341
Modern Monetary Theory: Musk Edition
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
341 points (98.9% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
41022 readers
3671 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
No. That would be achievable through reallocation of funds, e.g. from tax revenue. If the quote is correct, that's just increasing monetary mass, aka printing money. Which is Inflationary AF.
That being said, I find it hard to believe that a CEO in this day and age wouldn't have at least this basic understanding of how the economy works. This being Musk, there's no need to invent extra character flaws. The man has plenty to go around.
A cynical view is that he does understand and is just shitposting and muddying the water around UBI
I find that quite plausible.
Being a CEO is an actual disease that causes measurable cognitive decline. These are literally the dumbest fucks on the planet.
Its a cover. Saying populist ideas without any intention to support them or help them come about is just a way to hide his real actions under a veneer.
Well, the text says "you could actually get deflation because there will be so much abundance produced". There is some reality where this is true, as increasing the monetary mass would do nothing if the economy (the amount of goods and services produces) increases proportionally. But I wouldn't bet on a universal basic income increasing the country's production.
Also, only the rich and upper-middle class would suffer from inflation. Poor people's financial situation would still improve.
The printing money wouldn't be enough. You'd also have to legislate what people are not allowed to do after the money printing begins (like rent hikes equal to the average household size * the ubi check).
Which you already have to do, because there already is inflation. I don't see how a UBI would change anything if the inflation stays the same.
The only way this makes sense, and I guarantee he’s not advocating for this, would be to print and distribute so much money to the lower and middle classes that the upper class wealth is diluted and inequality is reduced. But the havoc that would wreak outside of the US is something I can’t even speculate on.
But even that wouldn't do a thing to them - their value isn't stored in money, so any inflation would only hurt the people who's value is.
How do you get UBI without issuing checks from the Treasury. There isn't enough tax money that can be taken from Billionaires to sustain UBI.
Not just tax a percentage, but take every penny of every Billionaire in the US. Net worth of all US billionaires is 8.4 Trillion.
270 million US adults.
= 31k per person. Once.
That's 31k one time. Then there is no money for next year.
The productive capacity of the accumulated capital owned by US billionaires exceeds $31k/person/year.
The "Net Worth" figure is deceptive, because it's the exchange value and not the use value. Sitting on tens of millions of vacant real estate units, many of which are underwater on their purchase price, shows up as far less on an individual balance sheet than the material benefit of not being homeless accrues to a homeowner.
If that was true then taking all their capital and distributing it would be more than $31k/person/year for each individual receiving their share of the 8.4 Trillion.
Yup.
So it doesn't change anything. You get $30k and yes that $30k is worth more because it can generate maybe $3k in investment income for you a year. It's still only $30k.
It does, in fact, change things
Nobody said it had to be over $2500/month?
Minimum wage in many US cities is $15/hr which is $30k/year.
Even at federal minimum wage of $7.50, that means not just taxing Billionaires at 100% but taking everything will give you 2 years of UBI before there is no money.
So? UBI isn’t a wage for work. It could be $300/month and that would still be a huge boon to struggling people.
The UBI baseline is supposed to be $12000 per year. The premise is it covers food and shelter.
So why did you inflate it to nearly 3x that amount while arguing about how it can’t work because it’s too expensive? $1000/month is still a lot of money for people.
Because baseline food and shelter is much more expensive in many cities where 80% of the population lives. That's why minimum wage is $30k in major cities.
But again, this isn’t a wage… people can still make extra money on top of UBI. The goal isn’t to make nobody ever work again. Why pretend you can’t do it because it doesn’t translate to fully automatic luxury gay space communism?