Not the Chinese kind but the kind proposed by C.H. Douglas. For those that need a quick explanation, please see the ““ paragraph at the bottom.
I may have missed the argument on this point for social credit but alas, I do not recall. One major criticism that I have with the idea of Social Credit is the desire for business profit and debt elimination. In the schema of issuing debt free credit, businesses would inevitably compete for that credit in order to pay down debt. With competition comes higher prices (not lower as many will claim) meaning a bigger gap. So now the gap payment is bigger. Businesses now have more to compete for so they raise prices again. Now the gap is bigger and… Without a mechanism that prevents a business from raising prices too aggressively there will be an increase in the gap over time as businesses gather up credit with higher margins to pay down bank debt and get higher margins. What business would willingly lower prices or avoid raising prices? They want profit.
So now we find that businesses are paying down their debts and not lowering prices while still maintaining low wages (because remember, they can keep wages as low as they want and the government will fill the gap). With the ability to maintain those prices while driving wages into the ground AND lowering costs through debt payoff, the gap explodes. People are being loaded with credit every month and it's being directed towards living expenses instead of debts, so the average person still has a potential shortage in their income needs versus available products so they take out more debt. This skews the system further as workers need more in wages and credit to fill the gap caused by their borrowing. Assuming they're being paid, of course.
In a social credit schema, I could very easily operate as a business that relies on the gap to pay my workers as I offer a wage of $0 per hour. Now every paycheck my workers earn is government credit instead of out of my reserve. I then have the ability to set the price of my goods to my heart's content and make pure profits beyond the remaining non-wage costs of production. With these profits I can eliminate my debt to the point of being debt free thus leaving only the final costs of production such as materials, land, and tax. Suddenly we live in a world where everyone is paid the same paycheck in ever increasing monthly amounts and we have ever increasing discounts on prices because prices will go up anyways to capture more profits, thus offsetting the force of the discount to begin with. Our personal debts keep growing as businesses collect more and more debt-free government credit in their reserves… Then start lending out notes for those credits to their most loyal customers who shop only at that one business. And then they lend out more than they have in reserve with interest. Hello private fractional reserve bank that produces a debt fiat-currency! Nice to meet you again! The very problem Social Credit seeks to solve with a public monetary creation system will inevitably be used by private entities to perpetuate the next era of that very same problem.
^ Social Credit is a monetary-economic theory from early to mid 20th century Scotland based on workers' rights and public interests. The basic idea behind C.H. Douglas' Social Credit theory is that in modern markets based on debt-fiat, prices and wages simply cannot be matched; in order for the business to cover the costs of operation they must cover both the workers' wages and the other capital costs of production. If P is the total Price of a finished good and P is equal to A (the cost of wage) plus B (the cost of other capital) then it's impossible for A to equal A + B (the total price). Thus the solution to the problem is to calculate the gap between wages and the cost of goods as a social credit that is created debt free from the government and issued either as a direct payment to the population (this is NOT the same as a UBI but I won't dive into that here) or as a government discount on prices sold by businesses. In theory, this debt free social credit issued from the government instead of the bank would cover the precise cost of the gap in wages and prices while also slowly eliminating the debts owed to the bank.