[wtdo]

And bumped wages means higher costs which are passed on to customers. The higher prices means having to raise UBI, and the only way to afford that is by increasing taxes, and so effective take home pay from those bumped wages isn't as high as everyone thought and now we're back to square one.

[munk-a]

The first half of your statement is perfectly true, through implementing UBI we're raising the floor on income inequality so that the relative gap between the richest and poorest shrinks. But, we don't end up back at square one, we just haven't given as effective a UBI as we originally intended.

[mikepurvis]

Maybe. These kinds of system-level effects are extremely hard to forecast with any kind of certainty. At best, the evidence we have is from studying the effects of things like raising minimum wage or giving away money to more niche groups such as families with children (eg Canada's CCTB), or people living in specific areas (Alaska Permanent Fund).

As far as I can tell, none of these lesser programmes has had any effect above and beyond inflation on cost of living. Wasn't the sky supposed to fall when Washington State passed that ballot measure for a graduated minimum wage increase back in 2016?

Meanwhile, there are plenty of examples of awfully expensive large scale "back to square one" experiments that have been undertaken by other political ideologies with little to no opposition—where is the economic growth that was supposed to have happened as a consequence of the Ryan/Trump tax cuts in 2017?