And now comes THE WEEK Magazine to spread misinformation.

THE WEEK publishes short, timely articles using an unusual format. Each article begins with a setup, followed by short sections presenting two or more sides of an argument and ending with a summary and opinion.

It is one of my favorite magazines. So, it grieves me to read the following assemblage of outright misinformation and nuttery in a magazine I read every week.

The national debt threat
The federal government is spending ever more money servicing an ever-larger debt pile. Are we headed for a crisis?

What does the U.S. owe?

The national debt stands at nearly $35 trillion, or more than $100,000 per person.

And there it is, concise and misleading. The U.S. does not owe $35 trillion, nor do you owe the $100,000 referenced.

The so-called “national debt” is based on the total of all federal deficits (spending minus taxes). The government doesn’t owe the deficits; they all have been paid.

The “national debt” also includes deposits (not borrowing) into Treasury Security accounts (T-bills, T-notes, T-bonds). These accounts resemble bank safe deposit boxes in that the contents are owned and touched only by the depositors, not by the federal government.

The purpose of T-security accounts is not to lend spending money to the government. The government never touches those dollars. They remain the property of the depositors.

Periodically, the government adds interest dollars to the T-security accounts. These are not tax dollars (which are destroyed upon receipt.) They are created ad hoc, from thin air, at the touch of computer keys.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman 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. It’s not tax money… We simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account.”

The purposes of T-security accounts is to:

Provide as safe storage place for unused dollars and,
To help the Federal Reserve control interest rates by setting the rates for the T-securities

Upon maturity, depositors receive their deposits + interest. The government merely returns the dollars that exist in each depositor’s T-security account.

No tax dollars are used. No taxpayers are obligated. You don’t owe the dollars. They already exist in the accounts, and are returned. No “debt” is involved.

The debt has climbed sharply over the past two decades — we owed $5.7 trillion in 2000 —with both Democratic and Republican administrations running budget deficits, meaning they spent more than they took in.

“We” (the federal government or you) don’t owe anything.

It is true that the government has spent more than it took from taxpayers. This is the only way the economy can grow.

It is 100% necessary for the federal government to run deficits, i.e. to create dollars and add them to the economy.

When the federal government instead runs surpluses instead of deficits, this is what happens:

U.S. depressions come from federal surpluses.

1804-1812: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 48%. Depression began 1807.
1817-1821: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 29%. Depression began 1819.
1823-1836: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 99%. Depression began 1837.
1852-1857: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 59%. Depression began 1857.
1867-1873: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 27%. Depression began 1873.
1880-1893: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 57%. Depression began 1893.
1920-1930: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 36%. Depression began 1929.
1997-2001: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 15%. Recession began 2001.

By definition, a growing economy requires a growing supply of money. But federal surpluses remove money from the economy, which always causes depressions and recessions.

In fact, deficits are so vital to economic growth that even insufficient federal deficits can lead to recessions.

**Two measures of federal “debt” show the same thing. Recessions (vertical gray bars) occur when deficit spending is reduced, and recessions are cured by increases in federal deficit spending.**

This year, the deficit is on track to hit $1.5 trillion, about 5 percent of gross domestic product.

The oft-quoted ratios of federal Debt or Deficit to gross Domestic Product are meaningless. They are a comparison of oranges versus orange crayons.

The sole connection between the two measures is that federal deficit spending grows Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In fact, it’s part of the formula: GDP = Federal Spending + Nonfederal Spending + Net Exports.

Federal Spending – Federal Taxes = Federal Deficit Spending, and taxes reduce Nonfederal Spending.

On wonders where THE WEEK writers think the economy’s dollars would come from if there were no federal deficit spending.

Because interest rates were low and expected to stay low, many officials and experts thought the cost of servicing that debt would remain manageable.

The federal government has the infinite ability to “manage” (pay for) any level of debt. It has the infinite ability to create dollars. It never can run short of dollars to pay its bills.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print the money to do that.”

But the pandemic and the return of high inflation changed that thinking. To curb inflation, the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates from close to zero in 2020 to above 5 percent.

This was a grave error. Interest is a business cost, and increasing interest rates increases business costs. To be profitable, businesses must raise prices above higher costs.

Thus, the Fed, amazingly, increases business costs and pricing to reduce inflation. It boggles.

Partly as a result, the government is for the first time expected to spend more this year on interest payments on the debt (about $870 billion) than on defense ($850 billion).

A meaningless statistic. Interest rates and defense have different purposes. It’s another orange/orange crayons comparison designed solely to shock you. It’s like telling you the cost of oranges is greater than the cost of orange crayons.

If rates remain high, interest payments could reach $2 trillion a year by the end of the decade, consuming 30 percent of federal tax revenue.

That means the federal government would pump $2 trillion in growth dollars a year into the economy. The more interest the government pays into the economy, the stronger the growth.

Interest payments do not consume federal tax revenue.

Federal taxes are destroyed upon receipt. The purpose of federal taxes is not to provide the government with spending money. Taxes have two purposes:
- To control the economy by taxing what the government wishes to discourage and by giving tax breaks to what the government wishes to reward, and
- To assure demand for the U.S. dollar by requiring taxes to be paid in dollars.
Interest payments, like all other federal spending, are made ad hoc with dollars created by pressing computer keys.

Payments on the debt would be the second-largest federal program, behind only Social Security. “We are in a spiral now — it’s a slow spiral, but it’s still a spiral — of rising debt and rising payments on the debt,” said Phillip Swagel, director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

“The situation is unsustainable.”

Utter nonsense. Here are some of the people who have been claiming since 1940 (!) that the federal debt is unsustainable. They called the debt a “ticking time bomb.” For 84 years, it has been “ticking.” Still no explosion.

Being wrong for 84 years doesn’t seem to embarrass them.

The term “unsustainable” often is used by debt worriers, but what does it mean? Does Mr. Swagel really believe the Monetarily Sovereign U.S. government, the government that invented the U.S. dollar and created the first dollar from thin air, really believe the federal government can now run out of the dollars?

Let’s replay Chairman Alan Greenspan’s words: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.”

Cities, counties, states, businesses, euro nations, you and I can run short of money. The U.S. government cannot. One is Monetarily Sovereign, while the others are monetarily non-sovereign.

Apparently, Mr. Swagel doesn’t understand the difference.

How did we get here?

It’s mostly because the government doesn’t collect enough tax revenue to cover the cost of federal programs—a problem exacerbated by multiple rounds of tax cuts.

Unlike state and local taxes, which do pay for state and local payments, federal taxes pay for nothing.

The federal tax cuts added growth dollars to the economy, which would have grown more slowly or sunk into recessions or depressions without them.

According to the Center for American Progress, the cuts signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 have added more than $8 trillion to the debt, while the tax cuts passed under President Donald Trump in 2017 have added another $1.7 trillion.

Nearly $5 trillion in emergency pandemic outlays under Trump and President Biden further added to the debt pile.

Translation: The Bush and Trump tax cuts added more than $14.7 trillion in growth dollars to the economy, and Biden added $5 trillion more. That is why U.S. economic growth has been so robust.

“The pandemic created enormous economic losses, and we used borrowing not so much to make the losses vanish into thin air but to spread them out over time,” said former CBO chief economist Wendy Edelberg.

No, Ms. Edelberg. The U.S. government, being the original creator of dollars, never borrows dollars; it creates them at will by pressing computer keys.

And your “vanish . . . spread” comment makes no economic sense. Think about it.

Meanwhile, the costs of Social Security and Medicare — the top two government outlays — will rise as millions more Baby Boomers retire over the coming years.

Why is this a problem?

The bigger the deficit, the more bonds the Treasury must issue to cover otherwise unfunded spending — unfunded spending that now includes repayments for those bonds.

All federal spending is funded by sovereign money creation. No federal spending is funded by tax collection.

Federal bonds do not pay for anything. They are deposits into safekeeping accounts. The words “bonds,” “notes,” and “bills” are misleading. They do not represent federal borrowing; they are terms used when monetarily non-sovereign entities borrow.

There’s a risk that investors could demand higher yields to buy the flood of government bonds, which in turn could push up borrowing costs on mortgages, credit cards, and business loans.

There is no such risk:

The federal government does not need to offer bonds in order to pay its bills. It can create all the dollars it needs simply by pressing computer keys
Investors have no leverage over the Federal Reserve’s setting of interest rates.

The Fed arbitrarily sets rates with inflation in mind, not to sell bonds. Even during the decade beginning in 2010, when federal debt growth was as high as 30% and averaged well over 8% a year, interest rates held near 0%. Were investors asleep, then?

The following graph demonstrates no relationship between federal debt growth and interest rates.

This graph demonstrates that the Fed does not raise interest rates when “investors demand higher rates,” asdebt rises. Investors have no leverage over the rates set by the Fed.

Consumer spending and corporate investment would dip, slowing the economy and causing tax revenues to drop — requiring the government to borrow even more to make up the shortfall. New debt isn’t the only problem.

It is true that raising interest rates is recessionary, but since the U.S. federal government never borrows U.S. dollars, federal debt does not lead to federal borrowing or increased interest rates.

What does lead to higher interest rates? The Fed’s misguided attempts to combat inflation.

Over the next three years, more than half of the government’s publicly held debt will mature and need to be refinanced at higher rates.

Unlike with private debt, the Fed does not raise rates in response to maturing T-securities. The magazine author seems to have no concept of the fundamental differences between federal Treasury securities and private sector bonds.

If inflation drops next year, the Fed will drop interest rates, regardless of how much deficit spending the government does.

And the more tax money that goes to debt servicing, the less there is for government programs that might boost growth, whether that’s investment in infrastructure, health care, or anti-poverty measures.

“We are paying for the past, not the future,” said Tim Penny and David Minge of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).

The above two sentences could not be more misleading. Federal tax dollars (unlike local tax dollars) do not service debt. Federal tax dollars service nothing; the federal government pays all its debts by creating new dollars, ad hoc.

Federal “debt servicing” does not reduce the amount available for “infrastructure, health care, or anti-poverty measures.” The government has the infinite ability to fund those programs.

The CRFB is a notorious shill for the rich, always urging federal tax increases that impact the middle classes while the rich get tax breaks.

How could we shrink the deficit?

Through a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts. “The middle class is going to have to contribute on the tax side or on the spending side,” said Marc Goldwein of the CRFB.

“There really is no path if they’re not part of it.”

Yep, there it is—the CRFB’s never-ending effort to widen the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

What do “tax hikes” and “spending cuts” have in common? They take dollars from the private sector, especially the middle classes, and widen the Gap between the rich and the rest while slowing or stopping economic growth.

In his most recent budget proposal, Biden said he’d let Trump’s tax cuts expire next year, but that only individuals making more than $400,000 would see a tax hike.

He also called for the minimum corporate tax rate to be hiked from 21 percent to 28 percent and for a 25 percent tax on individuals with more than $100 million in assets.

Would that plan make a difference?

Yes, it would make several differences:

It would take billions or trillions of growth dollars out of the economy, assuring much slower economic growth, or, more likely, recessions
It would do nothing to hurt the rich, who would find other tax dodges of the sort that allowed billionaire Donald Trump to pay far fewer dollars in taxes than you did in the past ten years.
It would directly hurt the economy by taking research and development dollars from American businesses.

It would shrink the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade, according to the White House.

But many of Biden’s proposals would struggle to pass even a Democratic-controlled Congress; with Republicans in control of the House, they’re going nowhere.

Thank goodness it won’t happen. The last thing the private sector needs to have $3 trillion pulled out, for no good purpose.

Should Trump return to the White House, he has vowed to extend his 2017 tax cuts —which the CBO says would add nearly $4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade —and to push for more cuts.

Trump’s promise to extend tax cuts almost (but not quite) makes me consider voting for him. Naw.

Both candidates oppose making cuts to the big sources of federal spending: Social Security, Medicare, and defense. “Neither party is remotely serious about either spending cuts or tax increases,” said Brian Riedl, of the conservative Manhattan Institute.

Yet, I often read false claims that the Medicare and Social Security fake trust funds are going bankrupt without tax increases or benefit reductions.

This is a lie based on the rich’s desire to widen the income/wealth/power Gap between them and the rest of us.

What happens if Congress does nothing?

Under current policy and in the best-case scenario, the U.S. has 20 years to take corrective action before the federal debt reaches an unsustainable level, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Sadly, I’m too old to be alive 20 years from now when none of the above nonsense is scheduled to happen, and this foolish prediction has been forgotten.

After that point, the analysts note, “no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt.”

Such a default would be disastrous for the U.S. and global economies.

A reckoning could be delayed if interest rates fall back to recent lows, or if U.S. economic growth outpaces interest rates. But most experts agree that the country will eventually have to tackle its surging debt and deficits.

The problem is that “nobody really knows what ‘eventually’ means,” said Louise Sheiner, of the Brookings Institute. “The longer you wait, the more you are shifting costs onto the future generation.”

I’m sorry, but this simply is wrong. The federal government cannot unintentionally default on its debts. It has the infinite ability to create dollars.

If you sent the government a legitimate invoice for a trillion dollars, or a hundred trillion, or a thousand trillion, it could pay it instantly simply by tapping a few computer keys.

“The analysts” do not understand the fundamental differences between a Monetarily Sovereign entity, like the U.S. government, and a monetarily non-sovereign entity, like a local government, a business, or a euro nation.

And, uh oh, here it comes, as usual:

Saving Social Security
A demographic time bomb could blow a hole in Social Security.

The program taxes current workers to support older Americans.

Those FICA taxes, like all other federal taxes, support nothing. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, who initiated Social Security, knew the taxes were useless.

Why did he create them when there were no special taxes to “fund” Congress, the Supreme Court, the White House, the Military, etc.?

When told the programs could be funded the same way all other federal spending was funded, he said the taxes created “a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those [payroll] taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

FICA was a political decision, not a financial one.

But as the population gets grayer and lives longer, the worker-to-retiree ratio is dipping lower and lower.

As a result, Social Security’s trust fund is projected to run dry by 2035, triggering an immediate 17 percent cut in benefits.

A number of proposals have been floated to stave off insolvency, including raising the age at which full benefits can be claimed from 67 to 70; hiking payroll taxes; and raising the limit on annual earnings subject to Social Security taxes, now about $168,600.

Yet despite nearly a decade of warnings about the program’s financial health, Congress has yet to approve any meaningful reform. “Nobody’s acting as if that’s something they’ve got to take seriously,” said Andrew Biggs, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“So, I’ll just be honest and say I’m worried about how this thing plays out.”

Angry Speaker Images – Browse 26,680 Stock Photos, Vectors, and Video | Adobe Stock — **The federal government can’t afford to help you unless you’re rich.**

Is it ignorance or intentional rubbish? Probably both.

“Insolvency.” “Tax hikes.” “Benefit cuts.” All lies.

The American people have been fed so many lies about federal affordability that not one in a million understands the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty.

There are lies about the so-called “debt,” lies about the purposes of federal taxes, lies about the so-called “trust funds,” and “ticking time bomb” lies.

The liars mislead about virtually everything regarding federal financing, so who can blame the American people for believing that federal spending is “socialism” and that federal surpluses are better than federal deficits.

It’s all they hear. The lies are even taught in economics classes and books.

Sadly, the fear of federal deficits has prevented people from receiving health care insurance, adequate retirement benefits, unemployment compensation, education, cures for poverty, hunger, homelessness, and so many other benefits the federal government could and should provide.

But there is a penalty for ignorance. The Gap widens.

In summary:

1. The federal government does not owe the “federal debt.
2. The federal government does not borrow dollars
3. Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds cannot become insolvent
4. FICA does not fund Social Security or Medicare
5. Federal taxes do not fund anything.
6. T-bonds are not debt
7. Interest rates are not determined by investor demand
8. Taxpayers do not owe the federal debt
9. Federal deficits are necessary for economic growth
10. Federal surpluses cause depressions.
11. The federal debt/GDP ratio is meaningless.
12. Federal taxes are destroyed upon receipt.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

……………………………………………………………………..

The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Who is on the wrong side of virtually every issue?

Are you a Republican or a Democrat? Or something else? Stop a moment and ask yourself, Why?

Are you what you are because it’s a family tradition? Or are there specific issues that move you? Interestingly, the nation seems almost evenly split between the two major parties, while the differences are profound.

My family historically voted Democrat, primarily because of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He created Social Security and maneuvered us out of the Great Recession (though by getting us into the Great War II).

His communication skills and the morals and strength of his wife, Eleanor, contributed to his aura of greatness.

After Harry S. Truman left office, and until perhaps a dozen years ago, I tended to vote Republican, possibly because I come from Chicago, where the Daleys (father and son) were so profoundly crooked. They were Democrats who ran the criminal Democrat machine.

More recently, because of Lyndon Johnson, who, if not for Viet Nam would be considered one of our greatest Presidents, I have leaned toward the Democrats. This is based on the issues.

Here are the issues as I see them:

I. Donald Trump: He is the uncontested winner of the “worst President” competition. He is a psychopath, which seems to be an infectious disease. His sickness has infected every aspect of American life.

Here is a list of Trump’s symptoms from the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. Glibness. Superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, need for stimulation, proneness to boredom, pathological lying, conning/manipulation, lack of remorse, lack of guilt, shallow emotions (emotions felt in superficial and fleeting ways), callousness, lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, promiscuous sexual behavior, early behavior problems, lack of realistic, long-term goals, impulsivity, failure to accept responsibility, many short-term marital relationships, juvenile delinquency, and criminal versatility.

Trump has all 20 of those symptoms. You can see the symptoms explained here.

The abject failure of the Republican party to recognize and deal with, rather than to defend this man’s actions and ravings, is the most crucial issue entering the next Presidential election.

Trump’s traitorous criminality came close to destroying American democracy, and the flag-waving GOP’s refusal to acknowledge it epitomizes the worst political party in recent memory.

II. Quality of people: In addition to Trump, the right-wing has assembled an astounding group of lying, bigoted, fence-straddling hate-mongering ignoramuses to represent conservatism. Think of the low-quality of such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, Kristi Noem, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, Lauren Boehbert, Lindsey Graham, Brian Mast, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Paul Gosar, Andrew Clyde,

We continue with Breitbart, Newsmax, Fox News, and such lying rogues as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, and Maria Bartiromo.

We also should include Dinesh D’Souza, Ben Shapiro, Stephen Miller, Mike Lindell, Michael Flynn, QAnon, and Steve Bannon.

And it’s only fitting that we end with Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

III. The election: Before the election, Trump already had planned to say the election was stolen if he lost. So he did.

Despite approximately 50 lawsuits, many in front of Republican-appointed judges, all of which determined the election was not stolen, Trump continues to make the same ridiculous claim.

The Republican Party had two options. It could have agreed with the facts and, for the sake of democracy, moved on. Or it could have adopted and disseminated Trump’s Big Lie.

The GOP chose the latter in a wondrous display of cowardice and dishonesty. That solidified the GOP’s strong consideration for the “Worst Political Party in American History” award.

IV. The Clarence Thomas Saga: Speaking of the “worst in history,” the Supreme Court’s current iconoclastic leader, Clarence Thomas, certainly competes for the title.

“Uncle Tom” Thomas has spent his later years trying to demonstrate that he is not black. He disclaims his blackness aided him in any way, including the affirmative action laws that helped him get into Yale law school. He later denied that the degree he received there helped him.

He voted to overturn a rule that forbids prosecutors from using race as a factor in making peremptory challenges in jury selection, thus pleasing white bigots everywhere.

His nomination by President Bush to replace Thurgood Marshall, the only black on the Supreme Court, was aided by his being black.

The ABA rated Thomas as qualified, with one of the lowest levels of support for a Supreme Court nominee. Thomas’s record includes voting against affirmative action and abortion.

His wife is a QAnon white supremacist, while Thomas refuses to recuse from cases involving that way of thinking, improbably claiming he never discusses cases with her.

Thomas makes decisions based on “originalism and textualism” when it suits his right-wing biases. He ironically denies the existence of the first 13 words of the 2nd Amendment and gives AR-15 rights based on founders who had never heard of an AR-15.

Although, during his confirmation hearings, Thomas claimed, ” “Stare decisis (precedent) provides continuity to our system, it provides predictability, and in our process of case-by-case decision making, I think it is a fundamental and critical concept.“

Nevertheless he proved to be a con artist (Anital Hill and others have testified to that, under oath) because he has voted to overturn precedent more often than any other Justice.

That includes voting to overturn the 50-year precedent of Roe v Wade.

Crooked Clarence’s accepting of massive gifts from litigants before the Court, under the “I didn’t know it was wrong,” demonstrates a contrived ignorance beyond belief for a judge in the nation’s highest court.

And have we mentioned Samuel Alito, who equals Thomas in personal duplicity but now has exceeded him in reverence for the rich?

V. The Supreme Court: It is a Court that follows the conservative opinion that a) if a law benefits the masses, and b) the Constitution doesn’t explicitly spell it out, get find a way to get rid of it, preferably by convoluted illogic.

(a) Abortion: This procedure always is available to the rich, who easily can travel to any city, state, or even country that allows it. The poor cannot.

Abortion benefits the poor, who cannot afford another mouth to feed. It also helps those who can’t afford the best health care that would tend to the health risks of difficult or dangerous pregnancies.

Thus, the local availability of abortion helps widen the Gap between the rich and the poor and functionally makes the rich richer. As Gap Psychology reveals, widening the Gap is the only way the rich can become more affluent.

(b) Guns: Ignoring the first 13 words of the 2nd Amendment (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”) upon which America’s gun/death epidemic exists, the self-defined “originalist” Court ignores the original intent of the framers.

The right-wing explicitly ignores the words “well-regulated” and the word “militia” while missing the original meaning of the word “arms.”

Remember that AK-47s, AR-15s, and large magazines for bullets, even bullets themselves, were unknown when writing the Constitution. Blunderbusses and bayonets were the “arms” mentioned in the 2nd Amendment. Honesty demands that originalists would not accept modern weapons. But this Supreme Court lacks honesty.

The conservatives also ignore the original purpose of the 2nd Amendment:

(The Constitution’s) most influential framer was James Madison. In Federalist No. 46, Madison wrote how the militia could keep a federal army in check: “A standing army … would be opposed [by] militia.”

He argued that State governments “would be able to repel the danger” of a federal army, “It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.”

He contrasted the federal government of the United States to the European kingdoms, which he described as “afraid to trust the people with arms”, and assured that “the existence of subordinate governments … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition”.

Thus, for the education of the Court’s phony “originalists,” the fundamental purpose of the 14th Amendment was for a well-regulated militia to keep the federal army in check.

Today, there is no militia, well-regulated or otherwise, and in any event, such a militia no longer could keep the U.S. military in check. And original “arms” do not include today’s current weapons.

Finally, high-powered rifles with large magazines are not good self-defense weapons but are more appropriate for mowing down large groups of people, as they have been doing with increasing regularity.

The conservative Court’s reasonings logically could apply to the individual ownership of machine guns, bazookas, hand grenades, and even poison gas, all of which have the same relevance to the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment’s “arms” as do AR-15s and AK-47s

(C)Money in politics The constitution does not mention that a well-financed candidate has an advantage over an equally qualified but less financed opponent.

As always, the conservatives take the side of the rich and equate spending money with free speech. Thus a conservative Court gave us Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which says that money is speech, and since the rich have more money, they have more right to more speech than the poor.

VI. Global warming is human-made: Here, as usual, Trumpism rules the GOP. Some of what Trump, parroted by his GOP toadies, said:

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

“Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles, and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”

“This winter is brutal. . . .Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientists [who] are having a lot of fun.”

“Any and all weather events are used by the GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS to justify higher taxes to save our planet! They don’t believe it $$$$!”

“When I hear Obama saying climate change is the No. 1 problem, it is just madness.”

After Trump denied repeatedly saying climate change is a hoax, Kellyanne Conway clarified his position: “He has said that he believes [climate change] is naturally occurring and is not all man-made.”

Virtually every accredited climate scientist disagrees with Trump and Kellyanne. Human-made carbon dioxide is warming the world, which will lead to an existential disaster. The GOP will be known as the party that helped destroy humankind and the rest of the living world.

Trump selected Scott Pruit to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the same Scott Pruitt who repeatedly sued the agency to prevent it from doing its job. It was like selecting the proverbial fox to guard the henhouse.

Finally, as with all things the GOP favors, global warming adversely affects the poor more than the rich. In addition to the rich having better air conditioning, the “heat island” effect in areas where parklands don’t exist is significantly more significant than the heating in more wide-open floral spaces common to estates.

VII. Guns: The GOP, the party of the rich, favors massive gun ownership for one crucial reason and perhaps several less critical ones.

Who is being killed by guns, the rich or the poor? The answer is clear. Widespread, easy access to firearms is killing and maiming the poor and middle classes, leaving the rich relatively unscathed. This death by violence widens the income, wealth, and power Gap between the rich and the rest.

Gap Psychology dictates that the only way the rich can become more prosperous is to widen the Gap between them and those below them. This is accomplished by gaining more for themselves and ensuring those below lose more.

Gun killings have shattered many poorer neighborhoods and lives, thus widening the Gap.

The rich have guns to protect themselves from the poor. The poor have guns to protect themselves from their neighbors.

VIII. Federal Benefits: The primary benefits for the middle and the poor are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, “Obamacare,” and the various anti-poverty initiatives — school lunch programs, the Child Tax Credit, The American Rescue Plan, etc., all of which are resisted by the GOP.

By contrast, the GOP has favored increased deductions for charitable donations, business expenses for personal benefit, tax-loss manipulations (which is how Trump managed to pay virtually no taxes for ten years), lower tax rates on capital gains, and numerous tax laws that allow the wealthiest Americans to pay no taxes at all.

Meanwhile, the GOP falsely claims the benefits paid to middle-class and poor Americans are running short of dollars and need to be cut. That is why you’ve seen all the crocodile tears regarding Social Security, Medicare, etc., running short of money. It’s a lie fostered by the rich.

IX. Dreamers: Per Brave:

The term “DREAMer” refers to young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children who have lived and gone to school here and often identify as American.

They are protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which is not designed as a path to permanent residency or citizenship. The recipients of DACA are young people who have grown up as Americans, identify themselves as Americans, and many speak only English and have no memory of or connection with the country where they were born.

Under current immigration law, most of these young people had no way to gain legal residency even though they had lived in the U.S. most of their lives.

Many Dreamers say they didn’t know they were unauthorized immigrants until they were teenagers, often when they discovered they couldn’t join their peers in getting a driver’s license or filling out financial aid forms for college because they didn’t have Social Security numbers.

The xenophobic, anti-poor, pro-rich GOP opposes citizenship for dreamers.

X. Gays: The GOP spreads the false narrative that being gay is evil, and being exposed to gay people somehow taints straight children and encourages them to “decide” to be gay. The GOP accuses gay people of “grooming” straight people to be gay.

It is a lie. One cannot be “groomed” to be gay.

According to “Kids Health,” :

Being straight, gay, or bisexual is not something a person can choose or change. People don’t choose their sexual orientation any more than they choose their height or eye color. It is estimated that about 10% of people are gay.

Gay people are represented in all walks of life, across all nationalities, ethnic backgrounds, and in all social and economic groups.

No one fully understands what determines a person’s sexual orientation, but various biological and genetic factors likely explain it.

Medical experts and organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Psychological Association (APA) view sexual orientation as part of someone’s nature.

Being gay is also not considered a mental disorder or abnormality.

The GOP’s anti-gay posture is no more defensible as an anti-black or anti-tall belief. It is ignorant bigotry, pure and simple.

XI. “Woke”: The GOP is anti-“Woke,” which has become a cornerstone of Ron DeSantis’s Presidential aspirations.

Although most Republicans claim to hate “woke,” most have no idea what it is. Their hatred begins with their ignorance.

From Wikipedia: Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English, meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.”Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism.

The GOP denies racial prejudice, discrimination, and social inequalities such as sexism exist and if they exist, they are meaningless, or their discussion is harmful.

Denying that social inequalities exist and refusing to warn our children about them grooms children to be haters and perpetuates the bigotry that still curses America. Sadly, that’s the GOP’s whole purpose.

By training children to be tomorrow’s bigots, today’s bigots retain control over society. Their fears and hatreds are shared. The notion that a black or gay or Jew might enter the neighborhood is an anathema to the insular right wing.

Denying the past is how never to learn from it, and is the method of the dictator.

XII. Book “Burning”: The Nazis did it. It has a long history in America, too.

Remember that the GOP criticized the left wing for its supposed “cancel culture.” But the Republicans have taken cancel culture to a new high in American history.

Among the books that have been banned by Republican censors are: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger; The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck; To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, Ulysses, by James Joyce, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, 1984, by George Orwell, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, Animal Farm, by George Orwell and many others.

Generally, a book is banned because a parent doesn’t want their child to read it. The parent harbors the false belief that if children don’t see swearing or pornography or read about communism, socialism, nazism, liberalism, and other “isms,” their little minds won’t be contaminated as they grow up.

The opposite is true. Understanding the sin, rather than experiencing it from their ignoble peers, can prevent absorbing the sin.

The GOP, notably Gov. Ron DeSantis, banned books that are “woke.” Teachers even are fired for talking about “woke.” The GOP wrongly believes ignorance is a good sin preventative.

Even the bible was smarter than that, for the bible explained sin in excruciating detail, while explaining why it was wrong.

XIII COVID: It has become a Trump/GOP loyalty test to deny the seriousness of COVID and the usefulness of anti-covid vaccines and masks.

Trump continued to claim COVID would “just go away” into 2020, when he caught the disease and was treated at Walter Reed Hospital in October 2020.

He received the COVID vaccination and other treatments and was released on October 10, 2020.

He said, “I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good!

“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge.”

Amazingly, even knowing firsthand the contagiousness of COVID, Trump continued to hold mass, maskless campaign events, at which hundreds of people caught COVID, many dying.

**Here is how one man, Donald Trump, managed to kill three hundred thousand Americans. On a related note, the GOP votes the death penalty for killing one American.**

More than three hundred thousand Americans died because they refused to become vaccinated. They effectively committed suicide, possibly the largest suicide pact in world history.

Many more caught COVID because they refused to wear masks, though Trump was vaccinated and, for a short time, wore a mask.

NPR reported people living in counties that voted for then-President Trump in the 2020 election were three times more likely to die from COVID-19 than people who lived in counties that voted for President Biden.

XIX. Student Debt”: As you read this section, remember that the U.S. government is Monetarily Sovereign, meaning it never can run short of dollars. Even if the federal government collected $0 taxes, it could afford to spend forever.

Thus, there never is a reason to lend dollars. The federal government has no need for returned dollars.

In September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement began. The protest against income inequality, the wealthy, and their financial institutions, led by activists “representing 99 percent of Americans,” soon led to the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, which directed its ire at the country’s skyrocketing tuition costs and debt-fueled higher education system.

When student debt surpassed $1 trillion in April 2012, the Debt Collective, a debtor union, called for abolishing all student debt and implementing free college.

Calls to abolish all student debt resurfaced amid myriad legal challenges representing victims of predatory for-profit colleges, catching the attention and support of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Packaging people with debt that schools knew or should have known would be unrepayable began to look predatory.

Only about half of borrowers were in repayment in 2019. A quarter — or more than 10 million people — were in delinquency or default, and the rest had applied for temporary relief for struggling borrowers, including deferments or forbearances.

The right-wing side of the Supreme Court ruled against President Joe Biden’s plan that would have forgiven up to $20,000 worth of student loan debt per borrower in a 6-3 decision1.

The majority opinion was delivered by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted against the student loan forgiveness plan. Conservative Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett voted with Roberts.

All earlier had pledged their reverence for precedent.

XX. Obamacare: The common name for the Affordable Care Act, is intended to make healthcare insurance more affordable for everyone by lowering costs for those who can’t afford them. The plan mandated that insurance companies include ten necessary benefits and paid the states to expand Medicaid coverage.

Twelve states rejected the plan; all GOP-dominated: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Their citizen continued to suffer from a lack of health care insurance. Before the ACA, insurance companies could exclude people with pre-existing conditions.

The GOP made several attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.

The first attempt was in 2017 when Republicans tried to repeal and replace parts of Obamacare by spring. The House released an Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill called the American Health Care Act in March 20171. However, intraparty opposition quickly mounted, with some conservatives calling it “Obamacare 2.0.”

After winning control of the presidency, Senate, and House in the 2016 elections, Republicans attempted multiple times to repeal ACA but were unsuccessful.

XXI: Affirmative action is a policy or a set of procedures that aims to improve the educational or employment opportunities of certain demographic groups historically discriminated against or underrepresented in society.

It gives limited preference to qualified groups based on criteria such as race, gender, ethnic origin, disability, and age.

A 2013 Harvard study found that after affirmative action ended in critical states, “sharp declines” in the workplace followed for Asian women, Black women, and Hispanic men.

When the University of California system eliminated affirmative action in 1995, the number of Black and Latino students accepted by Berkeley and UCLA was cut by nearly half by 1998, the first year affected by the ban.

There is theory, and there is reality. The theory is that all people should be treated equally. The reality is that certain groups never have been treated equally, and this unequal treatment of young children impacts them throughout their lives.

Affirmative action is a later attempt to undo the effects of early unfair treatment.

The Supreme Court decided 6-3 and 6-2 that race-conscious admission policies of the University of North Carolina and Harvard College violate the Constitution, effectively ending affirmative action in higher education through a decision that will reverberate across campuses nationwide.

The rulings fell along ideological lines. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for both cases, and Justice Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh wrote concurring opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has ties to Harvard and recused herself in that case but wrote a dissent in the North Carolina case.

The ruling is the latest from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority that has upended decades of precedent, including overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.

XXII. Conspiracy theories. No political party in history has been as enamored with idiotic conspiracy theories as has then GOP.

It begins with the obvious criminality of Donald Trump to which the Republican MAGAs haven blindfolded themselves. He spouts so many lies that to support him you first must turn off your brain and be amenable to accepting the latest idiocy, whether it agrees with, or contradicts the previous idiocy.

Here excerpts from a wonderful article the explains the mental coma in which Trump followers live.

Hunter Biden “whistleblower” exposed as a fugitive and accused spy — but MAGA won’t budge
By Amanda Marcotte

In May, Rep. James Comer (rhymes with “coma”), R-Ky had admitted that his supposed “whistleblower” had gone missing.

(Earlier), Comer crowed that “the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant” should “feel like fools right now,” because “a credible witness that the FBI flew all the way to Brussels to interview” was a-coming.

On Monday, the truth came out. Cormer’s supposed “informant,” Gal Luft, is not preparing his dramatic exposé of the Bidens. No, he’s actually on the run from the law, having been charged by the Department of Justice (DOJ) with illegal arms dealing and being a Chinese spy.

Of course, this egg on his face will not slow Comer down. Conspiracy theories are closed loop systems. When conflicting facts are presented, the conspiracist immediately declares not only are the facts fake, but the fakery is further “proof” of the conspiracy.

One could see this happening in real time the second the federal authorities announced the charges against Luft on Twitter.

The contagion of conspiracy theories | The Seattle Times

MAGA diehards, declared with confidence that Luft is an innocent man being framed by the deep state. Not one of these people could pick Luft out of a lineup or could say anything about his life prior to this moment. Yet the invention of a new conspiracy theory about Luft’s arrest was not just automatic, it seemed as mindless as breathing.

It’s highly unlikely that either Comer or Mace believes their own B.S. Indeed, Comer joked earlier this year to New York Times reporters about how he is just making it up as he goes along.

“You know, the customer’s always right,” Mr. Comer said wryly, of his approach.

That’s the reason it’s so easy for not just Comer, but the entire GOP base, to reflexively roll up these charges into the ever-expanding conspiracy theory. Most of them don’t believe any of this crap.

Conspiracy theorists often contradict themselves in frankly comical ways:

As social psych researcher, Karen Douglas found that “the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.” The more they “believed that Osama bin Laden was already dead when US special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive.”

Throughout and since 2020, conspiracy theorists have said that Covid is at the same time a nonexistent hoax, a bug no more dangerous than the flu, and a deadly Chinese bioweapon. It didn’t matter to them that these things can’t be true at the same time.

For Comer and other MAGA Republicans, the actual belief is straightforward: They wish to destroy the legitimately elected president and replace him with Donald Trump, a wannabe fascist who attempted a coup.

With the Hunter Biden conspiracies, the most obvious aspect is that it’s impossible for anyone, even those who made it up, to follow what exactly is being alleged here.

According to a purported IRS whistleblower, U.S. Attorney David Weiss had been turned down when he requested special counsel status….

But now, Trump appointee Weiss, has stated unambiguously that none of these claims are true. He never requested to become special counsel and he was never blocked from bringing any charges or investigating aspects of the Hunter Biden case.

If you’re going cross-eyed trying to keep up, that’s the point of this ever-more-deranged GOP conspiracy theory: (make it impossible) to figure out what the hell Republicans are talking about in the first place.

This is all by design. If a conspiracy theory is easy to follow, it’s also easy to see its flaws. But if it’s so complicated that even efforts at straightforward debunking are bewildering, it’s hard to argue against it.

The vast majority of Trump’s crimes are simple enough to explain: Stealing classified documents. Tax fraud. Sexual assault. Attempting to steal an election. But the sheer number of Trump crimes is mind-boggling.

What the average Trump voter needs in order to justify themselves is a claim that “both sides” are corrupt. With so much Trump criminality to distract from, the lies about the Bidens need to be overwhelming.

Not that it’s a hard task to keep making crap up. After all, nothing Republicans say about Biden needs to make sense. It just needs to be noisy.

Sadly for the MAGA zombies, this all came to early, and will be forgotten by election time, so they will need to come up with even more brain-dead theories they can take with them to the polls.

Finally, if you enjoy farce, fiction, and fairy tales, you’ll love reading some of these astounding MAGA-believed flights of imagination: 20 Conspiracy Theories Trump Has Pushed Before and During His Presidency

SUMMARY

I believe the Republican Party, in concert with its Supreme Court political hacks, has worked on the wrong side of every important issue facing America.

I believe that the GOP is a party of bigots, voting against those who are not born white-supremacist, Christian, Americans and who are not wealthy.

As befits such a party, it has appointed to the Supreme Court a cadre of political hacks who vote a false, lockstep, “originalism” (but only when it supports the conservative, white-supremacist view) and ignores the reality of the pain their vote will cause.

Despite billing itself as “the party of law and order” and the party of religion, the GOP, in my opinion, is overstocked with lawbreakers from its top to its bottom.

As the “party of religion,” the GOP talks the talk but does not walk the walk. What religion is so callous as to deny support for the poor and besieged minorities while bending the knee to the rich?

The religion supported by the GOP is the one with Donald Trump as its God, a belief that omits then denies the rights of all other religions, agnostics, or atheists.