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Fed “digital dollars” are part of debate over coronavirus stimulus
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/9f2Dp https://archive.md/9f2Dp
- wideasleep1 7y agoThank you for your service.
- seibelj 7y agoWe learned from the 2008 crisis that bailing out banks and industries causes massive social strife. So now they will bail out people in addition to banks and favored industries in order to make it less controversial. No one cares about $100 billion to the banks when they get a $500 check. By bypassing banks with Fed Accounts, it just makes handing out cash even easier. They do it in other countries all the time. Saudi Arabia routinely gives citizens thousands of dollars direct to their bank accounts to keep them sated.
- anonsubmit2671 7y ago$500 isn't going to do jack. Families need $4k per month and individuals need $2k per month. And then giving poor people nothing is a giant slap in the face. All this means testing is too slow. Limit it to exclude individuals who made over $130k or $200k combined last year, but that's it. Everyone else gets their Nixonbucks pandemic checks because the marginal propensity to consume is going to be higher than usual with 20-30% unemployment, or people will starve, riot and/or revolt.
- orasis 7y agoIt might keep some people from starving.
- anonsubmit2671 7y agoIt might buy a couple of rolls of toilet paper too. When rent is $1500, food costs $450 a month for a family now that staple items in particular are scarce and more expensive, car payments aren't going away, and rent will become due after the 90 day pause because there will be no forgiveness. I predict bread lines in 6 months and far more massive homelessness without a proper bailout of small businesses and the people, rather than trillions of corporate welfare. Trickledown Reaganomics corporate welfare will never work, only trickle-up works. When people don't have money to meet their non-discretionary needs and unemployment reaches 20-30%, which is worse than the Great Depression, what follows is deflation and depression on an unprecedented macro scale. At the street scale, starvation and homelessness would be the impact; Venezuela, Cuba and the UN would be flying in doctors, refugee camp materials and food to the US. Massive UBI directly to individuals and small businesses enough to meet basic needs is essential, and will be spent into the economy because MPC will be nearly 1.0. Otherwise, the US economy will contract more and for longer than at any point in recorded history.
- thanatropism 7y agoWhat massive social strife?
- markus_zhang 7y agoThe thing is they bail out institutions and corporations and the people who fucked up did not necessarily get punished., while people who get hurt are not compensated. There is a huge incentive to take risk on others' behalf and profit on one's own, then brag that one is a risk taker and an alpha male. You can see this behavior pretty much everywhere.
- marcrosoft 7y agoHow about start by just waving all taxes for individuals for the year.
- jbarciauskas 7y agoWhat? Who cares about taxes when you don't have cash in your pocket or food on your table
- improv32 7y agoYour entire withholding from 2019 would be returned as a tax refund, thus the cash
- jbarciauskas 7y agoThat's incredibly regressive. Give money to people who will spend it.
- geofft 7y agoWhy? I can pay my taxes just fine and I'm still employed because I'm a software engineer. Is there an argument that this will benefit either the economy or keep Americans alive beyond the general, non-crisis argument to get rid of taxes? Also, what's the plan for paying for government services, such as the military budget that's funding the Army Corps of Engineers that's building emergency ICUs?
- bosswipe 7y agoThat doesn't help the millions of recently unemployed. Especially if it takes months for the economy to recover and for those unemployed to be rehired.
- sneak 7y agoThis terrifies me more than just about anything they're doing. I think a lot of people just don't see the danger in the total lack of financial/transaction privacy that most cashless Americans live under. This threatens to extend that even further. If this goes through, then your options for receiving money from the government you might well need to not starve are just two: accept a payment to your 100% surveillance bank account, or accept a 100% surveillance "digital cash" payment if you're unbanked. In all cases the state will receive detailed permanent records of when, where, and how you spent the money.
- mycall 7y agoWhy can't you have separate accounts, one for Fed dollars, one for checking? One is receive-only public, the other is private.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SllX 7y agoWhy can’t we just keep cash and when we issue cash, we issue cash whether that’s an envelope of bills, or a direct deposit?
- warent 7y agoAgree with this. Humans/civilians are not government employees or public entities just by being alive. I'm probably not as big of an advocate for privacy as many of my peers, but trying to keep a public spending ledger of individual people is crossing a line.
- mycall 7y agoThere isn't enough cash to do that.
- wideasleep1 7y agoThat's what I'll do...simply cash out the Fed account, and pay cash as I go.
- naveen99 7y agoBrilliant. Please do it ASAP. Edit: Not being sarcastic.
- mycall 7y ago> most dollars are already electronic ... Americans still have a strong preference for cash. These two statements seem to nullify each other.
- davisr 7y agoMost Americans don't have most dollars.
- rodonn 7y agoAgreed. Most money is digital money held by banks and businesses. Even with paper dollars, something like 95% of the paper money supply is in $100 bills, which the typical American only rarely uses. Most Americans are not representative of the most common uses of the USD when you weight things by payment volume.
- viklove 7y agoWhich is why measuring economic health by GDP is utterly useless. It only measures the wellbeing of a minority of Americans -- those that have the most money to spend.
- ctdonath 7y agoBad money drives out good. And we're already at pretty darned bad money.
- phkahler 7y ago"As things now stand, the U.S. government lacks the infrastructure to disperse payments widely, and given the nature of the current crisis, speedy action is critical." I call bullshit. Back when there was a small budget surplus, Bush sent us all a check in the mail. That was almost 20 years ago. This stinks of pushing an agenda.
- joe_the_user 7y agoI don't know if the problem is easy. I've moved twice since I last filed taxes. I put in a change of address but many folks might not have. The aim of the Bush rebate was just to inject money into the economy. It didn't have to get to everyone but this does.
- harwareboot 7y agoLets be honest. This was the first thing I though of as a use case for blockchains ;)