–Which of these three candidates do you support: Barack Obama, Flip Romney or Flop Romney”

Mitchell’s laws: The more budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes. To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments. Austerity = poverty and leads to civil disorder. Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
==========================================================================================================================================

In the coming Presidential election, you will have a choice of three candidates, Barack Obama, Flip Romney or Flop Romney. Here are some positions held by Flip Romney and the opposing positions held by Flop Romney. Thanks to Senator John McCain for digging most of these up:

FLIP: “I think the minimum wage ought to keep pace with inflation.”
FLOP: “There”s no question raising the minimum wage excessively causes a loss of jobs.”

FLIP: “I will work and fight for stem cell research.”
FLOP: “In the end, I became persuaded that the stem-cell debate was grounded in a false premise.”

FLIP: “I respect and will protect a woman”s right to choose.”
FLOP: “I never really called myself pro-choice.”

FLIP: “I like mandates. The mandates work.”
FLOP: “I think it”s unconstitutional on the 10th Amendment front.”

FLIP: “I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”
FLOP: “Ronald Reagan is… my hero.”

FLIP: “Illegal immigrants should have a chance to obtain citizenship.”
FLOP: “Secure the border, employment verification and no special pathway to citizenship.”
FLIP: ““Mitt Romney believes that young illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children should have the chance to become permanent residents, and eventually citizens, by serving honorably in the United States military,” a Romney campaign release states.

FLIP: Romney refused to take a position on Bush’s massive, 10-year tax cut plan.
FLOP: “I supported them.” (The Bush tax cuts)

FLIP:Romney said he will take stands that put him at odds with some traditional ultra- conservative groups, and cited his support for the assault rifle ban and the Brady gun control law. “That’s not going to make me the hero of the NRA. I don”t line up with a lot of special interest groups.”
FLOP: “I’m after the NRA”s endorsement. I”m not sure they”ll give it to me. I hope they will. I also joined because if I’m going to ask for their endorsement, they’re going to ask for mine.”

FLIP: “I have a gun of my own. I go hunting myself.”
FLOP: Asked by reporters at the gun show Friday whether he personally owned a gun, Romney said he did not. He said one of his sons, Josh, keeps two guns at the family vacation home in Utah.

FLIP: “I think the global warming debate is now pretty much over . . .”
FLOP: “I have to tell you with regards to global warming that that’s something, which, you’re right, the scientists haven’t entirely resolved . . .”

FLIP: When a 2002 Constitutional Amendment was proposed to ban same-sex marriage, Romney opposed it
FLOP: Romney will join petition backers in a State House press event today to urge the Legislature to pass the Protection of Marriage Amendment

FLIP: Gov. Mitt Romney (R) signed a bill Wednesday requiring all Massachusetts residents to purchase health insurance.
FLOP: Romney … is much more likely to present his state’s universal coverage law as not a model to copy but an example for other states to learn from. He’s now a critic of his own biggest achievement.

FLIP: Mitt Romney broke with GOP tradition and refused to sign the [Americans for Tax Reform] pledge. Romney’s Gubernatorial Campaign Spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, Dismissed Such Pledges At The Time As “Government By Gimmickry.”
FLOP: Almost five years after he refused to sign a ‘no new taxes’ pledge during his campaign for governor, Mitt Romney announced … that he had done just that, as his campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination began in earnest.

Between Flip and Flop, I support Flip . . . or actually it’s Flop. I think half of right wingers should vote for Flip and the other half for Flop. Or maybe the other way around. And don’t quote me, because I may change my mind, depending on what you think.

While all politicians change positions for convenience, Flip and Flop seem to have cornered the world record. I therefore have created the Mitt Romney Flip Flop award, of which he will be the first recipient — five copies for extreme wishy-washy excellence.

WHO WILL YOU VOTE FOR?

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

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

–France changes leaders. Why and who next?

Mitchell’s laws: The more budgets are cut and taxes inceased, the weaker an economy becomes. To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments. Austerity = poverty and leads to civil disorder. Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
==========================================================================================================================================

France became the latest in the line of euro nations, whose voters tossed out their leader. Why has this been happening?

Washington Post
Francois Hollande wins French presidential vote over Sarkozy, exit polls show
By Edward Cody, Updated: Sunday, May 6,

PARIS — Francois Hollande, a moderate Socialist with an easy smile, was elected president of France on Sunday, exit polls showed, narrowly defeating the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative whose five-year term was undermined by Europe’s economic crisis and his combative personality.

The outcome turned Sarkozy into the latest political leader to fall victim to the European economic implosion of the past four years.

Leaders of France, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain all have been voted out. According to European Union and International Monetary Fund philosophy, all these leaders did not create enough austerity for their economies, while the voters believed these leaders created too much austerity.

Who is right? Could it be that the problem lies not in the leaders nor in their nations, but in the euro itself? That the problem might be a fundamental weakness in the euro, never seems to occur to the EU.

Based on EU beliefs,all these nations, (and in fact, most nations of the world,) have been profligate. The vast majority are deeply in debt to everyone else. So “A” owes “B” and “B” owes “C” and “C” owes “A” – and they all are in trouble. See anything wrong with those mathematics?

Sarkozy was generally given high marks for statesmanship in dealing with the economic crisis in the European Union. But voter dissatisfaction swelled nevertheless, in part from an impression that working-class French people were not getting enough attention as Sarkozy dealt with the crisis.

The Socialist candidate, although making clear that hard times lie ahead, promised to apportion out austerity with a more even hand, including stimulus for economic growth alongside debt reduction. In one telling argument, he charged Sarkozy with protecting the rich by limiting upper-tier tax rates and said, if elected, he would impose a 75 percent rate on all earnings above $1.3 million a year to finance more help for the poor.

A man is elected because he will “apportion out austerity with a more even hand”? Think how desperate the people must be, if that’s their criterion — continuing economic disaster, but doled out more equally.

And then there’s “stimulus for economic growth alongside debt reduction.” Exactly how is that accomplished? There is no known mechanism by which a government can reduce its debt (i.e. increase taxes and/or reduce spending), while stimulating its economy (something the U.S. Tea/Republicans have not yet figured out).

[O.K., there is one method: Spend less on foreign soil. This means reduced foreign wars, foreign purchases (by the government) and foreign assistance. But to achieve an approved level of austerity, governments tend to reduce domestic spending, a sure road to recession or depression.]

The euro is a failed concept. Unless changes are made, look for every euro nation, not just the PIIGS, to tumble painfully down the dark hole of austerity and economic disaster.

As I have said repeatedly, there are two, and only two, long-term salvations for the euro nations:

1. Return to Monetary Sovereignty by re-adopting your own sovereign currencies
or
2. The EU to become a republic, similar to the U.S. federal government, with the euro nations similar to U.S. states, in which the EU provides euros to member nations as needed.

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

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–Push button economics and the end of economists. Good riddance to us.

I predict that within 20 years, the science of economics, and the economists who ply that trade, will be gone, and the world will be much better for it.

Wikipedia and Websters New Collegiate Dictionary both define “economics” as: “The social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” The key word is “analyzes.”

How do economists “analyze” production, distribution and consumption? They begin by assembling information. They ask, “What and how many?” “Who?” “Where?” “When and how often?”

From these data, they come to conclusions (“Why?”), and from these conclusions, they make predictions and recommendations for actions. It is the conclusions and recommendations that give economics value. Without them, economics would be useless.

In a previous post, How IBM can change the world, I described how the IBM super computer named “Watson” played Jeopardy and beat the best, two, human Jeopardy players in history.

Those who know Jeopardy understand what an amazing accomplishment this was. The game is question and answer, with the twist that the answer is given, and the contestant must come up with the question. That twist essentially is meaningless; the contestant merely precedes his answer with the words “Who is” or “What is” and voila, an answer becomes the required question.

The difficulty lies in the nature of the questions. Not only do they ask for a broad knowledge of obscure trivia, but the wording of the questions can be ambiguous and non-specific, involving puns, analogies, metaphors and axioms.

Even a large group of programmers could not possibly input Watson with the infinite question and answer variations, so they used machine learning — a method by which a computer repeatedly answers questions, then is given the correct answers. Over time, the computer detects patterns that allow it to answer future questions more accurately.

The computers review data and the proven-wrong or proven-right answers, and doing this often enough, allows them to calculate degrees of “correctness” — the odds of various answers. Computers, of course, can handle massive data tirelessly. Humans cannot.

Every hypothesis and theory in economics evolves exactly the same way. An economist looks at data and determines its meaning. He does that by seeing repetitions and calculating correlations. At its essence, economics is mathematics.

As an economist who fancies himself somewhat creative, I believe there is no creativity or genius in economics. What passes for creativity and genius is just discovery. The economist compares two sets of data and discovers they seem to correlate — or not. So he adds more data, and soon he comes to the conclusion, or rather, discovers, that one factor seems to precede the other — most of the time.

Then he adds other data to see how they affect the results. Economics is a trial and error game.

Upon seeing what Watson can do, and understanding the nature of economics, I have come to this conclusion: There is not one thing human economists do that a computer cannot do faster, more accurately and without the hubris that affects human economists’ judgement.

Actually, what Watson did with Jeopardy is much more difficult than what a Watson clone could do with economics. Jeopardy involved interpretation of the nuances in the English language. Economics is much more straightforward — made for a computer.

Watson was primed with information, statistical and nonstatistical. An economics Watson, let’s call it “Econoputer,” would receive data from: Encyclopedias, the complete text of every book ever written, census tables, phone books, statistical abstracts, voting data, Macroeconomic and Regional Data, public finance, all federal laws, transportation, health, education, economic history, weather history, agricultural, astronomy, tax tables, physics, chemistry, crime and punishment — trillions of words and pieces of data that continuously are collected from existing sources.

Then our “Econoputer” would begin to correlate its information, trillions upon trillions of calculations, to establish probability tables, showing the likelihoods of cause and effect. No problem for Watson’s future “children.”

The President of the United states might ask a clerk in the Treasury Department, “What will happen to the economy, if I cut FICA to 5%?” Or he might go further: “What level of FICA will yield the greatest GDP and employment growth?

Econoputer would present its results: “Given all historical data, and the current situation, cutting FICA to 1.3% has a 92% probability of raising GDP 4.6% and a 94% probability of increasing employment 5.1%”

Or the President might go even broader: He might ask, “What can I do with all taxes for maximum economic growth?” Econoputer already has correlated all past tax rates and tax laws with all past tax collections, and correlated that with every other economic factor affecting GDP growth. It might tell the President to cut certain tax rates and increase others, while increasing the IRS staff by 7%.

This is what human economists attempt to do now, but no economist can do it. We are forced by human limitations, to use much less data, which is corrupted by personal biases. Can you imagine a human economist trying to answer the question: What will happen to farm income in Idaho, and total U.S. GDP, if we bring 25,000 soldiers back from Afghanistan?”

Wild-ass guess is what you’d get from a human economist. Econoputer would provide a far more precise calculation. It would include civilian clothing sales, new births and deaths, baby food sales, imports and exports, hospital visits, vacation travel — millions of changes no human could take into account.

Pierre Simon Laplace said:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

The quantum mechanics’ Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle proved Laplace wrong at the atomic level, but on a macroeconomic level, the more you know about the past and present, the more you can know about the future.

Because of Watson and its future progeny, economics will be reduced to information collection, and economists will be clerks. I’m an economist, but I hardly can wait for this to happen. It will mark the end of uninformed argument and decision-making, and humans will benefit from a better world.

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

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–The Zelig of American politics meets the clowns of American finance. A plot of humor and horror.

In 1983, Woody Allen directed and starred in a truly hilarious movie titled “Zelig.” It was a fake documentary about a man (Zelig) who adopts the appearance, mannerisms, indeed the entire persona, of whomever he is near — a human chameleon. The movie incorporated actual newsreel footage of such celebrities as Babe Ruth, President Wilson — even Hitler! Woody Allen as Zelig played each role.

Quoting from a review by a writer named Salon Kitty, “Allen plays a man so devoid of identity, so eager to assimilate, that he literally takes on the appearance or, at least, the attributes of anyone he comes in contact with.”

Sound familiar? It’s the perfect description of Mitt Romney, and with each passing day, he becomes more and more hilarious — a veritable Woody Allen/Zelig of American politics.

In that vein, you might find a few excerpts from an article in THIS WEEK amusing.

Team Romney claims Mitt saved GM: ‘The height of hypocrisy’?
The Romney camp boasts that GM survived bankruptcy only because President Obama followed the GOP candidate’s advice. Really?
POSTED ON MAY 1, 2012

Mitt Romney’s campaign has news for you: It was Romney, not President Obama, who saved the U.S. auto industry. This week, Romney’s campaign manager, Eric Fehrnstrom, said the reason General Motors and Chrysler survived the recession is because Obama followed Romney’s prescription to put the automakers through a “managed bankruptcy process.” That means “the only economic success that President Obama has had,” Fehrnstrom said, “is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”

Fehrnstrom is referring to a New York Times editorial that Romney penned in 2008, in which he called for a “managed bankruptcy” of the two auto giants. Critics were quick to deride Fehrnstrom’s claim as “mindboggling” and “the height of hypocrisy.” Did Obama really follow Romney’s lead on GM?

Romney opposed the hefty bailouts that the government extended to GM and Chrysler, which were crucial in saving the companies from bankruptcy. In late 2008 and early 2009, credit markets were in a deep freeze, and private companies were in no position to finance Detroit’s restructuring.

Romney is just shape-shifting again: “Mitt Romney, who was for the auto bailout before he was against it, is back to being for it,” says Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic. Once the GOP primaries got underway, he attacked Obama for risking taxpayer dollars, a popular position with conservatives.

But during the February primary in car-loving Michigan, he backtracked, saying he “would never have let the companies go bankrupt.” Now that the general election is nearing, he’s “backtracking all the way,” but only because Obama is enjoying the political fruit of saving the two companies.

I’m waiting for someone to write a book — not an article, but a complete book — describing all the Romney flip-flops in the past two years. No, not just one book; a complete multi-volume “Romney Flip-Flops” set will be needed.

Then, of course:

Obama hasn’t been honest about the bailouts either: “The Obama camp can’t stop clucking about how he saved GM and the car industry,” but the bailout was hardly a ringing success, says Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. The government still owns a huge chunk of GM, and the company still owes the Treasury billions of dollars. “Taxpayers have not been paid back and are still on the hook as GM continues to require government help.”

If that is how Obama defines success, it “speaks volumes about his policies.”

Actually, it speaks volumes about the economics ignorance of Investor’s Business Daily. Taxpayers did not pay for the loans to GM. No taxpayer pays for federal spending. And no taxpayer will collect one cent from GM’s payback. In fact, taxpayers will lose.

And, for the federal government to lend, instead of giving, money to industry also speaks volumes about the economics ignorance of federal planners. If anyone can explain why a Monetarily Sovereign government should be paid its own sovereign currency — a currency that government has the unlimited ability to create merely by pushing a computer button — I’d love to hear it.

GM has the dollars. To pay those dollars to the federal government is identical with a tax on GM. Will that help or hurt GM? Will that help or hurt the economy? Will that increase or decrease unemployment?

For those just learning Monetary Sovereignty, know this: Repaying the debt will hurt GM, hurt the economy and increase unemployment.

It’s difficult to say who is the funnier and who the more horrifying, Zelig Romney or the Democrats who devised that loan plan. I award them each clown symbols, not as loans, but as gifts. Don’t worry, I can make more, for I am sovereign clown symbols.

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

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
y”

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: