(Chris Parker, Headline USA) The Norwegian government has demanded the nation’s retailers submit receipts of every purchase made by its citizens – and Biden’s new digital currency policy could have a similar impact in the US.
Statistics Norway has ordered grocers to share all receipts. It’s also ordering the nation’s largest payment provider, Nets, to share detailed reports of its transactions, reported The Federalist.
Norway’s government has openly admitted that it does not plan to delete the massive volumes of information that it currently plans to track. That amounts to about 1.6 billion transactions annually.
Those details include the consumer’s name, location, account numbers, transaction dates and items purchased. They claim the information will be used to plan social programs, tax policies, and track regional differences in consumption.
Those actions seem eerily reminiscent of an executive order signed by President Biden in March. The executive order’s intention was to pass sweeping regulations on cryptocurrency trades.
However, it also called for a new central digital bank currency. This new CBDC “would differ from existing digital money available to the general public because a CBDC would be a liability of the Federal Reserve, not of a commercial bank.”
Biden’s executive order suggests a “programmable currency,” which means that it could track all transactions conducted with the CBDC. It would also allow the government to categorize purchases, such as those used for guns, and sort Americans by those categories.
The government could also set limits on how the currency could be used. This can be as simple as preventing felons from purchasing ammo or as broad as implementing a social credit system. When money is programmable, it can be designed to implement specific rules – including rewards for what the government deems good behavior.
Biden’s plans for a digital currency has the potential to upend the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies that have made them so valuable, industry experts warn. It also has the potential to remove free market solutions from that industry, forcing more reliance on government.
