THE ABUNDANCE PARADIGM: WHY AI FORCES A RETHINKING OF MONEY ITSELF — PART 1
By Ellen Brown on May 11, 2026
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has long been proposed as a way to cushion the blow of jobs lost to automation. Under that model, everyone receives a modest monthly payment – enough to cover basic needs and prevent extreme poverty.
But Elon Musk has gone further. On April 16, he posted on X:
Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.
Rather than a subsistence stipend, Universal High Income (UHI) would be a level of income allowing ordinary people to live well in a world where machines do most of the work. Musk has also said that AI and robotics are the only things that can solve the massive U.S. debt crisis.
That sounds promising, but where will the government get the money to pay the UHI? Critics say any government that tried it would go bankrupt. There are also other concerns, which will be addressed in Part 2 of this article. Here we will look at the financial underpinnings: why UHI is even thinkable, why AI forces a reexamination of how money enters the economy, why the current system cannot scale to meet what is coming, and the implicit transition needed to meet that challenge.
Why the Current Money System Cannot Scale
The national debt of the U.S. government just topped $39 trillion. China’s is $18.7 trillion. Japan’s is $8.6 trillion. Those of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are each in the multi-trillion-dollar range. Collective global debt now stands at $353 trillion, 305% of the world’s annual economic output. So even if, hypothetically, everything produced in the world in a year were applied toward liquidating the debt, it still would not be enough to pay it all off.
In fact the debt can never be repaid, because of the way money currently enters the system. Nearly all of the money supply today is created by banks when they make loans. Banks do not lend their existing capital. The loan itself creates the money. The bank adds the loan amount to the asset side of its balance sheet and balances that sum with the same amount on the liability side. When the borrower withdraws or transfers the funds, either the bank takes them from its reserves in “vault cash” or the Federal Reserve debits the bank’s digital reserve account at the central bank. But the lending bank typically has funds coming into its reserve account at about the same rate as they are going out, so its reserves are continually replenished. Thus a very small reserve account can support a much larger money creation engine. For decades before the Fed discontinued the reserve requirement in 2020, it hovered at around 10%.
The chief problem with this debt-based system is the interest, which the bank does not create in its original loan. For a typical long-term loan, interest can double the total tab or more. Where is the money to come from to pay this added liability? Across the system as a whole, it must either come from more borrowing or from existing funds. In the case of governments, that means issuing interest-bearing bonds or tapping taxes and other revenues. The interest on the debt compounds, meaning the government is paying interest on interest. This makes the debt increase exponentially, until it is mathematically unsustainable. Then bankruptcies occur, of banks or even whole governments. Booms turn into busts, and the cycle begins again.
Today, interest on the federal debt is the second largest budget line item after Social Security, exceeding $1 trillion. Meanwhile, workers are losing jobs to AI/robotics, shrinking the income tax base. The system is clearly unsustainable.
How to Raise Demand to Scale to the Upcoming Supply
A Universal High Income would replenish the shrinking tax base by replacing the lost wages of unemployed workers. But where will the money come from to pay the UHI? The only sustainable solution is for the government to issue it interest-free. That does not mean through the Federal Reserve, which creates money in the same way banks do: it buys federal interest-bearing securities with accounting entries. The Fed collects the interest, which it is supposed to return to the Treasury after deducting its costs. But since 2008, its costs include paying interest on the reserves of its participating banks, which consumes its profits. (See my earlier article here.)
The only interest-free, debt-free solution that will actually increase the money supply sufficiently to match the projected productivity of AI/robotics is for the money to be issued directly by the Treasury.
This is not a radical new idea. It is authorized in the U.S. Constitution, which provides in Article 1, Sec. 8, that “The Congress shall have Power To … coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof .…” Abraham Lincoln used government-issued “Greenbacks” to avoid a crippling debt to British-backed bankers. Debt-free government-issued money was also the funding mechanism by which the American colonists succeeded in creating a thriving economy and liberating themselves from the oppressive yoke of the British Empire.
In his 1729 pamphlet “A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency,” Benjamin Franklin argued that a lack of currency was a tax on industrious farmers and producers, and that a reliable, locally issued paper currency was the “oil” for the gears of trade. The “Nature and Necessity” of this currency was to facilitate the movement of goods between neighbors. Franklin observed that the British strategy of keeping the colonies short of cash was a method of economic suppression. By forcing the colonies to use gold and silver, which were constantly drained back to London to pay for imports, the Crown kept the colonies in a state of permanent debt and low productivity. When the money supply matched the productive capacity of the people, universal prosperity resulted without inflation.
This logic evolved into the “American System of Political Economy” championed by Henry Carey, economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln. He wrote:
Two systems are before the world… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. … One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.
In the context of the 21st century, the “oil” that best lowers the friction of trade is debt-free government-issued money similar to Lincoln’s Greenbacks and colonial scrip. Rather than implementing a radical financial innovation, we would be returning to our roots.
Inflation or Deflation?
The chief objection to the colonies’ paper “scrip” was that they tended to over-print, so that “demand” (money) outstripped supply. Too much money chasing too few goods produced price inflation. But in the 21st century, we will soon have the opposite problem: too little money chasing too many goods. Machines don’t need food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical treatment or other services. So who will buy those goods and services?
Money needs to be issued to human consumers, and not just to a few wealthy human consumers serving as debt brokers thriving on interest. To create sufficient demand for the voluminous output of AI/robotics, it needs to go to the whole national population, evenly distributed. Not only can UHI work in that sort of abundant supply without producing price inflation; it is actually essential to prevent deflation.
In a conversation on X, Musk wrote:
In a normal economy, issuing more money simply increases the dollar price of the existing output of goods & services, meaning people do NOT get more stuff. If AI/robotics massively increase goods & services output, then you actually MUST issue dollars to people or there will be massive disinflation.
As paraphrased on Yahoo Finance (reposted from Benzinga), Musk wrote that handing out more dollars becomes a problem only when the economy’s supply of goods and services fails to surge alongside the money supply. His claim is that AI and robotics could lift production so sharply that the bigger risk would be falling prices, not rising ones.
But aren’t falling prices a good thing? In this case, no. Prices would be falling due to a lack of demand, meaning producers can’t find customers for their products. They wind up laying off workers and eventually going bankrupt. When spread across the whole economy, the result is a deflationary spiral: prices fall, businesses lose revenue, and the economy contracts, not because production is inadequate but because purchasing power is insufficient. The result is recession or depression. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, food was rotting in the fields while people were starving, because they were out of work and had no money to spend.
Job cuts from AI are already happening. According to the same Benzinga article:
Evidence of near-term strain is showing up in corporate announcements: employers disclosed more than 27,000 job cuts linked to AI in the first quarter of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The outplacement firm said that figure was up 40% from the same period a year earlier.
Robert Reich reports that wages are around two-thirds of the typical corporation’s total cost, and that in the first four months of 2026, big U.S. corporations cut over 128,000 jobs.
How Soon Will All This Happen?
Another Benzinga article, reposted on Yahoo Finance on March 16, detailed Musk’s projected time frame:
Speaking remotely to the Abundance Summit last week, Musk told XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis that the global economy is on the verge of an explosion so massive it defies historical precedent.
“I’d say the economy is 10 times its current size in 10 years,” Musk said, before quickly clarifying that the growth could be even more explosive. “Greater than,” he added, framing the projected shift in economic output as a “fairly comfortable prediction.” …
Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, sees AI reaching Artificial General Intelligence (human-level intelligence across virtually all domains) by 2029, and full transformative abundance by 2045.
Other experts question these time projections, but a radical transformation of traditional manufacturing and trade is likely to happen sometime in the reasonably near future. The question is, will the money system transition soon enough to rescue all the laid-off workers from homelessness and famine?
The Sovereign Wealth Fund Alternative
There is another model for distributing the gains of automation, one that can be phased in gradually as the AI workforce expands. It comes from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. In an ironic twist, Altman and Musk, who jointly founded OpenAI in 2015, are now locked in a high-profile legal battle over whether Altman diverted Musk’s $44 million investment to transform what was conceived as a nonprofit “for the benefit of humanity” into a highly lucrative for-profit enterprise.
That dispute aside, Altman’s alternative model for sharing AI-generated wealth is a national sovereign wealth fund seeded by the profits of AI and robotics. His proposed American Equity Fund would take public stakes in the companies and technologies driving automation, capture a portion of the resulting productivity gains, and distribute them as universal dividends. The Fund would not replace a Universal High Income but would complement it.
This approach has several advantages. It ties payments directly to real output, scales automatically with productivity, and can be introduced gradually, avoiding the shock of issuing large payments before the supply side has fully expanded. It would resemble the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil revenues to residents, except that here the resource would be the most powerful general-purpose technology since electricity.
Conclusion: A New Monetary Logic for a New Productive Era
For centuries, money has been issued as a claim against the future productivity of human labor, repaid from the income that labor generates. The logic of this debt-based system collapses when machines become the primary producers of goods and services. Then the limiting factor becomes purchasing power — the ability of human beings to access the abundance their own technologies create. That requires a monetary architecture that expands with output rather than debt, and distributes income not through wages alone but through mechanisms tied to the productive capacity of the whole system.
Universal High Income and a sovereign wealth fund are two ways of doing that. One ensures a stable floor of demand; the other ensures that the public shares in the gains of automation. Both would be grounded in real production. But for the public to have access to those gains, the money supply needs to expand in proportion to the expanding pool of goods and services. This can be done by restoring the innovation our forefathers baked into the Constitution: debt-free money issued by the government itself.
How to fund a UHI without triggering inflation or driving the government into bankruptcy is the first objection critics raise, but there are others. They argue that people would stop working or stop learning, that society would collapse into idleness or chaos, that life would lose meaning without jobs, that the government would have the power to control how people spend their money. Will a UHI ring in the promised utopia or lock us into a state-controlled digital prison? Part 2 of this article will address those concerns.
This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.tom of Form
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Divorce From DC
Divorce, they say, is a tragedy.
But to remain with an abusive spouse is pure fatalism.
Perhaps it’s masochism.
A craving to be pummeled, disgraced, mind-raped, hated, canceled!
Thrown in your face:
Force-fed wars, anal sex, drag queens, degeneracy, and mutilation of children’s testicles and genitals.
This is the kind of dreck coming out of DC, and neither Trump nor DeSantis can fix it.
Both are “Israel Firsters.”
That means whatever’s good for the Jews is good for Trump and DeSantis.
DeSantis touts funding to Ukraine…[Clip]
[“We, when I was in Congress under President Trump, we funded a lot of weapons for Ukraine…”]
…and Trump got the ball rolling. [Clip]
[“The Trump administration of approved the sale of lethal defense weapons to Ukraine but it may come with some blowback from Russia. The State Department approved the commercial license to export sniper rifles, ammunition, and other associated materials that are estimated to be worth $41.5M million dollars.]
State—riddled with Jewish Russia-haters, Blinken, Nudelman, Rosenberg—has a front man pushing bottomless funding to Ukraine.
Here’s their schwartza shill, Lloyd Austin, rapt in adoration of his Ukrainian counterpart, the Yid, Oleksii Reznikov. [Clip]
[“Let me again thank my dear friend, Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov, for his outstanding, outstanding leadership.”]
Oh, it makes the Yids all over de vorld, just vanna shimmy, do the Kizomba-Kompa jungle mumba, seeing this schwartza baboon woo and spoon this vittle little yiddle who’s been given a gold-plated key to the US Treasury.
As for butterball Austin, he’s the laughing stock of what’s left of patriotic military personnel. [Clip]
[“Is anybody telling Joe Biden what you just told our audience, fortunate enough to have and to hear you? Is Lloyd Austin making these decisions?” “I doubt seriously that he is making any decisions. I don’t know what he’s doing other than prosecuting a war on White Supremacy and anybody else that questions the administration.”]
Shouldn’t we be questioning this abomination?
State has just allocated our money to fund drag queen theater in Ecuador.
Spreading “democracy” Jewish-style is all about sending America’s sexual-depravity abroad.
We are being played.
It’s being built into our monthly national cycle:
‘Pride Month of June’ is nothing less than celebrating for thirty dirty days:
Anal sex between men, dildo sex between women, gender confusion, and child genital mutilation. [Clip]
[“Gay! Gay! Gay! Gay!” “June is Pride Month in the United States when LGBTQ people celebrate their communities and press for full equality.” “My presence here is a testament…”]
A “testament,” at the Presidential Podium of the Executive Office that our nation is no longer under God but under the devil. [Clip/same]
[“My presence here is a testament that we are fighting back! Because our lives are glorious, beautiful, and worthy.”]
Last time I checked, shoving a penis up another man’s feces, is ignoble, ugly, unworthy of one’s manhood.
The very act of anal penetration sends a man to hell where demons stick their scorpion-tipped tails up the practitioner’s arse. [Clip]
[“Pride is back at the White House, it really is. From day one, from day one, this has been the most Pro-Equality administration in history led by guys like Peter Butteig…and so many others. I think we have more LBGTQ+ people than any administration or any administration combined. No no no, I really mean it! I really mean it! Because I promised when I got elected that I wanted my administration to look like America, look like America across the board. And we’ve done that. Record number of ‘Out” and ‘Proud’ appointees at every single level of our government.”]
Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed for less.
DC is the enemy of Jesus Christ.
If you love God you must hate DC.
You cannot serve God and Mammon.
Not only religious and moral issues are at stake, but practical and economic ones, too.
Under DC, your children face mandatory health-endangering ‘vaccines’ required to be educated.
Under DC, your children will learn to hate their skin color and their White Christian heritage.
Under DC, your borders are ravaged, drugs come pouring in, human trafficking explodes, and your demographics are altered forever.
Under DC, your property taxes increase, tied to escalating inflation, and home-ownership becomes a thing of the past.
Under DC, Third World illiterates are re-settled in Middle America, and your culture and racial unity are dismantled forever.
Under DC, firearms are eliminated and all you’re left with is squirt guns.
Ask yourself this question:
Do you smile with satisfaction that you and your family are benefited every time you send in your tax returns?
Seriously, can any good thing come out of DC?
Email me please if you can think of at least one good thing!
‘Breaking up is hard to do!’ you say.
But to be joined to a harlot is an execration.
Secession is the only way.
Right now a huge semi-secession push, the “Greater Idaho Movement,” is underway.
The movement proposes that two-thirds of Oregon’s land mass becomes part of neighboring Idaho. [Clip]
[“We want to adjust the border taking Eastern Oregon shifting to Idaho to help maintain the conservative values that Idaho has over there.”]
The movement has support from nine counties in Eastern Oregon, and two more will soon vote on moving the border to Idaho. [Clip]
[“I don’t think we should act like State lines are written in stone. We should look at them and ask, ‘Does this actually make sense?’” “Author, Richard Kreitner, who wrote a book about secession, says it’s hardly a new idea.” “Secession has always been there. Catholics lived in Maryland, debtors lived in Georgia, Puritans lived in New England. They were kind of separate to begin with, and that’s why they wanted nothing to do with one another.”]
Joining with a people who share the same values, culture, and politics, rather than be governed by leftist western Oregon, is the motif driving the Greater Idaho Movement.
But to be unified with those of a traditional Christian conservative outlook and still be governed by Christ-hating DC—ruled by perversion-loving Jews—makes no sense at all.
Once a semi-secessionist movement turns into reality then the question, “What have we to do with DC?” comes to the fore.
People say “Oregon will never allow it!”
Well, was the Trump raid allowed?
Was the Nord Stream Pipeline bombing allowed?
Forget ‘allow.’
We just got to do it apart from the ‘powers that be.’
Divorce, they say, is a tragedy.
But to stay married to a murderous spouse is downright stupid.
We’re almost there.
We need a breakthrough.
Divorce from DC is the smartest thing we can do.
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