r/UniversalBasicIncome

How about including baby bonds not just citizen dividends in georgism? Baby bonds are seeded capital when you're born that the government funds into trust accounts. Thomas Paine actually came up with this idea proposing a "national fund" to give every citizen a lump sum at age 21 to offset the privatization of land. Combining a Land Value Tax (LVT) with Baby Bonds is a powerful policy pairing that addresses economic inequality from two ends: preventing the hoarding of wealth at the source and providing seed capital to the next generation. The trusts will likely only come to fruition as a combination of govt bonds and privately managed portfolios, likely a hybrid model. It also allows the public and private sectors to contribute additional funds as rewards for actions families take and the individual children take: adding funds for civic volunteerism, participation in ROTC, scholastic achievement, etc.. the notion that your family and community and nation are invested in you helps create a sense of being valued by and feeling responsible to your family, community, and nation. Baby bonds already have wide bipartison support from both liberal and conservative backgrounds. For example Democratic Senator Booker American Opportunity accounts and currently Trump accounts.

• Funding Source: An LVT inherently captures the unearned increment of land value (the "community-created" value of location). This makes it an ideal, non-distortionary revenue stream to directly fund the public accounts for newborns without raising taxes on labor or improvements.
• Wealth Accumulation: Baby bonds function as publicly-funded trust accounts. When children reach adulthood, this "start-up capital" can be used for generational wealth-building assets such as higher education, homeownership, or small business ventures.
• Systemic Impact: Together, they prevent monopolies from inflating real estate prices while ensuring that youth from low-wealth backgrounds are not priced out of the economy, helping to aggressively close the racial wealth gap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset-based_egalitarianism

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/baby-bonds-and-wealth-inequality-4685973?utm_campaign=23836838133-&utm_source=googleawpaid&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=&utm_term=x-&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23836841256&gbraid=0AAAAAoYxJq1CKv5G521ZKMEpVGanwhi1_&gclid=CjwKCAjw0o3SBhBVEiwAh28-jYcgLhvy0F9qXsfUCttBlC2aCEU_Rw8rxkE9Nsz3GjH-YoqbXflv8xoCz9kQAvD_BwE

Quick concession up front, because this is the one room where I don't have to argue for it: the dollar loses value by design. A dollar saved in 2000 buys about 54 cents now. Fractional-reserve banks create money as debt, a discretionary central bank manages the price of credit, and the result is a slow, deliberate transfer away from anyone who holds the currency. You already know this. It's the disease, not a side effect.

So, I'll skip selling you the problem and go straight to the part you'll want to fight. I've built a worked-out alternative, and I'm posting it here because this is the room most likely to find where it breaks.

Here's what should interest you before you write it off as statist fiat. Banks can't create money by lending. Transaction accounts are fully reserved, and credit is intermediation of money that already exists, not new money conjured at the keystroke. Issuance is bound by a fixed rule tied to real growth, not a committee's discretion, closer to a monetary constitution than to a Fed meeting. And there's no interest-rate channel at all: rates are set by the market, not steered by a central authority. Full reserve, rules over discretion, no policy rate. Those are your priors, not the Fed's.

The setting I think is actually interesting for this room is the deflationary one. There the supply grows slower than real output by rule, so the price level drifts down close to 2% a year and every dollar you hold quietly gains purchasing power, not because a committee chose to be virtuous but because the rule won't let it do otherwise. That's the benign, productivity-driven deflation, not a frozen economy, and it's fixed constitutionally rather than left to anyone's judgment. It's also only one of the configurations the architecture allows, not the whole of it.

Now the parts you'll want to attack, said plainly, because they're the real fight.

First: the money is still issued by a public authority. It's sovereign. Not gold, not competing currencies, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The claim is narrower than "this is sound money." It's that a full-reserve, rule-bound, growth-tied issuance strips out the discretion and the debasement that make fiat rotten, without the supply rigidity of a metal standard. Whether that's enough, or whether sovereign issuance is rotten root-and-branch regardless of the rule, is exactly what I want argued.

Second, and this is the sharpest blade I can hand you: in the floor-building configurations the new money doesn't drop from a helicopter. It buys broad-market equity, which makes the issuer a large, price-insensitive buyer of stocks. I model the effect as a bounded valuation premium rather than a runaway one, because the buyer turns into a net seller as the population ages and firms issue more equity into the bid. But "bounded" is a claim, not a law, and a permanent sovereign bid under the whole index is precisely the kind of capital-market distortion this sub is right to be suspicious of. If it breaks anywhere, my money's on here. Tell me why the premium doesn't stay bounded.

And before someone says "just don't have the state buy stocks": you can configure it that way. There's a pure-dividend setting that buys no index at all. But that doesn't make the distortion vanish, it moves where it lands. The new money then goes into the goods circuit as a direct dividend instead of into equities. The framework's claim is that this stays goods-price-neutral as long as the dividend is capped by the same growth-matched budget, on the logic that it hands citizens a claim on real output the economy actually produced rather than new demand against a fixed supply. Push it past that budget and it becomes inflation by design, which is exactly how you select the inflation mode. So, the second target is that neutrality claim itself: is a dividend tied to real growth really non-inflationary, or does money handed to consumers bid up prices no matter what you tie it to? Pick whichever you think is the weaker link, the asset-price premium or the goods-price neutrality and aim there.

The redistribution piece, a per-person wealth floor some of you will object to on principle, is downstream of the monetary rule and separable from it. The issuance can be configured without it. Argue it if you like, but it isn't the load-bearing claim. The load-bearing claim is the money itself: can a discretion-free, full-reserve, growth-pinned issuance hold its value, or does it fail in a way I haven't modeled?

Fourteen papers, a macro model, and an interactive engine you can run in your browser, all built to be attacked rather than believed. The transactional-money claim it rests on now has two independent constructions that converge on the data, with full replication code, so there's something concrete to break, not just an assertion. If it's just fiat with extra steps, this is the room that will prove it.

Front door with all papers & replications: https://neo-solon.github.io/Citizens-Standard/front_door.html

MLK knew the coalition that could actually change things. https://youtu.be/CnH0EImqZVQ?t=512