If you want to make sure every person has access to a little bit of gold? Yeah go for it
If you want to make everyone a little bit richer? No it won’t change anything, you’ve just raised all boats by the same amount. There’s no relative difference, it won’t have any impact on the economy
you’ve just raised all boats by the same amount. There’s no relative difference, it won’t have any impact on the economy
Technically, that’s not exactly true, specifically because of wealth disparities. If you give everyone $100, someone who only had $100 before will get a 100% increase to their net worth, whereas a billionaire will get a 0.00001% increase to their net worth. It’s effectively a wealth redistribution. If you gave everyone a billion dollars, assuming everyone had nothing to start with before, they’d now have 50% of what a billionaire (now with $2B after gaining $1B from this change) would have, whereas before they’d only have a tiny fraction.
The problem is that it’s just not a very effective method at doing such wealth redistribution. The much more effective one is to print new currency and issue it like you would UBI, but tax billionaires a similar amount to offset the inflation caused. Releasing all this gold would just devalue gold similarly, and a lot of gold is already owned directly or by proxy, by the wealthy, but also poorer members of society, so it would effectively be like taxing billionaires, but also adding a little tax on top of specific working people for the hell of it, which isn’t ideal.
Not necessarily. Similar economic circumstances due to various implementations of UBI generally don’t result in inflation equivalent, or even near the level of money distributed.
Depends what your goals are.
If you want to make sure every person has access to a little bit of gold? Yeah go for it
If you want to make everyone a little bit richer? No it won’t change anything, you’ve just raised all boats by the same amount. There’s no relative difference, it won’t have any impact on the economy
Technically, that’s not exactly true, specifically because of wealth disparities. If you give everyone $100, someone who only had $100 before will get a 100% increase to their net worth, whereas a billionaire will get a 0.00001% increase to their net worth. It’s effectively a wealth redistribution. If you gave everyone a billion dollars, assuming everyone had nothing to start with before, they’d now have 50% of what a billionaire (now with $2B after gaining $1B from this change) would have, whereas before they’d only have a tiny fraction.
The problem is that it’s just not a very effective method at doing such wealth redistribution. The much more effective one is to print new currency and issue it like you would UBI, but tax billionaires a similar amount to offset the inflation caused. Releasing all this gold would just devalue gold similarly, and a lot of gold is already owned directly or by proxy, by the wealthy, but also poorer members of society, so it would effectively be like taxing billionaires, but also adding a little tax on top of specific working people for the hell of it, which isn’t ideal.
Sure you’d see a general increase in net worth, but it would be exactly matched by the inflation of raising everybody’s net worth by the same amount.
Not necessarily. Similar economic circumstances due to various implementations of UBI generally don’t result in inflation equivalent, or even near the level of money distributed.