I love the more utopian promise of UBI. It's a beautiful dream, as these things often are. The part I can't square in my mind is how it wouldn't cause inflation. If everyone gets free money, what's to stop corporation from just raising the prices of everything that much more, in effect kind of cancelling out everything.
That said, I'd love to see it honestly tried at scale. Wages have been flat here for 30 years, and now with inflation going absolute nuts, people are rapidly falling behind. I'd love to see it tried here.
I like the utopian idea of it too, but like you I feel it would just be eaten up by increased costs. Greedy corproations would just soak it all up like you stated. It is a fact. An example of this is look at military installations. Anytime there is a raise in military pay, all the local businesses in the area around the installtions raise their prices. Its predatory.
I think this is why there should be an increase in corporate taxes that would fund the UBI anyway. Business by definition is set up to be maximising, and without appropriate checks and balances, they will maximise until there is nothing left.
This is the problem, isn't it? But I think it would also balance out in time to some degree. Though, corporations are assholes. The balancer would of course be, corporate taxes that would finance the UBI anyway.