Is it time?

Thinking about all this, at the same time the earnings of many Americans have plummeted to zero, or something close to it, the earnings of all our GOVERNMENTS have also plummeted to something like half of what was coming in.  Some people are still paying payroll taxes, but not more than two thirds of the country, and probably a bit less than that.

At the same time, our governments are spending money like crazy to prevent hunger and riots from the situation they have created in response to this non-disaster.  THEY are the disaster, and it will get worse.

We are at the moment more or less inflating our way out of this.  Trump has mobilized the Fed to–perhaps for one of the first times in human history–use manufactured money to help ordinary people. Usually it is used only for power elites to help them keep power.  The power elite gets the benefit–first shot at spending the money–and the plebes get the result, the loss of value of everything they own, and everything they earn.

As Keynes noted just slightly over a 100 years ago, not one person in a thousand (or was it a million?  It may be even less than that) understands what is happening to them.

But to keep the boat afloat massive government expenditures are needed, at precisely the same time government REVENUES are tanking.  And we can expect a substantial recession in the wake of this clusterfuck, which will last proportionately longer the longer we drag this out.  Every week makes it exponentially worse, I suspect.  One failure leads to another failure.  House of cards.  Dominoes.

So maybe this is the time for my proposal or something like it (I will note I longer believe all the ideas in that piece are good ideas, but the gist of it I continue to believe in strongly.  Everything I wrote would benefit from the touch of an HONEST economist, if one can be found).  Follow the logic of the situation: we are already engaged in mass money creation, which over some period of time will lead to mass price inflation, which will dilute the already meager earnings of most of us.

Why not go all the way?  Use the Fed to pay off all debts, public and private, including US Treasury debt, including all State debt, and balance all the books everywhere.  No debt anywhere.  All cars, houses, boats and corporate debts gone.

Then dissolve the Fed and reset the currency.  Revalue the dollar and NEVER CHANGE IT AGAIN.  Not the gold standard.  Gold can be created.  And historically governments always cheat.  They lie about reserves.  Banks, if they can, lie about reserves.  And we have the physical problem of getting and housing the gold.

Now, precisely how we do this is a technical problem I’m not qualified to solve.  But that it can be solved, I have no doubt.

I won’t say this is the only way out of this.  We can muddle our way through miserably and slowly, watching business failures and eventually bank failures.  Life could be a complete shitshow for most Americans for a long time.

But this proposal has a moral element too: the banking system has been stealing from all of us for a very long time.  Total money in existence has QUADRUPLED since 1980, when the Fed got the last constraints off its back (in my view, after engineering the inflation of the 1970’s to create the rationale for that law).  That means ordinary Americans should be roughly four times wealthier than they are.  The excess went to yachts and mansions, and country clubs, and the best whiskey, wine and women money can buy.  Or children.  This does seem to be part of it, nauseatingly.

My proposal would simply RETURN the wealth to ordinary Americans.

Certainly, this qualifies as a dangerous and potentially calamitous situation.  This idea warrants serious consideration.