[RockIslandLine]

"The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?"

Congressional appropriations create money. That's how fiat currency works. We're not on the Gold Standard, we don't need to trace who holds how many Pretty Yellow Rocks.

The real question is "What is the inflationary impact of that spending?", and thus what level taxes have to be raised to destroy enough money to negate the inflation.

[somebodythere]

One interesting insight of MMT is that taxing $1,000 from the rich and giving $1,000 to the poor, is not actually necessarily "free", or net-non-inflationary. Because the poor on average spend more of the money that they have (on basic necessities like food and consumer goods), causing prices of those goods to rise which reflects in headline inflation. Whereas money in the hands of the rich tends to result in inflation of financial asset prices.

If a redistribution of this sort did cause a too-high level of consumer inflation, some additional counter-cyclical policy would be needed to counteract it. (The point I'm trying to make is that making sure that federal spending debits and credits cancel out to zero is neither necessary nor sufficient for good economic policy.)