this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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You and everyone you know has an extra $2k dollars per month from UBI. Your landlord raises rents because he knows everyone has 2k more.
In a perfect world your landlord would not be greedy and take that money. He would have actual competition from other landlords willing to rent. We don't live in a perfect world.
Increasing the money supply causes inflation.
That's just a repackaged argument against minimum wage. It's wrong there, too. Market competition is a thing, even for shitty landlords.
In the present day, the vast majority of the money created (over 90%) is created by banks when they give loans (I kid you not: you can read all about it in the paper "Money Creation In The Modern Economy", from the Bank Of England) so it actually makes sense what seems to have happenned in Alaska (as pointed out by others) that in overall UBI reduced inflation if UBI ended up reducing the number of loans people took.
This effect exceeding the inflation from UBI is probably only possible because it's a fixed amount per-person rather than a percentage of all the money in circulation, so it's a small percentage of all the money in circulation (a $660 UBI for every man woman and child in the US would be 1% of M3) and a tiny percentage of all the money in existence (i.e. including wealth held in various non-monetary forms).
So yeah, UBI would create some inflation, but not as much as you seem to think it would and it has side effects that work in the opposite direction which, judging by the experience in Alaska, are strong enough to offset the direct inflactionary effects of UBI.