I didn't say anything about the wage price spiral. One category that has had above-average inflation is food away from home. That's mostly driven by wages of the workers, not wages of the clientele.
The pesky law you mention is indeed the issue. Not enough people are willing to work in restaurants, and/or not enough people are willing to modify their habits to avoid eating in restaurants when the prices increase.
Whether "printing" money was a cause of generalized inflation is a matter of debate. It's hard to argue it didn't have some effect, but I think you'd probably expect the inflation to have been worse if it were just dependent on the amount of dollars in the system. Given the tightness in the labor market and reduced workforce participation, it seems to me that the pandemic was a large-scale, impromptu test of the UBI, and society failed it very badly. Turns out people will actually not work if they don't have to, and robots are not yet prepared to pick up the slack.
> Whether "printing" money was a cause of generalized inflation is a matter of debate.
It's only a debate for people who haven't looked at the history of money and inflation. Inflation is always the result of an increase in the supply of money relative to the value of goods and services in the economy. It happens when there are gold rushes, silver rushes, and running the government printing press.
Our current inflation happened soon after a massive increase in deficit spending.
