So much of what Donald Trump does is thoughtless, cruel, unnecessary, nutty, senseless, or based on a lie one can feel is unnecessary to critique. It stares us in the face.
But, so long as there are gullible MAGAs who still believe the idiocy, we’ll keep writing about it..
His instigation of massive import duties and simultaneously claiming to combat inflation is senseless. Announcing that Ukraine started the war with Russia is nutty and based on a blatant lie. So is the claim that Jan 6 was a typical tourist day, not a riot and that the election was stolen.
Hiring Elon Musk to mass fire thousands of government workers without considering their contribution to our economy falls into the thoughtless, cruel, and senseless territory.
There are too many in that vein to list here, but I feel compelled to address one because it’s so stupid as to be humorous.
Auditing Fort Knox gold reserves is “several decades overdue,” says a sound money advocacy group executive.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk indicated that Fort Knox, the Kentucky-based facility famous for storing U.S. gold reserves, could be investigated.
“Looking for the gold at Fort Knox,” Musk wrote on social media platform X on Feb. 18. “This gold is the property of the American people. I sure hope it’s still there!”
“Who is confirming that gold wasn’t stolen from Fort Knox? Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not,” Musk wrote. Last week, Musk was encouraged by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to review Fort Knox’s gold reserves. .
During a Feb. 17 interview with “FOX & Friends,” Paul revealed that he has been trying to obtain greater transparency for the last decade “to make sure it’s all there.”
The Kentucky senator also believes an audit can confirm that the precious metal “still has value” and can implicitly provide “value to the dollar.”
That’s why we don’t get rid of it. We’ve got it. .
The IMF has it, the World Bank has it. Most central banks worldwide have gold, and it’s an implicit trust that the dollar still has some backing,” Paul told host Lawrence Jones.
Let’s begin with Musk and his entourage marching into Fort Knox “to make sure it’s all there.” Really?
Will they go around counting bars? Will they weigh every bar? Will they check each bar to see whether any are gold-painted bricks? Will they do anything of value on their tour? Can they be trusted not to scratch some gold off a few bars?
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Is there any need for “Efficiency Elon Musk” to fly his gang down Fort Knox’s warehouses?
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This trek is even more useless because only half of U.S. government gold is at Fort Knox. The rest is stored at West Point Mint, New York, Denver Mint, Colorado, and Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and some are held as working stock across various Treasury facilities for minting coins.
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So even the most thorough, intensive, expensive examination of Fort Knox won’t answer the questions, “How much gold do we have,” and “Has any been stolen or lost?”
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$20 gold coin. Weight: approximately 1.075 troy ounces, Gold Content: 30.093 grams (approximately 0.9675 troy ounces, Purity: 90% gold, with the remaining 10% typically of copper
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Then there’s the question, what is a gold bar? There are many different purity levels in the government’s bars, ranging from 99.99% all the way down to 90% pure..
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Now let’s get to basics; Gold is not money. And gold does not back the U.S. dollar. Gold is nothing more than a metal. It is desired because it is pretty, fairly rare, a good conductor of electricity, and easily malleable. Iron, silver, and numerous other substances are far more helpful.
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Gold doesn’t back the dollar, simply because the price varies wildly, and the federal government can, and often has, adjusted the exchange value of gold for dollars.
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If gold backed the dollar, a $20 gold coin would be worth $20. But it isn’t. A $20 gold coin is worth close to $3,000 at current gold prices, and a different amount to coin collectors.
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So, how can one reasonably claim that the U.S. dollar is “backed” by gold? It isn’t and never has been. There could be an argument that the U.S. dollar once was backed by silver, in that the government offered to buy and sell silver at $35 per ounce.
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However, that silver “backing” no longer exists, and no such buy/sell agreement exists for gold.
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The government also stores silver at various locations, including the West Point Mint in New York and the Denver Mint in Colorado. Will the Musk gang also measure our silver holdings?
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Compare that to M1 Abrams Tanks: We have about 4,650 of those tanks, with a unit value of $14.5 million. In total, our tanks are worth about $67 Billion. Think about that. All the gold owned by the federal government is worth just one-sixth of our M1 Abrams Tanks.
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Just one aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is worth $16 Billion. Our B2 Stealth bombers are worth $15 Billion. Is Musk going to forget about tanks, carriers, bombers, and all other military hardware that totals Trillions of dollars, but focus on inventorying gold?
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And then, there are all the other federal assets: The federal government owns approximately 640 million acres of land, about 28% of the total land area in the United States. Will Musk inspect those to see how they are being used? The U.S. federal government owns and operates approximately 5,399 dams. Should Musk look into them, too?
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The U.S. government stores various strategic and precious metals, including copper, nickel, palladium, uranium, and platinum; I don’t know how much of each, but each one is more useful than gold and perhaps monetarily more valuable. Do they deserve a Musk visit?
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THE BOTTOM LINE
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Gold is a minimally functional, lovely-to-look-at metal that comprises a miniscule amount of federal assets. It is not money, nor does it back the U.S. dollar. Those Abram tanks are worth more and do more to back the dollar than gold bars.
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Musk is visiting Fort Knox to get his face on TV, not for any practical purpose. It is just one more extremely nonsensical idea from the current administration.
The irony is that Musk is the head of the mythical Department of Government Efficiency, and he is wasting thousands of federal dollars to go on a useless, nonsensical jaunt. That’s “efficiency”?
The Federal Government cannot run short of dollars. Your taxes do not fund federal spending. The federal government pays all its bills with newly created dollars.
Because the federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, it is not like you and me. It does not need to “save money.”
Who says so?
Former Fed 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.”
Former Fed 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.”
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell: “As a central bank, we have the ability to create money digitally.
Statement from the St. Louis Fed: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.”
The Boss and his underling.
So if the government isn’t running out of money, why is Musk/Trump (MT) firing so many federal employees?
Why gut these agencies? Because making the rich even richer requires making everyone else poorer.
The Game of Wealth: How the Rich Stay Richer
Wealth is relative. If you have $100,000, you’re rich when all others have $20,000—but poor when all others have $1 million.
For the ultra-wealthy, getting richer isn’t just about making more money. It’s also about ensuring the rest of us have less—widening the income, wealth, and power gap.
How do they do it? ✅ Tax cuts for the rich ✅ Cutting healthcare and social services ✅ Making basic necessities like housing and vaccines unaffordable
This isn’t about “saving money.” The government creates money at will.
In the last thirty years of my business career, I specialized in turning around unprofitable small (under $10 million) businesses.
There are two ways to improve profitability: Reduce costs and increase sales. I did both, but mostly the latter. When cutting costs, one must be careful to cut fat without cutting too much meat. Growth requires keeping good people, not merely keeping fewer people.
Shortterm, it’s easy to increase profitability. Merely fire everyone. Long term such a path can destroy a company.
Watching cost-cutter Elon Musk and his boss, Donald Trump, I am reminded of the notorious Albert John Dunlap.
From Wikipedia:
Albert John Dunlap (July 26, 1937 – January 25, 2019) was an American corporate executive. He was known at the peak of his career as a professional turnaround management specialist and downsizer. The mass layoffs at his companies earned him the nicknames “Chainsaw Al” and “Rambo in Pinstripes”, after he posed for a photo wearing an ammo belt across his chest.
When Sunbeam announces year-end results in January, people will see that sales, not just profits, are rising dramatically. (Dunlap eliminated) 16 of 26 factories, five of six headquarters, and half the 12,000 employees, Dunlap extracted $225 million in annual savings.
Then again from Wikipedia:
It was later discovered that his reputed turnarounds were elaborate frauds, and his career was ended after he engineered a massive accounting scandal at Sunbeam Products, now a division of Newell Brands, that forced the company into bankruptcy. Dunlap is on the lists of “Worst CEOs of All Time” published by several business publications. Read the list and you’ll find that many of the “worst” were massive job cutters, whose overall philosophy was. “We don’t need people. Just pay me more.”Fast Company noted that Dunlap “might score impressively on the Corporate Psychopath measure” and in an interview, Dunlap freely admitted to possessing many of the traits of a psychopath but considered them positive traits such as leadership and decisiveness.
“Mass layoffs, “frauds,” “bankruptcy,” psychopathy” “accounting scandal,”— do those terms remind you of our leaders? Consider these articles:
According to the ruling, which allows the civil trial to begin next week, Trump lied to banks and insurers by both overvaluing and undervaluing his assets when it was to his benefit while exaggerating his net worth to the tune of billions of dollars.
BANKRUPTCYWhy Donald Trump’s Companies Went Bankrupt, Details About the 6 Trump Corporate Bankruptcies The New York Times, which conducted an analysis of regulatory reviews, court records, and security filings, reported in 2016 that Trump “put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses, and other payments.
“The burden of his failures,” according to the newspaper, “fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.”
According to the Hare psychopath checklist, psychopaths tend to feel a lack of remorse for destructive acts, but they are unable to feel empathy, impulsive, manipulative and sexually promiscuous.
MASS LAYOFFSTrump officials fired nuclear staff not realizing they oversee the country’s weapons stockpile. by Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
Carly Arata received an email around 9 p.m. on Thursday saying her position in the federal government had been terminated. When she saw the email, Arata told ABC News that she “screamed.”
“I didn’t think it was real at first, so I reread it like three times, then kind of started crying because I was relying on this job,” Arata said. “My husband and I just purchased this house in December, and now we’re not really sure what we’re going to do.”
Arata is one of possibly more than 200,000 workers affected by mass firings of probationary employees.
Arata had been a probationary employee since September with the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service but had worked as a contractor in the role for a year before that. Arata, who turns 32 on Sunday, has experience in this area. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in environmental science and her master’s degree in ecological restoration.
“We’re relying on this job and we’re qualified for this job, and yet, we’re losing it just because we’re under a year,” Arata said.
“Chainsaw Al” fired his good, experienced workers, not for efficiency reasons but to demonstrate his frugality. Cutting payroll initially increased profits but losing good people helped destroy his company.
Trump/Musk are firing their good, experienced workers, also not for sound efficiency reasons, but to demonstrate frugality. The two are destroying government services, especially services to the middle-classes and the poor.
Does the Trump/Musk Joint Presidency claim a good way to lose weight is to cut off your arms and legs?THE CHAOS PRESIDENT
The computer people have a slogan, “Move fast and break things.” Musk seems to believe this idea defends his wild and reckless firing and deporting of good people.
The saying embodies a Silicon Valley ethos that encourages rapid change, even at the expense of stability or quality. But what may be acceptable for electronic program development is completely wrong for government programs that are supposed to “Improve and Protect People’s Lives.”
The destruction of a test rocket, as Musk has often done, doesn’t equate with the mass destruction of people’s jobs, lives, and financial protections.
Firing an entire police forcewill save money, but it opens the door to crime. If you have hoped that the U.S. would completely depart from democracy and adopt a dictatorship, your dreams are being answered.
Now, the Supreme Court. having given Trump limitless power, must worry that he will use the power to ignore and disobey every Court’s ruling. According to SCOTUS, Trump cannot be punished for any crime, so long as he can claim it was an official act within the scope of his presidential duties.
If Trump believes the Democratic Party is a threat to America, he could jail Democrats. He already has claimed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, along with all the judges who have ruled against him, are corrupt and should be jailed. The Supreme Court has opened that opportunity.
Trump even claims he is king. Recently he said, quoting Napoleon, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Apparently, SCOTUS doesn’t realize flouting the law is not a Trumpian bug; it’s a feature of the Trump persona and the solid step toward a dictatorship, where courts are puppets of the leader. In short, SCOTUS has voted for its own irrelevance.IN SUMMARY
Elon Musk and Donald Trump (MT) are clueless about the differences between business goals [monetarily non-sovereign finances] vs. federalgoals [Monetarily Sovereign finances].
In the MT business world the primary goal is to maximize profits, while spending is limited by income and borrowing. When MT began to cut federal expenses, mostly by mass firings, the naive public believed this benefitted the government and taxpayers.
But federal cost cutting benefits no one, not the public, not the government, not anyone.
Given the infinite power to create dollars,the federal government does not use taxpayers’ money to pay for things.
To pay for everything, the federal government creates new dollars, ad hoc. Taxpayer dollars are destroyed upon receipt. They begin as part of the M2 money supply measure, but when they reach the U.S. Treasury they instantly cease to be part of any money supply measure. They effectively are destroyed.
The sole purposes of federal taxes are to assure demandfor the U.S. dollar by requiring taxes to be paid in dollars, and to control the economy by taxing what Congress wishes to discourage and by giving tax breaks to what Congress wishes to reward–not to provide spending money for the federal government.
(State and local taxes do provide spending money to monetarily non-sovereign state and local governments.)
By contrast, in the federal world, the goal is to “Improve and Protect the People’s Lives, and the spending is unlimited. Federal deficit spending benefits the publicand grows the economy at no cost to taxpayers.
By attempting business solutions to federal government problems, the MT pair solves nothing while causing great harm.
While other nations (particularly oil nations) are pouring vast amounts of money into artificial intelligence (AI) and massive infrastructure projects, the Make America Great Again bunch tries to make America smaller, weaker, and even more bigoted than ever — much like its current leaders.
MT are pushing for a $2 Trillion reduction in federal spending, based on the formula, GDP = Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending – Net Imports, this is what would happen to the economy:
Estimated GDP: $29.2T: Federal Spending: $6.5T: Non-Federal Spending: $22.83T: Net Imports: $0.1335T. Superficially, GDP would fall 2T or 7%
However, Federal Spending also affects Non-federal Spending and Net Imports. A reduction in federal spending leads to:
Fewer government contracts for businesses. This could lead to less spending and less investment by businesses
Private sector layoffs, reducing consumer income and spending.
Fewer government workers, further reducing consumer income and spending
Federal funds often support state programs (infrastructure, education, healthcare). A federal cut may force state governments to reduce their own spending, further shrinking GDP.
A spending cut could lower the deficit, leading to lower interests, i.e. less federal interest paid to the private sector by federal T-securities.
If we assume each $1 cut in federal spending reduces non-federal spending by $0.50 (admittedly a guess, based on the certainty there would be some negative effect on Non-federal Spending), then:
Direct Federal Cut: $-2.0T; Indirect Non-Federal Spending Reduction: $-1.0T; Total GDP Reduction: $-3.0T
So instead of just a $2T drop, GDP could fall by $3T, making the contraction even more significant.
A reduction in GDP is defined as a recession or a depression, depending on length. Therefore:
The Musk/Trump (MT) spending reduction promise is, in fact, a promise to cause a recession or a depression.
Fortunately, the MT pair seldom keeps its promises, so they probably will fail, at which time they will blame Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, the “fake” media, “crooked judges,” Joe Biden, and the entire Democratic Party.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary SovereigntyTwitter: @rodgermitchellSearch #monetarysovereigntyFacebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell; https://www.academia.edu/
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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.
Sometimes, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. That’s when you encounter an idea that is so bad the people who favor it are wrong, and those who oppose it are also wrong. Now, that is a bad idea.
Here (in red) is a short article from the February 14th THE WEEK Magazine:
President Trump wants the United States to be in the investment business, said Jenny Leonard and Katherine Burton in Bloomberg. This week, Trump signed an executive order directing officials to create a national wealth fund. Trump floated the idea of a sovereign wealth fund –in essence, an investment fund owned by the government– during the campaign, proposing the “money from tariffs” could be used to “invest in manufacturing hubs, defense, and medical research.”
The Monetarily Sovereign U.S. government does not use any income for spending. It does not use taxes or “money from tariffs” (which effectively are taxes on American consumers).
Having the infinite ability to create dollars, the federal government destroys all the dollars it receives and newly creates every dollar it spends. Even if the U.S. government did not receive a single tax or tariff dollar, it could continue spending dollars forever.
Thus, the “wealth fund” could pay any amount it chose, at any time, to whomever it chose. Unlike a privately owned fund, a government fund can do whatever it wants with investors’ money, including keeping it.
Witness America’s Social Security, which changes the rules every year. You have been told that your FICA dollars fund Social Security. They don’t. If they did, the government couldn’t change the qualifying dates at will and couldn’t tax the benefits you supposedly paid for.
Trump and the Republicans have promised to eliminate income taxes on Social Security benefits, which they have the power to do. Or they could double the taxes, at will. The “wealth fund” could pay you any amount it chose, whenever it chose, and change the rules every day, at whim.
So, what would be the purpose of a government investment fund, and how would that be different from accepting deposits in T-bills, T-notes, and T-bonds?
Further, funds must have an investment philosophy. That is, will the fund mimic the S&P? The largest growth stocks? The total stock market? Include foreign stocks? Or will it be traded according to some other formula, and if so, which?
Never one to be bothered with details, Trump doesn’t say. But those are vital questions.
Other wealth funds generally exist in nations with excess money, either from “large foreign exchange reserves, like China, or revenue from the sale of oil.”
The U.S. government has infinite dollars.
The U.S. always has “excess money” because it has infinite money. When a government can create money at will and at no cost, at what point could it be said to have “excess money”?
China has funds in dollars and other currencies. It can exchange those dollars for yuan if it wishes to use them for spending (on oil, which is traded in dollars) or do anything else.
Trump floated the suggestion that “the fund could facilitate the sale of TikTok.”
Utter nonsense. The U.S. government has the financial ability to buy TikTok along with FaceBook, X, and every other app, and still has plenty left for politicians to pave their local streets in gold.
Let’s hope this doesn’t go anywhere, said Dominic Pino in National Review. A sovereign wealth fund makes sense for oil-rich states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which pull in massive revenues and “don’t have a ton to spend it on.”
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States has produced more crude oil than any nation at any time, according to our International Energy Statistics, for the past six years.
Crude oil production in the United States, including condensate, averaged 12.9 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2023, breaking the previous U.S. and global record of 12.3 million b/d, set in 2019.
Average monthly U.S. crude oil production established amonthly recordhigh in December 2023 at more than 13.3 million b/d.
A sovereign wealth fund in oil-rich nations facilitates the foreign exchange of local currencies and eliminates the need to rely on foreign exchange markets. The money is invested and banked, transforming into whatever currency the nation desires.
In dollars, the U.S. is the world’s second-largest oil exporter.
That fact has nothing to do with the U.S. creating a government-owned fund. The U.S. government has infinite money and infinite things to spend it on.
Among Western countries, “Norway is the canonical example of a successful sovereign wealth fund,” But it has money to spend, averaging a budget surplus of 10 percent of GDP since the 1970s.
A “budget surplus” means the government takes more money out of the economy than it puts in. The formula for GDP is GDP=Total Spending + Net Exports. Norway is a major exporter, and though it technically is Monetarily Sovereign, when was the last time you accepted payment in Norwegian Krones?
Still, it has the unlimited ability to pay its own people in Krones, so its fund cannot run short of money unless the government wants it to.
And finally, we come to the most naive statement in the entire article.
The U.S. is running enormous deficits, “would have to borrow even more money to start a wealth fund,” and is a “poor steward of the money it already controls.“
The authors display that they have no idea about the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty.
1: The U.S. government never borrows dollars. Think about it. Given the unlimited ability to create dollars, why would it ever borrow? It makes no sense.
The economically naive think that allowing deposits in Treasury Security Accounts (T-bills et al.) represents borrowing. It doesn’t. A borrower takes ownership of money to spend or invest that money.
However, the U.S. government never takes ownership of T-security dollars, and it never spends those dollars. Think of T-security dollars as being similar to dollars placed in a bank safe deposit box. The bank takes possessionof the dollars but does not have ownership of the dollars.
The T-security dollars remain the propertyof the depositors; the federal government never touches those dollars. It doesn’t use them for spending purposes. It only possesses the dollars.
This is not borrowing. It is safekeeping.
T-securities’ sole purposes are to help the Fed control interest rates and provide a safe storage place for unused dollars. They do not provide spending money to the government.
2: Federal deficits are not a burden on the federal government. Unlike you, me, business, and the state and local governments, the federal government could deficit spend, forever. It neither needs nor uses tax dollars or any other form of income.
3: Federal deficits are essential for GDP growth. Every depression in historyhas come when the federal government ran a surplus; government surpluses take dollars out of the economy, which reduces GDP. A reduction in GDP is known as a recession (short term) or a depression (long term).
The federal government would not have to borrow even one dime in order to start a wealth fund. It could begin to one tomorrow — a fund containing a trillion dollars or a trillion, trillion dollars — at the touch of a computer key. (The government also has the Constitutional power to create a multi-trillion dollar platinum coin, and deposit in the General Account from which to write checks. It’s unnecessary, but legal.)
And as far as the government is a “poor steward of the money it already controls,” who does the author think would control the investments in the wealth fund if not the “poor steward” federal government?
In summary, both the proponents and opponents of the “wealth fund” demonstrate ignorance about federal financing. Their pro and con comments apply to a private-sector fund, not to a Monetarily Sovereign government fund.
Trump, as usual, wants something he can twist into his own self-enrichment. Imagine him controlling a few trillion in assets, that the Supreme Court has ruled he can steal at will because he is immune to prosecution for actions taken as part of his official duties.
You can be sure that pumping a few billion or trillion into Trump properties will be considered “official duties” by the compliant Republican-controlled Senate and House. These bodies currently have no duties but to attend, vote “Yes,” and leave.
And yes, to cash their paychecks and take advantage of their ill-gotten perks.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary SovereigntyTwitter: @rodgermitchellSearch #monetarysovereigntyFacebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell; https://www.academia.edu/
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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.
Saddam Hussein tops the list ahead of Henry VIII and Idi Amin
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 