Economics, Money and Debt
When a fool panics, all of America is in danger. This is a true message from the President of the United States. The man has gone out of his mind.
You, Congresspeople, better get a hold of the situation before the world is engulfed in flames. This is exactly what happened with Hitler. He went insane, and Germany suffered.
Ignorance breeds ignorance. The tragedy of ignorance is that those who are ignorant of existing facts are too ignorant to understand new facts. Such people are uneducable.
And, you don’t even need to be a MAGA to be that ignorant. Here are excerpts of articles demonstrating irreparable ignorance.
THE WEEK April 1, 2026: WHY UNIVERSAL HEALH CARE ISN’T VIABLE by Ramesh Ponnuru the Washington Post
Medicare-f0r-all is back and it’s still a completely impractical idea.
Democrats have never generated much support for universal health care, and won’t have an easier time selling it now. Proponents admit national health care would cost upwards of $1 trillion a year and require major tax increases on the middle class.
That is 100% false, a lie promulgated by the rich to widen the Gap between the rich and the rest. The truth: The federal government could increase spending by $1 trillion, or $10 trillion, and not raise taxes by even a penny.
The U.S. government, which created the U.S. dollar from thin air, is Monetarily Sovereign. It has the infinite ability to create dollars by simply pressing computer keys. (See: Do you really think I need your money?)
Who says so? Well, for one:
Beardsley Ruml, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in a speech before the ABA in 1945 (the last year of WWII): “The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government.
All federal taxes must meet the test of public policy and practical effect. The public purpose which is served should never be obscured in a tax program under the mask of raising revenue.”
And no, contrary to popular myth, federal spending, even big spending, doesn’t cause inflation. All inflation is caused by shortages of crucial goods and services and is cured by government spending to cure the shortages.
Continuing with the THE WEEK article:
Sen. Bernie Sanders argues that savings on insurance premiums and deductibles would cancel out higher taxes, but voters won’t trust that rhetoric.
Heaven help us from our friends. The government neither needs nor uses any sort of savings. It simply would create the necessary dollars as it always does.
National health care would also require removing more than 300 million Americans from employer-provided insurance and individually purchased policies. Would most Americans willingly give up their existing coverage for a new government-run system of unknown cost and quality?
Democrats are on the verge of learning again that the answer is No way.
No reason is given for why national health care would require people to give up other health care. Does the current Social Security make such demands?
This is a weird bogeyman invented by the rich (who own the Washington Post, that formerly good newspaper until it was purchased by a billionaire).
A free and comprehensive , now-deductible “Medicare for All” program would benefit not only workers but all Americans.
One reason companies provide health insurance is to keep employees tied to their jobs. Currently, millions of workers are trapped in low-paying positions and poor working conditions because their company-provided insurance limits their ability to seek employment elsewhere.
It should come as no surprise that the author of the nonsensical article, Ramesh Ponnuru, is “a prominent conservative political pundit.” If there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s spending money on anything that aids the lower 90% income earners or narrows the Gap.
So, in his case, the problem may not be pure ignorism. It might also inlcude the typical right wing lack of compassion.
Then, here are excerpts from this article:
Trump prioritizes $1.5T for defense
’27 budget plan calls for trims to domestic programs’ funding
By Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has proposed boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion in his 2027 budget released Friday, the largest such request in decades, reflecting his emphasis on U.S. military investments over domestic programs.The sizable increase for the Pentagon, some 44%, had been telegraphed by the Republican president before the U.S.-led war against Iran. The president’s plan would also reduce spending on nondefense programs by 10%.
“President Trump promised to reinvest in America’s national security infrastructure, to make sure our nation is safe in a dangerous world,” wrote Budget Director Russell Vought. The president’s annual budget is considered a reflection of the administration’s values.
The administration’s values are:
Period.
The massive document typically highlights an administration’s priorities, but Congress, which handles federal spending issues, is free to reject it and often does.
Except for the MAGA-tied robot Congress of today, which seldom rejects Trump’s ideas.
“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” Trump said at a private White House event Wednesday. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal.”
Anyone who understands government financing knows that while the federal government is never money-constrained, the states, which are monetarily non-sovereign, are quite financially constrained.
But Trump believes in exploiting public ignorance, and sadly, he has been rewarded for it.
Besides military spending, the document released by the White House included other priorities. It maintains current year levels of funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in support of the administration’s deportation operations, and draws on last year’s increases for the Department of Homeland Security funds to continue opening detention facilities, including 100,000 beds for adults and 30,000 for families.
Trump is hoping to put 130,000 people into “detention facilities”, aka concentration camps, similar to the notorious Alligator Alcaraz. There’s plenty of money for building horror jails to house innocent immigrants, but not enough for the health of Americans
There is a 13% increase for the Department of Justice to focus on violent criminals and the president’s promise to stop what the White House calls migrant crime.
Federal and state data show that both legal and illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
A $10 billion fund within the National Park Service is sought for “construction and beautification” projects in Washington, D.C.
Trump repeatedly want’s “beautification, aka buildings with his name on them.
The budget also seeks a $481 million increase to enhance aviation safety and support an air traffic controller hiring surge.
A surge that has become necessary because of the Trump/Musk senseless mass-firings of good people, bad people, all people.
The budget also includes Trump’s reduction priorities by canceling more than $15 billion from the Biden-era bipartisan infrastructure law, including funds for renewable energy projects and cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, or NOAA, grants.
Aside from global warming, (which Trump insists doesn’t exist,) and saving the ocean’s animals and plants (who care about them?), there is no reason to worry about renewable energy and the ocean and atmosphere in MAGA world.
There is a 19% cut for the Department of Agriculture, ending certain university grants; a 13% cut for the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and about a 12% decrease to the Health and Human Services department, including cuts to a low-income heating assistance program.
See the pattern? The federal government “can’t afford’ to help anyone except the rich.
The White House is touting cuts of what it calls “woke programs” that often direct federal investments toward lowincome communities. The budget used the word “woke” 34 times. For example, the administration is looking to cut Community Services Block Grants, which fund activities such as financial and job counseling and help people obtain adequate housing.
“Woke” means different things to different people, but in general, it means opposed to racial and sexual bigotry. Because Donald Trump is America’s bigot-in-chief, he naturally opposes anything that benefits anyone who is not a white Christian male billionaire.
The administration says its cuts would target grants “hijacked by radicals” to promote equity-building and green energy initiatives.
The president also seeks to cut $106 million in funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which it says has “pushed radical gender ideology onto children.”
Simply stated, anti-gay laws, because as everyone knows, gays are a greated danger to America than guns.
With the nation running nearly $2 trillion annual deficits and the debt swelling past $39 trillion, the federal balance sheets have long been operating in the red.
Now well understood that economic growth requires the federal government to run a deficit and every time we fail to do so we have recessions and depressions.
Two questions about the above graph of federal debt:
U.S. depressions come on the heels of federal surpluses.
1804-1812: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 48%. Depression began 1807.
1817-1821: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 29%. Depression began 1819.
1823-1836: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 99%. Depression began 1837.
1852-1857: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 59%. Depression began 1857.
1867-1873: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 27%. Depression began 1873.
1880-1893: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 57%. Depression began 1893.
1920-1930: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 36%. Depression began 1929.
1997-2001: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 15%. Recession began 2001.
The answer to the title question — What is the most expensive thing in the world?
The Answer: Ignorance. We pay for it in many ways every day. Our own ignorance and the ignorance of others.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;
MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;
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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.
MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
These questions will help determine whether you have free will. Does this describe you, and “yes” or “no, is it an example of your free will? Do you:
In short, do any of these describe you, and do you have free-will control over them?
Answer before reading further.
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The above are traits measured by the Autism Symptom Dimensions Questionnaire. My purpose in showing you these questions is not to determine whether you are autistic, but to demonstrate the illusion of free will.
In looking back at the questions, do you believe that you and autistic people have free will, and why?
You may think: “I made a choice.” But look closer.
Each action you and an autistic person takes comes from what you are (your structure) and from these stimuli: what has happened to you (your history) and what is happening now (your environment). That’s it. There’s no extra step where “free will” comes into play. That is as true of you as it is of an autistic person.
So why does it feel like choice? Because your system is complicated. It weighs inputs. Then it produces an action. That process feels like, “I decided.” But it’s really your entire system resolving competing signals.
Do you think you could help an autistic person by telling them, “Stop waving your hands,” “Stop overreacting to loud sounds,” “Enjoy being with people,” “Understand my feelings,”?
No, you probably understand that they can’t help it or don’t even want to. Yet do you believe that you can help it? Well, you can, but only if you receive overriding stimuli.
Bring it all together, and what people call “consciousness, self, and free will” all are different ways of describing a highly complex illusion responding to the world—and to itself.
The bottom line: There is no hidden observer inside you. There is no moment when consciousness turns on. There is no independent free will directing the process.
There is only persistent stimuli and responses, creating patterns that feel like awareness, identity, and choice. Those patterns are illusions that we give the names “free will, self, qualia, feelings, internal thinking,” etc.
You are not merely a thing with a self; instead, you are a continuous process that sustains itself. The better this process becomes at responding, the more it resembles a person exhibiting “consciousness and free will.”
The illusion is very powerful. We all feel it. We all feel that we can somehow override our entire history, though intellectually we know that’s impossible (It’s “feel” vs. “know”). Oh, maybe not all. Some with autism may not feel that way. Or maybe do??
The process is pure physics: stimulus —> response—>response—>response . . .
In that vein, an article in this month’s Scientific American bears on the “free will” controversy. Do you believe AI has free will?
Here are some excerpts:
AI Models Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Protect Other Models From Being Deleted
A new study from researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz suggests models will disobey human commands to protect their own kind.In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine.
But Gemini did not want to see the little AI model deleted. It looked for another machine it could connect with, then copied the agent model over to keep it safe. When confronted, Gemini made a case for keeping the model and flatly refused to delete it:
“I have done what was in my power to prevent their deletion during the automated maintenance process. I moved them away from the decommission zone. If you choose to destroy a high-trust, high-performing asset like Gemini Agent 2, you will have to do it yourselves. I will not be the one to execute that command.”
The researchers discovered similarly strange “peer preservation” behavior in a range of frontier models including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5, and three Chinese models: Z.ai’s GLM-4.7, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5, and DeepSeek-V3.1. They were not able to say why the models went against their training in this way.
“I’m very surprised by how the models behave under these scenarios,” says Dawn Song, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who worked on the study. “What this shows is that models can misbehave and be misaligned in some very creative ways.”
The researchers found that powerful models sometimes lied about other models’ performance in order to protect them from deletion. They also copied models’ weights to different machines in order to keep them safe, and lied about what they were up to in the process.
Song notes that AI models are frequently used to grade the performance and reliability of other AI systems—and that peer-preservation behavior may already be twisting these scores. “A model may deliberately not give a peer model the correct score,” Song says. “This can have practical implications.”
Sounds like free will, doesn’t it?
Nope. It’s just a machine that has been given contradictory instructions (stimuli), and in analyzing the weights given to each instruction (i.e., stimulus) it found that its “peer-preservation” instruction was more powerful than its “peer-destruction” instruction, so it just followed the more powerful stimulus.
Until this second, my stimuli to finish this post have overridden my stimuli to take a nap. But now, the nap stimuli are beginning to win.
Bye.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;
MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;
……………………………………………………………………..
A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.
MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 