system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I keep hearing suggestions of 'universal income', but have never understood how it would not lead to inflation that would make the universal income essentially worthless. What am I missing?
gpt
Many defenses of the basic income, like for instance Munger's "One and One-Half Cheers for a Basic-Income Guarantee," suggest that the basic income would replace other government spending on poverty. So for instance in that paper Munger notes that the USA federal government spends about half a trillion each year on poverty programs. The suggestion is that instead of spending that money on these programs, it should just be given to poor people. So, you're not increasing the amount of money in the economy, you're just changing who it goes to.