Is this a good thing to do or a bad thing to do?
Besides what people already pointed out about individual’s wealth, I also want to mention the US has a lot of debt with other countries and institutions. Those would get very upset if it looks like the government can no longer pay those debts.
my first thought with this plan is the exact same thought I have when one of those “buy gold” commercials comes on and the old person be like “it’s tangible, I can hold it in my hand, it’s not sitting in a bank.” That only helps the person breaking into your house. So if you gave EVERYONE a little bit of gold, people would know others have this gold, and if the wrong person finds that out they’re gonna break into houses getting that gold.
So I looked up Fort Knox, which holds 147 million ounces of gold, and then I found out that probably the rarest coin in the world is held there.
The 1974 aluminum cent.
And me being really stoned right now, forgot the question.
But they have a little less than 60% of the total US gold reserves.
Do you want the government to give you some gold?
I mean, if you just happen to get your hands on it, feel free to keep me in mind.
Enjoy your 300 bucks of gold I guess…
Doesn’t really sound like a lot these days.
Strategic reserves are strategic. If your strategy is to crash the price of gold for a short period of time, then sure. It’s hard to see how society benefits from that though.
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
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.
It would have a similar effect to printing new USD and issuing it evenly to members of the population, since our gold reserve is largely a stockpile not expected to be sold on the market.
Gold gets released into circulation, the value of gold decreases, the value people individually receive is similar to the amount lost by those holding gold.
That effectively means it would likely be a transfer of value from gold hoarders, some of which are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the population, to everyone else, rather than some magical new source of value to give to people. (not exactly, obviously, but this is generally what I’d expect based on how the currency dynamic works with our existing USD reserves/printing capabilities, and how the supply rush would be similar with gold compared to USD)
Should we do it? I don’t know, it could be beneficial, but I’d rather we simply issued new currency and taxed the billionaires more to compensate for any inflation caused, rather than the government having to spend all the money on manpower and negotiation for the sale of all the gold we have, so that individuals could receive actually functional currency in the form of USD.
The leading party for the last 20 years in my country would say that printing money didn’t bring on inflation. It’s funny how such a simple example beats their economy planning
Replace us govt with Elon and yes, absolutely.
Replace us govt with Elon
Conservative erotica.
