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Depends where it comes from. If it's just printed by the government, yes. If it's taxed and redistributed then in theory no, but accounting for all the incentives that taxes create on both sides of the transaction is tricky and the result in most cases is "unintended consequences."


The idea that a tax will prevent inflation is an intuition that a lot of people have, but it's not correct. If your basic income is going to cause inflation, then a tax is not going to help. What matters is the level of consumer spending and the level of production that the consumer spending is chasing.

If you're curious, I've written a few blog posts about this:

http://www.greshm.org/blog/tax-revenue-is-meaningless/

http://www.greshm.org/blog/the-wrong-thing-to-tax-is-money/

http://www.greshm.org/blog/theres-only-one-way-to-pay-for-a-...




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