Yeah, because that horse hasn't been beaten to a fine pulp recently.
Eh, we're about due for our monthly money thread...
Just buying military weapons that contribute nothing to the well being of our citizens, sending money down a rat hole, contributes to GDP growth!
This is not a true statement, it is too broad. The indirect benefits of security are very real contributions to citizen personal and economic well-being.
These kind of overly broad strokes, while they play well rhetorically, in the end diminish the credibility of the speaker as they are pointed out and dissected. While there often isn't time for explicit detail on every point, a more nuanced statement is usually preferable and denies an opponant an easy contradiction to bring up and confuse the larger issue.
For example: "Buying military weapons, which may or may not directly contribute to the well-being of our citizens, always contributes to GDP growth."
Now if some obstructionist wants to try and attack Doc Paul on this point he can simply say, "The details of what constitute appropriate military expenditures belong to another discussion, what is important here is the role of fiat money in general... etc."
HR 2778 was dropped into the hopper. It is a bill to abolish the FED and return banking to the control of the US government and not a private international consortium.
That just isn't going to happen. For one thing, inflation is a great way to pay for future debt without actually raising taxes. And being able to whip up a bunch of cash at a moment's notice isn't an ability any politician is going to willingly give up.
All central banks will at some point fail and take their host country with them. The other wing of the plane is the income tax. Getting rid of the fed will accomplish nothing if the income tax remains. Both have to be pulled out by the roots for freedom to surface.
Agreed, but again...
I'm afraid the only way we're going to get rid of the crap is via a monumental collapse. Anything short of a TEOTWAWKI event will have the powers that be doing as they've always done... trying to "manage" the economy into recovery.
Few understand that our consumption and apparent wealth is dependent on a current account deficit of $800 billion per year.
Wrong. An awful lot of government spending does NOTHING to enhance the wealth of the nation - it's simply a matter of transfer payments whereby the government robs Peter to pay Paul in order to get Paul's votes.
the government robs Peter to pay Paul in order to get Paul's votes.
Ron Paul is taking stolen money in return for his vote? I knew that guy was dirty!
Few understand that our consumption and apparent wealth is dependent on a current account deficit of $800 billion per year.
Wrong. An awful lot of government spending does NOTHING to enhance the wealth of the nation - it's simply a matter of transfer payments whereby the government robs Peter to pay Paul in order to get Paul's votes.
What you say is true. Our goverment debt is certainly not a source of "wealth", but it is the basis for our money supply. The Federal government "sells" debt to the Fed, which creates money to "pay for" that debt. That money then enters circulation (sometimes as printed currency, more often as bank loans), and then we get to pay the actual bill via inflation.
If we were to pay off all government debt, our money supply would pretty much disappear. In The Creature From Jekyll Island, the author claims that all of it would disappear. That's an interesting and really weird idea
Secretive? Bernanke testifies almost weekly, as did Greenspan. Of course, nobody ever could understand what Greenspan was saying. Bernanke mostly tells Congress that we live in the Best Of All Possible Worlds, except that he's worried about inflation--when he's not worried about deflation.
He's made it clear that deflation is the dragon that must be slain. The Fed simply will not allow any deflation... they've stated very clearly that they will create money until the deflation turns back into inflation. Oh, and they also believe that "some" inflation is "good for the economy".
The drawback to the FRB system is that like all fiat-currency systems, the value of the currency declines over time. Too much money is printed. Right now, I hear they're hiring Lube Boys to keep the presses from burning up.
Yup. I love how they stopped reporting M3 figures. The guesstimates about what it probably is that I saw a while back were pretty scary. But, it's easy for them to poo-poo those figures and say, "Oh, those guys don't know what they're talking about, they don't have the facts". Uh, yeah... because you're withholding the facts!!!
Keep "Current Account Deficit" separate from federal budget deficit. The former is the difference between what your daddy makes and exports, and what your momma buys as imports. We buy from overseas more than we sell to overseas, by, yeah, just under $800 billion a year. Yet, the US is the world's biggest exporter. :-) Just less than in the past.
I just went through a gamut of books looking at current and future economic and financial issues for us. One addressed the trade deficit. It was a good read until I got to the last chapter about "what we should do". The author's suggestion was a global minimum wage and other pie-in-the-sky Socialist ideas about levelling the standard of living around the world.
The biggest money problem is the unfunded liabilities deal for Social Insecurity, Medicare and Medicaid. Forty trillion? Something like that.
The Coming Generational Storm addresses this. Very scary read.
The big question is a What If: What if those folks who've been accumulating the dollars decide they'd rather have a different currency, or gold, or US properties? They go to spending and selling dollars and the dollar fairly suddenly becomes worth a good bit less. Foreign goods cost more, but we don't have domestic-production capability any longer.
One of the points made in at least one of my recent selections was how all of the dollars that have gone overseas are a temporary economic benefit to us... we bought real goods, and paid with fiat dollars. But the people who accepted those dollars use them to buy up property, stocks, businesses, etc. And then there's the problem where, if a bunch of foreign dollar holders decide that the dollar is weakening, or is likely to lose its' status as the predominant world trade currency, they will start dumping their huge holdings, which will exacerbate our problems even more.
I have to admit to being completely entranced with macroeconomics right now. I'm reading everything I can get my hands on