Kennedy: the US budget on blockchain if he becomes President

Yesterday presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. declared that if elected he will put the entire budget of the USA on blockchain.

However, he did not specify how, that is, he did not clarify whether his idea is to move the funds to blockchain, or if he just wants to replicate the transactions in order to make them visible to everyone. 

However, he specified that the real goal would be to make it possible for all American citizens to easily check seven days a week, 24 hours a day, how much money is spent by the US government. 

Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and the blockchain budget proposal

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will run in the November presidential elections in the USA as an independent. He will challenge both the incumbent president Joe Biden, a Democrat, and his main opponent, Donald Trump, a Republican.

Just because Kennedy is not supported by either of the two major US parties, it seems he has very little chance of being elected, and in the absolutely probable case that he does not succeed, his political weight at the national level will remain essentially null. 

This makes candidate President Kennedy’s proposal to bring the budget of the US government onto blockchain more of a propaganda initiative than a feasible project.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been active in the Democratic Party following in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors, such as his father Robert Kennedy and his uncle John Fitzgerald Kennedy. 

However, for some years now, he has begun to show impatience with his party’s positions, especially after Democrat Joe Biden became president in 2021 and pursued a restrictive policy towards US citizens due to the pandemic, albeit in continuity with the policy of his Republican predecessor Donald Trump.

Furthermore, for some time now many members of the US Democratic Party have expressed opposition to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, while Kennedy is a true bitcoiner and a strong supporter of individual freedoms.

In the past, Kennedy has also received support from Elon Musk, although lately the owner of X seems to have shifted towards supporting the Republican Donald Trump, given Kennedy’s very low chances of winning.

The 2024 Presidential Elections

In the USA, the presidential elections of 2024 will be held on November 5th.

At the moment, according to various polls, there would be a neck-and-neck race between Biden and Trump in terms of preferences, both with about 45% of the votes. 

All the other candidates put together would only have 10% of the total consensus, not nearly enough to prevail. Since there are just over six months left until the elections, with such a similar gap it seems absolutely unlikely that Kennedy will be able to recover and beat both Biden and Trump. 

Actually, since Kennedy comes from the Democratic Party, it is likely that his candidacy will penalize Biden more than Trump, as it is difficult to imagine that many Republicans would decide to vote for him. 

Furthermore, among the democratic electorate there is certainly also a not insignificant portion of people who consider it important to defend individual freedoms, and therefore not take a stand against Bitcoin and the crypto sector, while many democratic politicians seem not to share this idea. 

So it is possible that Kennedy drains more votes from Biden than from Trump. 

Although in theory Bitcoin could become part of the ongoing election campaign, after the success of the new BTC spot ETFs on US exchanges, it doesn’t seem that many US politicians running for the November elections are focusing on issues related to the fight against cryptocurrencies.

Of course, there are some who continue to do so, as they have been doing for several years now, but the importance of this issue at a national level seems to have somewhat diminished. 

It is possible that Kennedy’s candidacy itself may have discouraged democratic initiatives against Bitcoin, in order not to give him votes. 

The budget on blockchain

The reason why candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he wants to bring the US government budget onto the blockchain is that governments often spend money in a non-transparent way. 

One must never forget that the funds spent by the government are actually wealth produced by the citizens, and taken from them through taxation. 

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that citizens want to carefully monitor how the government spends the wealth produced by them. 

The use of blockchain would make all transactions transparent, because true decentralized blockchains require that all transactions be public, even if anonymous. 

However, since they are anonymous, it may not be easy at all to analyze them to understand to whom the government has sent money. 

Furthermore, the only way to ensure that all government expenses are tracked on the blockchain would be to require the government itself to use only the blockchain to make any monetary transaction. 

Today it is extremely difficult to imagine such a thing at a technical level, because dollars are not on the blockchain. On the blockchain there are dollar stablecoins, but they are issued by private companies and not by the central bank. 

Kennedy’s idea may therefore not be easy to implement at all, unless we limit ourselves to recording on the blockchain all the dollar transactions made by the government, but at that point without the certainty that all of them are reported.