US presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he will underpin the dollar with more solid assets — including Bitcoin.
Kennedy, the nephew of assassinated president John F. Kennedy, is mounting an outsider challenge to incumbent Joe Biden for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the 2024 election.
Speaking at an event organised by the Heal-the-Divide political action committee (PAC) on Tuesday, Kennedy outlined some unorthodox ideas for shoring up the value of Treasury bills, government-issued short-term investment securities.
"My plan would be to start very, very small, perhaps one percent of issued T-bills would be backed by hard currency, by gold, silver platinum or Bitcoin," Kennedy said.
Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency on the market since its launch in 2009 by an enigmatic developer or developers known as Satoshi Nakamoto, is not backed by gold reserves or a national economy and continues to fluctuate wildly in value.
However, its creators have set a final limit on how many of the virtual 'crypto coins' will be in circulation, preventing their debasement.
"Backing dollars and US debt obligations with hard assets could help restore strength back to the dollar, rein in inflation and usher in a new era of American financial stability, peace and prosperity," the Democrat argued.
He also made a rare argument against the use of Fiat money — currencies not backed by gold or other commodities — as the the greenback has been since 1971 when president Richard Nixon took it off the Gold Standard.
Kennedy's late uncle JFK "understood the importance of hard currency and the dangers of having pure fiat currency with no other option,” he said. “He understood the relationship between fiat currency and war … and also these giant aggregations of wealth and the unbalance, the disparities in wealth that are the ultimate yield of every fiat currency.”
He also linked the shift to Fiat currency, with the option of inflationary 'quantitative easing' to America's endless series of imperialist conflicts overseas.
"Fiat currency was invented to fund wars," Kennedy stressed. “I like base currencies because they make it more difficult, you have to go to the public. You can't just print money to fund the war and tax the public through the hidden tax of inflation.”
Kennedy also pledged that, if elected, his administration would end the current policy of charging capital gains tax on Bitcoin transactions when holders cash in for dollars. He contradicted Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler by insisting that “bitcoin is not a security and should not be regulated as one,” and promised to “put an end to the current policies of the Biden administration that are invited by Choke Point 2.0 to punish banks that are dealing with bitcoin.”
The Democratic primary candidate argued the benefits of that move would include "facilitating innovation and spurring investment, ensuring citizen privacy, incentivizing ventures to grow their business and tech jobs in the United States rather than in Singapore, Switzerland, Germany and Portugal."
"Non-taxable events are unreportable and that means it will be more difficult for governments to weaponize currency against free speech, which as many of you know, is one of my principal objectives," Kennedy explained.