> Going from "predominantly what happens" to "it's theoretically possible occasionally" is a question of magnitude rather than direction.

Okay, fair enough. I took "without adding any new buyers" literally but yes, I can imagine this creating some downward pressure on stock prices.

> Or their spending it on food and rent results in an increase in rents, even for the people who didn't get any, which rents go in part to foreign investors who remove it from the jurisdiction, and then domestic people have even less to invest than before. ... Compare this to the thing where you e.g. relax zoning rules to reduce housing scarcity so that rents come down and then domestic people have that money to invest.

Are these mutually exclusive? I concede that people being unable to afford rent limits rent to some extent, but it's not my preferred price control. Giving them more money that they could use on rent might make it more clear we need to make other changes, and I can live with that.

> you've now created a preference for spending rather than saving/investing while increasing your reliance on the taxation of saving/investing.

Yes. Is that worse than the status quo? There's a lot of spending now that should be happening and is not—people literally dying from inability to afford medical treatment. You'll probably say—just as with the rent example—that people being more able to pay will cause medical costs to increase further, and I agree that should be addressed, but again I think people being flat-out unable to afford it is not the best way to control medical spending.

> [...pointless wars are a massive overall net loss...]

I think you understand this, but just to be clear in case anyone was wondering: I also hate pointless wars, just was making the point that even in the stupidest use of the tax money I can imagine there's still someone getting money to buy Apple stock, even though as a whole we're worse off.