–Is AARP clueless or owned by the rich?

Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
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Mitchell’s laws:
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes. .
●Liberals think the purpose of government is to protect the poor and powerless from the rich and powerful. Conservatives think the purpose of government is to protect the rich and powerful from the poor and powerless.
●The single most important problem in economics is the gap between rich and poor.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor.
●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.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive, and the motive is the Gap.

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Those of us who are retired or looking forward to retirement, sometimes make the mistake of believing that the people of AARP have our best interests at heart.

If they do, they certainly are clueless about Social Security. Here is a survey AARP just published:

How Would You Strengthen Social Security and Medicare?

To ensure that Americans get clear information, AARP asked the conservative Heritage Foundation, the progressive Brookings Institution and respected independent experts on both programs to provide the pros and cons for 12 proposals to change Social Security and 15 options to change Medicare.

Each set of proposals is detailed in a downloadable brochure at You’ve Earned a Say

Hmmm . . . the ultra-conservative, Koch-ruled Heritage Foundation?

And the “progressive” Brooking Institution? I’d have more faith in Brookings’s progressivism if its trustees weren’t all wealthy corporate heads — (*See below) — the very people who want to widen the Gap between the rich and the rest.

Here is the intoduction to AARP’s survey titled, “How Would You Strengthen Social Security”:

How Would You Strengthen Social Security?

AARP believes you’ve earned a say in the future of Social Security. That’s why we’ve developed a tool you can use to make your own choices about how to strengthen Social Security.

Social Security faces long-term financial challenges as the overall U.S. population ages, and contributions aren’t keeping up with longer life expectancies.

And there it is: The Big Lie that FICA “contributions” are necessary to pay Social Security benefits.

Never mind that federal finances are different from personal finances.
Never mind that the federal government never can run short of its own sovereign currency.
Never mind that even if FICA fell to $0, the federal government could continue paying benefits, forever.

When you begin with the Big Lie, everything that follows is a lie. For instance:

While the Social Security Trustees project that the program can pay full benefits for the next 20 years, it would only be able to pay about 75 percent of promised benefits after that.

The federal government (unlike state and local governments) creates dollars ad hoc, by paying bills. FICA removes dollars from the economy.

If FICA were eliminated (which it should be), Social Security benefit dollars would be added to the economy, stimulating economic growth.

The following is true:

The longer it takes for Washington to strengthen Social Security and close the funding gap, the harder it will be for workers to plan for their future.

If Washington simply eliminated FICA and continued to pay all benefits, workers would have no trouble planning for their future.

The AARP survey begins this way: You are given only two basic choices: ADJUST (increase) CONTRIBUTIONS or ADJUST (reduce) BENEFITS.

According to AARP, there is no other way to “strengthen” Social Security. (How about eliminating contributions and increasing benefits? Those choices are not considered.)

Here are the AARP alternatives under the “ADJUST CONTRIBUTIONS” heading:

Increase the Payroll Tax Cap; Increase Payroll Tax Rate; Apply Payroll Tax to All Salary Reduction Plans; Add All New State/Local Gov’t. Workers to Social Security

Note how they all widen the Gap between the rich and the rest.

And here are the AARP alternatives under the “ADJUST BENEFITS” heading:

Raise the Full Retirement Age; Begin Longevity Indexing; Means Test for Higher-Income People; Reduce Benefits for Higher Lifetime Earners; Raise Number of Years Used to Compute Retirement Benefits; Recalculate COLA; Improve Benefits for Targeted Groups

Note again how they all widen the Gap between the rich and the rest. AARP even includes a graph to show how much your answers would “fill the (non-existent) gap.”

Everything AARP proposes either would pay the “99%” less or charge the “99%” more.

Since everything in economics devolves to motive, what is AARP’s motive?

AARP fundamentally is a big business — mostly a huge insurance brokerage. It receives massive amounts of money from big insurance companies.

It’s leaders are rich and it consults the rich when it seeks answers. And it is the rich who want the public to believe that FICA funds Social Security (and Medicare).

Why? Because that belief requires FICA to be increased and/or benefits to be decreased, both of which widen the Gap between the rich and the rest.

That really is all the rich want: To widen the Gap. It is the Gap that makes them rich. Without the Gap, no one would be rich, and the wider the Gap, the richer they are.

In short, AARP, like the politicians, most of the media and most university professors are owned by the rich, whose primary goal is to widen the Gap between them and the rest of us.

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*BROOKINGS INSTITUTION BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Robert J. Abernethy
President
American Standard Development Co., Inc.

Paul M. Achleitner
Chairman of the Supervisory Board
Deutsche Bank AG

Liaquat Ahamed
Former Chief Executive Officer
Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, Inc.

Dominic Barton
Global Managing Director
McKinsey & Company, Inc.

Robert M. Bass
President
Keystone Group, L.P.

Alan R. Batkin
Chairman
Converse Associates, Inc.

Crandall Bowles
Chairman
The Springs Company

Hanzade Dogan Boyner
Vice Chairwoman
Dogan Holding Sirketler Grubu A.S.

Paul L. Cejas
Chairman
PLC Investment, Inc.

W. Edmund Clark
President and CEO
TD Bank Group

Abby Joseph Cohen
President, Global Markets Institute and Senior Investment Strategist
Goldman, Sachs & Co.

Betsy Z. Cohen
Chief Executive Officer
The Bancorp

Arthur R. Collins
Managing Partner
theGROUP

Howard E. Cox
Advisory Partner
Greylock

Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr.
Partner
O’Melveny & Myers LLP

Alan M. Dachs
President and CEO
Fremont Group

Paul Desmarais Jr.
Chairman and Co-CEO
Power Corporation of Canada

Kenneth M. Duberstein
Chairman and CEO
The Duberstein Group, Inc.

Cheryl Cohen Effron
Founder
Conjunction Fund

Alfonso Fanjul
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Fanjul Corp. and Florida Crystals Corporation

Bart Friedman
Senior Partner
Cahill Gordon & Reindel

Ann M. Fudge
Former Chairman and CEO
Young & Rubicam Brands

Ellen Futter
President
American Museum of Natural History

Brian L. Greenspun
Chairman and CEO
Greenspun Media Group

Pete Higgins
Founding Partner
Second Avenue Partners

Shirley Ann Jackson Ph.D.
President
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Benjamin R. Jacobs
Senior Advisor/Founder
The JBG Companies

Richard A. Kimball Jr.
Chief Strategy Officer
Accretive Health Inc.

Klaus Kleinfeld
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Alcoa, Inc.

Philip H. Knight
Chairman
Nike, Inc.

Nigel Morris
Managing Partner
QED Investors

James Murren
Chairman and CEO
MGM Resorts International

Thomas C. Ramey
Former Chairman
Liberty International, Liberty Mutual Group

Steven Rattner
Chairman
Willett Advisors LLC

Edgar Rios
Co-Founder and Managing Director
Wenzi Capital Partners

James Rogers
Chairman
Duke Energy

Wilbur Ross
Chief Executive Officer
WL Ross & Co. LLC

Haim Saban
Chairman and CEO
Saban Capital Group, Inc.

Victoria P. Sant
President
The Summit Foundation

Leonard D. Schaeffer
Founding Chairman & CEO
WellPoint

Peter Scher
Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate Responsibility
JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Lynn Thoman
Co-President
Leon Lowenstein Foundation

Andrew H. Tisch
Co-Chairman of the Board
Loews Corporation

Beatrice W. Welters
Founder and Co-Chairperson
AnBryce Foundation

John H. White Jr.
President and CEO
Taco, Inc.

Tracy R. Wolstencroft
CEO
Heidrick and Struggles

Daniel Yergin
Vice-Chairman
IHS, Inc.
Founder
IHS Cambridge Energry Research Associates

Lei Zhang
Founder and CEO
Hillhouse Capital Management

Daniel B. Zwirn
Managing Partner
Zwirn Family Interests, LLC

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Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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The Ten Steps to Prosperity:

1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D plus long term nursing care — for everyone (Click here)
3. Provide an Economic Bonus to every man, woman and child in America, and/or every state a per capita Economic Bonus. (Click here) Or institute a reverse income tax.
4. Federally funded, free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
5. Salary for attending school (Click here)
6. Eliminate corporate taxes (Click here)
7. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually. (Refer to this.)
8. Tax the very rich (.1%) more, with higher, progressive tax rates on all forms of income. (Click here)
9. Federal ownership of all banks (Click here and here)
10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99% (Click here)

Initiating The Ten Steps sequentially will add dollars to the economy, stimulate the economy, and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.
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10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt

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.
1. A growing economy requires a growing supply of dollars (GDP=Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports)
2. All deficit spending grows the supply of dollars
3. The limit to federal deficit spending is an inflation that cannot be cured with interest rate control.
4. The limit to non-federal deficit spending is the ability to borrow.

THE RECESSION CLOCK

Vertical gray bars mark recessions.

As the federal deficit growth lines drop, we approach recession, which will be cured only when the growth lines rise. Increasing federal deficit growth (aka “stimulus”) is necessary for long-term economic growth.

#MONETARYSOVEREIGNTY