–Casper the Ghost clarifies his positions. Well, not exactly.

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●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.
==========================================================================================================================================

In the previous post, I compared Mitt Romney to Casper the Ghost, a creature with no substance.

I mentioned the ghostly positions Romney has taken, or not taken, as like an undefined fog. He repeatedly has switched beliefs on minimum wage, stem cell research, health care mandates, citizenship for immigrants, pro-choice for women, the Bush tax reductions, gun control, global warming and same-sex marriage.

I felt that any person wishing to be President of the United States, perhaps becoming the most powerful man on earth, should at least offer solid and consistent plans for the country — and Romney seems to have no plans, solid or consistent.

Well, perhaps I was unfair. This is “Mitt Romney’s Plan for a Stronger Middle Class,” taken directly from his web site, together with my comments in [brackets].

Energy Independence
• Increase access to domestic energy resources [Drill and mine in ecologically sensitive areas?]
• Streamline permitting for exploration and development [Less oversight of drilling and mining?]
• Eliminate regulations destroying the coal industry [More pollution? Less oversight of mining safety?]
• Approve the Keystone XL pipeline [Reckless and controversial. See: Keystone XL pipeline may threaten aquifer that irrigates much of the central U.S.]

The Skills To Succeed
• Give every family access to a great school and quality teachers [Specifically, how?]
• Provide access to affordable and effective higher education options [Specifically, how?]
• Focus job training programs on building valuable skills that align with opportunities [Specifically, how?]
• Attract and retain the best and the brightest from around the world [Specifically, how?]

Trade That Works For America
• Curtail the unfair trade practices of countries like China [A trade war with China?]
• Open new markets for American goods and services [Specifically, how?]
• Build stronger economic ties in Latin America [Specifically, how? ]
• Create a Reagan Economic Zone to strengthen free enterprise around the world [Specifically, how?]

Cut The Deficit
• Immediately reduce non-security discretionary spending by five percent [How? Cut Social Security? Cut Medicare? Medicaid? Infrastructure repairs? Aid to education? Poverty aid? Food & Drug regulation? Bank regulation?]
• Cap federal spending below twenty percent of the economy [This is called “austerity,” a program that already has destroyed Europe. Cutting the deficit always causes a recession or a depression.]
• Give states responsibility for programs that they can implement more effectively [“Responsibility” is a code word for cutting federal aid to the already cash-strapped states, requiring increased local taxes.]
• Consolidate agencies and align compensation of federal workers with their private-sector counterparts [Cutting federal employment and salaries will increase U.S. unemployment and increase competition for private jobs, while reducing the U.S. savings rate.]

Champion Small Business
• Reduce taxes on job creation through individual and corporate tax reform [If tax “reform” means cutting business taxes, I’m for it. But since he wants to cut the deficit, business tax cuts may require personal tax increases.]
• Stop the increases in regulation that are tangling job creators in red tape [How will reducing business regulation benefit consumers? Specifically, which businesses are over-regulated?]
• Protect workers and businesses from strong-arm labor union tactics [Note to white, middle class workers with no college education: Labor unions are your protection against unfair employers.]
• Replace Obamacare with real health care reform that controls cost and improves care [Obamacare is Romney care, and specifically what is the reform you didn’t do in Massachusetts?]

Most of “Mitt Romney’s Plan for a Stronger Middle Class” is just generalized, pie-in-the-sky posturing. That’s the good part. The rest is truly dangerous.

Reducing the federal deficit absolutely, positively will return us to recession if we are lucky, and a depression if we are not. Europe has taught us all we need to know about austerity.

Reducing federal oversight of food manufacturers, drug manufacturers, banks and other financial institutions, our land and water and the myriad other businesses with potential to harm us, is foolish. Which agencies would he like to eliminate?

So perhaps it was unfair to compare Mitt Romney with a ghost. While most of his plans are misty, foggy and nebulous, those few with substance are economy killers.

And there are people who believe this man will be an improvement?? Yikes!

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

==========================================================================================================================================
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

–Casper the Ghost supported by less educated, white, working class voters

If you’re looking for sense in this election season, you’ll be disappointed. Mitt Romney, who has offered zero plans for the economy, and has changed virtually every position he ever has held – sometimes having changed more than once – is favored by the very people he is most likely to hurt.

This tells me Romney is irrelevant. The election is all about Barack Obama. I suspect there are very few true Romney supporters. Really, what is there to support? For the most part, there are Obama haters, Obama lovers and those who don’t know.

The Republicans essentially have put up Casper the Ghost, a creature without form or substance, and have done everything possible to keep the economy from improving, so that Obama will be blamed, to create more Obama haters than Obama lovers.

New York Times
Polls Underline Stubborn Splits in 3 Key States
By Jim Rutenberg and Allison Kopicki, Published: August 8, 2012

Mitt Romney is maintaining the traditional — and sizable — Republican advantage among white working-class voters in the states most likely to decide the presidential election. President Obama is holding on to the crucial support (of women) in most battleground states.

Those findings, contained in the latest batch of Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News swing state polls. Mr. Obama’s goal is to keep Mr. Romney from running up huge margins among white working-class voters — defined as those without college degrees and with household incomes of $30,000 to $100,000 — who could give him the edge.

Romney has offered no plan that would benefit white, working class voters. He hardly has offered any plan at all, with the possible exception of his amazing vow to eliminate Romneycare (aka Obamacare), a program that already has begun to help his white, working class supporters.

Why would anyone vote for a candidate offering no solid plan – a candidate who has switched positions on minimum wage, stem cell research, health care mandates, citizenship for immigrants, pro-choice for women, the Bush tax reductions, gun control, global warming and same-sex marriage?

A vote for Romney is a vote for – what, exactly?

The latest polls underscore just how tight the race continues to be, with the candidates running closely in Virginia and Colorado and Mr. Obama leading in Wisconsin. Mr. Obama is struggling because of the economy. But Mr. Romney is also struggling to connect with middle-class voters.

And about half of voters in each of the three states said presidential candidates should release several years of tax returns. (Mr. Romney has so far declined to release more than two years of returns amid calls by Democrats and even Republicans for more.)

A candidate’s repeated flip-flopping is a symptom of his intellectual dishonesty. A candidate’s refusal to release tax returns is a symptom of financial dishonesty. Yes, all politicians are liars — including Obama — but Romney seems to be taking political mendacity to another level.

In Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, more voters said that Mr. Obama’s policies would hurt their personal finances if he were elected to a second term than said they would help.

Mr. Romney is running ads in Virginia and Colorado featuring the owner of a metal fabricating business who asserts Mr. Obama is undermining him; the campaign has named his coming bus tour “The Romney Plan for a Stronger Middle Class.”

O.K., Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado, exactly what are those Romney Plans for a stronger middle class”? Anyone?

Try to touch Romney and your fingers will glide right through him. I have watched elections since Truman, and I never have seen a candidate for President of the United States with less substance and fewer solid beliefs than Mitt Romney.

As I said, this election is all about Barack Obama. But Casper the Ghost could win.

I award all those working class, less educated folks, who plan to vote for Romney, the Casper award for imaginary, ever-changing, ghostly lack of substance. Grab him if you can.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

The battle of money is being fought on the field of morality

Economics is morality. The science attempts to answer the question, “How can we improve our lives?” a moral and an economic question.

The right wing and the left wing have divergent views of morality. In the early 1860’s, the South, which at the time was mostly Democratic and also more right wing, felt virtue included slavery.

Even with southern preachers famously thumping their bibles and denouncing Satan, the notion of enslaving human beings, and denying them what we today consider human rights, the South was able to rationalize slavery. A master could beat, whip, starve and even kill his slaves, and no court would condemn him. That was considered moral by loyal church goers of the religious right.

A more left-leaning Republican North disputed this version of morality, and a civil war was fought over the difference, although as is the case with most morality questions, money was the underlying issue. The Civil War was the intersection of morality, religion, politics and economics, with each being used to justify the other.

Most Americans knew then and know now, slavery is immoral; the South was in league with the very Satan their religious preachers loudly warned about.

Today, the parties have flipped their right/left orientations; the Democrats believe those enduring poverty, sickness, homelessness and illiteracy are victims of fate, unfortunates who need and deserve direct support from a benevolent and financially limitless federal government.

The right wing, most pious voters believe otherwise, and tend to blame the victims, as exemplified in the following article from the Washington Post:

Romney attacks Obama over welfare reform

ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Ill. – Mitt Romney sought to inject welfare as an issue in the presidential campaign here Tuesday, accusing President Obama of dismantling federal welfare reform and creating a “culture of dependency.”

The presumptive Republican nominee charged the Obama administration with effectively reversing the popular bipartisan welfare reform signed into law in 1996 by President Bill Clinton by allowing waivers to states from welfare work requirements.

“That is wrong. If I’m president, I’ll put work back in welfare,” Romney said, campaigning in this suburb just outside Obama’s hometown of Chicago. He added, “We will end the culture of dependency and restore a culture of good hard work.”

The right wing version of morality is akin to “tough love.” It says people are responsible for their own misery, and government-provided benefits merely encourage sloth and Romney’s so-called “culture of dependency.”

Earlier Tuesday, the Romney campaign rolled out a new 30-second television advertisement, “Right Choice,” that says, “Obama guts welfare reform.” This is Romney’s latest attempt to cast Obama as a big-government liberal.

The Obama campaign responded by noting that in 2005, then-Massachusetts governor Romney and most other Republican governors requested state waivers similar to those the Obama administration began allowing with the Department of Health and Human Services’ July 12 announcement.

Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith said the waivers give states additional flexibility only if they move more people – not fewer – from welfare to work. She said, “These false and extremely hypocritical attacks demonstrate how Mitt Romney lacks the core strength and principles the nation needs in a President.

In today’s political language, welfare “reform” actually is a move toward less welfare.. “Reform” often is invoked by the religious right to justify punishing the middle and lower classes. Social Security “reform” means lower or later benefits. Medicare “reform” means less Medicare. Tax “reform” means closing so-called “loopholes” such as the mortgage interest deduction and the medical deduction. Beware of “reform” in the hands of the religious right.

The fact that United States Presidential hopeful Romney lacks core beliefs comes as no surprise, but his repeated, pusillanimous flip-flopping is not the issue.

The issue is, what is the morality of federal aid?

Ezra Klein’s WONKBLOG included these comments:

Ron Haskins, one of the reform’s main authors enthusiastically supports the waivers. Waivers are what made welfare reform possible in the first place, he argues, by letting states experiment with new practices and they can be useful going forward.

“Do you trust that the secretary of HHS is only going to grant waivers that really are promising? Maybe I’m naïve, but I just don’t come to the conclusion that the Democrats would really use the waiver to undermine welfare reform.”

One reasons he’s doubtful of the Republican attacks is the experience of the stimulus package, which included new welfare funding for states. Republicans and conservatives attacked the idea as undermining the principle that states should be funded based on their success in keeping people off welfare.

But a study by LaDonna Pavetti, Liz Schott and Elizabeth Lower-Basch put out by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found (pdf) that the funding created 260,000 jobs and was actually used to promote welfare-to-work initiatives, not undermine them.

If the Obama administration wanted to undermine the reform’s work requirements, Haskins asks, “why did they allow the states to use the $5 billion to subsidize work?”

Personal opinion: It is unseemly — no, disgusting — for a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars to suck up to the 1% highest income group, by speaking against aid to the poor, and pretending this is in some way, “good for them” — and that to do otherwise is to create a “culture of dependency.”

Let’s face it, the rich pretend to believe they succeeded not by good fortune, but by hard work, and if only the poor had worked as hard, they wouldn’t be poor. So, to make this possible, the poor should be denied “charity,” which will force them to work hard and thus be successful.

Very conveniently, denying aid to the poor and middle classes helps enlarge the income gap between them and the rich. Less Medicare, less Social Security, less Medicaid, fewer food stamps, less aid to education, less unemployment insurance — less federal spending in total — all balloon the income gap.

But this is justified on a moral principle, not the true financial principle. Reducing assistance supposedly cures the 99%’s “addiction” to government aid, and oh yes, it widens the gap.

The battle of money is being fought on the field of morality.

Sadly, the lower income groups, tending to be more pious, are more responsive to a moral argument. By voting for the right wing, they tacitly accept the thesis that they are responsible for their own misery, and if only they were more ambitious and smarter, and less willing to be “food stamp queens” and “unemployment kings” they could have succeeded, just like Mitt Romney.

They also are susceptible to the false “fairness” argument that taxpayers pay for these subsidies (they don’t in a Monetarily Sovereign govenment), and the government can’t afford them (it can). It all works to keep the middle and lower classes down and the 1% up, up, up.

Once again, the so-called “religious” right-wing is on the side of money and on the wrong side of morality.

And as for Mitt Romney, he is neither moral nor immoral. He is amoral, a man with no underlying beliefs, a man who blows with the wind, genuflecting to the right one day, to the left the next, displaying a degree of spinelessness amazing even for a politician. But it doesn’t matter. This election has nothing to do with Romney. He might as well be Casper the Ghost. This election is all about hating or loving Barack Obama.

And money-biased morality.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–Political correctness gone wild

Sorry for being the mean old Grinch who stole Christmas, but I found the following headline intriguing:

“Double amputee Oscar Pistorius, a.k.a ‘Blade Runner,’ has qualified for the 400m finals.” (http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=aov0i3n8ko7s4)

Here’s my prediction: The day he wins a medal is the day the IOC and the world will begin to realize he has, or soon will have, an unfair advantage — something akin to performance improving drugs.

Every year, manufacturers will find ways to make the blades better and better. Perhaps, in the next couple of years, someone using new improved blades will run the 100 meters in 5 seconds, run a mile in 2 minutes, do a 50 foot long jump and a 15 foot high jump — maybe even do the pole vault without a pole.

Ironically, the IOC just banned performance enhancing swim suits, so I guess there’s no chance we’ll see swim fins for legless swimmers. Or is there?

His using the blades is political correctness gone wild. But, as with economics, sometimes the obvious takes a bit of time to become . . . well, obvious.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

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