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.
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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
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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
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 