Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●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.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
=====================================================================

Up is now down; black is now white; big is now small.

Stimulus 2008: Mr. Obama called on Congress and the Bush administration to pass an economic stimulus package.

He said it was an “urgent priority” to extend unemployment insurance benefits for workers who could not find jobs in the bleak economy. He also said he would give aid to states, create new jobs and move forward with his tax-cut plans for middle-class families.

So, in 2008, “stimulus” and “create new jobs” required more federal deficit spending.

Stimulus 2009: The $787 billion economic stimulus package was approved by Congress in February, 2009. The package was designed to quickly jumpstart economic growth, and save between 900,000-2.3 million jobs. The package allocated funds as follows:
$288 billion in tax cuts.
$224 billion in extended unemployment benefits, education and health care.
$275 billion for job creation using federal contracts, grants and loans.

In 2009, “stimulus” still required more federal deficit spending.

Stimulus 2010: Most of the growth present in the US economy is coming from the money injected into our capitalist system by the Government. This is why so many people are asking if we will get another stimulus check in 2010? So here’s what we know so far: There will be a $250 stimulus check for Social Security (SS)

Yes, in 2010, “stimulus” still required more federal deficit spending.

Stimulus 2011: President Obama unveiled a stimulus plan Thursday night that he says will boost hiring and provide a jolt to the stalled economy if it becomes law.
A mix of $253 billion in tax cuts and $194 billion in new spending, the total bill for the plan is $447 billion.

Consistently in 2011, “stimulus” still required more federal deficit spending

Stimulus 2012: Putting pressure on Congress to approve parts of his latest economic stimulus plan, President Obama urged Americans Saturday to push lawmakers to approve his multibillion-dollar “to-do list” for creating jobs.

“Each of the ideas on this list will help create jobs and build a stronger economy right now,” Mr. Obama said. The president’s list includes an expanded program to help homeowners refinance their mortgages, a proposal to give small businesses tax breaks for hiring more workers, a program that would help veterans find jobs, and an extension of tax credits for clean-energy companies.

All told, the proposals on the president’s list could cost up to $34.7 billion:

In 2012, “stimulus” still required more federal deficit spending.

But wait! Up is now down; black is now white; big is now small:

Stimulus 2013: President Obama unveiled a 10-year budget blueprint Wednesday that calls for nearly $300 billion in new spending on jobs, public works and expanded pre-school education and nearly $800 billion in new taxes, including an extra 94 cents a pack on cigarettes.

But the president’s spending plan would also cut more than $1 trillion from programs across the federal government — for the first time targeting Social Security benefits.

“Our economy is poised for progress, as long as Washington doesn’t get in the way,” Obama said. He said his budget represents “a fiscally responsible blueprint for middle-class jobs and growth.”

The plan reduces the deficit and makes necessary investments “because we can do both,” he said. “We can grow our economy, and shrink our deficits.” He added: “The numbers work. There’s not a lot of smoke and mirrors in here.”

I have a question: How many millions of Americans now wrongly believe we grow the economy by taking money out of the economy, when in the previous five years, they correctly believed growth required adding money into the economy?

And by the way, exactly how do we “grow our economy, and shrink our deficits” at the same time? Smoke and mirrors?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================

Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

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 Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●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.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
======================================================================================

Deficit Reduction Causes Poverty
By formula, deficit reduction (a.k.a. “austerity”) impoverishes the economy. The most common measure of the economy is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The formula for GDP is:

GDP = Federal Spending + Nonfederal Spending – Net Imports

Deficit reduction requires a reduction in Federal Spending (green bar) and/or an increase in taxes, which reduces Nonfederal Spending (blue and red bars). Deficit reduction always impoverishes an economy, a harsh lesson the euro nations have been learning.

America will learn the same lesson, as deficit reduction becomes a reality.

National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP)
There are more than 72 million children under 18 years old in the United States.

45 percent – 32.4 million – live in low-income families.
22 percent – 16.1 million – live in poor families.

Nearly 16 million children in the United States – 22% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $23,021 a year for a family of four.

Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses. Using this standard, 45% of children live in low-income families.

Most of these children have parents who work, but low wages and unstable employment leave their families struggling to make ends meet. Poverty can impede children’s ability to learn and can contribute to social, emotional, and behavioral problems.

Poverty also can contribute to poor health and mental health. Risks are greatest for children who experience poverty when they are young and/or experience deep and persistent poverty.

Deficit reduction causes poverty, which in turn, causes poor education, poor housing and poor family environment, poor nourishment, sickness, crime, mental illness and low intelligence. No secret there.

Epigenetics
But what has not been realized is, these effects – the physical sickness, mental illness and low intellegence – can plague many generations into the future, possibly forever..

THIS WEEK
Epigenetics: How our experiences affect our offspring

In a quiet scientific revolution, researchers have come to realize that genes aren’t a fixed, predetermined program simply passed from one generation to the next. <bIInstead, genes can be turned on and off by experiences and environment.

What we eat, how much stress we undergo, and what toxins we’re exposed to can all alter the genetic legacy we pass on to our children and even grandchildren.

And not just grandchildren, but far beyond them:

Science News
From Great Grandma to You
Epigenetic changes reach down through the generations
By Tina Hesman Saey, April 6, 2013

Susan Murphy, a researcher at Duke University, studies links between a mother’s diet and chemical exposures during pregnancy with the child’s later health. She and others have established that what happens (in the womb) can influence a child’s health for life.

Now, animal studies and a smattering of human data suggest such prenatal effects could reach farther down the family tree: The vices, virtues, inadvertent actions and accidental exposures of a pregnant mother may pose health consequences for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and perhaps even their offspring.

The resulting health effects are not produced by altering DNA itself. Rather they stem from changes in chemical tags on DNA or its associated proteins, or to actions by RNA, another type of genetic molecule. All of these are exactly the types of changes that scientists have always assumed cannot be inherited. Their very name, epigenetic, literally means “over and above” or “beyond” genetics.

Part of your risk of disease may be determined by what your great-grandparents ate, not just the genes they passed on. One implication is that epigenetic programming becomes permanent and gets passed along to future generations.

Summary

Deficit reduction causes poverty. The adverse consequences of austerity can degrade the human species for many generations, possibly affecting human evolution, forever.

That is the bleak future austerity now may create for our grandchildren and beyond.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================

Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

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 Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●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.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
=====================================================================
BACKGROUND

Why is the National Rifle Association (NRA) so resoundingly successful, while the Occupy (OWS) groups have been so predictably impotent? The answer: The three M’s — Membership, Money and Message.

The NRA not only has a large and broad membership — they claim 5 million — but can count on millions of non-member sympathizers. OWS has a sparse membership and few sympathizers.

The NRA has tons of money. OWS has little.

The NRA has a simple, seductive message: “Guns protect you.” OWS has no coherent message. They simply seem angry at everything money. Their pride in having no leadership structure and no organization has made them a confused messenger with a confused message.

Embarrassingly, Modern Monetary Theory and Monetary Sovereignty are more like OWS than like the NRA. We have sparse Membership, little Money, and though we have a Message (“Deficit spending protects you”), it is counter-intuitive and not heard for lack of volume.

One might think we’d have an easier job. After all, we promise better health, education, infrastructure and housing — better lives overall — for the vast majority of Americans.

Our cut-the-deficit opponents promise worse of everything, and have the statistics to prove it. Everywhere austerity has been tried, it has resulted in abject misery. So why do we struggle?

The opposition has Membership (bought-and-paid-for, old line economists, the media, Congress) Money (the Peterson/Koch brothers crowd) and a simple, intuitive Message (“Deficits are bad”).

NOW, ABOUT THE AFL-CIO

Their site says:

“We are the umbrella federation for U.S. unions, with 57 unions representing more than 12 million working men and women.”

That’s 12 million members, plus millions of sympathizers — way more than the NRA has. And what does the AFL-CIO do? They say:

Our priorities include:
1. creating good family-supporting jobs
2. by investing tax dollars in schools, roads, bridges, ports and airports ;
3. improving the lives of workers through education, job training
4. and a livable minimum wage;
5. strengthening Social Security and private pensions;
6. ensuring fair tax policies;
7. making high-quality, affordable health care available to everyone;
8. and holding corporations more accountable for their actions.

NRA results: In the face of massive evidence that gun ownership begets gun murder, Congress resists gun control. Even the most innocuous gun control bills struggle. NRA Membership and Money are growing. Gun sales keep climbing. The NRA succeeds.

AFL-CIO results:
1. Unemployment remains high
2. Spending for schools, roads, bridges, ports and airports is cut
3. Spending for education is cut
4. The minimum wage is not “livable.”
5. Social Security is cut; private pensions are underfunded
6. FICA is increased. The middle class is overtaxed.
7. Medicare and Medicaid are cut. Still millions uninsured
8. No banksters yet convicted, and TBTF banks more powerful than ever.

In short, despite massive Membership and lots of Money, the AFL-CIO fails to accomplish its goals. In fact, they are backsliding.

They don’t have a strong, coherent Message. Why? Partly, because they accept the false belief the federal government spends tax dollars, which evolves to the false belief the deficit must be reduced.

But, an AFL-CIO and MMT-MS team could be a marriage made in heaven. We want mostly the same things for the 99% of Americans. With our Message, plus the AFL-CIO’s Membership and Money, we could change the world.

Suddenly, Congress would “realize” that deficit spending, far from being “unsustainable,” is vitally necessary. Suddenly, workers would receive better health care, income and retirement. Suddenly, the recession would disappear, forever.

Some cynics might say, “That is not what the AFL-CIO leaders want. All they want is union membership.” Whether or not that is true, the union leaders want credibility, an asset they have been losing. Were the unions to finance and spread the “Deficit spending protects you” message, their credibility would come from the credit they could take for saving the American worker.

AFL-CIO + MMT-MS would be a powerful, unstoppable force for the middle class. But, the marriage requires first a proposal. AFL-CIO already understands that the sequester is foolish, as witness their blog article, The Consequences of Austerity Are Dire. But this paragraph in the article indicates they do not understand that deficit reduction itself is foolish:

Working families are calling on Congress to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from benefit cuts (i.e., raising the retirement age and the “chained” CPI), repeal the sequester and close tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthiest 2%

My reading of this is they wrongly believe the deficit must be reduced, and so long as one believes that, arguments against deficit cuts merely turn into weak, seemingly self-serving bleatings, “Cut them, not us.”

If the leadership of AFL-CIO were educated to understand why the federal deficits actually should be increased, and increased significantly, they could use their Money to deliver the Message to their Membership and to Congress.

I can visualize, just for instance, the University of Missouri, Kansas City, setting up one-week seminars for AFL-CIO officers, leaders, lobbyists and marketing people, to provide the economics basics and arguing points countering the cut-the-defict lies.

The top three AFL-CIO officers are: Richard L. Trumka, President; Elizabeth Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer and Arlene Holt Baker, Executive Vice President.

Probably Mr. Trumka would be the one to reach, directly or via an intermediary. Which brings me to the title of this post: Whom do you know at AFL-CIO? If you know an official, I’ll contact him/her. Meanwhile, I’m going to write to Mr. Trumka. You might write him, too. His address is:

Richard L. Trumka, President
AFL-CIO
815 16th St., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20006

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================

Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

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 Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●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.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
=====================================================================

I wrote this as a comment on the previous post, but on second thought, I felt it deserved a post of its own.

President Barack Obama has proposed spending cuts that will crush the middle class, but John Boehmer wants even bigger cuts.

The National Memo
Boehner Rejects Obama’s Offer To Cut Social Security

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) preemptively rejected President Barack Obama’s upcoming budget proposal Friday, slamming the president’s offer to cut Social Security as “only modest entitlement savings.”

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka vowed that America’s largest labor federation would oppose any budget deal that included chained CPI, saying the index is “another example of how Washington creates fancy-sounding phrases to mask stupid policies that only work for the rich.”

The public seems to stand with Trumka; recent polling suggests that Americans strongly oppose any Social Security cuts.

The budget reportedly includes several other cuts, such as $400 billion in health care savings (including additional means-testing for Medicare,) and $200 billion in cuts to farm subsidies, federal employee retirement programs, and unemployment compensation.

Obama’s budget also aims to raise $600 billion in new revenues, including an increased cigarette tax, which would be used to finance the president’s proposal for universal pre-Kindergarten.

It sure looks like a fierce battle except, it’s not a real battle. It’s the pro wrestling version of combat. Obama and Boehner are putting on a show for the public. It goes like this:

Obama: “O.K. John, I’ll propose large cuts. You demand gigantic cuts. I reluctantly will offer to compromise on huge cuts.” The fools will think I’ve done my best and you’ll look like you’re being reasonable. We both get paid and no one gets hurt.

Both Obam and Boehner and their parties are bought and paid for by the upper .1%, so both will do as they are told, i.e. widen the gap between the rich and the rest. The rich want power, not just money, and power is what the gap gives them.

Since both parties are criminal, I’m beginning to wonder — dare I say it — whether this nation is headed for revolution. I sure hope not, but with the President and the entire Congress being owned by the .1%, for whom does one vote?

The people don’t understand what’s happening — they are brainwashed with debt-cutting lies — especially since the media also are owned by the rich.

The people pinned their hopes and dreams on Obama, but his greed got the best of him. He sold his soul for a Presidential Library, lucrative speaking engagements for his wife and him, and big jobs for his daughters.

As for the people, in frustration and feeling there is nowhere to turn, the people may lash out. They lack only a charismatic leader — an empathetic, Rooseveltian figure — to give them voice and strength.

Yes, it could happen here. Unfortunately, revolutions often result in even worse poverty for the middle and lower classes. But when people are killing your kids and stealing your house, you may not think about the subtleties.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================

Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

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 Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY