Money doesn't have inherent exchange value per se. It's primary value is in reducing friction in trade. Injecting more money into a system without tying it to injecting more goods and services into the system is a known means to fuel inflation.
> Injecting more money into a system without tying it to injecting more goods and services into the system is a known means to fuel inflation.
Right now people are paying for things on credit. If you give them the money instead of requiring them to borrow it, the only difference is that they don't have to pay interest.
But it could cause inflation in specific assets if the stuff the net recipients buy is different than the stuff the net payers would have bought -- which would be amazing. We're currently having a huge problem with central banks not being able to hit their inflation targets even at historically low interest rates. If we had something that could bring inflation up to traditional levels it would be a boon, since it would allow nominal wages to rise which is badly needed since everyone is currently saddled with unprecedented levels of mortgage, student loan and credit card debt and anything that could devalue the debt would be a major benefit.
You are probably talking about the government borrowing it instead of individuals. This tends to not end well.
The money has to come from somewhere. If it isn't tied to creating new goods and services, then either you are basically printing more or taxing someone for it. Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well. Schemes to "soak the rich" tend to get push back from the rich, who generally are in a better than average position to resist being victimized by the system.
It tends to end with inflation eroding the debt. Which is exactly what we want in this case, ideally over time rather than all at once, but still.
> The money has to come from somewhere.
Why can't it come from nowhere? That's where the debt it's replacing came from. Banks don't actually have the money they loan you. They're only required to keep a small fraction of it in reserve. The rest of the money is created from nothing.
We're fundamentally in a position that we have to print a lot of money and cause a nontrivial amount of inflation because we already did that throughout the housing crisis and the response to it, allowing the prices of housing, education, healthcare and stocks to enter serious bubble territory. As a result of that either the nominal prices of those things have to come down or nominal wages and the nominal prices of everything else have to go up to reach parity with them.
But lowering the nominal prices of those things can't save the people who already paid for them on credit and now hold significant debt as a result, which is nearly everybody. Moreover, reducing nominal major asset prices tends to cause much more economic damage than raising the nominal prices of some other assets, because it causes people to default on underwater mortgages, hoard cash rather than investing it because the currency then appreciates in value, etc.
So inflation is good right now and printing the money would be a completely reasonable thing to do in the short term.
What happens after that is you pay for it from taxes, the same as the subsidy for [more specific program] would otherwise. But that should be a lot easier afterwards because real wages (and therefore real tax revenues) should be significantly higher than they currently are relative to the cost of necessities like housing, education and healthcare. In other words, the real amount of UBI you would need would decline with the real cost of those necessities.
> Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well.
Then why do we keep passing/expanding rather than repealing various redistributive welfare and assistance programs?
Transfer payments are used as an economic stabilizer along with taxation. They also pool risk. You'll need to back up your assertion since most economists see some benefit to transfer payments, and most developed economies use them.
Such dismissiveness is unwarranted. There's a lot of intriguing research on the topic that indicates that it may be a cost-effective replacement for the byzantine social support systems of modern governments, with benefits for both recipients and taxpayers. It only seems like a broken model if you /start/ with an overly simplistic model of the current situation, e.g one that ignores both the existence and desirability of social support systems.
Unfortunately much of the research is frustratingly incomplete. Search e.g. for information on Mincome.
It also seems like a reasonable transition mechanism, from the market economies that have brought us increasing productivity, to a hoped-for post-scarcity future.
My favorite scheme, f.ex, would rely entirely on a geoistic LVT-style dividend. The idea there is basically to capture externalities as rent, so no debt, taxes or money printing involved.