Tag: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

–Poor Newt. He dared depart from Tea Nuttiness, and now he has been excommunicated.

The debt hawks are to economics as the creationists are to biology. Those, who do not understand Monetary Sovereignty, do not understand economics. If you understand the following, simple statement, you are ahead of most economists, politicians and media writers in America: Our government, being Monetarily Sovereign, has the unlimited ability to create the dollars to pay its bills.
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It’s amusing and also sad to watch the Tea (formerly Republican) Party twist and turn over its nonsensical, misdirected extremism. I’m no Newt Gingrich fan, but he probably is the most intelligent right winger around, and his comments, though still not recognizing the fundamental truth of Monetary Sovereignty, are considerably less nutsy than what we hear from the Tea/Republican folks.

From Vanity Fair, by Juli Weiner May 17, 2011

Newt Gingrich is in hot water with the Republican establishment for breaking rank and criticizing Representative Paul Ryan’s budget plan.

Heaven forbid criticizing someone who wants to emasculate Medicare and destroy federal social programs.

On Sunday’s episode of Meet the Press, Gingrich said that the Ryan plan was too much of a “radical change” for his taste, taking issue with the proposed modifications of Medicare in particular. “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” Gingrich explained . . . Republicans are not happy.

I’ll give this to the Tea (formerly Republican) Party. They are consistent. No matter how incredibly stupid their heroes’ proposals are, they will stick with them until the bitter end, and they will criticize anyone who doesn’t. Hewing to the party line is more important than proposing something intelligent and beneficial for America.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said . . . in a radio interview. “There’s no question there was a misspeak here. . . I think that many have said now he’s finished. I haven’t had a chance to really dissect what in the world he’s thinking … so I probably would reserve judgment on that.”

Serves you right, Newt, for daring to try to inject a bit of commons sense into the dialog. The Tea (formerly Republican) party has no use for that.

Gingrich took a stab at damage control earlier today during an appearance on Bill Bennett’s radio show. The Washington Post’s Right Turn blog provides a devastating summary of the interview: Gingrich begins by denying he really criticized Paul Ryan. He then is forced to listen to his own words and tries to rewrite them, suggesting he wanted to improve on the Ryan plan.

Bennett will have none of that and instructs Gingrich. . . that no one could have understood him to mean that. Then Gingrich begins to backpedal furiously. He loves Ryan, loves, loves, loves him. And Ryan’s budget (which includes the Medicare plan) is swell. It is at this point that Bennett tells him his campaign is over unless he retracts and apologizes. For emphasis he shares a conversation with a Gingrich supporter who has the same take. As it wraps up, Gingrich issues a non-apology and then sheepishly admits Bennett’s advice may be wise. At least he didn’t blame his “misspeak” on his love of country?

President Obama must be smiling. He needs to do nothing except stand back and watch the Tea (formerly Republican) Party dismantle itself. The Teas injected gobs of idiocy into the Republican Party, and much to their disgrace, the Republican bought into it. And now they are stuck with it. They equally are stuck with Paul Ryan, who is economically clueless, and have discarded Newt Gingrich, the closest thing they have to wisdom.

Yes, you can fool some of the people all the time, but that “some” is getting smaller and smaller for the Tea/Republicans.

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


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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. It’s been 40 years since the U.S. became Monetary Sovereign, , and neither Congress, nor the President, nor the Fed, nor the vast majority of economists and economics bloggers, nor the preponderance of the media, nor the most famous educational institutions, nor the Nobel committee, nor the International Monetary Fund have yet acquired even the slightest notion of what that means.

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to ask a dopey teenager, “What were you thinking?” He’s liable to respond, “Pretty much what your generation was thinking when it screwed up my future.”

Another reminder why reducing the federal deficit is national suicide. Your health, your children’s health and your grandchildren’s health are being sacrificed.

The debt hawks are to economics as the creationists are to biology. Those, who do not understand Monetary Sovereignty, do not understand economics. If you understand the following, simple statement, you are ahead of most economists, politicians and media writers in America: Our government, being Monetarily Sovereign, has the unlimited ability to create the dollars to pay its bills.
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Another reminder about why reducing the federal deficit is national suicide: Your health, your children’s health and your grandchildren’s health is being threatened — no more than threatened, compromised. And it’s all because of the myth the federal deficit and federal debt are “unsustainable.”

While the myth is easily disproved, the politicians, media and mainstream economists refuse to learn.

By Associated Press, Updated: Tuesday, May 17, 2011
WASHINGTON — A disease standoff may be brewing: How can Alzheimer’s research receive more scarce dollars without cutting from areas like heart disease or cancer?

In one of the stark realities of the budget crisis, scientists’ chances of winning research dollars from the National Institutes of Health for any condition have dipped to a new low.

“We are clearly not able to support a lot of great science that we would like to support,” NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told senators last week. This year, for every six grant applications that NIH receives, “five of them are going to go begging.”

That’s down from nearly 1 in 3 grants funded a decade ago, and 1 in 5 last year. And it comes before the looming fight over how much more to cut in overall government spending for next year, and where to make those cuts.

Already, a new report says one of the biggest losers is aging research, despite a rapidly graying population that promises a worsening epidemic of dementia, among other illnesses.

“Nobody wants to say Alzheimer’s is worse than diabetes or heart disease or cancer,” says Dr. Sam Gandy, a prominent neuroscientist at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

But “part of the problem now with all the pressure to cut the budget … is that for Alzheimer’s to get more, something else has to lose,” adds Gandy. His own lab is scrambling for funds to study a potential dementia drug after losing out on an NIH aging grant.

The NIH pays for much of the nation’s leading biomedical research. Republicans and Democrats alike have long been staunch supporters. But the agency’s nearly $31 billion budget offers an example of the hard choices facing lawmakers, especially if they’re to meet House calls for a drastic scale-back of overall government spending.

So which do you fear more: Disease or the federal deficit, knowing the federal government has proved it can support any size deficit? Have you been so brainwashed by the Tea (formerly Republican) Party nuts, you are willing to lay your health, and the health of your family on the line?

Consider aging issues.

The NIH spends about $469 million on Alzheimer’s research, says a new report from the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America that criticizes overall aging research as “a minuscule and declining investment.”

About 5.4 million Americans now have Alzheimer’s disease, and studies suggest health and nursing home expenditures for it cost more than $170 billion a year, much of it paid by Medicare and Medicaid.

NIH’s Collins told a Senate appropriations subcommittee that there’s a “very frightening cost curve.” In 2050, when more than 13 million Americans are projected to have Alzheimer’s, the bill is expected to reach a staggering $1 trillion. But he said that cost could be halved merely by finding a way to delay people getting Alzheimer’s by five years.

The debt-hawks are fond of showing you graphs illustrating (falsely) how the increase in older people will cause Social Security and Medicare to run out of money. But have they ever shown you a graph illustrating how many more people will get Alzheimers, for lack of medical research?

Monday, Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich jumped into the debate, saying that over the next four decades Alzheimer’s could cost the government a total of $20 trillion. He suggested selling U.S. bonds to raise money for research rather than have the disease compete each year for a share of the federal budget.

“We are grotesquely underfunded,” Gingrich said of health research dollars.

Yes, we are. Nice of him to notice. But creating T-securities out of thin air, then exchanging them for dollars we previously created out of thin air is foolish.

How foolish? Newt favors reducing the debt, but his bond-selling plan increases the debt. This demonstrates the idiocy of the Tea (formerly Republican) Party debt-reduction position. We wouldn’t need to struggle with complex, convoluted, nonsensical plans if we simply would end the debt-hawk control over our thinking. Stop selling bonds; fund with deficit spending.

Competition for today’s dollars is fierce, with applications up 60 percent at the aging division alone since 2003. Aging chief Dr. Richard Hodes says last year, his institute couldn’t pay for about half of what were ranked as the most outstanding applications for research projects. Still, he hopes to fund more scientists this year by limiting the number who get especially large grants.

What’s the squeeze? Congress doubled the NIH’s budget in the early 2000s, an investment that helped speed the genetic revolution and thus a host of new projects that scientists are clamoring to try. But in more recent years, economists say NIH’s budget hasn’t kept pace with medical inflation, and this year Congress cut overall NIH funding by 1 percent

The Obama administration has sought nearly $32 billion for next year, and prospects for avoiding a cut instead are far from clear. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who chairs the subcommittee that oversees the issue, warns that under some early-circulating House plans to curb health spending, “severe reductions to NIH research would be unavoidable.”

Still the Tea (formerly Republican) Party doesn’t get it. They don’t understand the simple premise that medical progress requires medical research.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., pushed Collins to make the case that investments in medical research really can pay off.

Collins’ response: Four decades of NIH-led research revealed how arteries get clogged and spurred development of cholesterol-fighting statin drugs, helping lead to a 60 percent drop in heart-disease deaths. Averaged out, that research cost about $3.70 per person per year, “the cost of a latte, and not even a grande latte,” Collins told lawmakers.

Get it now, debt hawks? Probably not. But are you willing to fight for your family’s health? Contact your Washington representatives and tell them our lives are being threatened by their misguided budget-reduction nonsense.

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


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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. It’s been 40 years since the U.S. became Monetary Sovereign, , and neither Congress, nor the President, nor the Fed, nor the vast majority of economists and economics bloggers, nor the preponderance of the media, nor the most famous educational institutions, nor the Nobel committee, nor the International Monetary Fund have yet acquired even the slightest notion of what that means.

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to ask a dopey teenager, “What were you thinking?” He’s liable to respond, “Pretty much what your generation was thinking when it screwed up my future.”

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–Economist says to sell the gold in Fort Knox to pay the debt.

The debt hawks are to economics as the creationists are to biology. Those, who do not understand Monetary Sovereignty, do not understand economics. If you understand the following, simple statement, you are ahead of most economists, politicians and media writers in America: Our government, being Monetarily Sovereign, has the unlimited ability to create the dollars to pay its bills.
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I often have said I don’t mind or criticize ignorance. Even the most brilliant of us is ignorant about many things. What I do mind is people who are supposed to be knowledgeable, refusing to learn, and instead of learning, continuing to spout false and harmful ideas in the face of facts. In that vein, some articles are so incredible, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. This is one of them:

Washington Post, Joel Achenbach, Published: May 15, 2011

With the United States poised to slam into its debt limit Monday, conservative economists are eyeballing all that gold in Fort Knox. There’s about 147 million ounces of gold parked in the legendary vault. Gold is selling at nearly $1,500 an ounce. That’s many billions of dollars in bullion.

“It’s just sort of sitting there,” said Ron Utt, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.”

Uh, excuse me Mr. Utt and your Heritage Foundation fellows, but the federal debt merely is the total of outstanding T-securities, which the U.S. easily could (and should) eliminate by exchanging them for dollars. It would be a simple asset swap, which the U.S. does every day at the touch of a computer key. The creditor’s T-securities account would be debited and his checking account credited.

Oh, but wait, all is not lost. Perhaps the Obama administration has a better idea:

“But that’s cockamamie,” declares the Obama administration.

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

Mary J. Miller, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial markets, said the U.S. should sell assets in an orderly, “well-telegraphed” manner, not in a “fire sale” atmosphere with a debt limit deadline accelerating the process. “It would be bad for the taxpayers. It would be bad for the markets,” Miller said.

Oh, no. She’s as ignorant of economics as is Utt. She doesn’t want to sell gold; she wants to sell other assets. Uh, excuse me Ms. Miller, but not only does the U.S. not need to sell any assets, but the federal debt does not affect, or even involve, the U.S. taxpayer. Servicing the debt does not use tax money.

O.K., maybe she’s an exceptionally ignorant example. There probably are more informed people in the White House:

Another senior administration official, not authorized to speak for attribution, described the situation more bluntly: “Selling off the gold is just one level of crazy away from selling Mount Rushmore.”

Excellent. Maybe the anonymous “senior administration official” actually knows something, although being part of the Obama administration, I can understand why he/she chose to remain anonymous.

The United States may have run up a huge debt, but it is not a poor country by any stretch of the imagination. The federal government owns roughly 650 million acres of land, close to a third of the nation’s total land mass. Plus a million buildings. Plus electrical utilities like the Tennessee Valley Authority. And an interstate highway system.

OMG, as the kids say. Now the author of this article begins to demonstrate his ignorance. Excuse me, Mr. Achenbach, but federal assets have nothing to do with servicing T-securities. If the government didn’t own a single building, a single acre or a single electrical utility, that would not affect the government’s ability to service its T-securities by even a single penny. Isn’t there anyone in government or the media who understands Monetary Sovereignty? Anyone?

Economists of a conservative or libertarian bent have long argued that the federal government needs to get out of certain businesses, unload unneeded assets, and privatize such functions as passenger rail service and air traffic control. No one advocates selling Yellowstone, but why, some economists ask, should the federal government be in the electricity business?

Economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute said the federal government should consider the sale of interstate highways. Motorists would have to pay tolls to the private owners, he said, but the roads would likely be in better shape. Federal, state and local governments could raise hundreds of billions of dollars through highway privatization, he said.

“Many of the world’s roads were originally built as toll roads, so it would hardly be revolutionary to return to that model,” Hassett said. “If it can work for the River Styx, why not the Beltway?”

Yet another economist who does not know what he’s talking about. The City of Chicago privatized its parking meters and a toll road. The result: Costs to users tripled and service is lousy. And wouldn’t that be just peachy for the national highway system to be converted to toll roads? Drivers would love that.

And why does a Monetarily Sovereign nation need to collect tolls, anyway? Ah Kevin, please enjoy your return to the River Styx.

The Heritage Foundation on Tuesday released a plan for balancing the budget that did not include tax increases, but did include a proposal to sell $260 billion in federal assets over 15 years. The plan does not specify the assets. It refers to “partial sales of federal properties, real estate, mineral rights, the electromagnetic spectrum, and energy-generation facilities.”

“We’re not going to say we’re going to sell off the Smithsonian and the Capitol. We would not propose that anyway. There’s no specific building that we would point to,” said Alison Fraser, head of the Economic Policy Studies department at Heritage.

The Heritage group chose not to mention the Fort Knox gold when it included asset sales in the budget plan. Fraser said the group didn’t want to be “sidetracked” into a debate with the hardy band of folks who think the country should return to the gold standard. “We just opted not to go there,” she said.

That would be something to remember: One group ignorant of economics, debating with another group, equally ignorant of economics. Lord have mercy.

But some economists want to liberate the bullion.

“Why not?” asks Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “I think it shows that the government is getting serious about reforming itself.”

Another “genius” joins the conversation. Excuse me, Mr. Edwards, but what the heck are you talking about?

Oh, well, I could go on and on quoting ignorant remarks from this article, but they all essentially are based on the same idiocy, which is: The federal debt, composed of T-bills created from thin air, somehow is a difficult burden to a government that also creates dollars from thin air.

So tell me, should I laugh or cry? This controversy deserves at least 3 dunce caps for major ignorance. Note that though I am running a dunce cap deficit, I will have no difficulty creating as many as I wish. I am dunce cap sovereign, just as the U.S. government is dollar sovereign. It can create as many as it wishes:

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


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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. It’s been 40 years since the U.S. became Monetary Sovereign, , and neither Congress, nor the President, nor the Fed, nor the vast majority of economists and economics bloggers, nor the preponderance of the media, nor the most famous educational institutions, nor the Nobel committee, nor the International Monetary Fund have yet acquired even the slightest notion of what that means.

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to ask a dopey teenager, “What were you thinking?” He’s liable to respond, “Pretty much what your generation was thinking when it screwed up my future.”

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

–I have been erased!

The debt hawks are to economics as the creationists are to biology. Those, who do not understand Monetary Sovereignty, do not understand economics. If you understand the following, simple statement, you are ahead of most economists, politicians and media writers in America: Our government, being Monetarily Sovereign, has the unlimited ability to create the dollars to pay its bills.
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I have been erased! Not just banned, but erased! Yes, it’s true. I have been erased by Barry Ritholtz. Here is the Email I just received from him:


Buh Bye

From: The Big Picture thebigpicture@optionline.net
To: rmmadvertising@yahoo.com
Date: May 15, 2011

WE ARE OFFICIALLY DONE

YOU ARE ERASED

My erasure apparently came as a result of an article Barry wrote titled, “When should you fire your fund manager?” My response was, “When he repeatedly demonstrates he doesn’t understand the difference between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty.”

Think of it. Here is a man who has promoted himself into world fame, but if my “erasure” means what I assume it does, he seemingly cannot tolerate differences from his opinions. On many occasions I have challenged him to debate his philosophy (whatever that may be) vs Monetary Sovereignty, and he never has taken me up on it. And now, he has, in effect, done the childish act of clamping his hands over his his ears, stamping his feet and screaming “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you.”

To give you an idea of Barry’s thinking, this is the paragraph he puts at the top of every article in his blog:

”Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.”

Hmmm. Detect any irony, there? Anyway, by contrast, one always can come to my blog, and feel free to disagree with me. We’ll have a nice discussion, and perhaps we each will learn something. I have learned a great deal from my blog readers. Could it be that Barry is not interested in that kind of learning?

Hey Barry, you always can come to my blog and tell me I’m wrong and why. Perhaps we’ll have that nice debate you’ve managed to miss. And by the way, Barry, you aren’t the first to ban (or as you say, “erase”) me. Years ago, I was banned by the Concord Coalition, that notorious debt-hawk group. So you’re in good company.

As for my “erasure,” I feel honored.

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


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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. It’s been 40 years since the U.S. became Monetary Sovereign, , and neither Congress, nor the President, nor the Fed, nor the vast majority of economists and economics bloggers, nor the preponderance of the media, nor the most famous educational institutions, nor the Nobel committee, nor the International Monetary Fund have yet acquired even the slightest notion of what that means.

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to ask a dopey teenager, “What were you thinking?” He’s liable to respond, “Pretty much what your generation was thinking when it screwed up my future.”

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY