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Saturday, March 9, 2024

A Better Than Nordic-Style Social Welfare State With Less Than Florida Taxes

A friendly reminder to all readers:  contrary to popular opinion, it is entirely possible to have a better than Nordic-style social welfare state with less than Florida taxes.  Why?  (You really may want to sit down before reading any further.)

Because federal taxes do NOT fund federal spending, that's why!  Not the individual income tax, not the corporate income tax, not FICA, not the various excises, duties, and tariffs, not estate or gift taxes, nor any other federal tax for that matter.  It is all a Big Lie illusion to prop up the oligarchy, especially the big banks, via artificial scarcity of dollars.  As Rodger Malcolm Mitchell famously notes, and echoed by Dr. Joseph M. Firestone, the federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, that is, being the issuer of it's own currency, it by definition has infinite money.  Any money they receive, through taxes or otherwise, is effectively like bringing coals to Newcastle, in that it disappears into infinity (thus de facto destroyed).  And whenever they spend money on anything, they create each dollar on an ad hoc basis to pay as they go.  

Switching to what Dr. Firestone calls "Overt Congressional Financing (OCF)" is LONG overdue.  On August 15, 1971, the gold standard effectively ended for good, but the method of Congressional financing remains more or less stuck in the past.

Meanwhile, the so-called "National Debt" (TM) is also an illusion, in that it consists of Treasury securities that are only spuriously linked to federal spending due to arcane and archaic rules left over from the now-defunct gold standard that ended over half a century ago.  Each T-security is effectively equivalent to a CD savings account for those who choose to invest in them.  Additionally, the idea that money can only be created with interest or other "strings" attached to it is yet another part of the Big Lie as well.

(It could literally be paid off in one fell swoop at zero cost to anyone, in fact.  And it's technically not even "borrowing" at all.  Infinite money, remember?)

Ditto for the Social Security, Medicare, and other federal "trust funds", which are literally nothing more than accounting gimmicks based on artificial scarcity.  They could fund all of that and more by simply creating the money on an ad hoc basis.

As for inflation, that is generally caused by shortages of goods and services, NOT by printing too much money.  It is ultimately a supply-side problem that requires supply-side solutions, including (counterintuitively) more federal spending targeted to incentivize more production of scarce goods and services.  Thus, rationing dollars via austerity measures and/or raising interest rates to fight inflation and/or recession is like applying leeches to cure anemia.  It is a fundamental category mistake that does far more harm than good on balance.

Of course, the oligarchs want to condition We the People to accept mere crumbs from the tables of the rich.  That way they can keep widening the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots, givng the oligarchs more power to lord it over us all.

Bottom line: all of these gimmicks are completely artificial, contrived, and designed to deceive us all.  The ONLY purposes of taxes in a Monetarily Sovereign government that issues it's own currency (like the federal government, but not (yet) state and local governments) are 1) to control and regulate the economy by encouraging or discouraging various behaviors and activities, 2) to (crudely) fight inflation, 3) to create demand for the currency, and 4) to prop up and give credence to the Big Lie.  But the supposed need to raise revenue is NOT one of them at all.

Thus, with the stroke of a pen, Congress can very easily square the circle of a better than Nordic-style social welfare state with less than Florida taxes.  They gave the FERAL Reserve its power in 1913, and they can just as easily take it away today if they chose to.  But of course, their oligarch masters would NOT want that at all!  Most Congresscritters save for a tiny few, are of course bought and paid for by the big money interests.  Thus we need to throw the bums out!

So what are we waiting for? PAGING DR. FIRESTONE!  NEEDED IN WASHINGTON, DC, STAT!

1 comment:

  1. Only God is the only Lord over us. We also should have a foreign policy which promotes diplomacy. That would help in reducing spending. I don't want to sound like a broken record but we need Trump back in the White House to help the middle and working classes again.

    ReplyDelete