That didn’t take long: More debt-related idiocy

No sooner did I publish “It is 2019, and the phony federal debt ‘time bomb’ still is ticking (Thursday, Jan 24 2019)” when here comes a typically wrongheaded article:

New Poll: Medicare for All Is Popular Until You Explain How It Works
Support drops when you tell people it would require higher taxes, longer lines, and switching insurance plans. Peter Suderman|Jan. 24, 2019

A new poll shows that a clear majority of Americans support Medicare for All—until they are told what it is and how it would work.

The survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 56 percent of the country supports a “national health plan, sometimes called Medicare for All” and an even larger percentage—71 percent—supports the idea when told that it would “guarantee health insurance as a right for all Americans.”

When told that such a plan would eliminate health insurance premiums, 67 percent say they’re in favor.

One way to look at these numbers is as strong public approval for the broad outlines of a single-payer health care system, which would create a single national health insurance plan run by the federal government and financed through taxes.

That public is support is why so many 2020 Democratic presidential contenders have been warming up to the idea.

No, Mr. Suderman, the plan would not be “financed through taxes.” And this lie is the primary cause of confusion.

But the more revealing part of the survey, I think, comes from the questions focused on the costs of single payer, all of which caused support for Medicare for All to drop below 40 percent.

Told that it would eliminate private health insurance and require people to pay more in taxes, for example, support fell to 37 percent.

Yes, if you lie about the plan, by claiming taxes would be increased, fewer people will want it. No big surprise, there.

Told that it would cause some medical treatments and tests to be delayed, support dropped even further, to 26 percent.

Yes, add another lie, and even fewer people will want it.

Medicare for All supporters might complain that these are loaded descriptions that don’t accurately capture the reality of single payer, which they say is about freeing people from premiums while offering a guarantee of access.

But these are, at a very basic level, just descriptions of what an American single-payer system would do.

Wrong. They are not accurate descriptions at all. They are lies.

The most prominent such plan is the one put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), which would eliminate all existing private health insurance plans in a four-year period.

Although it allows for some secondary private coverage once the system is in place, it requires most everyone in the U.S. to enroll in a new, government-run plan.

Wrong, again. No one would be “required” to move to a free plan that covers more than a for-fee plan. People would do that voluntarily.

Arguably the whole point of the most ambitious single-payer schemes is to move everyone off private insurance and onto a single federally managed plan; that’s not possible unless people who currently have private insurance get new coverage.

Wrong, yet again. The “whole point” is to provide free, comprehensive health care insurance to all who want it. Original Medicare was one small step in that direction. No one is forced to accept it, but the vast majority of those eligible do.

Some single-payer proposal would make the transition more slowly, but coverage disruption is not incidental; it’s the point.

And wrong, again. It’s not coverage “disruption.” It’s coverage improvement.

Mr. Suderman distorts facts to make people believe insurance is being taken from them, and that they are being “moved off private insurance.”

No one needs to be “moved” anywhere. People will choose to move, just as they moved to original Medicare.

Think about it. If you were offered comprehensive health care insurance, that covered everything — doctors, hospitals, home care, pharmaceuticals — everything, and at zero cost, would the government have to “move” you?

Financing that plan would require a massive increase in federal spending—about $32 trillion over a decade, according to estimates from think tanks across the political spectrum.

Even with the most carefree attitude toward debt and deficits, it is nearly unthinkable that an increase in government spending of that size would not come with higher taxes, probably much higher taxes, which would likely affect the middle class.d

“Unthinkable” for those whose knowledge ends at the monetarily non-sovereign, gold standard years. But perfectly “thinkable” for those who understand that a Monetarily Sovereign government cannot run short of its own sovereign currency.

It is impossible for the U.S. federal government unintentionally to run short of U.S. dollars. It creates dollars, ad hoc, by the simple act of paying a creditor. The more dollars it pays to creditors, the more dollars it creates.

The contention that waiting times for health care services would be longer is the most debatable of the bunch, but given the experience of other countries and the probable design of a full-scale single-payer plan, it’s a more than a plausible outcome.

Government-run health care systems like the ones in the United Kingdom (which is fully socialized) and Canada (a territorial single-payer system) are notorious for having long wait times for services such as cancer treatment.

The “long-wait-times” bogeyman is put forth by the right wing and the ignorant, to scare the public.

The cause of long wait times is insufficient money. Obviously, any program that is underfunded will experience long wait times.

But just as there is no reason for a Monetarily Sovereign government to underfund, there is no reason for long wait times.

Furthermore, the Sanders plan calls for significant reductions to reimbursements for health care providers, which, if implemented, would almost certainly put some health care centers out of business, reducing the number of doctors and other medical professionals.

And although it’s possible, in theory, to imagine a system that doesn’t cut provider rates, that would be far, far more expensive, and would require even higher taxes while robbing supporters of one of their favorite talking points—that Medicare for All is much cheaper, overall, than the current system.

Reductions to reimbursements for health care providers are absolutely, 100% unnecessary. Sanders cripples his own plan by telling the public the “Big Lie,” that federal taxes fund federal spending.

The “Big Truth” is: Even if the federal government didn’t collect a single penny in taxes, it could continue spending, forever.

The function of federal taxes is not to fund spending but rather to:

1. Control the economy by encouraging some activities and discouraging others. (Example: Home mortgages are tax deductible, while rents are not, because the government wanted to encourage home ownership.)
2. To narrow the gap between the richer and the poorer.

Medicare for All proponents might be pleased with the show of support found in the survey, but what those questions mostly revealed was that people say yes when you ask them if they favor a health care system that is essentially cost-free.

Yes, cost-free is exactly what Medicare-for-All could be and should be.

Clear public support, in other words, only materializes when you ignore the practical reality of making a transition from a mixed public/private system to single payer—higher taxes, longer waits, and the loss of existing private insurance arrangements.

Three lies were bundled into one short paragraph:

There is no need for higher taxes. (The federal government cannot run short of dollars.)
There is no need for longer waits. (Original Medicare has not caused longer waits.)
And there is no “loss” of existing insurance. (People voluntarily will move to free Medicare for all, just as they voluntarily moved to original Medicare.)

It truly is disgusting that both the proponents and the opponents of Medicare-for-All have not displayed the honesty and courage to tell the populace the truth.

Could it be that the public is not ready for the truth? Will all financial decisions continue to be based on the Big Lie.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
Search #monetarysovereigntyFacebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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The single most important problems in economics involve the excessive income/wealth/power Gaps between the have-mores and the have-less.

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.

Implementation of The Ten Steps To Prosperity can narrow the Gaps:

Ten Steps To Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA

2. Federally funded medicare — parts a, b & d, plus long-term care — for everyone

3. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to social security for all)

4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone

5. Salary for attending school

6. Eliminate federal taxes on business

7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually.

8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.

9. Federal ownership of all banks

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9%

The Ten Steps will grow the economy, and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and you.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

It is 2019, and the phony federal debt “time bomb” still is ticking.

Periodically, I remind you about a disaster that was considered to be so imminent, it repeatedly was referred to as a “ticking time bomb.” I have evidence of the warning as early as 1940, and then every year thereafter.

I’m talking about the federal debt that not only was said to be a “ticking time bomb,” but “unsustainable” and “the time bomb of doom!”

THE FEDERAL DEBT

Year after year, that “time bomb of doom” has kept ticking, and here we are, in 2019, with a healthy economy, and still that bomb hasn’t exploded.

Eighty years of warnings, eighty years of being wrong, eighty years and many people still believe the doomsday sayers.

Visualize a cult leader telling his flock the world is about to end, so they all give away their earthly belongings, and then they march up the mountain to await the end. But the world doesn’t end. So they march back down.

And they do this every year for eighty years, and they still don’t catch on to the fact that the cult leader’s predictions are a farce.

That is analogous to the endless, wrong warnings about the federal debt.

Here for your amusement, is my latest reminder, beginning with 1940:

Back in 1940, the federal budget was a “ticking time-bomb which can eventually destroy the American system,” said Robert M. Hanes, president of the American Bankers Association.

**September 26, 1940, New York Times, Column 8**

By 1960: the debt was “threatening the country’s fiscal future,” said Secretary of Commerce, Frederick H. Mueller. (“The enormous cost of various Federal programs is a time-bomb threatening the country’s fiscal future, Secretary of Commerce Frederick H. Mueller warned here yesterday.”)

By 1983: “The debt probably will explode in the third quarter of 1984,” said Fred Napolitano, former president of the National Association of Home Builders.

In 1984: AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said. “It’s a time bomb ticking away.”

In 1985: “The federal deficit is ‘a ticking time bomb, and it’s about to blow up,” U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. (Remember him?)

Later in 1985: Los Angeles Times: “We labeled the deficit a ‘ticking time bomb’ that threatens to permanently undermine the strength and vitality of the American economy.”

In 1987: Richmond Times–Dispatch – Richmond, VA: “100TH CONGRESS FACING U.S. DEFICIT ‘TIME BOMB’”

Later in 1987: The Dallas Morning News: “A fiscal time bomb is slowly ticking that, if not defused, could explode into a financial crisis within the next few years for the federal government.”

In 1989: FORTUNE Magazine: “A TIME BOMB FOR U.S. TAXPAYERS”

In 1992: The Pantagraph – Bloomington, Illinois: “I have seen where politicians in Washington have expressed little or no concern about this ticking time bomb they have helped to create, that being the enormous federal budget deficit, approaching $4 trillion.”

Later in 1992: Ross Perot: “Our great nation is sitting right on top of a ticking time bomb. We have a national debt of $4 trillion.”

In 1995: Kansas City Star: “Concerned citizens. . . regard the national debt as a ticking time bomb poised to explode with devastating consequences at some future date.”

In 2003: Porter Stansberry, for the Daily Reckoning: “Generation debt is a ticking time bomb . . . with about ten years left on the clock.”

In 2004: Bradenton Herald: “A NATION AT RISK: TWIN DEFICIT A TICKING TIME BOMB”

In 2005: Providence Journal: “Some lawmakers see the Medicare drug benefit for what it is: a ticking time bomb.”

In 2006: NewsMax.com, “We have to worry about the deficit . . . when we combine it with the trade deficit we have a real ticking time bomb in our economy,” said Mrs. Clinton.

In 2007: USA Today: “Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen.”

In 2010: Reason Alert: “. . . the time bomb that’s ticking under the federal budget like a Guy Fawkes’ powder keg.”

In 2011: Washington Post, Lori Montgomery: ” . . . defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode.”

In 2014: CBN News: “The United States of Debt: A Ticking Time Bomb”

On Jun 18, 2015: The ticking economic time bomb that presidential candidates are ignoring: Fortune Magazine, Shawn Tully,

On February 10, 2016, The Daily Bell: “Obama’s $4.1 Trillion Budget Is Latest Sign of America’s Looming Collapse”

On January 23, 2017: Trump’s ‘Debt Bomb’: Deficit May Grow, Defense Budget May Not, By Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr.

On January 27, 2017: America’s “debt bomb is going to explode.” That’s according to financial strategist Peter Schiff. Schiff said that while low interest rates had helped keep a lid on U.S. debt, it couldn’t be contained for much longer. Interest rates and inflation are rising, creditors will demand higher premiums, and the country is headed “off the edge of a cliff.”

On April 28, 2017: Debt in the U.S. Fuel for Growth or Ticking Time Bomb?, American Institute for Economic Research, by Max Gulker, PhD – Senior Research Fellow, Theodore Cangeros

Feb. 16, 2018 America’s Debt Bomb By Andrew Soergel, Senior Reporter: Conservatives and deficit hawks are hurling criticism at Washington for deepening America’s debt hole.

April 18, 2018 By Alan Greenspan and John R. Kasich: “Time is running short, and America’s debt time bomb continues to tick.”

January 10, 2019, Unfunded Govt. Liabilities — Our Ticking Time Bomb. By Myra Adams, Tick, tick, tick goes the time bomb of national doom.

January 18, 2019; 2019 Is Gold’s Year To Shine (And The Ticking US Debt Time-Bomb) By Gavin Wendt

[The following were added after the original publishing of this article]

April 10, 2019, The National Debt: America’s Ticking Time Bomb. TIL Journal. Entire nations can go bankrupt. One prominent example was the *nation of Greece which was threatened with insolvency, a decade ago. Greece survived the economic crisis because the European Union and the IMF bailed the nation out.

July 11, 2019: National debt is a ‘ticking time bomb‘: Sen. Mike Lee

SEP 12, 2019, Our national ticking time bomb, By BILL YEARGIN
SPECIAL TO THE SUN SENTINEL | At some point, investors will become concerned about lending to a debt-riddled U.S., which will result in having to offer higher interest rates to attract the money. Even with rates low today, interest expense is the federal government’s third-highest expenditure following the elderly and military. The U.S. already borrows all the money it uses to pay its interest expense, sort of like a Ponzi scheme. Lack of investor confidence will only make this problem worse.

Keep in mind that the phony “time bomb” began to “tick” back in 1940, when the total debt was $40 Billion. Today, 80 years later, it has risen 52,500% (!) to $21 Trillion, and still it ticks.

Also, keep in mind that unlike the U.S. government, *Greece’s government is monetarily non-sovereign. The U.S. government is Monetarily Sovereign; it never can run short of its own sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar. The federal debt is nothing like a Ponzi scheme, which always runs short of money.

The question is: How many years will you allow the debt con artists to be wrong about the bogus debt dangers, before you shout “Enough!” We don’t believe you“?

Are 80 years of being wrong, sufficient?

As the saying goes: “Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me repeatedly for 80 years; shame on me.”

Will you continue to let these phonies fool you, forever? If so, shame on you.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

The single most important problems in economics involve the excessive income/wealth/power Gaps between the have-mores and the have-less.

Implementation of The Ten Steps To Prosperity can narrow the Gaps:

Ten Steps To Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA

2. Federally funded medicare — parts a, b & d, plus long-term care — for everyone

3. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to social security for all)

4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone

5. Salary for attending school

6. Eliminate federal taxes on business

7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually.

8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.

9. Federal ownership of all banks

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9%

The Ten Steps will grow the economy, and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and you.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

If you could provide free, comprehensive healthcare to everyone . . .

If you were a multi-trillionaire, and you easily could afford to provide free healthcare to every man, woman, and child in America, would you do it? Image result for rich man

Imagine, no sick child dying from a treatable illness, no parent suffering without a doctor, no homeless person languishing in what should be curable pain — and you could do this simply by writing a check.

Would you do it?

Would you do it if it all could be accomplished by your command, without it costing you even one cent? All you would need to do is say, “Give everyone health care.” Would you do it?

Or would you just let sick people suffer and die too soon?

You actually do have that choice and you do have that power. Your choice is to tell your Senators and Representatives to create a comprehensive, no-deductible Medicare-for-All plan that covers all hospitals, all doctors, all medically approved treatments, and all pharmaceuticals.

And yes, it won’t cost you even one cent, because the U.S. federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, creates new dollars, ad hoc, every time it pays a bill.

Federal finances are different from city, county, and state finances. These local governments are monetarily non-sovereign. They do not create dollars by paying bills. They can run short of dollars and become insolvent. They need and use tax dollars, which they deposit in banks.

By contrast, the government neither needs nor even uses tax dollars. Those federal tax dollars, that are taken from your paycheck or your checking account, are destroyed upon receipt. They never see a bank. They never are part of any money-supply measure.

Even if all federal tax collections, including federal income taxes, FICA payroll taxes, federal luxury taxes, — every federal tax of every kind — were eliminated, the federal government could continue spending forever. It never can run short of its own sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar.

With Medicare for all, we’re not talking about socialism, where the government owns all the hospitals and employs all the health care providers. (That’s like the Veteran’s Administration).

We’re talking about the U.S. government being the insurer — taking the place of private insurance companies, but providing much more comprehensive coverage than any insurance company could afford — and not charging you or your employer anything.

If you were Monetarily Sovereign, like the U.S. government is, you easily could provide comprehensive, no-cost medical insurance to every American.

And yet, many Americans, not understanding the facts of Monetary Sovereignty, say they don’t want to change. They want to continue paying for private insurance. They want to continue paying FICA. They want to continue paying deductibles and being subject to limitations.

They want to continue paying the 20% copay Medicare charges. And they want to continue paying for Medicare Part D, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands, for expensive drugs.

They want each insurance company to offer a different formulary, so it becomes necessary to hunt through multiple companies to learn whether certain drugs are covered, only to be surprised when the doctor prescribes a new drug that isn’t covered.

This is what people say they want, but it’s not what you really want. No one would.

We Americans have been deceived by the politicians, who have been bought and paid for by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Here are some of the lies we have been told:

1. Medicare-for-All is socialism.
As we said previously, with socialism, the government owns and operates all the medical providers.

In Medicare-for-All, the government merely would pay for medical services, just as private insurance companies now do — just as Medicare now does, though Medicare is too limited.

2. Medicare-for-All would cost too much.
There are only two alternatives for medical services: Either someone pays or someone does without.

Thus, Americans have these choices:

*The federal government will pay for your medical care, or
*You will pay, or
*You will do without medical care.

Which do you prefer?

3. If the government pays, the federal deficit and debt would increase.
The so-called “federal debt” is the incorrect name given to the total of Treasury securities issued by the Treasury. They are similar to bank CDs.

The Treasury does not issue them to obtain dollars (which it can create endlessly), but rather to provide a safe “parking place” for unused dollars and to help control interest rates.

The Treasury could stop issuing T-securities tomorrow, and still continue to spend, forever.

For the past eighty years, misleaders have been telling the American people that the federal debt is an unsustainable, “ticking time bomb.” Yet here we are, the so-called “time bomb” still is ticking, and the economy still is sustaining and growing.

The federal debt is no burden on anyone — not on the government, not on you, not on your grandchildren. Federal taxes do not pay for the federal debt.

The “federal deficit” is the difference between taxes collected and dollars spent. No one ever “pays for” the deficit. It merely is a bookkeeping number, of no threat to anyone.

Increased deficits grow the economy by adding dollars to the private sector.

In fact, reductions in deficits lead to recessions and depressions, and increases in deficits cure recessions and depressions.

Deficit reductions lead to recessions (vertical bars), which are cured by deficit increases

4. Medicare-for-All would cause inflation.
The failure to take FICA dollars from your paycheck is not inflationary. The failure to take FICA dollars from employers is not inflationary. Paying for healthcare is not inflationary.

Inflations are caused by shortages, not by federal spending.

5. Medicare-for-All would bankrupt the pharmaceutical companies
On the contrary, the pharmaceutical companies would benefit.

Today, nearly all pharmaceuticals are paid for by insurance and by individuals. Under Medicare-for-All, the drugs would be paid for by the federal government, similar to a free, comprehensive version of Medicare Part D.

Have you ever seen drug commercials that say, “If you can’t afford your prescription contact us”? Patient assistance programs are run by pharmaceutical companies to provide free medications to people who cannot afford to buy their medicine.

Comprehensive Medicare-for-All not only would increase the number of people who purchase pharmaceuticals, but would relieve the drug companies of any obligation to fund patient assistance programs.

6. Medicare-for-All would bankrupt the healthcare insurance companies.
Actually, there is some truth to this. Over the years, many industries disappear, only to be replaced by new industries.

When I was very young, the way to make a phone call was to tell the number to a human operator, of whom there were hundreds of thousands. Also, horse-drawn carts were common. Those, and thousands of other industries, have disappeared, much to the benefit of the American public.

Private healthcare insurance, its complications, unfairness, and its onerous costs, all would disappear.

Unfortunately, even the people who favor Medicare-for-All, do not have the knowledge, the courage, or the honesty to tell you the truth: It can be funded 100% by our Monetarily Sovereign federal government.

Support for a national Medicare-for-all plan swings wildly after folks hear about the potential effects. It spikes when respondents are told that it would guarantee health insurance as a right or eliminate premiums and reduce out-of-pocket costs.

But favorability slumps when they are told it would eliminate private health insurance, raise taxes or threaten the current Medicare program.

And it tanks when told it would lead to delays in receiving care.

Many people don’t think Medicare-for-all would have an impact on them.

There is, in fact, no reason for taxes to increase. In fact, taxes would decrease dramatically. No more FICA paid by you or businesses.

There would be no “threat” to Medicare. It simply would be expanded.

Delays could be prevented by paying healthcare providers enough to encourage entry into the market. Given unlimited dollars, there is no reason to scrimp on payments.

Medicare-for-All would benefit everyone, the sick and the well, the young and the old, the rich and the poor.

Unfortunately, because of misinformation and disinformation, very few Americans are able to visualize a true Medicare-for-All program. So they assume the wrong threats.

A Kaiser Family Foundation January 2019 tracking poll revealed that Americans believe Congress’ top priorities should be:

Percent who say the following is the top priority for Congress

Making sure Obamacare’s pre-existing conditions protections continue: 21%
Lower drug costs: 20%
Implementing Medicare-for-All: 11%
Repealing & replacing Obamacare: 11%e
Protecting people from surprise medical bills: 9%

See how misinformation permeates the answers? With Medicare-for-All, there would be no need for Obamacare, pre-existing conditions would be protected, drug costs would be zero, and no one would need to worry about surprise medical bills.

Even Bernie Sanders, the foremost proponent of Medicare-for-All, misleads the public.

Bernie starts out well enough. Here’s what his site says:

BETTER COVERAGE
Bernie’s plan would create a federally administered single-payer health care program. Universal single-payer health care means comprehensive coverage for all Americans.

Bernie’s plan will cover the entire continuum of health care, from inpatient to outpatient care; preventive to emergency care; primary care to specialty care, including long-term and palliative care; vision, hearing and oral health care; mental health and substance abuse services; as well as prescription medications, medical equipment, supplies, diagnostics and treatments.

Patients will be able to choose a health care provider without worrying about whether that provider is in-network and will be able to get the care they need without having to read any fine print or trying to figure out how they can afford the out-of-pocket costs.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR PATIENTS
As a patient, all you need to do is go to the doctor and show your insurance card. Bernie’s plan means no more copays, no more deductibles and no more fighting with insurance companieswhen they fail to pay for charges.

The above is perfect, exactly what the plan should do, though I’m not sure why you would have to show an insurance card. If you’re here, you’re covered. Perhaps there are overseas issues to be worked out.

But anyway, then Bernie goes completely off track. Here is what his web site says:

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?
This plan has been estimated to cost $1.38 trillion per year.

THE PLAN WOULD BE FULLY PAID FOR BY:
A 6.2 percent income-based health care premium paid by employers.
A 2.2 percent income-based premium paid by households.
Progressive income tax rates.

37 percent on income between $250,000 and $500,000.
43 percent on income between $500,000 and $2 million.
48 percent on income between $2 million and $10 million.
52 percent on income above $10 million.

Taxing capital gains and dividends the same as income from work.
Limit tax deductions for rich.
The Responsible Estate Tax.
Savings from health tax expenditures.

If Bernie were honest and courageous, he would have said: THE PLAN WOULD BE FULLY PAID FOR BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Period.

The above-listed tax increases will pay for nothing. The federal government does not use tax dollars to pay for spending. Tax dollars are destroyed upon receipt.

But Bernie has gone along with the phony “affordability” issue, rather than fighting it.

Image result for bernanke and greenspan — *Doesn’t Bernie know we don’t use tax dollars? Why should we? We create all the dollars we need.*

Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

Alan Greenspan: “Central banks can issue currency, a non-interest-bearing claim on the government, effectively without limit. A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.”

St. Louis Federal Reserve: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.

Bernie understands this. He was assisted by Professor Stephanie Kelton, who not only knows Monetary Sovereignty quite well, but has taught it to Bernie.

So, I must assume Bernie believes the American people are not smart enough to understand it — and that they would say, “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” or “Why does the government collect taxes, if they don’t need them,” and other admissions of ignorance that substitute for knowledge.

And he doesn’t have the political courage to set them straight.

Is he right?

What about you? If Medicare-for-All could be accomplished just by your command, without it costing you even one cent, and all you would need to do is tell the politicians, “Give everyone health care,” would you do it?

Should Bernie do it?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

The single most important problems in economics involve the excessive income/wealth/power Gaps between the have-mores and the have-less.

Implementation of The Ten Steps To Prosperity can narrow the Gaps:

Ten Steps To Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA

2. Federally funded medicare — parts a, b & d, plus long-term care — for everyone

3. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to social security for all)

4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone

5. Salary for attending school

6. Eliminate federal taxes on business

7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually.

8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.

9. Federal ownership of all banks

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9%

The Ten Steps will grow the economy, and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and you.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Outstanding article from The Week Magazine

The Week is one of the best news magazines I know. Part of its method is to provide a short opinion, then a counter-opinion, then a summary opinion. A really good approached to offering both sides.

The Week also publishes individual, long articles, and what follows is one I think you will find to be truly outstanding.

You also can find the article and subscribe to the magazine online by clicking the link, below. And as a bonus, you will learn a new word, “kakistocrats.”

Trump and the obliteration of America
By David Faris
January 20, 2019

Today marks the two year anniversary of President Trump’s ignominious reign over the United States. We are now at the midpoint of Trump’s first, perhaps only, term as president of the United States, what we can now understand as our collective Trumpening.

It is natural to ask about the consequences of handing the office of the presidency to a friendless, joyless, violence-worshipping narcissist. Unfortunately, what we know about the repercussions of this period is vastly outstripped by the disasters to come. For all the many ignominious assaults that the country has endured over the past two years, we have not yet experienced even a fifth of the calamities this man and his misrule will ultimately inflict upon us.

But we know a few things.

We know that President Trump has, perhaps permanently, transformed the presidency with his malevolence, ineptitude, and divisiveness. Donald Trump is by far the laziest and least informed person ever to inhabit the White House. In two years, he has defined deviance so far down that he may have forever altered the expectations of the office of the presidency itself.

As we have learned from a thousand anonymously sourced news analyses, the president’s time is largely unstructured, filled mostly with blocks of compulsive Fox News watching, an activity that he telegraphs to the public by live tweeting it. America’s voters are constantly being told, by the president of the United States, to watch particular Fox programs and to applaud quotes by right-wing gadflies uttered without any serious pushback from other guests on what is now effectively Republican state television.

Aides, despairing of any real hope that Trump will take his job seriously, desperately schedule short blocks of “policy time” for their addled boss, a man so bereft of any lawmaking depth that he has repeatedly sent his congressional enablers scrambling to meet his capricious demands and volte faces.

He has lit millions of taxpayer dollars on fire visiting his own gauche resorts, time he might have spent reining in the unprecedented corruption emanating from nearly every executive agency he staffed either with members of his dimwitted entourage or the very “globalists” he continues to hypocritically decry.

Every day, this darling of the evangelical movement lives his truth, which happens to line up with every one of the seven deadly sins of sloth, envy, greed, pride, anger and gluttony. Lust, at least, he seems to have left mercifully in his recent past.

Heralded as the first post-partisan president, a transactional dealmaker sent to blow up the shriveled gridlock in Washington, Trump has instead governed as the president of the Red States of America. Journalists working outside of the right wing mediasphere are demonized as “enemies of the people” and hounded by his supporters.

He rarely visits states that voted for Hillary Clinton unless there’s a golf course there, and signs bills designed explicitly to punish voters in Democratic strongholds. While he constantly caterwauls about Democrats obstructing his agenda, he has never once crafted a public message designed to expand his appeal beyond his MAGA base and clearly views his political future as dependent only on the narrow coalition of people who voted for him in 2016.

Fueled by a lifetime of resentment against elites, racial minorities, and immigrants, he is incapable even of treating disasters and tragedies in blue states and territories with the gravity they deserve.

Texas is a “great state” hit by an unfathomably catastrophic hurricane, while Puerto Ricans “want everything done for them” and California wildfires are the fault of government mismanagement. Here again what was once unthinkable — a president openly despising people who voted against him and punishing them for their supposed thought crimes — has become routine.

A complete trainwreck as a policy leader, Trump has also managed to be a miserable failure at the president’s ceremonial duties.

Instead of comfort to the afflicted, he drags his witlessness and anger into every room with him, teaching victims of calamity that their moral worth depends on who they voted for or which racial caste they were born into. He feuds endlessly with black women, uses the fever-swamp sobriquet “Democrat Party” to describe his opposition, bestows a childish nickname (“Adam Schitt”) on each of his multitudinous detractors, and seems to reserve his admiration only for fellow American white nationalists and overseas strongmen.

That this dispiriting display of churlishness, petty grievance mongering, and inept blame-wielding has resulted in consistently low approval ratings is little comfort for the future.

At least a third of the country has told pollsters over and over again that there is no line the president can cross, no standard of action that he can violate, no indecency incapable of being waved away by pointing to the unemployment rate or manufacturing gains.

Millions of Americans — thankfully not yet a majority — are willing to tolerate from our chief executive execrable behavior that no sane person would put up with from their friends, co-workers, or loved ones. He is able to do this because he is the apotheosis of a 40-year-long Republican-led assault on objective truth, expertise, and policy evaluation.

Like domestic abusers and cult leaders and con men, the activity that consumes the preponderance of President Trump’s time is relentlessly hammering away at our self-worth and our sense of objective reality. His war on truth operates on multiple fronts and never rests.

Arrayed against him are journalists, and at The Washington Post and Politifact they employ a truth-value spectrum, where the number of ‘Pinocchios’ or a four-category schematic lends a sort of nuance to the kind of nonsense claims politicians clobber each other with in staged debates or campaign ads.

Was Barack Obama ‘lying’ when he said, “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor?” I guess, but the real problem there was the inability to be straight with voters, to able to say something like, “A small number of you may be forced to change insurance plans, for the greater good of your fellow citizens.”

Donald Trump’s lies are not like this. He fills up the public record with things that are not just artful rearrangements of things that are basically real, but rather outlandishly, transparently, undeniably untrue.

I’m not here to recount this litany of lies for you. Set aside for a moment the running count of the total number of lies that he has told — the content of each is irrelevant. The point is for you to forget what it is like to have the president try to tell the truth, to disorient you, to get you to make a false confession.

This is our truth, he wants us to say. That’s why the president of the United States gets up every morning, uncaps a bottomless flask filled with lies and magnificently ill-informed opinions, and spends entire days and evenings pouring it out over all of us. It is working. We have become inured.

We are told that to point out the president’s preposterous, outrageous lies is to play directly into a game whose rules only he sets and understands. This is how you got Trump, we are told over and over again by our abusers and their apologists.

In the haze of this unending sensory and rhetorical assault, President Trump has also, loosely, governed the United States as the leader of the most disinterested and unproductive unified government in American history. Has the president delivered on the promises he made? His economic policies, it should be obvious, have been radically different than what you might have gathered from his rally bluster.

The man who campaigned on behalf of ruined factory towns and raw-dealed blue collar workers immediately appointed a gallery of sniveling economic con artists to his Cabinet. Together, they have mildly tweaked American trade policy but have tripled down on Reagan-era economic orthodoxy, blowing a long-term hole in the deficit with reckless tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Fleeting manufacturing gains have not been married to any coherent reorientation of American economic policy that will survive the next recession. He has ruined the lives of many people — workers in Ford manufacturing plants and soybean farmers in the Midwest, for instance — that he explicitly promised to rescue.

Thus far there has been no 2008-style disaster so obvious that it penetrates the epistemic closure of even the most fervent diehards. The stock market is up. Unemployment is down.

Trump’s overseas misadventures, for all of their gobsmacking foolishness, have not yet begun to even approach anything on the scale of the Iraq disaster. For many Americans, that is enough. If you tuned the dude out on Twitter (and you don’t work for or depend on the shuttered federal government) you might be able to convince yourself that nothing all that important is amiss.

But it is in the realm of policy where we are likely to experience the worst aftershocks, untraceable to the fault line of origin, for many years hence.

President Trump’s open dismantling of the country’s diplomatic apparatus and soft power capital is likely to haunt us in future dealings with other countries. When future presidents find it impossible to negotiate agreements and treaties with allies and adversaries, because all trust in American policy continuity has been broken and because an entire generation of foreign policy talent has been vaporized, they can thank President Trump.

Presidents and prime ministers know that Trump is temporary, that Trumpism might be fleeting. But they now regard America’s voters themselves with wariness. When will they next erupt in a petulant display of shortsightedness? Who will be the next rogue elevated to the presidency?

The transition to a post-American global system, multipolar and more complex, was inevitable. But we did not have to gratuitously piss away a century’s worth of accumulated goodwill in the process.

Republicans since the turn of this century have been bent on dismantling the very international institutions that could help ease the shift to a world in which America is no longer its most powerful country.

But it is Trump who has finished the job of blowing apart the post-World War II international order, a loss that while currently a kind of abstraction will be deeply felt during the next serious crisis. For all the many faults of the Pax Americana, one led by China, hampered by an untrusted, isolated United States and reeling from crisis to crisis inflicted by a warming planet, will be worse in ways we can scarcely yet imagine.

The Trump administration’s blinkered economic policies, so far the only thing where voters broadly give him some credit, are setting us up for a future meltdown that we will be very poorly equipped to manage.

The decade-long Republican assault on the public sector is driving new workers away from civil service, and will leave every important agency within the federal government scrambling for properly trained talent when the time finally comes to either hire them or depend on them in a crisis.

Who wants to work for an employer who threatens either to furlough you or drag you into work without pay every time Congress and the president can’t agree on a budget? The destruction of these institutions, constructed painstakingly over decades, may cripple a theoretical Democratic administration trying to expand Medicare or reform the systemic graft in our financial system. Just holding together what we now still have may become an impossible task.

America is also deliberately, as a matter of official Republican policy, hemorrhaging money during a long economic expansion. If Trump is in charge when the economy crashes, he will surely listen to the Randian ideologues in his coterie, who will tell him to cut spending, which will make it all incomprehensibly worse. Millions will suffer needlessly.

If Republicans manage to slip out of office before the reckoning, the next Democratic administration will be forced to run unthinkable, politically toxic deficits in order to pull us out of the economic spiral. Everything that the leaders of the Democratic primary field want to do will be made more challenging by the wreckage they will first be compelled to wade through. Heads they win, tails we lose.

A Trumpist minority that, during these relatively good economic times seems bent on cruelty to minorities and immigrants, will turn darker and more sadistic when the good times come to an end, or when their status as a numerical minority is finally reflected in our politics.

They will not go quietly and they almost certainly will go violently. They will add social mayhem to the economic wreckage. It will not be pretty.

And yet we do not know, cannot know, the precise shape of the horrors to come. What we know is that over the past two years, we have cheapened and embarrassed ourselves.

Even if this man and his enablers are removed from their offices next year, or even if the latest bombshell leads to Trump’s impeachment, we will be like a teenager slinking back home at midnight, stinking of booze, promising that we only had one beer and that we’ll never do it again.

The moment of release will be poisoned by the memory of what has already transpired. Something about America, as an idea, has been obliterated.

If there is some silver lining to be found, it is that Trump’s opponents have rediscovered the importance of institutions that they long took for granted. Normal people are talking about regulations at the Department of Justice, the separation of powers, and the Emoluments Clause.

A new generation of young people is engaged in the political process and determined to seize power from the Baby Boomers who have destroyed their futures. The hot blog of the administration is a geekfest called Lawfare.

Far from destroying his media tormentors, President Trump has instead sent people scrambling for subscriptions and stories. And millions of people have realized the ways that our democracy is deficient, from the suppression of voter rights via Voter ID laws and felony disenfranchisement procedures to the unequal representation in the Senate suffered by so many Americans.

Whether that encouraging fervor is sufficient to rescue American democracy from the grip of kakistocrats, white nationalists, grifters, and traitors remains to be seen.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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