Consider that in many western economies, inflation has been perilously low for a decade or more. Japan, Europe, and the US all have extremely low inflation today. This leads to some problems we don't usually hear economists worry about--namely that debt-financed personal investments like a home mortgage or a student loan become much more onerous to people who have taken on that debt in the last 20 years. Since such debts tend to have fixed payments over fixed periods, a reasonable rate of inflation would ensure that the real cost of paying off those debts goes down over time, and even if everything else gets more expensive, you still end up with more discretionary income over time, even if your real wages never go up compared to inflation. But with 1% or lower inflation, those debts become a decades-long constant drag on an individual's discretionary income, which may never grow. For real assets, such as homes, inflation also ensures that homeowners actually accrue equity over time, in addition to shrinking debt payments.
All of that is to say, we could do with a couple of decades of 3-4% inflation. Implementing UBI very likely would trigger some inflation, but if there's one thing central banks know how to do and have the power to do, it's clamping down on inflation. Other economists have proposed less direct methods of giving money, from burying caches of cash (to create employment and stimulate investment), to dropping money from helicopters. Sure, those examples were tongue-in-cheek, but you can kill two birds with one stone by using government money to invest in rebuilding infrastructure, building high speed rail, curing cancer and diabetes, paying for more and better public education from pre-K through college. That money pays off in multiple ways: more people have jobs, you stimulate moderate inflation and wage growth, and in the end you have all new infrastructure, new treatments for disease, and a better educated population. Better still, all that money will get spent by all these people with more money and better jobs on buying better housing, newer cars, better food, more luxuries, and that money can make our corporations more profitable and faster-growing...
Yet I fear we are all headed the other direction on these things.