Nine thousand dollars. And what should drive you crazy is (yes Ron Paul inflation exists, we’ll address why it also does not matter) that this could quite easily be done quarterly or even monthly, which would bring all Americans to the golden $85,000 or so a year where money’s relationship with happiness begins to offer diminishing returns.
if you earn less than that, give or take depending on where you live - for example in LA it’s probably more like $150,000 and in Missouri closer to 60k due to cost of living differences, it is a fact that you are being deprived of the maximum degree of happiness that you are capable of.
Money buys happiness - up to about $85,000 - because every dollar less than that Goldilocks salary/stipend adds an additional stress factor until you get down to the poverty line where before you know it you’re being treated like subhuman filth, getting price gouged or outright denied access to basic essential services and human rights on a daily basis, until you become homeless at which point most people either pick up the Meth pipe and learn to go with the flow (constant police harassment, the black hole at the center of our society where some sort of shared purpose or kinship may once have been) - or take a long walk off a short ledge like all those Stock Brokers on black Monday as the sun set on the roaring 20’s they’d once helped to define with an opulence and style that never lost its appeal between Gatsby the novel and Gatsby the film, up to this day.
In the horror of the first Great Depression, FDR recognized that a finite monentary supply was going to inevitably end in these disastrous results within the present capitalist system, as Marx foretold the previous century - and leave the government essentially powerless to help its people as they starved - as had been the case during the Hoover administration.
since the US had the unique privilege of being the currency of global exchange already at that time, while many other monies were metal backed, nearly all all based their worth on the US Banknote, and it’s declared relationship with gold, and not so much their own currency’s metal buying power, since the US had the most gold, albeit mostly in private ownership then.
So FDR confiscated all the gold like a Badass and says ‘no more redemption for gold cause ..the gold place is closed or we’re at war or something. And John Maynard Keynes entered the ethos.
infinite money. The US dollar had replaced gold as ..gold, and we could now effectively do what alchemists had failed for millennia to achieve - pull wealth from thin air.
other countries like Zimbabwe at times tried to do this, but as they overprinted their notes and were not international currencies, they overdid it and in Zimbabwe’s case once a wheelbarrow of 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bills was needed to buy a loaf of stale bread (Seriously. You can buy one on Amazon for like three bucks.) their money was no longer seen as legitimate domestically or abroad, and today Zimbabwe uses US dollars.
So we can print money, the EU Can print money now too, and the UK can print money. Anybody else who tries with any real vigor (they all do it but not noticeably) ends up with worthless Monopoly money for a currency, except China now. Russia tried for a bit and we slapped them with sanctions and the ruble crumbled almost immediately.
So what have we done with this God-like privilege that allows us to perform a magic trick only a few others can do, and literally pull wealth out of thin air?
War
Corporate Graft
War
Spying
More War
Unannounced War but still War
Secret War
War
War
War
War Related Corporate Welfare
Other Corporate Welfare
War
Bank Bailouts
War
War Drones
Secret CIA shenanigans
War
War
You get the idea. It’s actually completely legal for any presidential administration to mint a platinum coin, or several, valued at 1 Trillion Dollars at any time. Obama almost did it but when McConnell caught wind that he’s found a way to bypass his obstructive Scrooge like agenda, the bitter old turtle caved, for the time being.
But we could be sending checks like the one from April, and would be - every month if we gave the slightest little microfuck about each other and the little guys here in America. But America is not that country. America is the evil empire that rejected sharing like the Romans rejected Jesus and only uses our magic power to turn Yemeni children into skeletons and such, never to turn our own children into happy, educated, financially literate and economically secure and optimistic creative people with healthcare. cUZ w℈ dOn”T L!Kkę š0Ć¡æL!Sm iN üŠÅ
My point is universalx income is necessary and it would be incredibly easy to implement thanks to our powerful currency. If they don’t do it, it’s because they hate us and want us to be miserable enough that we can be easily manipulated
