US Representative Rashida Tlaib has introduced a digital dollar bill in the US Congress.
ABC
Called the Automatic Boost to Communities Act, or ABC, the bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives. The bill has been presented by Representative Rashida Tlaib in what is look like an extended monthly payments system designed for a longer run under the COVID 19 outbreak. The bill calls for monthly payments of USD 2,000, called BOOSTs and is to be paid till the till March, next year. The bill says that the digital dollar payment system should be implemented at the start of 2021,
“No later than January 1, 2021, the Secretary shall offer all recipients of BOOST payments the option to receive their payments in digital dollar wallets. BOOST recipients receiving their payments through interim BOOST cards shall instead receive a Federal Reserve Account for debit cards and be given the option to sign up online for fully operational digital dollar account wallets.”
The bill asks for a digital wallet to support the electronic dollar, asking that the wallets should be free of restriction of any kind when it comes to fee required to maintain the wallets, minimum balances or any other rule or regulation that would subject to it being suspended or withdrawn.
The bill comes after nearly a week, when Representative Tlaib led a group of others in raising voice for a recurring payment system instead of a single one of USD 1,200 that is in the 2.3 trillion stimulus package announced by the Trump administration.
Reincarnated
The concept of the digital dollar was existing in the original versions of the largest stimulus package in the history of United States. However, by the time the bill became a law by President Donald Trump signing it, the digital dollar idea had been scrapped from it.
The ABC act has thus come as an independent bill. The bill pushes for the United States to develop a mechanism for maintaining wallets and distribution of the digital dollars in a time when the logistics of distributing the cash has become difficult. With criticism of how ineffective the one time distribution of the USD 1,200 dollars from the stimulus package will do little to support families and people when the isolation and businesses shutdown are likely to continue for more than just a few months, the bill is starting to gain momentum. A lot of businesses and services are shut down across the US due to the corona virus and social distancing and isolation calls for methods of sending out the stimulus in a quick and effective way. Traditional money would require a lot of people involved and that could lead to the virus spreading faster.
The United States has become the epicenter of the virus as the number of deaths and infected shift from China to the continental US.
