–Screw you, soldier. I’ve got mine.

Mitchell’s laws: Reduced money growth never stimulates economic growth. To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments. Austerity breeds austerity 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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The Tea (Take Everything Away) Party Patriots have been the dominant influence on today’s politics. Their cut, cut, cut philosophy, which has permeated both political parties and the media, ignores a basic fact of economics: Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings.

Cut deficits and you cut savings. It’s that simple.

The Tea’s relentless drive to impoverish America touches every facet of our lives. One of many, many examples: How we treat our returning soldiers.

Washington Post
Veterans Affairs claims progress in ending homelessness among vets
By Steve Vogel, Published: December 26

Making aggressive use of a voucher program, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has housed more than 33,000 veterans in the past 2 1/2 years.

That our returning soldiers must struggle with homelessness, is a disgrace. Ironic too, considering who the flag wavers in America are.

VA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development want enough funds to issue 60,000 vouchers at the rate of 10,000 a year through 2014. The effort comes as tens of thousands of troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are leaving military service and entering an often bleak job market.

Why have Congress and the President not created a program to employ these men and women who Congress and the President sent away from their homes and families, to risk their lives?

. . . more than 20,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been homeless at some point during the past five years and that their numbers are rising.

Matt Barnes, a 28-year-old former Marine corporal, is representative of this new generation. On a rainy December night, Barnes slipped quietly into St. George’s Episcopal Church in Arlington County, gratefully accepting a bowl of meat stew offered by volunteers and taking a seat at a table with other homeless veterans.

Barnes has been homeless for two years since losing his job as a waiter and being unable to afford his apartment in Fairfax County. Barnes served five years in the Marine Corps, including a tour in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004 during the height of the insurgency, when he regularly risked roadside bombings as a convoy driver.

“It was easier over there,” Barnes mused. Barnes finds it nearly impossible to look for a job while homeless. “You can’t get good sleep on the street,” he said. He lacks a phone or even money to get a haircut.

The poverty rate for veterans ages 18 to 34 reached 12.5 percent in 2010, more than double that of 10 years earlier, according to a report last month from Congress’s Joint Economic Committee. Veterans pay 30 percent of their income to rent, and the voucher covers any rent above that amount. Each voucher costs the government on average $6,500 a year, plus $4,148 in case management services — much less than the costs of staying in jails, hospitals or emergency shelters, advocates say.

“It literally saved me,” said Mickiela Montoya, who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq and received a voucher last year for an Orange County, Calif., apartment where she lives with her 4-year-old daughter.

Gary Bush, a homeless 54-year-old Navy veteran in Arlington whose hollow cheeks and sunken eyes tell of long nights on the streets, has asked for a voucher, but he was discouraged by the response. “They tell me the waiting list is 500 deep,” Bush said .

Those selected often must wait four months to a year for housing, depending on the amount of paperwork required by the jurisdiction, said Becky Kanis, who directs a homeless project run by Community Solutions.

Wealthy Congresspersons call for cuts in federal spending, but every cut hurts real people with real needs. The most common Tea Party, debt-hawk excuse for deficit cuts is: “Deficit spending causes inflation.” Not only is this false (See: Oil causes inflation,) but it is heartless.

It says, “All you sick and homeless and jobless veterans must suffer, because I personally believe (with no evidence to support my belief) that at some unknown future time, federal deficit spending, which is necessary for economic growth, might just possibly cause inflation.

“In short, screw you soldier. I’ve got mine.”

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

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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

–Get this. The employees of the Treasury don’t know why they sell T-securities

Here is a letter I just received from the Division of Customer Service, Bureau of the Public Debt, Office of Retail Securities, Parkersburg, WV, 26106;

December 22, 2011
Dear Mr. Mitchell, This refers to your letter dated November 24, 2011.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution empowers Congress to borrow money on the credit of the United States. This authority has been delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury. As an organizational entity withing Treasury’s Fiscal Service, the Bureau of the Public Debt is authorized to conduct such borrowing for the federal government.

So far, so good.

The Bureau of the Public Debt borrows the money needed to operate the federal government and account for the resulting debt. We borrow by selling Treasury bills, notes and bands, as well as U.S. Savings Bonds; we pay interest to investors; and, when the time comes to pay back the loans, we redeem investor’s securities. Every time we borrow or pay back money, it affects the outstanding debt of the United States.

We trust that this information will be of assistance.
Sincerely,
Division of Customer Assistance.

So there you have it. The people, who do the so-called “borrowing,” think they “borrow the money needed to operate the federal government.” They have no clue about what happened on August 15, 1971. Although going off the gold standard was the single most momentous financial change in the past century, to the Treasury, absolutely nothing happened then.

I would give Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, John Connally props for encouraging the end of the gold standard, but he also encouraged the disastrous wage and price controls. So give him 1/2 half a prop, which still puts him way ahead of Timothy Geithner.

My next letter to the Treasury will read something like this:

“Thank you for your note in which you said, ‘The Bureau of the Public Debt borrows the money needed to operate the federal government.’ On August 15, 1971, the U.S. went off the gold standard, thus giving the federal government the unlimited ability to create money. So, why do you continue to borrow?”

I don’t expect a coherent answer, but anyway . . .

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

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–So, you want to know why Congress favors taking benefits from the poor and middle classes, even though the poor and middle classes make up the vast majority of voters?

The answer is quite simple:

Washington Post
Growing wealth widens distance between lawmakers and constituents

By Peter Whoriskey, Monday, December 26, 1:54 PM

BUTLER, Pa. — One day after his shift at the steel mill, Gary Myers drove home in his 10-year-old Pontiac and told his wife he was going to run for Congress. . . . Three years later, he won.
[…]

The financial gap between Americans and their representatives in Congress has widened considerably since then, according to an analysis of financial disclosures by The Washington Post. Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House has risen 2 1 / 2 times, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, rising from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the median sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

Very few rich people can truly empathize with the problems of the not-rich. Worrying about tomorrow’s meal, how to afford schooling, being unemployed and broke, and knowing you never will retire voluntarily are not on the rich person’s radar. (“You mean you never have bought a new car?!!”)

The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.

Myers, the son of a bricklayer, had worked his way through college to a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, and looked at issues of work and security at least partly through the lens of his own experience. For example, he bucked other Republicans to vote to raise the minimum wage and favored expanding a program to aid workers affected by foreign imports. He said he understood the need for what was then called “the safety net.”

“It would be hard to argue that the work in the steel mill didn’t give me a different perspective,” said Myers, now 74 and retired in Florida, said. “I think everybody’s history has an impact on them.”

Today, this area of Pennsylvania just north of Pittsburgh is represented in Congress by another Republican, Mike Kelly, a wealthy car dealer elected for the first time in 2010.

Kelly, on the other hand, focuses on the hard work he and his family have done to build the dealership. The government should be run more like a business and laws must be fair to people who strive and succeed. He opposes the estate tax, the inheritance tax levied on the wealthy, because, among other things, he feels he has been overtaxed already. He says unemployment checks make some less willing to go back to work. And asked about tax breaks for oil companies, he notes that when corporations profit, people with pensions and portfolios do, too.

Moreover, he favors the so-called Ryan budget plan, which seeks to eliminate tax loopholes and lowers the income tax on the highest earners from 35 percent to 25 percent.

Note the belief that the wealthy deserve their wealth and by implication, that the poor deserve their poverty.

About a decade ago, academics studying the effect of income inequality on politics noticed a striking fact: The growth of income inequality has tracked very closely with measures of political polarization, which has been gauged using the average difference between the liberal/conservative scores for Republican and Democratic members of the House. The scores come from a database widely used by academics.

“The proximity of these trends is uncanny,” according to a 2003 paper by researchers Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. “Remarkably, the trends of economic inequality and elite political polarization have moved almost in tandem for the past half-century.”

Wealthy people favor conservatives, and since there are more wealthy people in Congress, the edge always goes to money, and the income gap grows wider.

Asked how long the government should pay jobless benefits, Kelly suggests that the government checks keep some of the unemployed from returning to work. He interviews some of the jobless for openings at (his car) dealership.

“They say, ‘When are you looking to hire somebody?’ I say, ‘Right now — that’s why we have an ad in the paper.’ They say, ‘Well, I still have about six weeks left on my unemployment. Will you still be looking for somebody then?’

Classic rich man’s attitude toward unemployment. He owns the dealership and can’t relate to people who can’t find jobs, so he justifies his attitude with his little story about an incident that may have happened once, if then.

“Let’s stop railing against the really wealthy because I got to tell you something, as a guy who has had to pay his own way his whole life, I am greatly offended by the idea that somehow someone in Washington knows how to spend my money better than I do,” Kelly said.

Guess how he will vote on cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to the poor and all other benefits for the 99%. Sadly, with the aid of the media editorial writers (also wealthy people), the 99% have been sold the bill of goods that these social programs are going broke, so the benefits must be cut. See: “How the politicians convince you to take money from your pocket and flush it.”

Congress is rich because being rich helps one get elected. Then the rich Congress votes for the rich, which makes the gap grow. And, the not-rich, through ignorance of economics, collude in their own demise. They are the turkeys who vote for Thanksgiving.

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

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–Get big government off our backs. Now, who will pay?

The Tea/Republicans want to get the federal government off our backs. They want to cut federal regulations and federal services, until we have a much smaller federal government.

The question is, who will pay for this much smaller government with fewer regulations and services? Here’s just one of a thousand examples to consider:

Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services
By Julie Steenhuysen and Jilian Mincer

CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) – On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself. “He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn’t showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray.”

Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies – attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis – as states slash mental health services and the country’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.

This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.

“These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost sometimes their homes, they can’t provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed,” said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Visits to the hospital’s psychiatric emergency department have climbed 20 percent in the past three years.
[…]
On top of that, doctors are seeing some cases where the patient’s most critical need is a warm bed. “The more I see these patients, the more I realize that if it’s sleeting and raining outside, the emergency room is the only place they have,” said Dr. R. Corey Waller, director of the Spectrum Health Medical Group Center for Integrative Medicine in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
[…]
More than 70 percent of emergency department administrators said they have kept patients waiting in the emergency department for 24 hours, according to a 2010 survey of 600 hospital emergency department administrators by the Schumacher Group, which manages emergency departments across the country.

So, I ask again. Who will pay for uninsured people using emergency rooms as their “doctor of first choice”? And while I’m asking, who will pay for insufficient regulation of food, drugs, air and water quality? Who will pay for unregulated financial institutions?

Who pays for bad schools? Crime? Who pays for poverty? Who pays for bad roads, bridges and dams? Who pays for uncontrolled disease? Weak healthcare research? Natural disasters? Who pays for overcrowded courts and jails?

Who will pay if our military is weak? Who will pay for the lack of government?

Yes, big government needs to get off our backs, but who will pay when it does?

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

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

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