prices and sellers competing at every price point.

It feels like the laws of physics, once you cut off one side of the scale it will fling in the other direction. I also hate everything I just said, I would love to exist in a world that wasn’t subject to these forces. Just seems impossible in a freely capitalistic system.

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scarmig12d ago

The point is that, if limited to a level that just covers essential goods, it won't change their distribution, just their payer. If it did change the distribution of the good, then it wasn't essential (because it's the floor; without it, the consumer of the good would be dead; above it, and the vast majority of people immediately spend their income on luxury substitutes).

That is, to be clear, a much lower floor than what many people mean by "essential," which has undergone a kind of concept creep in modern discussion that, depending on the person, might be a cell phone, to an education at a private university, to owning a condo in San Francisco. My essential here means enough to afford enough caloric and nutrient intake to maintain a livable body mass; a couple sets of plain tee shirts and jeans; and a minimal shared living space in a low cost of living area. That's quite below what the US considers the current poverty line and a quite bleak existence (and most people would wonder what's even the point of it).

Income beyond that would drive inflation, at least in the short term.

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0 pointsjdejean12d ago0 comments

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scarmig12d ago

Income beyond that would drive inflation, at least in the short term.

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