The US government is inviting inflation

And you don’t think people getting UBI with a bunch of free time aren’t going to occupy that time by taking unofficial jobs and getting paid under the table to earn more income? Get real.

I haven't crunched the numbers but so much of people's income goes to housing and housing prices vary so much that I think that would likely result in the outliers trashing any utility the index has.

I don’t think OP argued to bail out the rich. They only argued that UBI doesn’t make sense.

Maybe UBI makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t. I’m on the fence, personally. But bailing out the way we did in 2008-2009, where CEOs and other saboteurs got massive bonuses instead of jail time, was highly immoral. Some of believe that that caused latent inflation.

Bailing out the rich has nothing to do with UBI.

I’ll welcome an UBI scheme that doesn’t wreck personal agency and responsibility. But the onus is on the proponents to prove that it isn’t a terminal civilization’s 21st century version of the Roman “bread and circus”

Btw, a great implicit UBI is to

- reduce the work week to 30 hours. Shares existing jobs with more people

- change the “part time” rules to discourage hiring “part time” employees to avoid benefits

- increase minimum pay. Yes, that too. But it has to be local government in a manner that makes sense to their local economy. Alternatively the federal imposed min. wage should depend on geography

- Bring back weekends to low wage earners (my wife’s entire family works at Walmart or similar places. I see how weekend instability wrecks their ability to enjoy being together). Either close on weekend, or have workers choose a week day they always get off. Mandate 50% overtime for work on weekends.

- Put a 15% tariffs on all goods (no exceptions!). This acts like a sales tax (counter cyclical to the economy. Big plus one) that isn’t as regressive as a sales tax since it encourages local jobs for cheap things and for fancy things the rich pay).

I find Steven Van Metre point of view interesting, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdXR4BZ6Fw.

I'm a software engineer, so not an expert in macroeconomics obviously, but here are some highlights that I think we are missing to consider when we think inflation is coming:

- The USD is the reserve currency of the world, printing money does not only affect the USA but the entire world to some degree.

- Money printing is not just happening in the USD, but rather, the pandemic was a world event and many nations are "printing money".

- The USA Federal Reserve is not, strictly speaking, printing money. It is way more complex than just money printing. From what I understand, is more efficient to "print money" by increasing the money multiplier, meaning, the Fed ask banks to lend more since lending money multiplies the money faster than printing. Therefore, with QE (Quantitative Easing), the Fed buys debt from banks giving them liquidity for them to lend more money into the system. However, given that we are in an economic recession (temporary perhaps but recession nonetheless), banks are not really lending at the rates the Fed wants. In order to fix this, the usual approach is to lower even further the rates, but we are already at near zero so there is not much to do there either; which is what I understand is referred to as a Liquidity Trap.

- A weak dollar (and strong Yuan, etc) is bad for the exports of other countries, so they will be incentivized to devalue their currencies.

Anyways, this is not to say that inflation won't happen, but rather than a simplistic point of view "printer goes brrrr, inflation will happen" is probably not correct.

I personally find it hard to believe that hyper-inflation will happen, but I also recognize that I'm not certain of this.

The hardest part navigating this is you simultaneously hear that equities are absurdly overvalued and will soon crash, and that the dollar is about to hyper-inflate. These two tales seem at odds with each other unless there's something I'm missing.