GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Maybe more lefty and anti-corporate politics in 1970s in response to slow erosion of middle class?
AHC: “social credit” money parallels regular money in U.S. by 2018
- Thread starter GeographyDude
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GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) drew a lot from Milton Friedman's ideas regarding a negative income tax.
And the Earned Income Credit passed by Congress in 1975 takes major aspects of this. The credit increases as wages increase, up to a point, then rides a plateau, and then slowly phases out. The really big dollar amounts are for persons living with related children, or a foster child officially placed.
Now, if we combined this with overtime provisions which aggressively encouraged companies to spread out available jobs, we might really be on to something!
And the Earned Income Credit passed by Congress in 1975 takes major aspects of this. The credit increases as wages increase, up to a point, then rides a plateau, and then slowly phases out. The really big dollar amounts are for persons living with related children, or a foster child officially placed.
Now, if we combined this with overtime provisions which aggressively encouraged companies to spread out available jobs, we might really be on to something!
FillyofDelphi
Banned
If you want to encourage a greater number of positions, you're going to have to lower to expected externalities/per-position expenses. For example, employer-provided health insurance plans are liable to be removed, and training costs will be increasingly expected to be unloaded onto the educational system. Now, its possible you could have a tax credit made available for citizens to privately fund this, or introduce practices like public-private job training certification programs in community collages and create public insurence pools, but these would require significant funding that's liable to cut into the available money for social credit. Especially since a broader spreading of wages means a lower percentage of total economic activity is taking place in higher-rate tax brackets.
easy pod to get a basic income/UHC: the advisor who convinced nixon in otl both weren't good ideas somehow rubs him the wrong way on first introduction. we get both in 1969-70. Sure, taxes get raised a bit t pay for it but well 1) no nixon screwing with keynesian money system 2) no absurd social security cost of living raises 3) less inflation as a result
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
I mean, social credit “dollars” for volunteer work which I do, and which I can then “spend” to hire other volunteers to do my yard work, maybe even help me write a letter and a follow-up phone call to my insurance company, maybe a tutor for learning guitar, etc.
It’s healthy activities when we have more time on our hands.
And it’s a way to receive positive regard in my local community. Not federal or even local government, more something that just springs up.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
More an antidote to what this guy is talking about, that a lot of stuff does not take the place of meaningful activity.
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https://www.c-span.org/video/?454499-2/the-future-worker
youtube: The Once and Future Worker: How the Consumerist Consensus Led America Astray, and How to Recover
The author is saying, people always ask, well, if people aren’t working, aren’t there other activities such as child care, taking care of sick relatives, going back to school?
And he answers, we have very good time-use data from the Census. Women who are out of work do many of these things. Men who are out of work sleep more and watch more TV (with video games being a subset of TV).
< With Me Saying — because men are socialized about work to the nth degree from a very young age. I mean, from the time infant and toddler boys are first learning the language and learning how the world works. >
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Yes, it’s the doggone Heritage Foundation. The fellow is giving a talk at the Heritage Foundation and it sounds like he generally describes himself as a conservative, not a libertarian. And that’s all fine. I’m a good liberal, but I’m more than happy to borrow worthwhile ideas from conservatives.
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Having a basic income would work better than having any sort of social security. Poor but not struggling people or young people spend more than olds.
The Chinese social credit system is more like a credit score than anything else. Any parallel monetary system based on volunteer work or something like that would have to be pegged to dollars (a society will only recognize a single reference unit of monetary value) so it wouldn't actually be a parallel system and it wouldn't actually be volunteer work.
Uncontrolled increases in M2 like this are how you get stagflation.
FillyofDelphi
Banned
Oh, slightly different than what I was thinking giving your Corperate reference. In that case, I question how this "currency" will have the flexibility to facilitate equitable trade outideof small closed social groups without more details. How does one codify/keep track of how much "credit" somebody has if you don't know them personally? What about transforming it into more comodified or larger scale good like, for example, lodging, transit fees, food, ect? I suppose a less specialized and more localized economy would produce this, but from what we know about "barter"/early community based modes of communial credit this system collapses when dealing with strangers. It dosen't scale up the same way money as a unit of exchange does, because it's a universal point of reference. If you charge 5 dollars for a pound of ham, it dosen't matter if I earned it from teaching guitar, working on an oil rig, marriage counciling, or making birdhouses in my garage and selling them at a farmer's market, because I provided 5 dollars worth of "value" to somebody else who gave me that Lincoln to verify that, which he got from providing something to somebody who thought it had 5 dollars worth of value, ect. Meanwhile, if I have a credit for "1 hour of guitar lessons" for a birdhouse I gave you, that may have widely differing values to different people. If I want to pay rent, but my landlord dosen't think guiter playing is a worthwhile social activity... well, I'm living out in a cardboard box. It has all the shortcomings of the fabled barter system laughed at in any Econ 101 Course
FillyofDelphi
Banned
In a sentence; they can, but taking care of your family or increasing your skill base is considered a self-benefitiary activity and not a responsability of society behyond the already existing social safety net. By saying society should compensate you for caring for your children, you are explicently declaring that it is society's responsability to raise your children for you as you doing piddly squat is "value neutral". The child tax credit, public subsidies for state schools and aid/grants, Medicare, ect. Already exist recognizing the social recognition of having an interest in encouraging these activities.
BigBlueBox
Banned
America is in the middle of the Vietnam war at this point and is still on the Bretton Woods system. Saying that taxes will be raised “a bit” is an understatement, and LBJ’s Great Society programs would also have to be scrapped.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
For those reading along,
M1 = cash money + checking accounts,
M2 = M1 + saving deposits + Money Market Mutual Funds + several other less liquid forms of "money."
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
1970 had stagflation, and 1971 had continued inflation. Yes, both the Vietnam War and Great Society social spending were involved, but I tend to think there were more factors as well. I think of these as the confusing early '70s!
Whereas 1973 firstly was,
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
And then, following the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, there was the OPEC oil embargo. Over a period of months, this led to a 4-fold increase in the price of oil (yes, four-fold).
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-stagflation-occur-in-the-70s-Why-didnt-it-happen-in-2009
The Supply Curve shifted inward and that was that.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-stagflation-occur-in-the-70s-Why-didnt-it-happen-in-2009
The Supply Curve shifted inward and that was that.
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GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
I remember in the early '80s, my Dad was enthused about a new barter program that would take place just in a part of Houston, but then he found out that it would be fully taxable income.
What I have in mind, not for everyone, but for many people it becomes a part of pride that they build up 500 or 1,000 hours or whatever in the "bank." And maybe it would only be 50 or 100 hours, and that's perfectly okay, too.
And then, people might occasionally use it to try acupuncture, or shiatsu massage, or fencing lessons, and branch out a little more than they otherwise might have.
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This has the effect of assigning monetary value to the "hours" that have been accrued. If the government is going to be paying for this acupuncture or massage or fencing lesson (somebody is going to be paying them actual money or they won't accept "hours" as payment), you have just shifted the burden of paying for it from the person actually using the service to the tax-paying population as a whole. As I said before, no society will ever have more than one reference unit of monetary value, so any "hours" in the "bank" will be seen as equivalent to actual money.
FillyofDelphi
Banned
You can't eat pride, and the vast swath of the population already faces great difficulty in metabolizing their labor into enough money to keep at least a lower-middle class lifestyle and store away resources for self improvement, investment, and hopefully eventual retirement. This strikes me more as a system set on top of the basic economy which the already comfortable can engage in for leisure and social purposes, which is perfectly fine, unless you're moving to a share of product/co-op model in which the members have an agreed upon exchange rate internally, but this would essentially be currency by a different name if you want to make the system large and diverse enough to sustain anything remotely similar to a modern economy. Otherwise, you're basically just discussing a social club
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Maybe a little seed money on the local level.
Other than that, I mainly just want local, state, and the federal govt. to respect the non-cash economy and leave it alone.
FillyofDelphi
Banned
Then you need them to A) Have the public mandate to regulate consumer fairness/safety supremely truncated and B) Not starved for tax revenue. Possible, if you deeply cut into the social safety net and develo a much more laizze faire economic culture (Utterly flopping Great Society could set things in that direction), but I don't think that's the type of change you were personally thinking of