Bots, Billionaires and Basic Income
One of the big buzzwords of 2026 is pretty sure to be ‘affordability’. What with Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in the New York mayoral election, the emergence of the Working Families party into the US political mainstream, and President Trump’s claim during a cabinet meeting in December 2025 that the affordability crisis is “a con job created by the Democrats”, the issue is here for real.[1]
Job-security is another emerging buzzword. If I lose my job to a bot, what will I do for money?
Although some voters continue to support the current administration’s actions on immigration and international trade, this support reveals a deep unease about their perceived stability of employment.[2] Voters’ attention on immigration and tariffs might be misplaced but the anxiety about a reliable income is tangible. As Steven Greenhouse reports, people’s fears about the rise of artificial intelligence do not revolve around an emerging bubble in the financial markets but whether they themselves will be replaced by a bot, becoming part of a vast new jobless underclass.
Ironic, isn’t it, that it’s not the immigrants who are stealing your jobs but instead the very AI that Trump’s billionaire tech bro buddies are pushing upon society. At least if illegal immigrants are expelled from the country, a whole new class of AI-immune jobs should open up for recent university grads, such as picking crops in the fields or banging nails into wood to build houses. Enjoy your great, new America!
With that, the third big buzzword for 2026 has to be billionaires.
Perhaps feeling guilty about putting Harvard grads into the fields or up a ladder, some tech executives have called for a universal basic income of some kind. “Unfortunately,” Greenhouse adds, “most UBI proposals would give an inadequate amount, perhaps $12,000 a year, to those most in need, while giving that same amount to tens of millions who are working and don’t need it.” These include the very same AI billionaires who, Greenhouse argues, should instead be taxed to fund a better social safety net: more generous unemployment insurance, universal health coverage and retraining programs.[3]
Mitt Romney concurs. “Tax the rich, like me,” he urged in a recent New York Times op-ed. It is perhaps a measure of the current state of affairs that this self-professed rich guy, Obama’s arch-conservative opponent in the 2012 presidential election, is now calling for higher taxes on the wealthy to avert a looming welfare disaster, namely, the drying up of Social Security funds in the 2030s. “We have reached a point,” he writes, “where any mix of solutions to our nation’s economic problems is going to involve having the wealthiest Americans contribute more.”
The “more” that Romney envisions is not so much higher rates of income tax, which he fears will slow economic growth, but a tightening of the rules around capital gains, carried interest, and state and local tax deductions.[4] There’s no doubt that these measures would bring in much-needed tax revenue, but they convey a sense of fiddling around the edges and a reluctance to tackle the problem head-on. They also assume that Congress would actually use the money to replenish the Social Security trust fund, which is not a safe assumption.
Equally, other more sweeping tax measures, such as an income tax that scales with billionaires’ overall wealth, risk of not being predicated to welfare programs for those most in need. And, as Gabriel Zucman, one of the authors of this idea, points out, billionaires are slippery fish, able to move money from one jurisdiction to another or hide behind tax-exempt institutions.[5]
The scale of the wealth, writes Michael Hirschorn, “beggars even the riches of the Gilded Age.” Little wonder that what was once admiration for the achievements of billionaires—particularly tech ones, particularly in America—has now soured to resentment among many. Anti-billionaire messaging continues to gain political traction. Zohran Mamdani thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist at all, and a majority of Americans seem to agree, according to recent polls.
Hirschorn traces a parallel with the of France Louis XV: “The preconditions [for revolution] were all there: suffocating top-down control of the media, rapid technological change, let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, weaponized religious bigotry, mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms…” all of these capped, like a cherry on top, with King Louis’ penchant for teenage girls. Plus ça change, mes amis. Reverence turned to mockery, as Hirschorn writes, and mockery begot contempt.
So here we are in a world where billionaires are paying a lower aggregate rate of income tax than the bottom 50 percent; the AI boom from which many of them are further enriching themselves has working people antsy about losing their jobs; even for those with a job, what was once the ‘American dream’ of an affordable house and a car in the driveway is now out of reach; and an already frayed social safety net is about to completely unravel. Oh, and most of the billionaires themselves, including the one in the White House, are serenely out of touch with these realities. “A revolt against self-dealing elites may be the only cause compelling enough to bring us together,” suggests Hirschorn.[6]
Since all these issues are interrelated, the revolt can be avoided, but it necessitates an ability on the part of lawmakers to take a step back and think creatively. The ideas that follow draw in part from my 2020 book, A Planetary Economy. But before jumping in, I need to offer a little conceptual background from its 2019 predecessor, Economics of a Crowded Planet.
That book describes an economics one might develop if starting with a blank sheet of paper, knowing what we know today about the relationship between the human economy and planet Earth. It is, naturally, a ‘planetarian’ economics, which subjects the workings of the market to a ‘prime directive’ (to borrow a phrase from Star Trek) of enhancing nature’s capacity to support the economy. As such, it is goal-directed, or teleological, and thus utterly distinct from the neoclassical paradigm, which imagines an idealized, unguided market within a world where resources are practically unlimited. The neoclassical model might have served as an approximation to a pre-industrial world, but by the time Milton Friedman and others first outlined it in the 1950s, it was already obsolete.
Crucially, the prime directive of enhancing natural capacity cannot be achieved without also enhancing the ability of the economy to support its people. If you can’t make ends meet even when employed, and you’re worried about losing your job to a bot, and there’s no social safety net, of course the state of Earth’s natural systems are not exactly going to be foremost in your mind. In a sense, then, the ‘primary’ directive today is to ensure that everybody in the economy becomes able to participate in a program of material discipline, lessening the economy’s material burden upon nature—and the only way that’s going to happen is once everybody has a solid foundation of income and well-being.
Conventional economic theory has long been mocked for its ‘physics envy’—its tendency to think of the economy as a mechanical system subject to Euclidean mathematics. In reality, markets are permanently far from equilibrium, similar in that sense to ecological communities. Both have certain self-organizing properties that confer high thermodynamic potential and, with it, a degree of stochastic unpredictability. But there is one physical law that has an analogue in economics, which is the law of conservation of energy. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s brilliant 1971 book, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, first made this connection. It follows naturally that energy has economic value, so where the law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only moved around, so Economics of a Crowded Planet proposes a principle of conservation of value, which says the same thing for measures of value within the economy.
These include, among other things, money. Granted, money can be created and destroyed, but that creation and destruction actually represents a conversion with other forms of economic value, whether tangible ones, such as gold or artifacts, or intangible ones, such as goodwill or reciprocity.[7]
Conventional wisdom states that the money supply must be constrained to preserve its scarcity, and therefore value. Addressing the Social Security cliff, Mitt Romney argues that while the government could print more money, this would induce “hyperinflation that devalues the national debt—along with your savings.” The alternative would be for the government to borrow the necessary funds from commercial banks. Yet “when lenders refuse to provide the money, unless they are paid much higher interest rates, economic calamity will almost certainly ensue.”[8]
This argument reveals something unusual about commercial banking and its relationship to government. When a government needs funds, it ordinarily doesn’t just print new money. It borrows money from commercial banks, using its goodwill as collateral. Banks lend to governments because, for the most part, they view them as trustworthy borrowers. It is the banks, then, who create new money out of nothing, employing a convention known as fractional-reserve banking. The logic of fractional-reserve banking is based on actuarial risk: on any given day, it is highly unlikely that all of a bank’s depositors would seek to withdraw their deposits at once. So the bank can lend against those deposits to the tune of multiples of their value, confident in the knowledge that they will not be caught short.
Of course, it doesn’t always work as hoped, which is why, when available goodwill is exceeded, a run on the banks and a crash in the financial markets can ensue, such as happened in 2008.
Advocates of sovereign money creation argue that market bubbles, such as the subprime mortgage bubble of the 2000s and the AI bubble that could be emerging today, would be avoided if the government simply created its own money, as governments did for hundreds of years before the first commercial banks emerged during the Renaissance. New money placed into circulation by government would be put directly into the hands of people as a form of basic income, to be spent on goods and services, thereby stimulating demand, creating jobs, and feeding the production-consumption cycle. New money also could be invested directly into enterprises, to stimulate their capacity to deliver goods and services; and in this regard, a prime directive of enhancing natural capacity could apply, thereby helping to steer markets in a planetarian direction.
Any tendency toward price-inflation would be dampened through higher rates of income tax. Those rates could happily fall on rich people like Mitt Romney, without significantly affecting their standards of living. Provided the system were correctly tuned, the total amount of money in circulation would not vary much.
The financial markets would become much less volatile as a result and would cease to dominate the real economy. Unemployment among superannuated financial traders would spike, until they found something else useful to do. Commercial banks would revert to their core business of holding deposits and lending against the actual value of those deposits. Fractional-reserve banking would become a thing of the past.[9] The likelihood of an AI stock bubble would be diminished, as would its effects.
It wouldn’t matter if the same amount of basic income were paid to everybody because all except the wealthy would notice the difference it made. In economic parlance, the ‘marginal utility’ of basic income, even at the level of $1000 per month, would be significant for a majority of the population, as Social Security is today.[10] A family of four, with two parents trying to hold down two precarious jobs, would suddenly find themselves $4000 per month better off—a windfall! Imagine the relief. Life’s necessities would become affordable again. Even a starter home might be within reach after a while.
The wealthy, if they wanted to exercise good karma, could donate their basic income to charity. Billionaires would be fewer in number and less obscenely wealthy at the upper end, for the simple reason that much of their apparent wealth is illiquid, tied up as it is in corporate stock.
Nonetheless, billionaires would still exist. A great deal of literature in economics revolves around the questions of income and wealth distribution: how wide or narrow should the wealth gap be? There is no correct answer here, although a convincing argument can be made that anyone with more than $1 billion in liquid assets probably doesn’t need the extra money; and if there really is only so much money to go around in aggregate, then the marginal utility of that excess income to families on the breadline justifies a distribution to them. The money also is more likely to be spent by low-income families than if it were secreted in a billionaire’s offshore account, precisely because of its utility to them. This spending would deliver beneficial stimulative effects to the economy at large.
A planetarian economy is at once an economy in material alignment with nature—that is, materially efficient by minimizing inflows and outflows—and broadly prosperous, in terms of people’s financial ability to support the purchase of goods and services derived from high material circulation within it. Planetarian prosperity is supported not by a social safety net, most of which is holes, but instead by a concrete floor. No-one can fall though. However, it is not limited to income: A Planetary Economy outlines a basic living program which includes other essentials, such as healthcare, family care, education and even housing support.
It might all sound very socialist (as if that were disparaging) but in the present gilded age, as in the 1920s, we are beginning to witness significant pushback against the billionaire class and the idolization of wealth in general. There is already, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, a general sense that we’re all in this together, and the billionaires are no more immune from global catastrophe than the rest of us, no matter how sophisticated their bunkers on remote islands might be. I expect this sentiment to only grow as the century unfolds.
This is the reason for advocating big-picture thinking and creativity among lawmakers. If the Working Families party in the United States begins to peel voters away both from the Democrats and the Republicans—given its appeal to disaffected working people, is likely—then a whole cohort of lawmakers at all levels of government are going to have to think very creatively very quickly.
Here are some suggestions.
As the top priority, government should institute a basic living program for all. A variety of means exist to fund it, of which sovereign money creation is only one. A Planetary Economy describes others, such as common capacity fees. These are fees paid by corporations for the use of commonly-owned capacity. This capacity may take the form of natural capacity—the air, watersheds, oceans, biota—or artificial capacity, such as the internet, utilities, the financial system, transportation networks, the electromagnetic spectrum. The fees are small on a per-unit basis, so that they do not place corporations under significant burdens, but the potential revenues in the aggregate run into the trillions of dollars per year: sufficient to fund most or all of a basic living program. Corporations could be rendered indifferent to the fees by concomitant reductions in corporate taxes; although, as Zucman points out, corporate income taxes have been steadily declining anyway over the past forty years.[11]
The key feature of this scheme, which was the brainchild of Peter Barnes, is that, unlike income taxes, the fees would be predicated—that is, the revenue generated from them would flow not into the exchequer but into a trust established by government legislation, and independently administered, analogous to most central banks.[12] This ‘basic living trust’, if we could call it that, would disburse income in equal parcels to every eligible adult and child within the national jurisdiction. Some of the trust’s revenue could also guarantee free healthcare at the point of consumption, generous funding for family care and public schools, including a much-needed raise for teachers, and possibly also a housing-support program for low-income families.
In an alternate form of the scheme, some or all of the funds due to minors could be held in trust until they turn eighteen, at which point they would be eligible not only for their own basic income but also for the income accumulated during their childhood. Imagine starting out life with what is essentially a kind of pension, rather than having to wait until old age for it. The amount might not be enough to cover all of one’s expenses but, in a way, that is the point. It would represent a safe platform from which to make the most of one’s early adulthood. The social effects would be far-reaching.
Notably, a basic living program could be established without having to alter the income tax structure. By predicating the program, it might be possible to allow Social Security to assume a lesser role, or perhaps eventually be phased out, provided that the establishment of the basic living trust were ironclad and immune from executive meddling; and also that the basic income were at least equal to the Social Security it replaced, including cost-of-living adjustments. In the US, the whole health insurance system, including Obamacare, would be rendered obsolete.
If sovereign money creation were not used to fund part or all of a basic living program, perhaps because of concerns about inflation, then a question about how to disentangle the currency from commercial banking would remain. This would be the second priority. The currency is another form of common capacity. It is neither the property nor the responsibility of commercial banks but actually belongs to the people via their elected representatives. By not reclaiming control over the currency, elected representatives are violating a fiduciary duty to those they represent. If money is sovereign then the government should take away commercial banks’ ability to create new money through such tricks as fractional-reserve banking.
The effects of such reform would be legion. Some of them are addressed in A Planetary Economy. Suffice to say that, within the present context, the vast inflations of paper wealth populating today’s financial markets would evaporate, leaving behind only tangible wealth.
If government instituted a basic living program along with banking reform then, within this new world, would billionaires still exist? Most likely yes. Should they be allowed to? One could argue it both ways. After all, a basic living program places no upper bound on material wealth, it only establishes a concrete floor as a basis for widespread prosperity.
In theory, governments could tax all liquid assets above $1 billion at 100 percent. Illiquid assets above $1 billion in value also could be taxed, as Zucman suggests. In A Planetary Economy, I explore the effects of a progressive income tax for narrowing the wealth gap, without dialing the top tax rate all the way up to 100%. The rationale is that if a basic living scheme is delivering as intended then perhaps not much is gained by abolishing billionaires altogether. In a planetarian economy, it would just become incredibly difficult to reach the billionaire level.
The book also explores a novel concept of elective redistribution. It is inspired by the idea of predicating revenues for specific programs. Today, all the income taxes we pay go sloshing into the exchequer, to be allocated according to the whims of the legislature. In theory, the lawmakers making budget appropriations should represent the preferences of the people who elect them, but in reality, lawmakers’ heads are continually turned by billionaire money—leaving voters abandoned and unheard.
Under an elective redistribution scheme, a taxpayer can allocate a portion of what they owe as income tax to programs or causes they support. As with common capacity fees, the system would be administered by a trust, firewalled from the exchequer. Let’s say for illustration that up to 50 percent of filer’s income tax could be directed this way. They would create an account with the trust and would choose from a wide variety of causes to which to donate portions of this money. A filer could choose not only from government programs but also from among numerous private charities, who would apply to become members of the scheme and would be vetted by the trust.
A conservative Christian taxpayer might allocate pre-tax income to church causes, whereas a liberal, secular taxpayer might support LGBTQ charities. Both might support international charities or conservation programs for their specific reasons. Whatever their preferences, a taxpayer would feel able to exert a degree of control over where and how some of their pre-tax income were spent. At the same time, the exchequer would continue to receive general tax income for essential government programs.
A third legislative priority would be to sever billionaires’ political influence by overturning the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Eliminating ‘dark money’ from politics has broad popular support for reasons of fairness, but even just enacting the two main legislative priorities—basic living and banking reform—would dramatically reduce the influence of dark money, much of which today is leveraged from paper wealth in the financial markets.
These three actions, if taken, would transform society from its present state of humiliating inequality, chronic anxiety and growing instability into one of relative peace and tranquility. Working people of all political stripes would no longer be at each another’s throats about economic issues, nor their perceived causes. Resentment at the billionaire class would mostly die away because the billionaire class itself would become vestigial. Certain cultural hot-button issues would persist, and questions of immigration and immigrants’ rights would linger, but a less anxious, more prosperous electorate surely would find itself less divided and more inclined to converse.
The only way these legislative priorities could be enacted in the first place, as I see it, is by a Congress comprising several political parties. If the Working Families party succeeds in pushing open the door then others will follow through it. And in a multi-party Congress, as I argue elsewhere,[13] voters hot under the collar about cultural issues or immigration at least will feel there’s someone in Washington speaking for them.
A reckoning among the people, the bots and the billionaires may be coming. If it were resolved peacefully along the lines above then a basis of prosperity would be established to tackle the long-term prime directive of aligning the economy and society with nature. That is the full planetarian vision which, like much Indigenous philosophy, recognizes human society as within nature. If changes are made to ensure that the economy has the capacity to support its people—all of them, not merely billionaire investors in AI—then the conditions would be established for the economy to begin to regenerate natural capacity, which in turn would support the economy and society for centuries to come.
Works cited
Abebe, N. (2025) People can’t stop saying ‘affordability.’ But it wasn’t always popular. New York Times, Dec. 18, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/magazine/affordability-economy.html.
Barnes, P. (2014) With Liberty and Dividends for All. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, CA.
Fisher, I. (1936) 100% money and the public debt. Economic Forum, Spring Number, April–June: 406–420.
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press.
Greenhouse, S. (2025) Most people aren’t fretting about an AI bubble. What they fear is mass layoffs. The Guardian, 12 Dec 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/12/ai-bubble-mass-layoffs-income-inequality.
Hirschorn, M. (2025) The billionaires have gone full Louis XV. New York Times, Dec. 14, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/opinion/billionaires-politics-money.html.
Huber, J. and J. Robertson (2000) Creating New Money: A Monetary Reform for the Information Age. Report of the New Economics Foundation, London.
Jackson, A. and B. Dyson (2013) Sovereign Money. Positive Money, London.
Leingang, R. (2025) Working Families bet on 2026 as the right time for a third US party after a wave of wins. The Guardian, 29 Dec 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/29/working-families-party-2026-run.
Levitin, A. J. (2016) Safe banking: finance and democracy. University of Chicago Law Review, 83(1): 357–455.
Mellor, M. (2016) Debt or Democracy: Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice. Pluto Press, London.
Murison Smith, F.D. (2019) Economics of a Crowded Planet. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-31798-0.
Murison Smith, F.D. (2020) A Planetary Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-49296-0.
Murison Smith, F.D. (2022) How to ensure the United States never falls prey to the ‘tyranny of the minority’. Dispatches From a Crowded Planet, Oct. 27, 2022. https://fdms.substack.com/p/how-to-ensure-the-united-states-never.
New York Times reporters (2025) 11 voters on Trump’s first year. New York Times, Dec. 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/us/politics/trump-first-year-voter-voices.html.
Romney, M. (2025) Tax the rich, like me. New York Times, Dec. 19, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/opinion/romney-tax-the-rich.html.
Sommer, J. (2025) Americans’ most valuable asset isn’t stocks or a home. It’s Social Security. New York Times, Sept. 5, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/business/social-security-wealth-benefits.html.
Wolf, M. (2014) Strip private banks of their power to create money. Financial Times, 24 April 2014.
Zucman, G. (2024)It’s time to tax the billionaires.New York Times, May 3, 2024.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/global-billionaires-tax.html.
[1] Leingang (2025); Abebe (2025).
[2] New York Times reporters (2025).
[3] Greenhouse (2025).
[4] Romney (2025).
[5] Zucman (2024).
[6] Hirschorn (2025).
[7] Murison Smith (2019) p. 333.
[8] Romney (2025).
[9] Various flavors of this idea have been proposed. Irving Fisher was the first to suggest something along these lines in 1936. The idea was picked up by a variety of authors in the early years of this century. See, for example, Warburton (1999), Huber and Robertson (2000), Jackson and Dyson (2013), Wolf (2014), Striner (2015), Levitin (2016) and Mellor (2016).
[10] Sommer (2025).
[11] Zucman (2025).
[12] Barnes (2014).
[13] Murison Smith (2022).