Comment by candiddevmike
3 years ago
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
3 years ago
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.
"Petrodollars" are completely unimportant. They just mean Saudi Arabia's financial reserves, and KSA is not a large country so it wouldn't matter if they abandoned the dollar. It already doesn't matter that we stopped Russia from trading in dollars.
If anyone ever mentions petrodollars, CBDC, or crypto to you, they are crazy and I recommend stealing their wallet. (Since they're into crypto they're used to it.)
4 replies →
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.