Here is the solution to the federal debt problem — a solution that involves neither increased taxes nor reduced spending.

The federal debt is caused by deficit spending. Taxpayers do not pay for deficit spending, which by definition is spending above tax receipts. Yet taxpayers find the debt worrisome for two reasons: They incorrectly believe someday, they or their grandchildren will have to pay it, and they incorrectly believe large federal deficits cause inflation.

Those concerns affect efforts to improve our health care system, crumbling infrastructure, bad schools, excessive taxes, bankrupt states, Social Security funding, poverty, joblessness and homelessness, Internet service, NASA funding, military funding, disease research and repeated recessions. The solutions require deficit spending, which debt fear prevents.

Currently the government obtains money for deficit spending by borrowing. It borrows by creating T-securities (T-bills, notes and bonds), then selling them. These T-securities are created in unlimited quantities out of thin air. This method, though still used, actually became obsolete in 1971, when President Nixon took us off the last vestiges of the gold standard. Before then, T-securities were collateralized in part by gold, which limited their issuance. Today, they are collateralized solely by the “full faith and credit” of the federal government, a resource the government has in unlimited supply.

Just as the government now creates T-securities out of thin air, it as easily and prudently could create money directly – also out of thin air and also backed only by full faith and credit.

Ending the creation and sale of T-securities would end the creation of debt. No longer would we suffer over deficits, fears that nations might refuse to lend to us and fears our path is “unsustainable.” Rather than “deficit spending” the process would be called “money-creation,” and what now is called “debt,” would more properly be called “Net Money Created.”

By eliminating debt, we would eliminate taxpayers’ concerns they or their grandchildren would pay it. Further, because the federal government now controls not only the supply, but the demand for U.S. money (via interest rates), large federal deficits have not caused inflation. See chart, below:

Since we went off the gold standard, there has been no relationship between deficits and inflation.

The elimination of T-securities would allow us to create the money to solve our many economic problems and to prevent the negative economic consequences of tax increases or spending decreases.

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