John Coble
Nov 4 · 2 min read

It is common sense that an increase in the minimum wage will cause price inflation but…

Mitigating price inflation can be done in a few ways:

  1. The indexing based on the local cost of living that I mention in the story,
  2. Supplemental income such as an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit which would not increase the wage cost for the business owners; I mentioned this in the story,
  3. Phasing the new minimum wage in over four to five years. I did not mention this in the story, but it would be necessary in order to avoid inflation. By allowing the minimum wage to create more demand slowly, the prices will go up and then drop again due to competition. The following year, the minimum wage would again be raised incrementally and again, there would be time for market adjustments. The point is when done slowly, demand will increase before prices increase and as a result, increased accounting profits will lead to price competition driving prices back down. The wage increase only increases one variable cost. The other variable costs and fixed costs will remain static. Prices will adjust. 2% inflation is the target that we want. Markets are too complicated to hit the target perfectly though.

Gees, blockchain-based-basic-income is a new one for me. The basic income aspect is similar to the supplemental income I built into my minimum wage proposal.

As for now, blockchain has a serious problem. I studied blockchain closely a few years ago. My favorite was Etherium. I even studied the Solidity language a little. To me, the distributive ledger/database seemed more like a Napster type peer to peer system. I get the superiority of the distributive system. My problem is with the encryption. My understanding is that Quantum Computing will blow away any cryptography we currently have. Quantum Computing is ahead of schedule. I have even seen one story about a hybrid quantum/classical chip that could be put into a notebook computer (no need for liquid helium). My guess is, blockchain will not be a serious money system until it can incorporate quantum cryptography. Mannn, there is just too little time — I have been wanting to look at Microsoft’s Q# forever now.

John Coble

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I am just your average everyday lawyer/coder/accountant/data scientist/blogger with a left-wing tilt. https://ko-fi.com/johncoble

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