Top earnings come from the support of 1000s of participants with lesser earnings. This is an unhealthy economic trend. It's more than a stagnation risk.
Issues like these are created in a short term but take comparatively longer to correct.
The world is a very different place than it was in the early 20th century, but at the same time, "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
I say this not to be a "doomer". I say this because those forces I mentioned above were very real and we have to keep our eyes wide open.
Pay peanuts, expect a circus.
At this point, we'll either have universal UBI -=or=- ongoing war.
Unfortunately, the latter is more profitable, so... the future is by design, probably.
And that's the only solution to UBI, when resources are abundant enough that UBI isn't needed or with UBI we increase resource enough that there isn't inflation risks.
All UBI experiments till now have proven it's not bad for the people, if we just manage the economy part it will all work out somehow.
(And I say controlled wages because the natural solution people bring up to paying for UBI is to carpet-tax the assets of the wealthy).
Or, 90% of us (that aren't zoo-worthy) will need to be exterminated. 2/3rds+ of us American't were "paycheck to paycheck" – a statistic which pre-dates Covid!
Eternal War is Peace™
Alice has nothing, Elon has $1T and we give them each a UBI of, lets say, $50k.
Your "instant inflation" means now their effective buying power is diluted by some fixed factor X. You claim this somehow leaves both Alice and Elon in "the same place they started from"
100000005 X == 100000000 but 5 X = 0, if you've done high school math you can probably see that there is no value of X for which this works.
>>It's just welfare by another name.
Don't really care what you call it, what is your solution ("UBI" or "welfare" – who cares?)?
Because killing the majority of us zoo exhibits seems like the easiest solution, IMHO.
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Have great Mondays, frens.
USA has no welfare system to speak of so it would be a massive change there. In places like Canada it's mostly an efficiency and fairness gain.
Well, no, even if it causes inflation, everyone won't be in the same place they started from, because (even if you assume no additional progressive tax or other revenue stream is established alongside it) a flat per-capita additional personal income stream doesn't result in the same distribution of income as existed without it. It would narrow the (relative) range of income distribution, making the poor better off and the rich worse off (assuming no overall change in purchasing power.)