Problem: tons of money is concentrated in the hands of about 1% of the American population, who have largely taken it out of the American economy.
Solution: Start creating money at a higher rate, deliberately designed to create inflation. At the same time, we instigate a basic income for all Americans; the size of this income is not defined as a dollar value, but rather as a percentage of all of the dollars in existence. Possibly with some kind of relationship to some kind of measure to the cost of living – renting a 1br apartment in the most expensive city to live in, for instance, if we want to be really aggressive.
So the value of the dollar drops into the ground. That’s fine, because everyone is getting a basic income guaranteed to have about the same amount of purchasing power no matter what. And the money that the 1% are sitting on rapidly becomes worthless; eventually everyone is getting the amount of money those folks are sitting on every month.
Disclaimer: I am stoned as fuck right now. Feel free to discuss exactly why this is a terrible idea and how it could be better. Take as given that I have mind-controlled the POTUS, Senate, and the Congress, or some other equally unlikely method of making it happen despite the way folks with tons of money will be fighting against this happening.
Your job pays $10/hour. An egg costs $1 trillion. So, there’s no economic incentive to work. The government would be splitting an ever-decreasing pie in the economic collapsse.
People with easily-traded assets would win. And right now, those people aren’t the common people.
If you’re curious, look up what happened in Brazil or Zimbabwe during their hyperinflation times…
Your job wouldn’t pay $10/h any more once workers became a scarce resource, though. Because how many shitty jobs would be left looking for employees once people can do whatever they want, if they’re willing to live relatively simply?
Ugh, had a long reply to this but the site ate it.
Short version: Not necessarily. There are problems with the idea, but that isn’t one of them, unless wages are inelastic upwards for some reason. If people became unwilling to work for $10/hour, the wage would just have to increase until it made sense again.
Currently our wages are inelastic upwards because we have more workers than jobs; that’s only going to get worse as long as we continue automating, and continue asserting that everyone has to have a job if they’re going to survive.