I too think your economic arguments are pretty far off from a likely scenario, so I'll try to say a little bit in counter. In your example, $12bn goes to peopl

I too think your economic arguments are pretty far off from a likely scenario, so I'll try to say a little bit in counter. In your example, $12bn goes to people who are 'poor'. You imagine all of this will be spent on scarce consumer resources and housing, creating increasing cost for those items. You make a number of assumptions that have to be teased out before we can know how likely that scenario is: 1. Poor people will just spend any additional income. 2. Poor people will not have housing mobility and therefore be subject to rising prices for housing. 3. Consumer goods are scarce and supply will not increase based on increased demand. 1. has shown to be (surprisingly?) untrue in basic income trials so far. Read about India's Basic Income experiments at resources like this: http://www.salon.com/2015/01/25/sponsored_by_my_husband_why_its_a_problem_that_writers_never_talk_about_where_their_money_comes_from/ http://www.salon.com/2015/01/25/sponsored_by_my_husband_why_... It turns out poor people use income security to accrue useful economic assets that have sustained financial benefits. Food security also improves. In addition, research into economic security shows that money worries vastly lower IQ (google for Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir to learn more). So the data we have so far is pretty uniformly the opposite of your narrative here. 2. This to me seems pretty obviously false, or at least likely to at most be a small impact net of the money. Poorer families must choose between job proximity, communities, schools, all kinds of things, often with less than one month of safety money. Mobility is extraordinarily low in these circumstances. Guaranteed payments will vastly increase mobility for this community, allowing them to purchase property in economically appealing areas while expanding the number of jobs they take. This will at most redistribute people. Perhaps slumlords will raise rents immediately, but they will find two things: tenants who stay can pay, lowering their own costs, and tenants who don't like prices will move much more quickly. Liquidity in markets is good for efficiency. I don't think you can tell a compelling story about harm to poor renters with UBI here, it's just not sound reasoning. 3. This seems like a very silly assertion to make. Automated factories and low-labor-cost factories around the world would cheerfully sell 5x the consumer goods they manufacture now, and prices will decrease as demand increases. Perhaps the increased demand for factory workers would drive some additional jobs. But, a) I'm not sure what scarce resource you imagine will drive inflationary costs, and b) the India research shows spending goes into a pretty diverse basket of things, education, food security, investment and housing among others.