So let's think about what it would mean to do that.

In one case you could have some people who are just above the poverty line and if you took a little bit of money from them and gave it to people below the poverty line then the first group could end up below it while the people already below it don't get enough to end up above it. In theory that's "increasing poverty" but only in a strict technical sense which isn't even inconsistent with the result still being a net positive. Also, that wouldn't be possible under plausible rate structures because anybody in the approximate vicinity the poverty line would be receiving more than they pay in taxes and the net payers would be making significantly more than that with no reasonable possibility of falling into poverty as a result.

The other possibility is that the program somehow causes such a dramatic amount of economic damage that more people end up below the poverty line than started there as a result of increased involuntary unemployment etc. But the poverty line in the US is $12,760, whereas the most commonly proposed amount for the UBI is $12,000, so that seems incredibly unlikely -- people would have to be unable to find a job making $760/year, in an environment where employees have greater leverage. And you could preclude the possibility entirely if desired by making the UBI e.g. $13,000, which would just outright directly eliminate poverty.

If different people had money than currently do then they might buy different things with it, and then the demand for the things they want would go up and demand for some other things would go down. That isn't inflation, it's a demand shift. And for most types of products it would only cause increased production of those things rather than significant price changes. Meanwhile for other things (e.g. things which are artificially scarce), the price changes themselves would shift demand elsewhere -- who is going to pay $10,000 rent in San Francisco if it's <$1000 in Pennsylvania and the difference in local wages doesn't close the gap?

Which serves as a reason to regularly increase the amount.

“UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all“

Speak for yourself. Work is a means to an end. I have no desire to work if basic income takes care of my basic necessities. I have no intrinsic desire to get up every day at the same time and do what my employer tells me to do. And to be clear, when I say work I mean the necessity of doing things in exchange for money. Cultivating my garden, writing software nobody uses, or music nobody pays for, isn’t what I mean by work.

It is widely observed that many people work far more than is necessary to supply their basic necessities, because people's desires don't tend to end with those needs.

You may have quite limited desires, but there is no evidence that that is true of humans generally.

Which serves to further increase inflation.

So you increase the amount more, and shortly thereafter inflation increases more again.

And so you increase the amount again, and so on, and so on until suddenly you have hyperinflation and your economy collapses, see for example the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, or any of a dozen other examples throughout history.

Most of the proposals I've heard of UBI / negative income tax are good supplements but don't completely replace work-based income. $1000/month per adult is among the largest benefit I've heard.

That's great, but if a significant number of people feel that way, then there is a noticeable loss of productivity in the economy as say 35% of people are not producing anything of economic value. That impacts tax revenue. It probably also means there is work not getting done, like the stuff nobody wants to do.

I'm pretty sure there have been various studies all but disproving the "common sense" notions people have about UBI and laziness. Or the fundamental idea that if you don't make it hard on poor people they won't do anything of value. Or that poor people are lazy, and that they are poor because they are lazy. Etc, etc, etc.

That work still has to get done though. Somebody has to be the janitor. If you then increase the pay of a janitor then lots of people that would otherwise increase their skills to do with that requires more skills would end up as a janitor instead. This triggers a pay increase in those jobs too.

I don't see how you don't end up with just a lot of inflation. The money a job pays doesn't matter on a societal level. What matters is the products/service doing the job provides. No amount of money shuffling is going to make 2 apples turn into 3.

The highest paid jobs (eg. CEO) inflate very little and the lowest page jobs inflate quite a lot. There is currently an anti-inflation effect in the lowest paid jobs when inflation would help these workers have a better living.

Jobs thought of as "minimum wage jobs" in the USA (eg. hourly workers at McDonalds) pay a decent living in Denmark. They don't have runaway inflation. We should examine why there is a such stark difference in expectation between the USA and these other countries.

That said, I don't think UBI is the only way to solve the issues I care about. I might be satisfied simply by easier and fairer access to existing welfare programs (which are already subsidizing those low-wage employers).

The issue is that you have few of the highest paid jobs and many of the lowest paid jobs. The labor cost of a giant factory isn't so much the director, it's the thousands of workers. If you double their wages, you double the cost. If you double the director's salary, you'll hardly notice in the balance sheet.

"Since 1978, and adjusted for inflation, American workers have seen an 11.2 percent increase in compensation. During that same period, CEO’s have seen a 937 percent increase in earnings. That salary growth is even 70 percent faster than the rise in the stock market, according to the Economic Policy Institute."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/22/heres-how-much-ceo-pay-has-i....