Thank you for the very thoughtful questions.

A pretty fundamental question: why the Gresham Dollar and not regular dollars?

Political reasons. The United States government could technically fund a basic income through deficit spending, but they won't. The Fed will inject money into the banks through TARP and QE etc, but there's no easy way for them to inject money at the consumer level, nor do they want to.

I mean, there's no practical limitation on the monetary authority creating more real dollars to pump into the economy.

Exactly. But they're not going to do it, so I'll do it myself.

The reason it doesn't (and the reason why it's fashionable to separate monetary authority from fiscal authority) is because of beliefs about pervasive inflation caused by large increases the supply of money, particularly if that comes in the form of handouts to those with a high marginal propensity to spend it.

Yes. That's exactly right. Last Spring, before I came up with the idea for Gresham Dollar, I realized that these inflationary concerns are unfounded. Obviously, if you dump $8 trillion into consumers' hands all at once, you'll have some kind of a problem, but an increase in spending is not inherently inflationary if we can scale our production to meet the new demand.

I could go on about this forever. But the bottom line is that printing money and handing people a basic income does not necessarily cause general price inflation and there are always ways to manage price levels.

But as far as I can see based on your outline, Gresham dollars are at best functionally equivalent to regular dollars in their effects on demand in the economy.

Yes. That's the idea.

Demand increases when they're handed out, supply lags, ergo prices go up.

In the short term, prices for certain things can go up. But, thanks to technology, our collective means of production is getting ever more scalable. That means prices can even come down as we produce more. It's not entirely clear what will happen to prices, but I have a few different models for different types of goods. Another example is that a basic income will likely cause people to migrate away from big cities and could put downward pressure on real estate prices in places like Silicon Valley.

It's all very fascinating. Anyway, the government thinks this kind of thing will automatically cause inflation. I don't. So I'm doing it.

But you can add in a [very] slight increase in cost of sale for merchants accepting GD, especially if they need to convert to regular dollars to pay their suppliers.

I'm not sure we need to do that. At first, the GD business will only be a small part of the sales these merchants make, so they can still pay their suppliers in USD and wait for their GD to convert. Later on, more businesses, including possibly their suppliers, will be accepting GD.

So why Gresham dollars? Why not just hand out newly minted regular dollars?

I wish they'd do that. Then I wouldn't have to work on this project.

Or food stamps, if the aim is to socially engineer how they're spent?

The idea isn't to socially engineer how they're spent. The idea is to subsidize consumer spending for the entire economy. I don't want to cause distortions in the markets. I receive food stamps myself and they are very economically inefficient.

As far as I can see, all the differences are disadvantages (confusion, costly new infrastructure, discouraging saving behaviour amongst low income beneficiaries)

Confusion and costly new infrastructure are certainly disadvantages. I disagree that discouraging saving behavior is a disadvantage. Especially in today's economy, consumer spending could use a boost.