Meanwhile, wealthier people get paid in ‘unrestricted’ currency.
I'd just as soon give everyone dollars via UBI
The government provides coupons that allow you to buy food which is remediated to the seller in dollars. The authority and funding to provide that service is something that voters can impact or change.
These are very different things, not "that already exists" at all.
This is an primarily American phenomenon though and it's only really true because of the dominance of the US and US petrodollars over global society. It's probably not easy to spend Turkish lira in Madagascar, for example. Yes there are banks which will exchange approved currencies, but that's one step removed from being paid in a global global currency as you imply.
Christian Gelleri made this proposal to solve the Greek crisis: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3144910
I actually prefer we give out UBI, in a tracked manner, as well.
"cash" they can spend on anything, but with data collection so we can do society improving retrospectives on how it was spent.
If there were political motive and will to implement such a system, it could be done without a CBDC and certainly without modernization of ACH (heh).
Conversely, if there's not political motive and will, then the presence of a CBDC doesn't change that fact.
Then you can enforce meat and fossil fuel rations with no way to buy yourself around it.
Many are concerned that cdbc will allow the gov to create carbon rations that are enforced by disallowing purchases. Cash is fungible while regulated digital currency isn't.
Plus, if the goal is to limit carbon emissioms, it's more of a liberal market-shaping attitude that mainstream economists have to simply tax carbon heavy activities rather than invent new and unpopular technological measures to force it to happen. Same applies to the fears about limiting meat consumption, etc.
(I’m not in any way a climate denier, just a huge pessimist when it comes to attempted solutions)
