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

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 ultimately 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, and the motive is the gap.
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Our best and brightest attend Ivy League schools, and after these privileged few receive the finest education America has to offer, they stride out into a grateful world thereby to lead us to higher peaks of glory.

Right?

William Deresiewicz taught in Yale’s vaunted English department for 10 years. In the half-decade since, he has been writing about higher education, most notably in The American Scholar, where two of his essays, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” and “Solitude and Leadership,” garnered the kind of attention that suggests that he’d hit not a raw nerve but a diseased organ.

Now comes his book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.

The numbers he cites are damning. For example, 36 percent of Princeton’s class of 2011 went into finance alone, while the twin sirens of finance and consulting claimed about half of Harvard’s class of 2010.

Deresiewicz thinks of Johnny Harvard and his buddies in the Ancient Eight: A “great university dedicated to liberty of thought and action” has become, little more than a funnel into the junior ranks of Goldman Sachs.

While the English major is becoming an extinct species, economics, conversely, is as popular as beer, topping all majors at Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Penn.

In what Deresiewicz calls “a stunning convergence,” it was the top major at 26 of the nation’s top 40 universities and colleges. Deresiewicz thinks of Johnny Harvard and his buddies in the Ancient Eight. To say the least, Stover’s “great university dedicated to liberty of thought and action” has become, in this telling, little more than a funnel into the junior ranks of Goldman Sachs.

What is this experienced, Ivy League professor telling us? My take is:

1. Our future leaders, the captains of America in training, are learning little of morality, poverty, compassion, history or the arts. They are learning greed, negligence, avarice and arrogance.

2. They also are learning the affluent .1% version of economics, aka the “Big Lie.”

They are learning that the federal government “can’t afford” social programs, and that “we’re broke.” They are learning that if you simply want success, it will come to you, so if you are poor, it’s your own fault.

They are learning that if the government provides benefits to those lower on the income/wealth/power scale, this only encourages sloth, while benefits to the upper .1% are earned and well deserved.

They are learning that “makers” are the people who take high salaries at the top of big companies, while “takers” are the people who actually make things, in a wonderful and convenient reversal of fact.

Why this skew toward unproductive wealth? Kenneth Griffin, a stock trader, recently gave Harvard $150 million. It was barely a blip in Harvard’s total endowment fund, which stands at $30 Billion., Yale’s is at “only” $21 Billion. Brown is a relative pauper with just $3 Billion.

What kind of people made these outsized funds possible? The poor and middle-income contributors? And given these numbers, is it any wonder that Ivy League schools — the clout kings of American education — teach selfishness, gluttony and disdain for the less financially advantaged?

Thus, does American greatness fall, not because of enemies without, and not because of dreaded refugees coming to our shores, but because of the failure of our schools — a failure orchestrated by the princes of plenty.

When this ship sinks, our captains will be first to the lifeboats, where safe and dry, they will swear there is no room for us.

Ask an immigrant.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================
Ten Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D plus long term nursing care — for everyone (Click here)
3. Provide an Economic Bonus to every man, woman and child in America, and/or every state a per capita Economic Bonus. (Click here) Or institute a reverse income tax.
4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
5. Salary for attending school (Click here)
6. Eliminate corporate taxes (Click here)
7. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
8. Tax the very rich (.1%) more, with higher, progressive tax rates on all forms of income. (Click here)
9. Federal ownership of all banks (Click here)

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99% (Click here)

—–

10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt

As the federal deficit growth lines drop, we approach recession, which will be cured only when the growth lines rise. Increasing federal deficit growth (aka “stimulus”) is necessary for long-term economic growth.

#MONETARYSOVEREIGNTY

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

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 ultimately 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, and the motive is the gap.
======================================================================================================================================================================================

The Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare, is a complex, convoluted, Byzantine mess. It’s based on the “Big Lie” that the federal government could run out of dollars and that deficits are to be avoided.

Every American, rich or poor, old or young, Democrat or Republican, is entitled to the best health care medical science can provide.

Rather than Obamacare, America would be much better served with a fully funded (by the federal government), comprehensive Medicare program for every man, woman and child.

That said, Obamacare is better than what it replaced, an even more complex, more convoluted, more Byzantine mess that excluded millions of people. And that is why I find these articles in the Chicago Tribune, a right-wing newspaper, so compelling:

Chicago Tribune, 8/6/14
Pushing Obmacare Helps States Cut Rate Of Uninisured

States that have aggressively put the Affordable Care Act into practice have cut the number of uninsured residents sharply — in some cases in half or better — while those that balked have improved little if at all.

All 10 states with the largest percentages of uninsured adults now have Republican governors and legislatures. The states that still have the highest percentages of uninsured residents all declined to expand Medicaid and refused to participate in creating online exchanges.

Some states went further this year and actively impeded the exchanges, forbidding state employees to provide information about them.

Last year, 14 states had one-fifth or more of the adult population lacking insurance. As of midyear, only three states remained in that group, Georgia, Mississippi joining Texas, with Florida and Louisiana close behind.

Nice going “red” state voters, your Republican leaders care about you.

All five of those states are among the 21 that have ruled out expansion of Medicaid to adults at or near the poverty level. The law provides for the federal government to pick up the entire cost for the first several years, and the lion’s share thereafter.

But to spite the Democrats, the Republican governors decided to forego billions in free dollars from the federal government, dollars that not only would have helped pay for their citizens health care, but also would have stimulated their local economies.

It’s pitiful.

(The pity is not that politicians intentionally harm their own constituents. They are politicians, after all. The pity is that people actually vote for them.)

Chicago Tribune, 8/6/14
Mississippi Hurts The Poor, Blames Obama

Like most Republicans, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant rejected the Medicaid expansion, refused to build an exchange and won’t encourage Mississippians to enroll.

This is why the number of uninsured in Mississippi has grown since last year, to more than 21%.

By contrast, West Virginia — a similarly poor state that took the opposite approach — has seen its uninsured rate decline to about 7%.

Bryant set a new standard for chutzpah: “If the statistics show that the ill-conceived and so-called Affordable Care Act is resulting in higher rates of uninsured people in Mississippi, that’s yet another example of a broken promise from Barack Obama.”

Translation: “I refused to expand Medicaid, because I am a Republican, but now I need someone to blame for the health care disaster I caused. Fortunately, my people are stupid enough to believe anything I tell them, so I’ll blame Obama.”

The simple fact is that some states aren’t interested in running a social safety net.

Conservative readers might argue, “a relentless expansion of federal power has replaced the laboratories of democracy with heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all solutions, turning the states into mere field offices of the federal government.”

This is the phony “big government” argument, which boils down to this: “I don’t want to be ruled by a big government. I’d rather be ruled by a smaller (but still big) government, because as everyone knows, state governments are more honest and caring than the federal government.”

Oh, really? State governments are more honest and caring? Think closely about your state’s government and see if you really believe that.

A family of three in Alabama has to earn less than $4,500 a year to become eligible for Medicaid. Louisiana, Kansas, Texas and Virginia have similar requirements. (This is) designed to keep as few people on Medicaid as practical, despite the obvious costs of low-income families and communities having no insurance.

Yes, nothing like those honest and caring state governments. California and Washington provide cash assistance to those making less than about $1,200 a month. Florida and Texas residents require you to earn less than about $400 a month (!), before you receive assistance.

California and Washington provide actual safety nets, versus programs in Texas and Florida, which seek to remove recipients as quickly as possible by providing as little as possible. Our so-called “laboratories of democracy” weren’t there when people needed them most.

The more autonomy you grant to individual states in anti-poverty programs, the less coverage there is for low-income Americans.

Remember, these articles came from a right-wing newspaper, that has not been a fan of Obamacare, but recognizes the realities of poverty in America.

The purpose of government is to do for people what people are unable to do for themselves. The rich need less help than do the middle-income groups, which in turn, need less help than do the poor.

The “red” state voters have been brainwashed that the poor are lazy, worthless and deserving of their poverty. So the poor are denied voting rights under the flimsy excuse of election security, and are denied poverty assistance because . . . well, just because.

When even a Republican newspaper finds the Republican states’ governors and legislatures disgusting, you know the right-wing has sunk to new lows.

That right-wing, as it currently is operated, is a disaster for the “red” states.

It’s a disaster for America.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================
Ten Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D plus long term nursing care — for everyone (Click here)
3. Provide an Economic Bonus to every man, woman and child in America, and/or every state a per capita Economic Bonus. (Click here) Or institute a reverse income tax.
4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
5. Salary for attending school (Click here)
6. Eliminate corporate taxes (Click here)
7. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
8. Tax the very rich (.1%) more, with higher, progressive tax rates on all forms of income. (Click here)
9. Federal ownership of all banks (Click here)

10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99% (Click here)

—–

10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt

As the federal deficit growth lines drop, we approach recession, which will be cured only when the growth lines rise. Increasing federal deficit growth (aka “stimulus”) is necessary for long-term economic growth.

#MONETARYSOVEREIGNTY