UBI without the U is just welfare, which is fine, but it's kind of odd to say that UBI would be better if we just did "thing that makes it by definition no longer UBI."
I totally agree with you on re: inflation, though. Some organization, presumably government, will need to manage any UBI implementation, and government is nothing if not an inefficient allocator of its resources. I worry any broad national UBI system will just raise inflation to absorb the prices, while increases tax on the entire population, and losing a non-trivial percentage of that increase in the transfer.
In US, these taxes wouldn’t be particularly progressive. US taxes are already very progressive, much more so than in Europe. In US, the wealthy already pay overwhelming majority of the tax. If US was to embark on European level governmental spending, it would have to introduce more European-like taxation system, where bulk of the revenue is collected from middle and working class.
Exactly, I came to say the same thing. You could pay for UBI with some MMT trick, but you‘d just end up inflating/rescaling all the prices. It would only work as a massive wealth redistribution program where the rich and middle class get heavily taxed. The latter is infinitely more difficult to implement than the former, but technically both would be UBI.
I totally agree with you on re: inflation, though. Some organization, presumably government, will need to manage any UBI implementation, and government is nothing if not an inefficient allocator of its resources. I worry any broad national UBI system will just raise inflation to absorb the prices, while increases tax on the entire population, and losing a non-trivial percentage of that increase in the transfer.