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That is the digital economy of the future. Tagged credits, some with expirations and other constraints (perhaps geospatial). It's the only reasonable way to im
by pphysch 3y ago
That is the digital economy of the future. Tagged credits, some with expirations and other constraints (perhaps geospatial).
It's the only reasonable way to implement something like UBI: give everyone X "food credits" and Y "housing credits" each week. There would still be fraud and "credit laundering" to get around the expirations, but the overall waste would be tiny compared to the legacy finance system.
- zmgsabst 3y agoDo you have a study showing EBT cards are more effective and reduce fraud compared to direct cash subsidies?
- hakfoo 3y agoThe problem isn't a lack of expiration, so much as it is relying on commercial middlemen. Nationalize the real-estate and you create a monopsony for housing credits. Open up state-run distribution centres that accept the food vouchers, and only redeem them there. The laundering/cashout concept relies on someone qualified to accept the credits and get real money back from the state. Stereotypically, this was a shady bodega or landlord who would fudge the books to claim they had enough sales to cover the vouchers they bought for 20% of face value. Going to direct fulfillment means they fall out of the loop: there's nobody[0] who can give you anything for the voucher except for a can of corn. [0] Yes, someone might be willing to buy up vouchers if they wanted a LOT of cans of corn, but the logistics and difficulty of converting that to real cash means that it's not going to scale. It might surge during crisis events, where the cash price of a staple suddenly skyrocketed, but a voucher denominated in grams/litres/bushels held value.