However, a higher velocity of capital without commensurate economic value being created ~= massive inflation.
This is a potential risk for UBI, and one that small-scale studies do not cover. Ideally, the additional economic value would be greater than the face value of the capital transferred every year, but there is no guarantee that is correct (nor is there any reason they should even be on the same order of magnitude).
Implementing UBI on a national scale would be a grand experiment. Most grand experiments tend to fail with massive upheaval. I think for UBI to be adopted, you would need a plausible incremental strategy with a lot of safety checks.
The perspective of MMT is that government can and should tax out money at a rate that keeps the economy from inflating beyond the scope of our control, and inject it at a rate that sustains the velocity of capital. Making this perspective the dominant one in discourse, however, would require a lot more public trust in government before people got comfortable with the idea of governments taxing us for our benefit.
The NPV of that dilution would be enormous, unless the economic value being created is very close to $1000/mo (or higher).
I'm perplexed by how often people assume that spending will only increase with the introduction of UBI, when there are many existing pathways for capital to travel that will become obsolete when UBI is enacted, and can be diverted to funding UBI instead.
This is a good point. Money maps to stuff and services. But there is ample surplus production (and unused capacity) in our economy.
Every year 40bn+ pounds of food is wasted at the retail level (on top of all the waste that happens before retail in production), while ~11% of the American population is food insecure.
Nearly every clothing company — H&M, Nike, Burberry, Eddie Bauer, and so on — destroys billions of dollars of unsold clothing every year in order to preserve their brand.
We have material abundance thanks to highly optimised mechanisation and more recently automation in agriculture and manufacturing. UBI can allow the poorest parts of society access the surplus that we would otherwise destroy.
Having an income (via UBI or some other mechanism) would help the poor, that is true (minus the caveat above about economic upheaval). Assuming that said income will reduce economic waste is not at all evident.
This fetishism with "work" as a proxy for the value of the human life which performs the work is a very American concept with corollaries in only a couple other countries. This is not the norm and certainly not a healthy way to look at labor and the economy.
Money is a recent invention, and economies have flourished without it. Money facilitates trade, increases liquidity, and reduces friction in transactions.
> This fetishism with "work" as a proxy for the value of the human life which performs the work
It is not a proxy for the value of a human life. It is a representation of the value of the labor of that human.
Americans are very generous in voluntarily giving to charities.
We are paid what can demand and not a penny more irrespective of our labor's actual value.
Value is what people are willing to freely pay for it. Any other definition of it is subjective and fairly useless.
By withholding economic power until someone provides "labor" as defined by the state, and leaving them embedded in an economy which requires money to survive, you are directly tying the value of the human life to the value of their labor.
> giving to charities
Interesting, probably has a lot to do with the low taxes and high amount of disposable income.
A young lady I used to know was the kindest person I ever met. She didn't have much, but would donate a few dollars to every charity that called. They had her number, and called her all the time.
She was the real deal, not one of those people who are only generous with someone else's money.
> you are directly tying the value of the human life to the value of their labor.
Oh baloney. Plenty of people will voluntarily give food to a hungry person.
I hope you see where I'm going with this.
Not enough, with the amount of hunger that's present in the richest country in the world.
signed, a surfer
Certainly UBI isn't going to do it, either.
The country of Finland has done the same, with a plan to reach absolute zero (nobody staying temporarily with friends or relatives) by 2022. Right now, over there, with 5.5 million people, 500 people don't have permanent housing of their own.
Does that count?
I.e. it's inadequate.
If you think that 500 people out of 5.5 million -- who aren't sleeping on the street, but have access to shelter and only lack their own permanent housing, with a plan to house them in the next two years -- is "inadequate," that's a you problem, not a "no social problem has adequately been resolved by any organization" problem.
Try surfing, man. It might relax you.
But the money doesn't just vanish when it enters people's bank accounts. All of a sudden, banks have a lot more collateral against which to borrow and invest, by virtue of the fact that the bank accounts which store the UBI have money in them. People spend that money and it enters and moves through the economy. The government taxes it back out via sales taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc.
I think, in general, it's worth having an economy that keeps moving. If you let too few people have too much proportion of available wealth, the consumers won't have any to work with and your economy will be entirely dependent on luxury goods for a tiny proportion of the population.