No matter what eventually passes–and obviously something will soon–it will not go close to far enough. The cuts we need to be discussing should be on the order of a trillion a year. Anything short of that simply isn’t serious, and whatever passes will be well short of that.
The can will get kicked down the road. This is inevitable. If we get a conservative President, and control of Congress, we might see something interesting, but no matter who wins in 2012, the American people will still be getting much of their news from organizations whose sole raison d’etre-outside of using the profits from Capitalism to implicitly and explicitly denigrate free markets–is to propagate disinformation. That we are even having a debate over whether or not we can borrow half the money we spend for the next several decades is farcical.
I just don’t see us EVER having the political will to do what is right. I hope I am wrong, but the stickiness of Medicare and Social Security was built in. Stupid selfish people become old stupid selfish people, and old stupid selfish people still vote. And they have more money.
At some point, we must, must, must grasp the predatory natures of the Federal Reserve and the fractional reserve system. What I have proposed in my series on our financial system really includes two parts. Doing away with the Federal Reserve is not original to me. It has been proposed many times by many people, with Ron Paul being the most articulate modern advocate of this.
What is original to me is using the Federal Reserve positively to eradicate our debt. The link to this proposal is at the end of this post. As I note in the series, this was done by the Germans after World War One. They ran the printing presses long enough to eliminate industrial and government debt, then stopped. Schacht revalued the mark, and poof, the inflation was gone. But it did them a LOT of good in the meantime. What it also did was hurt ordinary Germans, who did not understand what was being done to them. As Keynes said, not one person in a thousand understands the origins of inflation, or who benefits from it. The government and industrialists benefited hugely, though. My goal is to get the pluses and lose the minuses, or most of them. (
I am a conservative historian, so self evidently I grasp the difference between intention and outcome, but that does not mean daring is never warranted. One project I have set myself when I get time is to figure out how to test this proposal in miniature. I’ve been hoping the Europeans would try something like this, since they lead us in their collective finanical woes. Something like this will be needed for them, and ought in my view to result in returns to national currencies, where I have State currencies.)
What I am proposing is doing openly what the Germans did covertly, and in such a way as to harness the benefits and largely avoid the detriments. I am proposing we do in one week what the Germans did over 3 years. It is a large idea. It is an audacious idea. But it is an idea which has been tested in only a slightly different form, and which WORKED.
I am the only one I know of proposing anything remotely like this. Self evidently, this will only get traction in conditions of great difficulty, but it benefits EVERYONE except those who most benefit from the current situation. They obviously have a lot of money, but they are very small in number. These are the actual greedy parasites Marx condemned. They were never the “Capitalists” per se, who do in fact contribute much to society, and who increase our well being.
The link to my proposal–and thought process leading up to it–is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html