All basic income does is create a floor. Depending on flavors of basic income, some have suggested lowering or entirely abolishing the minimum wage. This way, labor would be done at the true (or closer to true) market value. If you're not willing to work at Mickey D's for a dollar an hour, you would have a basic income to fall back on.

I don't think that inflation would be a huge problem, since this is wealth redistribution, likely through taxes, rather than printing money and giving it to people. However, I'm no economist either, so I may be far off base in regards to inflation.

> I don't think that inflation would be a huge problem, since this is wealth redistribution, likely through taxes, rather than printing money and giving it to people. However, I'm no economist either, so I may be far off base in regards to inflation.

The short term effects of redistribution downward on the income scale (and thus generally from those with a lower marginal propensity to consume to those with a higher propensity) would seem pretty clearly to be some degree of demand-pull inflation.