> You can't pump enough money into UBI to overwhelm the system.
You aren't trying to, UBI isn’t an exogenous money flow into the bottom, it's a siphon that reverses the direction of the one you describe from poor to rich—you fund UBI with taxes on the wealthy (e.g., increased high-end income taxes, taxing capital as income) and tie the UBI level to the revenue from those taxes (with a bit of reserve so that you smooth out short-term revenue/population drops)
> So if you create an artificial excess by cutting $1000 checks to people, the siphon can just be dialed up from 2 to 3
Which just pumps more money into UBI, if it's funded as I suggest.
And then the siphons ramp up from 3 to 4. Which pumps more money into UBI. So the rentiers raise the rent again. Which pumps more money into UBI. Now the rentiers are in a game of Chicken with the Fed, with respect to hyperinflation. Their owned property has about the same value no matter what dollars are worth, so it is a game of Chicken with one person in a bespoke killdozer with front-impact armor, and the other player in an AMC Pacer with a floppy purple protuberance duct-taped to the hood--the owner-rentiers will win every time.
You can't beat the rentiers by taking their cash. You have to undermine the value of their ownership, by taking away the pricing power of their monopolies and oligopolies.
> Now the rentiers are in a game of Chicken with the Fed, with respect to hyperinflation.
No, they aren't. Because the money supply isn't increasing because of UBI (which is redistribution, not extra supply), and “the rentiers” aren't the whole basket of goods that determined inflation. If they are sucking up more money, there is less money chasing every good that's sold in a competitive market, and those prices are falling.
Also, at some point.the rentiers run into limits set by existing policies, or policies that their outrageous behavior provokes. E.g., the most major component of the rent-seeking siphon is the thing that inspired the broad economic term “rent”, that is, real-estate (specifically housing) rental, which already is often subject to limits on increases in many major urban markets (and, potentially as of next year, under a bill with the backing of leadership of both state houses and the governor, statewide in California.)
Your thesis that it is necessary to attack the siphon by means outside of UBI is not entirely incorrect, but your suggestion that there is no political will to do that in the USA now (and further that there would be no greater will were rentiers try to counteract redistribution in the manner you suggest) does not seem consistent with the experience, which shows some mechanisms of the siphon you identify already subject to policy restrictions, and those restrictions likely to be escalated where the impacts of those siphons are most pronounced.
You aren't trying to, UBI isn’t an exogenous money flow into the bottom, it's a siphon that reverses the direction of the one you describe from poor to rich—you fund UBI with taxes on the wealthy (e.g., increased high-end income taxes, taxing capital as income) and tie the UBI level to the revenue from those taxes (with a bit of reserve so that you smooth out short-term revenue/population drops)
> So if you create an artificial excess by cutting $1000 checks to people, the siphon can just be dialed up from 2 to 3
Which just pumps more money into UBI, if it's funded as I suggest.