You can't help soften the blow of inflation by giving people more money! That will just cause more inflation and make everything worse!
We've all heard it a thousand times, giving normal working class people, especially poor people, more money will only make everything worse by causing more inflation. Somehow this will leave the majority worse off than if nothing had been done.
This is considered common sense among liberal-conservatives but as leftists we instinctively know that it is bullshit. Maybe higher wages and benefits would increase inflation but the net total is that the working class would be better off than before.
Instinct is not a very convincing argument though so how do you argue the case against the wage inflation spiral to liberal-conservatives?
As usual, it's an incorrect use of the word inflation, taking it to mean "things getting more expensive," as opposed to "things getting more expensive because of the government printing more money." The government giving people money will not cause any more inflation than spending the same amount of money on bombs and shit, because the same amount is being minted either way.
Whether it will cause "inflation" in the sense of "things getting more expensive" is another question. Essentially the claim that is being made here is that people having more money in their pockets will result in companies raising their prices - which implies that those prices are set based on how much money people have. And if that's the case, then it means it's time to start doing nationalization, trust busting, and price controls. Prices shouldn't be determined by how much people can pay, they should be determined by how much the product costs to make. It's supposed to be the case that if a company tries to raise prices because their customers have more money, then another company can move in and produce the same thing and sell if for less, stealing their customers while still making a profit. If a company (or a group of companies colluding) can raise their prices without fear of being undercut by a competitor, that's what you call monopolization and extortion.
I don't have the numbers to say whether their claim holds up in practice, but what they're claiming when they say this is that our economy is so riddled with monopolies that there is no possibility of the poor advancing as a class. If people having more money means things get more expensive, then it doesn't matter where that money comes from - if everyone starts making money because they learned to code, or because of some technological advancement, or because the economy improved, it doesn't matter, the same argument applies. The logical conclusion of what they're saying is that there is no possibility of improving things except through systemic change and restructuring the economy.