How does America pay for a $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill? With two shiny coins, this lawmaker argues:
If the government wants money, why doesn’t it just—poof!—make the money? In this case, the $2 trillion would fund prepaid debit cards for “every person in America,” as Rep. Tlaib’s so-called Automatic BOOST to Communities Act says. The cards would come loaded with $2,000 and be topped up with another $1,000 every month until a year after the end of the crisis. Problem solved, right? [link to fortune.com (secure)]

Automatic BOOST to Communities Act:
IV. Funding the Program
a. This Automatic BOOST to Communities Act would be a money-financed fiscal program for which no additional U.S. debt would be issued.
b. Instead, the program would be funded directly from the Treasury, using its legal authority to create money via coin seigniorage, which is a statutory delegation of Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.
c. The mechanics of this funding approach would be as follows:
• The Treasury Secretary would direct the U.S. Mint to issue two $1 trillion platinum coins, under the legal authority provided by 31 U.S.C. § 5112(k).
• Congress would direct the Federal Reserve to purchase the newly issued coins at full face value.
• The Federal Reserve would complete the purchase by crediting the U.S. Mint’s account at the Fed with $2 trillion in reserves.
• The Fed would retain ownership over the two $1 trillion coins permanently in order to ensure its own balance sheet remains fully capitalized by the Treasury.
• The Treasury Secretary would “sweep” the newly created reserve funds from the Mint’s account into the regular Treasury General Account.
• The Treasury would make the funds available to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service to disperse to every person in America in the form of pre-paid U.S. Debit Cards.
d. This approach would preserve the historical separation between fiscal and monetary policy and avoid financial entanglement between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve which would eventually undermine the independence of the Fed.

In the long term, the card infrastructure should be converted into a permanent, Treasury- administered digital public currency wallet system, to serve as a privacy-respecting “eCash” complement to universal Fed Accounts and/or Postal Bank Accounts for All. This proposal should be accompanied by progressive tax reform to ensure that emergency relief provisioning does not exacerbate income or wealth inequality in the long-term.
[link to tlaib.house.gov (secure)]