Bureaucrats and politicians deciding what kinds of jobs and who gets them? Really?

The extent of the federal control would be in setting regional wage rates and computing the total credit given to the state or local government determined by the number of participants and managers. The one thing the federal government does well is paying for stuff.

In San Francisco, the deadbeat alcoholic is forced into some broom pushing job and then paid $85k/year?

If $85k is the minimum suitable wage for the area to be considered “livable”, then how can anyone justify paying any less? I think, however, that your use of extremes is a reach. Be careful of the wage envy though, as the program’s wage and benefit package would become the floor for private sector employers.

The economy is way to complex to be managed by some over-paid schlubs in DC who are too insulated from the effects of their actions and only concerned about what looks/sounds good and keeps them in power.

I would remind you that the current method of controlling the economy involves those schlubs creating a “pool” of a specified percentage of workers made involuntarily unemployed by increased interest rates and paying them far less than anything resembling livable, with most of the burden for that falling on states, present employees and their employers, none of whom have the power to create money on demand. Being counter-cyclical to the job market the added creation of dollars at the federal level wouldn’t be inflationary as a UBI/VAT would.

This one has to be thought through very, very carefully. Even then, it might just be a fiscal bomb that brings down the whole house, one already balanced on a crumbing foundation of $21 TRILLION in debt.

I can guarantee that this has been thought through by much sharper minds than those who conjured up UBI. The first thing to do if considering any such spending is to lose your concept of the national debt. Without a gold reserve to defend the debt is nothing more than an accounting entity at Treasury that tracks the total dollars in the economy. It is quite simple really. Dollars are created out of thin air for “all” federal spending in the private sector, and an opposite entry is made in the government sector to balance those. Whenever a dollar moves from the private sector to the government sector it is balanced/canceled by that debt entry. This means that the debt is just all dollars created by Congress over time that haven’t been used to pay a federal tax obligation.

This also means that a balanced budget, the holy grail of politicians, is a 100% tax rate that leaves nothing in the economy to act as a store of value in commerce or retire private debt without incurring more debt. It basically steals the resources used by the federal government by clawing back all payments to the private sector. If the government doesn’t spend in large enough deficits to compensate for wealth accumulation and trade deficits the total money supply shrinks. The red ink of the federal government is the only “net” source of black ink the private sector has after private bank debt is balanced. Deficits can be too big, or too small, but they almost never can be zero or negative for any length of time without causing recession/depression.

This is verified by the fact that the only seven times we’ve done it, the last being Clinton’s surplus budgets, have resulted in almost immediate recession as the private sector is forced to leverage its private debt to unsustainable level with no means to retire that debt. No deficit also means no Treasury bonds, which pushes investors into alternative investments, such as the mortgage bond market. Many quite sharp economists I know attribute the ’08 crash to Clinton for this reason.

Much of the confusion surrounding the deficit/debt is due to a policy of issuing Treasury bonds to match any deficit spending. We should stop that as the federal government can’t “borrow” its own currency, even if it needed to, without first creating it to be available to lend. The propaganda value of something labeled “debt” and paying interest is not something many politicians can pass on, even if they know the truth. Treasury bonds serve no purpose in funding our government’s spending and only serve to set interest rates above zero and provide welfare for banks and the wealthy.

The US dollar is self-funding via the monopoly patent given Congress by the Constitution. Our government can “afford” anything priced in dollars that is for sale and can never involuntarily default on any obligation denominated in dollars. Most of what you know about money and its creation is false, obvious from your debt comment. The budget and spending process of the monopoly issuer of the currency is nothing like, and most often opposite, your household budget.

Is $22 Trillion too much money to have in the US economy, including all savings/wealth? We can, and should, have that conversation. However, that will only be productive if approached from the perspective of our reality, not myths from the gold standard or propaganda to keep us from demanding nice things like other governments provide their citizens.