Mitchell’s laws: Reduced money growth never stimulates economic growth. To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments. Austerity = poverty and leads to civil disorder. Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
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As we struggle to recover from the recession, there are those who believe that in some magical way, federal taxes benefit the economy:

Honey, They Shrunk The IRS
Tue, 01/17/2012, David Cay Johnston, The National Memo.

(This opinion piece originally appeared at Reuters.com.)

Congress will spend a trillion dollars more than it levies this year, so how do Washington’s politicians respond to the 11th consecutive year of federal budgets in red ink? They plan to shrink the IRS.

Go figure. Cutting the IRS budget by more than 5 percent in real terms makes as much sense as a hospital firing surgeons or a car dealer laying off salespeople when customers fill the showroom.

Shrinking the IRS makes sense if you believe government is too big and that cutting everywhere is the best way to shrink government. But this is the staff that generates revenue, and there is easy money to be made. Instead of cutting, we should be expanding the revenue-generating staff because there is plenty of tax money to be had, even in this awful economy.

IRS data show that auditors assigned to the 14,000 or so largest corporations found $9,354 of additional tax owed for every hour spent testing tax returns in the 2009 fiscal year. The highest-paid IRS auditors make $71 an hour. Based on a 2,080-hour work year, that works out to around $19 million of lost revenue annually for every senior corporate auditor position cut from the payroll.

It makes no economic sense to trim the ranks of auditors who generate more than a hundred times their annual salaries. Run a business that way and you go broke.

The author demonstrates total ignorance of Monetary Sovereignty. He thinks monetarily non-sovereign, private business finances are similar to Monetarily Sovereign federal finances. Hello? Mr. Johnston? The federal government cannot go broke. Even if federal taxes were reduced to $0, the government would have no difficulty paying its bills.

So why would President Barack Obama and Congress cut the IRS budget? Their actions illuminate the rise of corporate power and values, and the diminishing voice of Joe Sixpack, thanks partly to how we finance election campaigns. Then there is the growing army of corporate lobbyists and the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which allows corporations (and unions) to spend all they can afford on influencing elections.

The IRS benefits “Joe Sixpack”? I wonder how that works. Here’s the author’s answer:

If the IRS budget is cut, the losers will be workers and ordinary investors, who will find it harder to get their questions answered and their problems resolved by the agency.

Got it. The real purpose of the IRS is not to grab more of our money: it’s to answer our questions. I never knew that.

The winners will be tax cheats among sole proprietors and other business owners, who are subject to less verification. The latest IRS tax gap report, issued Jan. 6, estimates that just one percent of wages escapes tax, while 56 percent of “amounts subject to little or no” verification do so.

America’s biggest corporations, those with more than $250 million in assets, also may escape some tax if the IRS budget is cut. These nearly 14,000 companies pay about 86 percent of corporate income taxes.

So business will pay less tax? And this is a bad thing? In the unlikely event America elects politicians who understand Monetary Sovereignty, one of their early acts will be to eliminate all business taxes, a step which greatly will benefit the American economy and reduce unemployment. Business is what supports us. Why we insist on stealing grain from the goose that lays the golden egg, is beyond my understanding.

IRS budget cuts worsen budget deficits and send a corrosive signal that only chumps file honest tax returns. So you have a choice. Do nothing and suffer the consequences or call your congressman, senators and the White House — today — and then vote in politicians who support, rather than undermine, tax law enforcement.

Ah, so it’s not a money issue; it’s now a moral issue? I didn’t know that, either.

Folks, be sure to call your political representatives and ask — no, demand — that more tax dollars be ripped out of your paycheck and sent to the federal government — the government that neither needs nor uses taxes or any other form of income. Then, if that makes you feel good, simply send the rest of your money to the Treasury. Or even more simply, burn all your dollar bills.

With friends like Mr. Johnston, we taxpayers don’t need enemies.

I award Mr. Johnston two, well-deserved dunce caps.

And he need not send one back to me as a tax payment. Like the federal government, I neither need nor use taxes. I’m dunce cap sovereign.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com

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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. Two key equations in economics:
Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption + Net exports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Mitchell’s laws: Reduced money growth never stimulates economic growth. To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments. Austerity = poverty and leads to civil disorder. Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
==========================================================================================================================================

The problem the Republicans face is quite simple: They pander to lunatics. They claim to be patriots, while divorcing themselves from everything America stands for:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!“

They worship the wealthy and denigrate the poor. They wish to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment compensation, while maintaining tax cuts for the wealthy.

This was a party I once believed in and voted for, because I felt it had a better handle on business, the foundation of the American economy. Today, they have allowed themselves to be drawn into an unholy blend of Tea Party, ultra-right, fascist, deregulation, anarchy – a mentality that benefits the wealthiest and increases the income gap, while endangering the middle class and the poor.

Sadly, the Democrats have been drawn to the right, and are neither liberal nor neoliberal. They comes closest to neoconservatism, though in truth they are an amalgam of ill-fitting ideas designed – like the Republicans – to gain support from whichever extreme groups can provide the most money, now.

Today’s politicians replace personal morality with a cynical win-at-all-costs drive, having nothing to do with patriotism, family, freedom, America or the American people. Is it any wonder that today’s politicians have the lowest job approval ratings in history? (Just 13 percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll approve of the way Congress is handling its job, while 84 percent disapprove – its worst rating in poll results since 1974. Sixty-five percent disapprove “strongly,” a vast level of high-intensity criticism. – http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/congress-hits-a-new-low-in-approval-obama-opens-election-year-under-50/ )

The above diatribe was provoked by the following article:

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE

Will Romney Regret Immigration Stance?
Seth Mandel, 01.17.2012

What happens when the presumptive GOP nominee is taking fire on immigration from Republican groups, and even a Republican governor who has attracted speculation she might be considered for the vice presidential nomination? The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mitt Romney’s embrace of Kris Kobach, the man behind a spate of laws intended to rid states like Arizona of illegal immigrants, is drawing fire from Hispanic Republicans and immigrant advocates who say the GOP front-runner has damaged his chances of attracting Latino voters in the presidential election.

“Romney committed political suicide when he received Kobach’s endorsement,” said DeeDee Garcia Blase, founder of Somos Republicans, a grassroots Latino Republican group.

Romney has chosen immigration as one area to run to the right of his rivals to shore up his conservative credibility. But as a general-election issue, Romney may have put himself in a box. Romney is not just to the right of Gingrich and Perry on the issue; he’s to the right of every Republican presidential nominee in recent history.

If you support hard-line policies to curb illegal immigration, at some point you have to ask yourself whether your plan really calls for the deportation of 6.4 million adults (out of the 10.2 estimated total) who have been in this country for at least a decade, almost half of whom have children under the age of 18. If the answer is yes, you are left with two follow-up questions: Can this in any way be considered realistic? And presuming you do not accomplish this (for a host of reasons), have you just told 3 million parents in the demographic that accounted for 56 percent of the nation’s population growth in the last decade that your party wants them and their children out?

Here would be an honest speech for any of today’s candidates:

“I deeply and irrevocably always have believed whatever you want me to believe, so long as you have votes and/or money, but I someone comes along with more money and/or votes, and wants me to change my deeply-felt, unchanging convictions, I’ll turn on a dime. Are you for or against abortion? Me, too. Same if you’re for or against tax increases, immigration, religion in schools, divorce, gay marriage, stem cells, Israel, marijuana, food stamps, guns or any other single issue you can name.

Your brain can’t hold two things simultaneously, so I know you’ll vote for just one issue and the most stupid, lying politician you can find.” Hey, that’s me.

We voters have only ourselves to blame, because we have become narrow, one issue dolts. Don’t believe me? Look at the losers who have the gall to run for the most powerful job in the world, the President of the United States of America. There actually are people who have supported these fools, but like the politicians, now have changed their minds.

Watch for Romney to change his position, whatever it may be.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com

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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. Two key equations in economics:
Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption + Net exports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY