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:"Big Tech is the new Big Tobacco" is often bandied about these days. And while that has a kernel of truth to it (a kernel the size of a cornfield, in fact), it is also used by authoritarian zealots with a very illiberal (and ageist) agenda. Mandatory age verification, censorship, repealing Section 230, and other related illiberal restrictions would open up the door to many unintended consequences to privacy, cybersecurity, and civil rights and liberties in general. Even those adults who don't support youth rights will eventually experience these consequences sooner or later. Kafka, meet trap. Pandora, meet box. Albatross, meet neck. And of course, baby, meet bathwater.
And none of these things will actually solve the collective action problem of Big Tech and the "Social Dilemma". But here are some things that will, in descending order of priority and effectiveness:
The first two items on the list in particular would of course be vehemently opposed by Big Tech. That's because their whole business model depends on creepy surveillance advertising and creepy algorithms, and thus incentivizing addiction for profit. They would thus have to switch to the (gasp!) DuckDuckGo model if these items were done. (Plays world's smallest violin) That would of course be tantamount to throwing the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, in J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
For another, related collective action problem, what about the emerging idea of phone-free schools? Fine, but to be fair, how about phone-free workplaces for all ages as well? In both cases, it should ONLY apply while "on the clock", which for school would be best defined as being from the opening bell to the final bell of the day, as well as during any after-school detention time. And of course, in both cases, there would have to be medical exemptions for students and employees who need such devices for real-time medical monitoring (glucose for diabetes, for example). Surely productivity would increase so much as a result that we could easily shorten the standard workweek to 30-32 hours per week (8 hours for 4 days, or 6 hours for 5 days) with no loss in profits? But that would make too much sense.
Other good ideas we would endorse are a voluntary smartphone buyback program (similar to gun buybacks), and perhaps even paying people to voluntarily delete or deactivate their social media accounts for a time. That would accomplish far more than any realistic mandatory measures would.
Another possible idea is simply to slow down by design the pace of these social media platforms. Much like #OneClickSafer mentioned above, adding a little bit of friction to an otherwise frictionless system can help tame the very real dark side of that system. I mean, would you willingly drive on a frictionless surface (such as ice)? Of course you wouldn't.
Note that internet connection speeds are more than ten times faster (!) today on average than in 2010. That leaves a LOT of room for adding back friction!
And finally, the idea of banning certain questionable design features (infinite scroll, autoplay, etc.) may be controversial in terms of whether such features are protected by the First Amendment, but we believe that those features per se are not automatically protected, unless the ban is deliberately abused to censor specific content. If such bans are truly content-neutal, we are fine with that.
We must remember that, at the end of the day, Big Tech is NOT our friend. But neither are the illiberal control freak zealots. These measures that we endorse will actually make both sides quite angry indeed. But truly that's a feature, not a bug.
Big Tech can go EFF off!
(Updated from the 2023 version)
The current draft of the WHO pandemic treaty is very close to being finalized now. And while the "fact checkers" vociferously deny that the treaty will sign over America's hard-won national sovereignty to the WHO in the event of a future global health emergency, there is still good reason for all nations, and especially the USA, to refuse to sign, ratify, OR accede to it until serious revisions are made.
First, the constitutionally questionable practice of it possibly even going into effect without the Senate's "advice and consent" (as is typically required to ratify international treaties), let alone the utterly specious notion that treaties can even supersede the Constitution itself, is enough to give anyone a severe case of the heebie-jeebies, or at least any serious student of history that gives a crap about the Constitution. That alone is bad enough.
But the most important problem of all, is what the treaty, by omission, does NOT require of its signatories. The following is what we believe any such treaty absolutely MUST require explicitly, in light of the three year "free" trial of authoritarianism (and often totalitarianism) from 2020-2023:
To be prohibited in any circumstances:
Definitions:
From ecological overshoot to all of its attendant crises, including climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and mass extinction, along with the current global energy crisis, the idea of "degrowth" (i.e. a deliberate and planned shrinking of the economy) may seem like an appealing alternative in some circles. However, not only is it a political nonstarter, but the level of central planning and austerity required would ultimately do more harm than good, get us permanently stuck in a bad place, and we would still end up destroying the Earth in the end (albeit a bit more slowly, compared to business as usual). It would "flatten the curve", of course, but really just drag it out and prolong the pain without solving the problem. In other words, it would basically be like Covid lockdown, only permanently, though hopefully minus all of the antisocial distancing and ocean-killing masks. And we saw what a disaster that was, with the Global South faring the very worst in terms of collateral damage.
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"Limbic capitalism" is the term of art given to the phenomenon by which Big Business deliberately engineers addiction to various products and services to encourage more consumption, and therefore more profit. It is an externality-generating practice that is ultimately a collective action problem at base. We currently see it in practically everything from Big Tobacco to Big Tech to Big Media to Big Food to Big Booze to Big Pharma to Big Oil to Big Casino and so on, all the way up to and including Wall Street, the world's largest casino of all. And of course, the only true and complete solution to end limbic capitalism for good is to end capitalism itself completely.
After all, it's all part of the same general addiction at base: i.e. growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host.
That said, partial solutions can still be worthwhile, and we should not let the Nirvana Fallacy paralyze us in that regard. Ending capitalism itself completely is a lot easier said than done, or at the very least is NOT a particularly quick process. Thus, in the meantime, one "low-hanging fruit" measure to take is to pass a broad law that makes it categorically illegal to deliberately, and for no legitimate purpose, design a product or service to be more addictive than it would otherwise be. That would of course include wilfully adding any gratuitous and questionable additives or features that cannot otherwise be legitimately justified. That would of course include a wide range of troublesome food additives, and of course practically all tobacco additives a fortiori, but also the more subtle things such as curated "addictive feeds", "infinite scroll", and "frictionless sharing" on social media, and various blatantly gambling-like features built into some MMO video games as well.
Some things are of course naturally or inherently addictive (to one degree or another) in themselves, granted. And humans are wired to seek such things out, thanks in part to our evolutionary baggage. But there is NO justifiable or redeeming reason at all to deliberately make such things MORE addictive than they would otherwise be, for the sake of filthy lucre.
Of course, at the same time, we would also still be wise to heed Lysander Spooner's famous and timeless maxim: vices are not crimes. We ignore such a crucial distinction at our peril, as history has shown.
Back in 2017, there was an article in The Week by Damon Linker titled, "The Spiritual Ruin of a Universal Basic Income". He basically argues that it is a Very Bad Idea for the left to pursue the idea of a UBI because 1) it fails to address (and perhaps even intensifies) the psychological and spiritual consequences of joblessness, which are (in his view) distinct from and worse than the economic consequences, 2) most people couldn't handle joblessness even with a basic income, and would thus become depressed and purposeless and give themselves over to video games, porn, and/or drug addiction, and 3) the left should not concede that automation (and the resulting job losses) is in any way inevitable. Because reasons, obviously.
And all of these things are in fact false. (Or to be exceedingly charitable, highly subjective at best.)We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.Thus, on balance, a Universal Basic Income Guarantee for all is a good idea regardless. A win-win-win situation for everyone but the oligarchs. And the only real arguments against it are selfish, patronizing, paternalistic, and/or sadistic ones, which really means there are NO good arguments against it in a free and civilized society. So what are we waiting for?
"Catch and release" of criminals is literally one of the very dumbest policies in all of recorded history, right up there with "defund the police" and similar half-baked ideas. And the results of such no-accountability de facto tacit decriminalization of crimes big and small have sadly been predictable.
Only the most dyed-in-the-wool, super left-brained (and hare-brained), out-of-touch, ivory-tower academics and their acolytes could possibly think that such a real-life, literal "get out of jail free card" is somehow a good idea on balance. People can argue "root cause theory" till they are blue in the face, but that does NOT somehow negate the non-root causes that clearly need to be tackled as well. It's NOT an either/or situation, and clearly most of the root causes of crime are much harder and slower to solve. Forest, meet trees. And map, meet territory.
Also, as much as we loathe victimless crime laws, per the late, great Peter McWilliams, author of Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Society, that does NOT somehow imply a lax attitude towards real crimes (whether big or small, violent or not) that objectively harm (or unduly endanger) the person or property of nonconsenting others, or that otherwise violate the civil or human rights of others. In other words, "Get tough on REAL crime" should really be the appropriate slogan here, something even the Libertarian Party has long agreed with.
(That is precisely where we at the TSAP decidedly part ways with the late criminologist James Q. Wilson, the main proponent of the "broken windows" theory, who we otherwise at least partially agree with. In any case, the "broken windows" theory was ultimately inspired by the late sociologist Jane Jacobs.)
The TSAP has long compiled a list of promising ideas called "Smart On Crime", that should be food for thought indeed. And guess what it does NOT include? Catch and release, defund the police, or anything of the sort. Focused deterrence actually does work, and these latest silly "new" (old) fads only monkeywrench and vitiate such a proven crime-fighting strategy.
The one major city that bucked the disastrous trend recently was Dallas, Texas. And not only did they NOT defund the police, they actually increased the use of smart policing tactics to target violent and serious crime. And whaddya know, it worked. So let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater now!
The TSAP has once endorsed the MMT idea of a Job Guarantee (JG), which is exactly what it sounds like. Of course, we also supported Universal Basic Income (UBI) with NO strings attached as well for years now, but still maintained that a JG would be good in addition to that. However, we no longer support that idea anymore. JG, in all of its flavors, has far too many conceptual, logistical, and ontological problems to be workable at scale, as Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes in his article, and several others.
So what do we at the TSAP support instead of JG? Well, we clearly support UBI, hands down. But beyond that, we support a scaled-up version of something like Job Corps, and which is basically a Job Guarantee but without the "guarantee" part. That is, simply a jobs program, both for finding and creating jobs as needed, and one that provides only useful work rather than the Sisyphean make-work boondoggles that would inevitably occur in a true JG program. Otherwise, it is guaranteed to fail.
Hindsight is quite literally 2020.
Four years ago (roughly) today, the world lost its marbles and began to shut down. And as we have noted before, it was effectively all for naught. In the end, the lockdowns, masks, and jabs did more harm than good on balance.
From the ever-insightful Dr. Steve Kirsch's recent Substack article last year, in a nutshell:
"Special mention for the fact that the entire pandemic was completely unnecessary. 3 supplements work better than vaccines and are safe and cheap. All the lockdowns, masking, vaccines, mandates, social distancing, etc. were all unnecessary. And even though this is now known, nobody will pay attention since it will make them look bad.
"Uptake of vitamin C, vitamin D and zinc were significantly associated with the reduced risk of infection and severity of COVID-19 (OR: 0.006 (95% CI: 0.03–0.11) (p = 0.004)) and (OR: 0.03 (95% CI: 0.01–0.22) (p = 0.005))... this study was conducted before the start of mass vaccination against COVID-19 in Bangladesh."
That's over 150x decreased risk just from taking these 3 dirt-cheap supplements that everyone has known to be safe + effective for decades! And it was all pre-vax, it was for the original Wuhan strain that was most dangerous!"
Read that again, and again, and again and let it sink in. Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zinc. Those three things alone would have largely defanged and declawed this overall already relatively humdrum virus to begin with, which was basically a classic super-flu at worst, and never an existential threat.
And especially for Vitamin D, but the others too, this was confirmed time and again. And again and again.
Oh, and one of the other thing that we at the TSAP have long advocated, the humble xylitol nasal spray, has also been confirmed yet again as prophylaxis.
It gets even worse still for the powers that be, apparently, when one also notes that the standard of care for patients with post-viral pneumonia was abruptly changed worldwide, at or before the beginning of the pandemic. And not for the better, either. The change was to no longer give antibiotics for pneumonia if Covid was thought to be the cause, even though it was very likely that many if not most of such deaths were from secondary bacterial infections. And antibiotics would have been given had they not been inexplicably removed from the protocols, and thus deliberately withheld from patients for political reasons. A good chunk of excess deaths could thus easily be attributed to that alone.
Just #3tablets of azithromycin or doxycycline would often have been enough to save their lives.
What should have been done? "Letting it rip", that is, "adopting the flu strategy", ultimately would have in fact been the least-worst alternative in the long run, all things considered. That is precisely what a properly right-brain dominant person would have advocated from the get-go, at least if they were properly informed and NOT bombarded 24/7 with fearporn news media.
Looks like "Stockholm Syndrome" should really be renamed "Melbourne Syndrome" because #SwedenGotItRight. The verdict is in. In terms of cumulative all-cause excess mortality, Sweden, who famously eschewed lockdowns and masks and such, actually came out as one of the best in Europe, and not very different from their much stricter neighbors in the long run. Ditto for other countries and US states that largely ignored the plandemic, but did similarly or better than their stricter neighbors. Lockdowns, masks, and jab mandates were thus worse than useless.
On March 12, 2020, interestingly enough, the band The Killers released the song "Caution". The song, while not about the virus, is nonetheless basically about the theme of "throwing caution to the wind". And in hindsight, that is ironically pretty much what should have been done in regards to the virus, at least for the vast majority of the population who was at relatively low risk overall, whose resulting "herd immunity" would have thus ultimately protected those who were truly vulnerable to the virus. Lockdowns, on the other hand, merely dragged things out and ultimately put the genuinely vulnerable at greater risk. The science of epidemiology and public health didn't really change, but the politics sure did.
And failing that, once those who were genuinely fooled (including myself somewhat as well, regrettably) had wised up early on, the second least-worst policy would have been to, as the same song says, "go straight from zero to the Fourth of July" in terms of reopening and ending all restrictions at once. That's right, ALL at once, all the way back to 2019 normal, period, and don't look back.
But instead, the unholy "public health" trinity of collective action problems, prevention paradox, and precautionary principle had all been turned on their heads and weaponized against We the People. Benjamin Franklin spins in his grave.
Moral of the story: NEVER give up any rights "temporarily", that you are not willing to say goodbye to forever. Or at the very least, you will not get them back without a fight.
Indeed, hindsight is 2020, in more ways than one.
What happens when the FERAL Reserve uses raising interest rates in an attempt to quash inflation? You guessed it: STAGFLATION. That is, a combination of economic stagnation (or even recession, if they keep raising it "until something breaks") and persistently high inflation. But if the only tool that have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to them. And a quagmire thus results when tight monetary policy is kept in place well beyond its (very short) shelf life.
Contrary to Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism (who literally coined the term "neoliberalism" himself, along with the term "stagflation"), who claimed that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon", it is more accurately described as being (almost) always and everywhere a supply-side problem of goods and services, as Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes. And the only way to cure it is to cure the shortages, which counterintuitively often requires increasing (and better targeting) federal spending to incentivize production of scarce goods and services, especially energy. There is clearly an extremely strong correlation (almost perfect, in fact) between energy prices (especially oil) and the general price level (CPI) of goods and services overall. While there is, contrary to popular opinion, very little to no correlation between inflation and federal deficit spending, or even the general money supply itself. (The general money supply consists of deficit spending of new money into existence plus banks lending new money into existence, though the latter is of course inflationary albeit only due to interest.)
(And let's not forget greedflation as well!)
At best, as a "break glass in case of emergency" measure, raising interest rates, especially to above the inflation rate, has a weak, very short-term benefit on fighting inflation, followed by a longer-term exacerbation and prolonging of inflation that seems to be unrelated but is in fact caused by it. After all, hiking interest rates is effectively a blunt and regressive tax that increases costs across the board, which are then passed onto the consumer in the form of...higher prices. And so on. That is, MORE INFLATION, in a vicious cycle like a yo-yo. The "cure" is in fact far worse than the disease, like applying leeches to cure anemia, as Mitchell would put it.
The plandemic-induced supply-chain issues have been resolved, and even the global geopolitical issues would should by now have less effect in the domestic oil and gas powerhouse that is the USA. Oil and gas prices are now down significantly stateside. The money supply and federal spending have shrank since then as well. And yet inflation, though much lower than its 9% peak in 2022, remains stubbornly above than 3% today. Could it be that keeping interest rates well above the current inflation rate is actually not only part of the problem, but now THE problem?
BINGO. So the FERAL Reserve would be wise to end Quantitative Tightening and cut interest rates yesterday from the current 5.25% to 3%, then to below 3% very shortly thereafter (within days or weeks). Then when inflation falls, cut it again to below the new inflation rate, and so on. All the way to zero if necessary. Failing that, the only thing that would end this quagmire is a severe enough recession to kill demand across the board, which will clearly do more harm than good. History certainly bears that out.
(It explains not only today's quagmire, but also the 1970s and 1980s in the USA and a fortiori in Canada. And it even at least partially explains the phenomenon of "chronic inflation" in various Latin American countries in the 1990s and beyond.)
Then, Congress must increase, not decrease, federal spending to cure the stagnation part, which is the other half of the stagflation. Yesterday.
And while we are at it, we should also phase out the scam known as "fractional reserve banking" (or more accurately, "fractional capital lending") by increasing the reserve requirement for private banks from the current 0% to 10% immediately, as it was before March 15, 2020, then very gradually raising it all the way to 100% over a number of years. (The only reason to do it gradually is to prevent markets from suddenly seizing up and causing a financial crisis.) And also either break up, nationalize, or tax heavily any banks that are "too big to fail" as well.
So what are we waiting for?
P.S. This argument does NOT apply to "creeping inflation" (i.e. consistently below 3%), as that level of inflation is easily controlled and adjusted for, promotes economic growth, and is actually beneficial on balance. Such low to moderate inflation is far better tolerated than risking even a small amount of deflation (negative inflation), which, at best, is VERY difficult to control and can all too easily become a vicious cycle and downward spiral into a full-blown depression or long-term "stagpression". In contrast, inflation only becomes net harmful on balance when it greatly exceeds 3%. Again, history bears this out.
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!
There is, in fact, an eternal law of nature that at once explains just about everything, and even makes politics possible to finally understand. It is called The Law of Eristic Escalation:
Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos
By that, it pertains to any arbitrary or coercive imposition of order, which at least in the long run, actually causes disorder (chaos) to escalate. Fenderson's Amendment further adds that "the tighter the order in question is maintained, the longer the consequent chaos takes to escalate, BUT the more it does when it does." Finally, the Thudthwacker Addendum still further adds that this relationship is nonlinear, thus rendering the resulting escalation of chaos completely unpredictable in terms of the original imposition of order.
We see the real world consequences of this in everything from Prohibition to the War on (people who use a few particular) Drugs to zero tolerance policies to Covid lockdowns to sexual repression and so much more. And especially in the ageist abomination that is the 21 drinking age in the USA. Any short-term benefits that these arbitrary and coercive impositions of order may provide is entirely outweighed when they inevitably backfire in the long run. For example, Miron and Tetelbaum (2009), Asch and Levy (1987 and 1990), and Males (1986) illustrate this very nicely in the case of the 21 drinking age.
(This same logic applies to practically every "victimless crime" law, and pretty much every other form of government overreach, as well as various excessive socio-cultural repressions of all kinds.)
Perhaps that is why most bans on various things have historically had a track record that is quite lackluster at best. Ironically, bans tend to give more power to the very things that they seek to ban.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, you finally understand politics.
P.S. The Dutch seem to understand this better. They even have a proverb: "when you permit, you control", which is the antithesis of the American proverb, "when you permit, you promote". Carl Jung would also likely have a field day with that as well.
Last year we discussed the QUADRILLION dollar derivatives bubble and the risks that come with it. Well, guess what? That bubble is still there, just WAITING to pop, and thus drag down the rest of the economy with it as well due to is massive size and interconnectedness. And it has only grown dramatically since the last major financial crisis and Great Recession in 2007-2009.
Ellen Brown recently wrote another excellent article about what to do about it. She notes how this dangerous derivatives bubble was no accident, but came into being via deliberate deregulation that specially privileged derivatives. Repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 was only the start. In 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) not only removed derivatives from any sort of federal oversight, but it also declared them be legally enforceable, a privilege that NO other bets have ever historically enjoyed. (Let's face it, derivatives are literally nothing more than glorified bets.) Then in 2005, the Bankruptcy Act gave derivatives extra special "safe harbor" protections as well. And after the Great Financial Crisis, a crisis in large part caused by wanton derivatives speculation, what law was passed to pretend to tame this out of control casino? You guessed it: the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, a band-aid which only further entrenched the fundamental derivatives problem that was left to fester.
That is, fully legalized and unregulated gambling with other people's money on a truly gargantuan scale by the ultra-rich, using very questionable and opaque financial instruments, all backed by special privilege and protection of the law, is still very much a thing, alas. And like any casino, the house (the oligarchy) always wins. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. Heads, they win, tails, We the People lose.
Talk about moral hazard!
Clearly, repealing Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the 1999 law that repealed Glass-Steagall, thus reinstating the latter), repealing the CFMA especially, repealing the "safe harbor" protections in the Bankruptcy Act, and repealing Dodd-Frank should be the absolute highest priorities to defuse this massive ticking time bomb. No doubt about that. That is, we must regulate derivatives at LEAST as stringently as they were in the 20th century, if not more so. Additionally, a modest financial transactions tax (say, 0.1% on all transactions) would also be a good idea as well. The latter can alternatively be achieved by raising and expanding the current SEC Fee to include ALL financial instruments equally, including derivatives.
We should also jettison the largely inaccurate term "hedge fund" from our collective vocabulary as well. They should really be called "speculation funds", since that is what they really are in practice.
Oh, and to the FERAL Reserve: CUT INTEREST RATES YESTERDAY! And stop Quantitative Tightening yesterday as well. It is really playing with fire in the worst way right now. KNOCK IT OFF.
The aforementioned items would be enough to defuse it in the near term, while the following items would be to clean up the damage and/or prevent it from happening again in the future:
So what are we waiting for?
