Comment by bluescrn
3 years ago
Imagine being paid in a ‘programmable’ currency that your employer (or government) decides cannot be spent on alcohol, meat, or fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, wealthier people get paid in ‘unrestricted’ currency.
3 years ago
Imagine being paid in a ‘programmable’ currency that your employer (or government) decides cannot be spent on alcohol, meat, or fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, wealthier people get paid in ‘unrestricted’ currency.
That already exists today, food stamps/SNAP/EBT for low income and dollars for everyone else
I'd just as soon give everyone dollars via UBI
Your employer doesn't pay you in food stamps, they pay you in money you can use to buy anything you need in the entire world.
The government provides coupons that allow you to buy food which is remediated to the seller in dollars. The authority and funding to provide that service is something that voters can impact or change.
These are very different things, not "that already exists" at all.
> they pay you in money you can use to buy anything you need in the entire world.
This is an primarily American phenomenon though and it's only really true because of the dominance of the US and US petrodollars over global society. It's probably not easy to spend Turkish lira in Madagascar, for example. Yes there are banks which will exchange approved currencies, but that's one step removed from being paid in a global global currency as you imply.
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Honestly, if governments paid out all social benefits in a demurrage currency which they accept for tax payments, they would save a lot of money because the velocity and therefore fiscal multiplier of a demurrage currency is very high.
Christian Gelleri made this proposal to solve the Greek crisis: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3144910
afaik food stamps/SNAP/EBT is a charitable thing though, right? ie, the recipients are not trading labor for it, right?
cannot edit, but would like to say
I actually prefer we give out UBI, in a tracked manner, as well.
"cash" they can spend on anything, but with data collection so we can do society improving retrospectives on how it was spent.
I view this type of thinking as the conspiratorially minded's version of "trying to solve social problems with technical solutions".
If there were political motive and will to implement such a system, it could be done without a CBDC and certainly without modernization of ACH (heh).
Conversely, if there's not political motive and will, then the presence of a CBDC doesn't change that fact.
I mean if we're talking that level of societal breakdown they would just use the system we already have for tracking semi-restricted purchases which is scanning and reporting your government ID.
Then you can enforce meat and fossil fuel rations with no way to buy yourself around it.
Payment processors like VISA can already block payments that they don't like. Even if they are completely legal.
A CBDC does not necessarily need to be implemented with that capability.
No, but big centralized power tends to crave ever more power, control, and surveillance
Why would they want to do that? How would either your employer or the fed have the grounds to justify doing that?
Look at what happened with the Canadian protests and banking restrictions.
Many are concerned that cdbc will allow the gov to create carbon rations that are enforced by disallowing purchases. Cash is fungible while regulated digital currency isn't.
But how could something like a carbon ration possibly be implemented? They'd have to retrofit every PoS system in the nation to classify sales and tag payments with that information. This would already be possible using the existing settlement infrastructure, nothing unique to how a CBDC would work.
Plus, if the goal is to limit carbon emissioms, it's more of a liberal market-shaping attitude that mainstream economists have to simply tax carbon heavy activities rather than invent new and unpopular technological measures to force it to happen. Same applies to the fears about limiting meat consumption, etc.
Something along the lines of ‘We face a climate emergency that is even more serious than the Covid emergency, we have to do this, this is about saving lives’?
(I’m not in any way a climate denier, just a huge pessimist when it comes to attempted solutions)
it's what they do with foodstamps already, is the point. I don't know whether that'll atually happen, but that's the theory.