I think the greatest danger to a UBI program is something like easy student loans made tuition more expensive. It will just make the basics more expensive and you are back to square one.
You would need to break the regulatory capture that artificially make housing & healthcare expensive before you can implement a UBI program successfully.
Yeah, I think inflation's the biggest risk. It hasn't shown up in any studies so far because they've been too small. If 1000 people have an extra $2k/month it doesn't measurably affect prices; if 100,000 people have an extra $2k/month suddenly everything becomes more expensive.
Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply. Build more houses and the price of housing comes down. Train more doctors (or nurse practitioners) and the price of health care comes down. Both of these industries have strong institutionalized cartels, though.
> Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply.
I always thought this was the biggest problem Obamacare (well intentioned though it is) left unaddressed. It looks like the ACA lacks the reforms that would allow supply to grow to meet demand.
Yes the bottleneck in producing more licensed physicians is currently the number of open residency slots in teaching hospitals. We need more funding for those. Every year some students graduate from medical school but are unable to actually practice medicine because they fail to get matched to a residency program.
You would need to break the regulatory capture that artificially make housing & healthcare expensive before you can implement a UBI program successfully.