–You never will know what you have lost: IV

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●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.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
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This is the fourth in a series of posts titled, “You never will know what you have lost” (Part I, Part II and Part III) Each post describes the invisible, but real costs of federal deficit reduction, aka “austerity.”

Since austerity never has benefited any Monetarily Sovereign nation that has tried it – 100% record of abject failure, often culminating in economic disaster – it is amazing that people still believe in it. But that is exactly what our own government is trying, now.

The first of the posts contained these paragraphs:

The list goes on and on: The lame who might have walked. The blind who might have seen. The children who might have given to America. The tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes that might have been foreseen.

The money that investors might have saved. The inventions never invented. The recessions and depressions that might have been avoided. The wars that might have been won or prevented. The life-saving drugs that might have been developed. The people who might not have died too soon. The beauty never created. The ideas lost. The better world that might have been.

You never will know.

Day by day, we die the death of a thousand invisible cuts, at the hands of people who know not what they do. Like doctors who treat anemia by bleeding the patient with leeches, they bleed the economy of its blood, its dollars, in the name of frugality.

And yet again:

The October 20, 2012 issue of NewScientist magazine contained a short article titled, “Hurricane threat deepens.”

The world really is getting stormier. Climate change is making hurricanes more severe, according to a new study of their effects on the US.

Aslak Grinsted of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, analysed storm surges due to hurricanes dating back to 1923, as measured by six US tide gauges. He found a clear upward trend. If it continues, the average number of hurricanes to hit the US each year will almost double by 2100 compared to 1923, and big storms like Hurricane Katrina will become more common.

Extreme weather already costs US insurers huge sums – some $32 billion in 2011.

Much damage can be mitigated and lives saved, if we have accurate prediction of hurricane paths, storm surges, rainfall and wind speeds.

New York Times
U.S. Satellite Plans Falter, Imperiling Data on Storms
By John H. Cushman, Jr.
Published: October 26, 2012

WASHINGTON — The United States is facing a year or more without crucial satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks, a result of years of mismanagement, lack of financing and delays in launching replacements, according to several recent official reviews.

The looming gap in satellite coverage, which some experts view as almost certain within the next few years, could result in shaky forecasts about storms like Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to hit the East Coast early next week.

All this week, forecasters have been relying on such satellites for almost all the data needed to narrow down what were at first widely divergent computer models of what Hurricane Sandy would do next: hit the coast, or veer away into the open ocean?

Experiments show that without this kind of satellite data, forecasters would have underestimated by half the huge blizzard that hit Washington in 2010.

“We cannot afford to lose any enhancement that allows us to accurately forecast any weather event coming our way,” said Craig J. Craft, commissioner of emergency management for Nassau County on Long Island, where the great hurricane of 1938 killed hundreds.

On Thursday, Mr. Craft was seeking more precise forecasts for Sandy and gearing up for possible evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes, as were ordered before Tropical Storm Irene last year. “Without accurate forecasts it is hard to know when to pull that trigger,” he said.

Experts have grown increasingly alarmed in the past two years because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launch of the next replacement, known as J.P.S.S.-1, has slipped to 2017, probably too late to avoid a coverage gap of at least a year.

For now, the agency is running on a stopgap bill that allows it to redirect money from other projects to the polar satellites. In approving it, Congress demanded a plan by next week showing how NOAA intended to stay on schedule and within a strict limit — about $900 million a year.

“NOAA does not have a policy to effect consistent and reliable cost estimates,” the Commerce inspector general said. The outside review team said it could not tell “if the current $12.9 billion is high, low, or exactly correct.”

The program’s problems began a decade ago with an effort to merge military and civilian weather satellites into a single project. After its cost doubled and its schedule slipped five years, that project was sundered by the Obama administration.

The false belief the federal government is limited in its ability to spend dollars, once again will cause property damage and loss of life. That is an absolute certainty.

How much more property will be damaged? How many more lives will be lost? You never will know. Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats debate, not about whether we should undergo austerity, nor even how severe a misguided austerity should be, but rather what form of austerity we should face — tax increases or spending cuts.

Austerity is a foregone conclusion, never debated. What kind, is the only question. There are harsh penalties for economic ignorance. How harsh? How many lost lives? How much property unnecessarily damaged?

You never will know.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

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 Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY