Inclu$ive Money: Why IVL is Better than UBI
Thanks to presidential hopeful and businessman Andrew Yang, the entire world is paying attention to the impact of AI and automation on the workforce. Will my job exist tomorrow? Will my wages ever increase, or will I be replaced by a robot?
Yang’s solution and his campaign gimmick is for Americans to trade in their social benefits for monthly cash (starting at $1,000 per month) or what we all know now as the Freedom Dividend, or Universal Basic Income (UBI). Instead of trickle-down, he calls it “trickle-up” economics.
There are two glaring problems with trickle-up UBI: there’s no protection of the monthly cash from external and extractive forces like debt collectors, check cashers, payday lenders, etc., and cashflow should not “trickle-up” — it should stay flowing at the poorest and local neighborhoods.
For these reasons, I believe the Inclusive Value Ledger (IVL) is a better solution for the lack of cashflow caused by stagnant wages, automation and greedy corporations. IVL will simply allow people to use their benefits and other government credits as real cash on a free public payment platform. It will serve as a public Venmo, an e-wallet, or one card that can be used to spur peer-to-peer transactions and local commerce.
IVL will be the first public payment architecture that won’t charge a fee for people to trade their values with one another or with local businesses. And as long as we oversee the public payment platform using a permanent and safe system, with 100% privacy protection for residents, we can ensure that those funds and people’s personal data are not extracted or leveraged by third party profiteers. For example, we will design the platform in a way so individual tax credits, returns and social benefits are completely fluid and portable, and can be incentivized toward trading for care work (home care, nursing, tutoring, babysitting, cleaning up parks, etc). IVL will also help boost local commerce at independently-owned small businesses.
In places like New York, we can turn roughly $55 billion of individual tax returns, credits, breaks, and social benefits into fungible and liquid public money on a public debit-credit ledger system. Imagine if New Yorkers can start using their tax credits months before it is “cashed out” by the state on the IVL system. Every tax credit could multiply in value every time it is exchanged for goods and services. That $55 billion could easily turn into a trillion dollars’ worth of economic activities.
Unlike UBI’s cash, which can be leveraged to borrow more money at high interest rates or taken directly out of people’s hands from debt collectors, IVL money will remain flowing and circulating to capture devalued, unvalued, and undervalued work.
Of course, UBI can also be disbursed under conditions on how that money can be used, but unless it’s enforced through a public payment architecture, it would be impossible to protect people’s “freedom dividend” from external forces. For predatory lenders, giant e-commerce sites, and private banks, UBI’s trickle-up impact is a welcoming proposition where they would have the ability to extract liquidated social benefits out of people’s hands.
IVL will restore the original intent of money, which was and should always be to store and exchange as much value between people. For the first time, we would be creating a comprehensive complementary currency program designed to unrig an economy that has for centuries devalued women’s work, or “soft” work, that resulted in the normalization of underpaying care workers all around us. From nurses, teachers, domestic workers, and any work related to care, we’ve adopted and enforced a philosophy that “it doesn’t pay to care”.
For so many unbanked workers in the care sector, the current rigid tax and social benefits, even when we expand them, rarely reach the workers’ wallets. The key to getting them usable money is to make these benefits fluid and portable and deliver them directly into their wallets (or e-wallets) through a public payment platform.
Andrew Yang is one of the only candidates who has directly mentioned on the national debate stage the importance of an economy that captures the value of care work, often referencing his wife who takes care of their autistic child. He genuinely gets the importance of economically acknowledging the unvalued care work in our communities.
UBI is a good way to get people’s attention toward the lack of cashflow in our neighborhoods but IVL is a better solution to not only fix the lack of cashflow but also implement a caring society.
We hope Andrew Yang, as well as other presidential candidates, will consider adopting the improved version of UBI, the IVL, as a better solution against automation and an uncaring economy.