I don't see how it can. Let's say we give out $1 trillion worth of basic income to everyone. Is there $1 trillion more goods and services available to spend that on? No. In fact, depending on how many spend their time on non-productive work, there might be a lot less. So a lot more money chasing fewer goods and services. Classical price inflation will quickly make that basic income have no purchasing power.
This is a weak argument. First of all, it seems as a strawman argument, since you assume a trillion dollars get somehow injected while the amount of goods and services stay the same. Secondly, you assume people will suddenly stop being productive, which probably might be true in cases where people earn so little that it is much less than the basic income (which is one of the problems basic income tries to solve).
I picked $1 trillion because I've read that as an estimate (actually read $3 trillion, so was trying to be conservative).
Where the money comes from is important though which you point out probably wouldn't just be printed (injected from nowhere), but pulled from somewhere else. So where DOES it come from? I'm assuming one way or another it comes from the rich or from companies -- where else would we come up with that kind of money? But that doesn't change the idea that 330 million (I'm using USA numbers) people suddenly have significant more money than they had before. What will they spend it on? Everyone can't upgrade their housing -- the housing available is finite, and supply pretty much meets demand. Giving everyone money increases demand, but how will supply change to meet that? Go through the same thought process on cars, food, electronics, toys, clothing, transportation, energy, raw materials, etc. Increased demand on everything will increase prices pretty much across the board. It's Econ 101.
The number is fine; I take it's reasonable since we are talking about ensuring BI for a lot of people.
Yes, it makes sense that the money comes from the richest, where we assume the government is actually capable to achieve it in some way.
So you are essentially saying that the money that was hoarded by rich, now would not be spent at all, and in addition, this would raise prices across the market. This does not make any sense to me, since the assumptions that need to hold for that kind of result seem invalid: firstly, you need scarsity of goods in the existing situation for this to happen which is clearly not the case (especially when we talk about demands of the lower and middle class); secondly, demands would go higher yes, but only proportionally to existing division of classes of consumers -- thus, we would essentially have a situation in which all classes get promoted in their "buying power" except the very rich (and therefore, no big disruption to the market overall).
