> The money has to come from somewhere. More like "An equivalent amount of US dollars has to be taken out of the economy in order to keep the money supply in b

> The money has to come from somewhere. More like "An equivalent amount of US dollars has to be taken out of the economy in order to keep the money supply in balance with the amount of real goods and services and thus prevent higher-than-desired inflation." I don't know if the tools available to the Federal Reserve are sufficient to do that indefinitely like taxation does, but my real point is that it's a mistake to think of Federal fiscal/monetary policies as moving money from one place to another when the important part is creating money (spending, including transfers like Social Security checks or a basic income; lowering banks' reserve requirements or the discount rate; buying Treasury bills on the open market) versus destroying it (taxation; Federal fees and fines; raising reserve requirements or the discount rate; selling Treasury bills). For example, the national debt isn't a problem because we might not be able to afford to pay it off, it's that it creates constraints on our ability to manage the money supply. Over time, we're obligated to pay back all the bills that make up the national debt, and each one we pay back increases the dollars in the economy, reducing the Federal government's ability to perform necessary spending (which also creates more dollars) without causing inflation. So we sell more Treasury bills (destroying dollars in the process, albeit temporarily) to create room for spending. Point being: a basic income is possible, but we'd have to get real creative about destroying dollars. The US dollar economy is a big, arbitrary game with rules and mechanics made up by humans; there might be some way to change the mechanics to make a basic income work elegantly. Demurrage, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29 Edit: I just threw demurrage out there because it was a cool, strange monetary thing I remembered reading about, but it got me wondering and apparently Robert Anton Wilson conceived of a basic income system funded by an unlendable demurrage currency at least 40 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/3h89tn/demurrage_cryptocurrency_basic_income/cu5ebab https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/3h89tn/demurra...