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Universal Basic Income Is Easier Than It Looks

Sun 6th Jan 2019





The point here is to show that it could actually be funded year after year without driving up taxes or prices. New money is continually being added to the money supply, but it is added as debt created privately by banks. (How banks, rather than the government, create most of the money supply today is explained on the Bank of England website here.) A UBI would replace money-created-as-debt with debt-free money—a “debt jubilee” for consumers—while leaving the money supply for the most part unchanged; and to the extent that new money was added, it could help create the demand needed to fill the gap between actual and potential productivity.

The Debt Overhang Crippling Economies


Debt always grows faster than the money available to repay it. One problem is the interest, which is not created along with the principal, so more money is always owed back than was created in the original loan. Beyond that, some of the money created as debt is held off the consumer market by “savers” and investors who place it elsewhere, making it unavailable to companies selling their wares and the wage-earners they employ. The result is a debt bubble that continues to grow until it is not sustainable and the system collapses, in the familiar death spiral euphemistically called the “business cycle.” As economist Michael Hudson shows in his 2018 book, “… and Forgive Them Their Debts,” this inevitable debt overhang was corrected historically with periodic “debt jubilees”—debt forgiveness—something he argues we need to do again today.


Why a UBI Need Not Be Inflationary

In a 2018 book called “The Road to Debt Bondage: How Banks Create Unpayable Debt,” political economist Derryl Hermanutz proposes a central-bank-issued UBI of $1,000 per month, credited directly to people’s bank accounts. Assuming this payment went to all U.S. residents over 18, or about 250 million people, the outlay would be about $2.5 trillion annually. For people with overdue debt, Hermanutz proposes that it automatically go to pay down those debts. Since money is created as loans and extinguished when they are repaid, that portion of a UBI disbursement would be extinguished along with the debt.





In 2017, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product was $19.4 trillion. If the economy is running at 10 percent below full capacity, $2 trillion could be injected into the economy every year without creating price inflation. It would just generate the demand needed to stimulate an additional $2 trillion in GDP. In fact a UBI might pay for itself, just as the G.I. Bill produced a sevenfold return from increased productivity after World War II.

The Evidence of China

That new money can be injected year after year without triggering price inflation is evident from a look at China. In the last 20 years, its M2 money supply has grown from just over 10 trillion yuan to 80 trillion yuan ($11.6T), a nearly 800 percent increase. Yet the inflation rate of its Consumer Price Index (CPI) remains a modest 2.2 percent.


Whether or not the Chinese government would approve of a UBI, it does recognize that to stimulate productivity, the money must get out there first; and since the government owns 80 percent of China’s banks, it is in a position to borrow money into existence as needed. For “self-funding” loans—those that generate income (fees for rail travel and electricity, rents for real estate)—repayment extinguishes the debt along with the money it created, leaving the net money supply unchanged. When loans are not repaid, the money they created is not extinguished; but if it goes to consumers and businesses that then buy goods and services with it, demand will still stimulate the production of supply, so that supply and demand rise together and prices remain stable.


The Fed Tightens the Screws

Rather than stimulating the economy with new demand, the Fed has been engaging in “quantitative tightening.” On Dec. 19, 2018, it raised the Fed funds rate for the ninth time in three years, despite a “brutal” stock market in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average had already lost 3,000 points in 2 ½ months. The Fed is still struggling to reach even its modest 2 percent inflation target, and GDP growth is trending down, with estimates at only 2-2.7 percent for 2019. So why did it again raise rates, over the protests of commentators, including the president himself?

For its barometer, the Fed looks at whether the economy has hit “full employment,” which it considers to be 4.7 percent unemployment, taking into account the “natural rate of unemployment” of people between jobs or voluntarily out of work. At full employment, workers are expected to demand more wages, causing prices to rise. But unemployment is now officially at 3.7 percent—beyond technical full employment—and neither wages nor consumer prices have shot up. There is obviously something wrong with the theory, as is evident from a look at Japan, where prices have long refused to rise despite a serious lack of workers.

The official unemployment figures are actually misleading. Including short-term discouraged workers, the rate of U.S. unemployed or underemployed workers as of May 2018 was 7.6 percent, double the widely reported rate. When long-term discouraged workers are included, the real unemployment figure was 21.5 percent.

Beyond that large untapped pool of workers, there is the seemingly endless supply of cheap labor from abroad and the expanding labor potential of robots, computers and machines. In fact, the economy’s ability to generate supply in response to demand is far from reaching full capacity today.



This article first appeared at Truthdig https://www.truthdig.com/articles/universal-basic-income-is-easier-than-it-looks/
