UBI is implemented tomorrow. Every citizen gets $1000 per month.
Landlord now knows you have an extra $1000 that you never had before. Why wouldn’t the landlord raise prices?
Now you have an extra $1000 a month and instead of eating rice and beans for a few meals you go out to a restaurant. The restaurant owners know everyone is eating out more so why not raise prices and maximize shareholder profit as always. The restaurant/corporation is on TV saying, “well, demand increased and it is a simple Economic principle that prices had to increase. There’s nothing we can do about it”.
Your state/country has toll roads. The state needs money for its deficit. UBI is implemented and the state/country sees it as the perfect time to incrementally raise toll prices.
Next thing you know UBI is effectively gone because everything costs more and billionaires keep hitting higher and higher all time net worth records.
That doesn’t seem to happen when you raise minimum wage, so probably not. Also, it hasn’t happened in the places that have tried UBI.
Raising the floor doesn’t mean raising all wages.if when raising minimum wage every other wage were increased by the same amount you’d see a very different pattern.
Also, nowhere tried UBI uniformly to every member of the country. The problem with UBI is that testing it with a subset of the population doesn’t have any predictive power because these people individually exist in a society that doesn’t have UBI.
Think about it this way: the lowest amount of money a person needs to survive is your break even point. Ideally, your minimum wage should be a little higher than that so people can save some money for emergencies etc.
For the sake of ease of use let’s make that our unit of value, call it 1L for Life.
So, every person working (ideally) receives at least 1L, if you’re not working you either have savings worth 1L for the span of time you won’t work, or you’ll have to incur debt or other hardships.
Now, if you took absolutely everyone, working or not, and gave them, say, 0.5L for free, this won’t raise the floor, it’ll mean everyone will.amke at least 1.5L if working, 0.5L if not.
This leads to either lowering of wages back to a level where the total is closer to 1L, or the increase of the minimum cost of living to 1.5L, or more likely a mix of the two.
The reason why money is valuable isn’t random, it’s because money is finite and scarce.
The amount everyone has is the null amount whether that is 0 or 100L, because it’s the differential between your income and that null amount that gives it purchasing power.
Look at the effects of the covid stimulus and bailouts on purchasing power, and you’ll see a much closer result to an actual UBI than looking at the european UBI trials which ended up being much closer to randomly giving welfare to people than actual UBI.