Disagree, many progressives totally also expected prices to rise.

The alternative of forcing people to go to work while covid-19 sick, or being laid off and facing total abject poverty, and such... well not very attractive.

Prices & wages going up was going to be inevitable with inflation, which was on the plate, even if unemployment was never expanded and we forced the working poor to work, or eat our of dumpsters.

Yep, but at the end of the day anyone who's trying to build wealth or have anything left for retirement gets fucked by inflation. People who are spendthrift and receiving UBI or unemployment payments (long term) were never trying to do that anyways and their payments in theory would increase with inflation.

I'm a supporter of the idea of UBI but I just can't see the incentives panning out realistically.

How are the incentives panning out now? Every system has trade offs and the ones we've made seem to get worse and worse.

Great, actually. I've worked my ass off, paid-off my student loans and live in a great city. By no means making crazy developer money either.

But price inflation is the policy goal regardless of minimum wage or UBI. In fact, government spending makes for better inflation in that it is spread around the economy, rather than lending based inflation that only shows up in CPI after it sends assets through the roof.

Could you go into more detail here? My head is still slow to digest economics concepts like this, but this is something I certainly haven't read about before.

The Federal Reserve's mandate is to make sure there is a steady level of gradual price inflation. The main way they accomplish this is to lower interest rates, so that more money gets lent out into circulation. But this new money only affects the Consumer Price Index via housing assets and other big ticket items that get financed - it doesn't directly bid up the demand for consumer goods.

Whereas if the federal government creates more money (via debt) and gives it out direct aid to the people, it goes right into the consumer market. Prices rise across the board, getting the CPI to the target level without the Federal Reserve having to lower rates.

There will always be inflation as long as the monetary policy is to create inflation. But government spending at least chooses somewhere explicit for it to end up, rather than the default option of just inflating financial assets (which we've had quite enough of).