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 Alaska 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 Alaska taxes, complete with a national version of the Alaska Permanent Fund. 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, yesterday!
So what are we waiting for? PAGING DR. FIRESTONE! NEEDED IN WASHINGTON, DC, STAT!
In the wake of the still ongoing Israel-Gaza war following the brutal and barbaric terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel, and especially with all of the recent protests on college campuses and elsewhere, there has been an outpouring of antisemitism lately from both left and right (though largely from the regressive "left"). Some of it is ostensibly at least tangentially related to current events, while some of it is simply a "mask off" moment for longstanding hatred against Jews that has always been there but now has come to the surface now they have found a politically convenient excuse to hide behind. Either way, it is completely unacceptable. Regardless of how one may feel about current events, there is NO excuse for that sort of bigotry. Period. And the silence is truly deafening among those who should know better than to be silent in the face of it as well.
As we have said in the past, we the TSAP hereby vow to NEVER make that sort of mistake by either omission or commission, and hereby condemn antisemitism in the very strongest of terms, just as strongly as we do racism in general. And the reader is put on notice that we will NEVER tolerate any overt or covert antisemitism in our party, period, no matter how much one tries (in vain, by definition) to dress it up in any sort of leftist or social justice rhetoric. Bigotry by any other name still stinks.
Therefore, using any of the following red flag words, phrases, or references will get your comments promptly deleted, and severe and/or repeat offenders will be banned permanently:
