It's no such thing; not remotely. BI isn't new money, it's simply a redistribution of money from those with more to those with less. It won't increase the money supply and thus doesn't cause inflation.
BI seems desirable because it addresses a glaring symptom of the inflationary treadmill. But if the treadmill remains the explicit national policy ("full employment"), BI will really just give us even more rope to hang ourselves. The sustainable answer is higher interest rates, so that frugal people can be rewarded for channeling discretionary spending towards paying off principle. But this would diminish our "service economy", which is all we have left after gutting domestic manufacturing.
I think what we're really witnessing is an erosion of money as a decentralized store of value, part of the general centralization of power enabled by digital communication networks.
False presumption, BI will not enable everyone to spend twice as much on rent.
> BI will cause price inflation.
Unfounded.
> The sustainable answer is higher interest rates, so that frugal people can be rewarded for channeling discretionary spending towards paying off principle.
That doesn't remotely address the issue that BI attempts to solve, lack of available jobs for people due to the effects of automation.
> False presumption
It wasn't a presumption about BI, but a hypothetical framing of an example situation. Please give opposing viewpoints their due interpretation rather than looking for phrases to pick on out of context.
> Unfounded
Once again, this is what we're arguing about. You can't simply quote my conclusion without my supporting arguments and say it's unfounded.
> That doesn't remotely address the issue that BI attempts to solve, lack of available jobs for people due to the effects of automation.
I didn't expand on it, but my view actually does address this. If working people had been able to save money, then they would have had more economic bargaining power to demand higher wages and fewer working hours, gradually over the past few decades. As it stands, we could fix much of the employment issue by redefining "full time" to be 15 hours per week, getting rid of the exempt loophole, and changing overtime to double or triple pay. But this is such a drastic change (because the issue has been building so long), it seems quite ridiculous. But it's important to understand how we got to this point in order to know how to proceed, lest we choose another "quick fix" that actually just makes the situation even worse.
In a low interest rate environment this is not really true. Speculative booms can and do occur (see Australia). During such booms the ratio of house prices to rents diverges significantly. It is rents that are constrained by wages - not house prices (people don't take out loans to pay rent like they do to buy houses).
Now we go to BI. Now millions of what used to be my money are going to low-income people. They're spending it on food and rent. No, it's not new money, but it's new to the rent market in whatever city. Will that tend to drive rents up? I think so, yes.
Most nations have government housing which serves not just to house the poorest but to put a cap on how much people in the next rung up of society are willing to pay for housing.
