The comments to my post yesterday on the Lerner / Salvi pre-scandal, the majority of which center around discussion of a replacement to our current taxation system.
In nearly all my posts that advocate for the neutering or all-out abolition of tghe IRS, I note that a fair OR flat tax would be preferable to our current system — rhetorically, because it effectively defangs the class-warfare arguments that the left relies upon for its sale of a (Marxist) progressive income tax system while reaffirming the idea of “fairness” as it’s been traditionally understood in the context of constitutional republicanism and free market capitalism; and practically, because either one would force us to devise the particulars of whichever replacement system we allow, a process that would — in any context wherein we as a country have already shown the willingness to wake from our slumber and demand a change be made — almost certainly require an enormous degree of public scrutiny and input.
So I’ve avoiding advocating for a particular system over the other, mostly because right now my concern is to raise awareness about the partisan and politicized nature of the current system, which awareness my hope is leads to a demand for comprehensive reforms, up to and including an end to the giant tax agency that holds far too much power over us, and has shown time and again a willingness, along with the elected officials who rely on it, to use that power in a way that is completely at odds with its apolitical mandate.
But since you all seem to wish to talk about it, I’d like to open up this thread for ideas for a system to replace the IRS. I’m aware of the concerns both advocates of the fair tax and flat tax levy against the others’ preferred solution. So the question becomes, how do we overcome those concerns and create a constitutionally-sound system that promotes the values of classical liberalism?
For instance, it is my understanding that a “fair tax” scheme would require a constitutional amendment, unlike a “flat tax” scheme. So is there a way, for instance, to use the flat tax parameters to create something that acts in some way like a fair tax? Alternately, why not work to define, in the narrowest and most specific and easily understood sense, what counts as “income” for the purposes of taxation, then set a rate for a flat tax on that? Also, why not demand a concurrent vote that would require a 2/3 majority to raise the tax rate?
Americans need to understand that when they hear “flat tax” or “fair tax” that the taxation scheme still has the stated effect of the progressive schemes — that is, those who earn more pay more — while it does away with the system of patronage Congress uses now.
That is, it puts the pigs back in the pen, and returns the control of the farm back over to the American people.
WE get to decide what laws we live under. The government requires OUR consent.
I’m interested to hear all blueprints here. And I’d like to learn more, since tax policy isn’t really my strong suit. To me, it seems that a low or zero corporate tax would create a climate of investment in the US, and that would create jobs and spur growth. And I admit, I’m unclear when it comes to the argument against the low corporate rates.
I recognize that a consumption tax is the “fairest” of all the solutions, but it is also the most difficult to come by. So what’s the best way forward, taking into account all the hurdles — legal, logistical, rhetorical — and why do you support your particular solution over that of others?
I will be reading your responses intently — and I further ask that you invite in to the discussion others who have expertise in this area — and learning as best as I can so that going forward I can have a more thorough understanding of how to formulate a comprehensive sales pitch, something at which I am rather good, the fact that I’m often bracketed from the mainstream conservative conversation notwithstanding.
Ready? GO!
I have some thoughts on the matter and appreciate the post but I’ve come to learn that some topics are best to personally avoid because it’s just too fruitless and frustrating to interact with others.
You want a tax that’s fair and that doesn’t hit the poor? Try a sales tax on new items excluding food, household rent, non-financial services and medical care/devices/drugs.
Most poor people spend the great majority of their money on food and rent. You shouldn’t tax people for being sick. Most poor people work in service industries.
Cap it at 10%, because even God doesn’t ask for more than that, and abolish the income tax. Have it collected at the state level by the various state tax agencies, give them a cut of say 10%.
No IRS, no behemoth federal tax agency, just a batch of auditors. If you want to avoid the tax, buy it at Goodwill, or used off of the internets.
Of course, we’d have to cut the budget by a few hundred billion dollars, so it’ll never happen.
I got an e-mail from Hillsdale today inviting me to listen to a colloquy with Larry Arnn, Thomas West and Hugh Hewitt where they discuss Plato’s cave allegory and the dissolution of our scheme of government now in progress (and seen in the attacks on political liberty undertaken by the IRS). That’s progress for ya, dissolving the best source of liberty ever devised, I guess.
Anyhow, on account of the reminder, as well as on account of an idiosyncratic habit or quirk of nature, I’m minded to return to the beginning in order to fix [locate, not repair] the grounds of coherence in any ‘comprehensive’ endeavor at reforming our legal system [positive law intended here], whether the ‘comprehensive’ endeavor happens to be concerning the most fundamental necessities of government (like taxation) or another at only a little remove (like immigration policy, say). I don’t think the work will be akin to a geometry, so much, but I do think it may have the virtue of exposing to our view the alternatives, or possibly a conundrum, embedded necessarily in the principles we otherwise take for granted.
Pretend you’re just talking to me, bh. I need to absorb this stuff, and I trust your sincerity and judgment.
Of course, we’d have to cut the budget by a few hundred billion dollars, so it’ll never happen.
– Try a few trillion dollars, which would be more like it. When you have a bohemeth problem to deal with it’s best to start at the roots and work your way up to loping off the head of the monster.
– Yesterday I hinted at a good start. Namely taking the taxation process entirely out of DC, period. Toss the responsibility, and limits, back to the states in a pay as you go system that puts the whole mess back in the hands of the local electorate. Whats needed is steps to short circuit the sweetheart deals where certain states rape the locals and augment their big gov platforms by supporting things like unfettered illegal immigration, which is designed for just one purpose; To swell the ranks of social service theft from the national coffers.
– You would see an immediate effect instead of this dirty little game of ripping off financially sound states by states like California, which uses the political spoils system in DC to feather its nest.
– Problems at a state level. They’re legion, and would have to be delt with on a local level, but without the fat cat largess and legal theft flowing from DC they would get corrected in short order through the ballot box, where it all happens anyway. Take away hiding behind DC’s shirt tails and things would be self regulating by neccessity.
Toss the responsibility, and limits, back to the states in a pay as you go system that puts the whole mess back in the hands of the local electorate.
How would you differentiate such a beast from the situation extant in the Articles of Confederation, and the fiscal chaos which resulted, necessitating the creation of the US Constitution, bbh?
My proposal: Corporate-only tax, a variant on the Fair Tax applied just to the legal stratum that exists between the State and individual, that level being defined as the publicly-held corporation.
Rationale:
1. Serves stated goals.
2. Historically vetted prior to the 16th Amendment and fundamentally constitutional.
3. Personal wage is not profit and in a constitutional system the individual must not be at arbitrary, political, or capricious legal risk to property or liberty.
4. Reinverts the Business-State relationship such the former is again properly engaged in limiting the latter instead of joined with it to defeat individual sovereignty.
5. Compatible with state-based collection.
Sure, it’s completely impossible and it’ll be shot down on pragmatic grounds by conflating the 2013 corporate State with honest, desirable capitalism. But it serves the best ends.
I’ll drop back in and offer my 2 cents later in the evening then, Jeff.
Just learned I might have some issues with the fire suppression system at the restaurant so I have to go put out that metaphorical fire.
– I’m not advocating zero FED support, just vastly more limited in scope. That’s a critical difference. The FED simply could not grow at an unbounded pace. Make Washington dependent on us rather than the fairytale system it now enjoys.
– I also do not have any firm opinions on who gets taxed for what. I might later on, but in my mind you have to have a workable approach that precludes political adventurism foremost, forces the responsibility on those that actually support the system, and precludes direct benefit to gaming whatever system you decide on. Do that, and you might be surprised how quickly the political atmospherics change, and how some “problems” suddenly lose their luster to certain special interest groups. Abolishing public sector unions would be among the top of the list of things-to-do. Require the FED to align its hiring/firing/retirement policies with private sector industries, ect. No more “dual systems”.
– I tend to go at problems that way.
I don’t have any particular plan I would push, but I want one that denies to statists, as much as possible, the opportunity to take more money and convert it into more power at the federal level without the electorate feeling it and making its displeasure known.
The fewest steps needed to achieve this with the existing income tax system would be (1) abolition of tax withholding, so that people have to write a check to the tax-collection agency and thus know how much the government they voted for is costing them, (2) establishment of a single flat bracket without exemptions, loopholes or credits, and (3) elimination of any tax source except the individual.
If the income tax system can be eliminated, there would be other measures I would expect to see in place to ensure that voters feel the pain of what they’ve voted for, so they can vote differently next time.
You cannot train any living thing by shielding it from the consequences of its mistakes.
I’m basically with Danby. Consumption tax in place of our current productivity tax, exempting food, etc. I suspect it would catch a lot of money that’s in the economy but not currently taxed, which means the rate could be quite low.
My position:
I don’t like taxes on income, because there is an inherent ambiguity in the term. That ambiguity requires refinement and definition (which is actually the bulk of our current bloated and broken tax code) which affects personal and corporate behavior (and therefore freedom). Taxes upon income and profits also require making available more information to the government than what ought to be considered necessary.
I would like to see a tax on retail sales collected at the state level.
(As an aside, it would be neat to see an open thread [maybe on a rainy day sometime] like this about how this country would return to Constitutional roots. Not politically, but feasibly: is the country simply too addicted to dependency to give it up without a fight? What would a Constitutional America even look like?)
I have .. a different idea. Repeal the 16th Amendment and fund the Fed via a “tax” on the 50 States themselves.
Tax to be based on some ratio of private real estate valuation, population, and Fed dollars spent – so a physically small State like Rhode Island with high population density and real estate valuations would pay a fair value relative to much less densely populated Wisconsin.
As to how the States raise the money to pay their share of the Fed tax? Up to them! Do like Delaware and write banking laws to attract – and tax banks? Fine. Do like Florida and abolish the income tax? Fine. Do like Oregon and kill the sales tax? Fine!
Get the laboratories of democracy to work out what’s best – and get people voting with their feet.
Mew
In a “first step” way of abolishing the IRS is to ban withholding.
When people just see withhold as another deduction on their paycheck and make happy noises in April about their “return” (rather than looking at the free loan they gave the Fed) then the reality of income taxes is lost.
When one has to actually write a check on 4/15 for the full 10-15-39% of income to the Feds, then you’ll see a demand to cut back the Leviathan.
At a general level of discourse on tax law, we’d hold with Sen. Cruz (and with Herman Cain) that the primary characteristic of tax law be that it is “simple” and intelligible to the taxpayers.
This, of necessity, since no law that is unintelligible to the governed (no law, tax or otherwise) can justly be held over them, such that they must attend to an arbitrarily determined interpretation of the outcome of a reading of the law. This falls into our sense of ruling out of bounds any creation of “ex post facto law.
But how else to understand a tax law which results in a different determination of the amount of tax “owed” by every expert set to the solution of the individual tax problem at hand? And this is what obtains today. Mounting up an impossible complexity in tax code merely hands the nascent tyrant a tool with which to abuse the individual.
This.
The changes I suggested to the income tax system would simplify the tax code considerably and reduce the role of the IRS to almost none, compared to now — but it does leave the IRS or something like it in place.
In fact there is no federal tax scheme that couldn’t be exploited for money and power by the
rulinggrifting class, thus leading to an IRS successor once again demanding too much information, so I’m liking the idea of having the states do the collecting.Tax to be based on some ratio of private real estate valuation, population, and Fed dollars spent
Problem with that is if you repeal the 16th it goes back to why the 16th was passed in the first place
No Fed tax is Constitutional unless it is apportioned to the States per the Census.
So each state is responsible for their share of the Fed based on population alone.
I’d be willing to see whether the horrible situation the 16th was meant to alleviate, was worse than the present situation…
So each state is responsible for their share of the Fed based on population alone.
– But allowing the benefactor and special interests to set the framework and laws and collections simply opens the system to endless rigging and manipulation. Thus my basic position on taking that responsibility back where it belongs. The benefits are widespread and self evident when you make the supporters responsible.
– But more than anything, the viceral reaction sure to come from the Left/Progressives with any such proposal is all you’d need to know its the right thing to do.
McGehee
I would LOVE the 16th repealed. The income tax has always been a Trojan horse.
It was always about class warfare to facilitate the Feds gaining the upper hand over states.
When one has to actually write a check on 4/15 for the full 10-15-39% of income to the Feds, then you’ll see a demand to cut back the Leviathan.
I fully agree with making taxpayers pay tax outright, but April 15th is a stupid time to pay taxes. I’m thinking that a week before Election Day might be a good deadline.
i like the idea of the fed collecting only from the state govts (either a fixed cost per state + per citizen charge, or just a per citizen charge). It would tend to be self-limiting. Also a smaller # of revenue sources (feds wouldn’t want to have any states refusing to pay over bad relations). Would make the issue of non-payment interesting though.
The states would have a a stronger voice re how the money is spent, and it might be easier for the citizen to manage a state level tyrant than a fed level tyrant. This idea could use some development.
– By throwing control back to the individual states you effectively limit the coertion from the Left to only those states that were willing to form a trust. Say Cal, Oegon, and Wash. for instance. But any such collusion would be short lived, and Nationally they would not stand a chance.
The “fair tax” and the “flat tax” both have as an unstated assumption that the purpose of taxes is to raise revenue with which to fund the government to do those things that we need a government for. As sdferr put it to me in an email.
However what we have as a tax system is not aimed at raising revenue, that is a secondary consideration at best and even further down it would seem in the view of the modern Democrats who believe that they can either print or borrow whatever amount they wish to spend no matter how much revenue the taxes bring in.
What our system is aimed at is control, power, for the political class. We call what is being done by the IRS “The Chicago Way” of rewarding your friends and destroying your political enemies but it has always been that way with taxes. It is just getting more obvious as more control is falling into the hands of those who have no scruples about using it to the max.
Getting either the fair or the flat tax in place and eliminating all the others will require a political class that will give up its most cherished and direct power, the power to grant exemptions to “friends” and to channel behavior of the public by rewarding some actions and taxing others. having that power means more to them than revenue.
What taxes are for, for to most of the political class, is that they along with regulation are a means for government, them, to control the entire economy. They will not relinquish that power unless forced and even if they are forced to change it I expect there to be some backdoor way they will hang on to that control. It is in the nature of those who seek the offices that they wish to command others to do what they think is needed to be done.
That said I pretty much agree with McGehee at 12:42. Flat tax could be easily implemented. Fair tax would be better but needs to have the repeal of the income tax amendment or we will have both types. That repeal is one thing which would greatly limit the power of those wishing to control the economy and so that to me makes the Fair tax preferable.
Without preview I can only hope I didn’t make a mess of what I said.
I agree that we need a system that is not based on income. The government has no business knowing how much money we make and where we make it. I think a national sales tax applied at the point of sale of goods and services would be a decent solution.
I think there are a lot of pluses and very few minuses. You would probably exempt food, medical care and perhaps clothing from the tax, but you would of course get people arguing about what food is actually food and what food is junk that is taxable, but those are relatively minor things.
A sales tax is advantageous in that everyone knows exactly what it is when you pay it. It’s right there on the receipt.
Such a system would be gamed, of course, but not much more than one games the current system. Bartering would get around some of it, but that happens already.
Now, can we get there from where we are now? I’m not sure. While the infrastructure is in place already (because state sales taxes are already there), there is no political incentive to make the change, and a lot of incentive not to (the loss of power). That’s where eliminating automatic withholding comes in. Once everyone is required to pay quarterly estimated taxes, and massive amounts of people screw it up, there will be a clamoring for a system that’s based on taxation when the money goes out, as opposed to when it comes in.
Also, because the tax is so visible, and everyone deals with it daily, raising that tax would be difficult. Once people see the cost of all the services they demand, they might learn to live with a lot less.
Nothing new, I know.
– Why would it be short lived. As soon as FED tax rape states like Cal had to face its own bankruptcies with no FED bailout money the only thing it could do is actually start cutting back services instead of just using that as a threat to maintain power. When voters saw that happening for real things would probably change at the ballot box.
– Loss of services means loss of property values. Want to see local politics change in a NY minute, threaten property values in any way.
I think you go with a low flat tax couple with a consumption tax.
Used items cannot be exempt, because it would be more government intervention in the free market. Exempting used items from a consumption tax would probably drive up the price of used items. Also, exempting used items from a consumption tax creates a huge avenue for fraud.
However, a flat tax and consumption tax must be tied to ending the current welfare state.
I don’t think corporations should be taxed, because, in the end, corporations are made up of people and stock holders wind up paying taxes on the money they earn either directly, in the form of wages or, indirectly, through dividends.
Scribe of Slog (McGehee) says May 31, 2013 at 12:57 pm
I completely stole that notion from my father who had been both an IRS agent, and later a CPA. Most of what little I know about taxation (and probably all of what is actually correct) I learned from him.
9-9-9
My problem with a consumption tax is that if it’s federal there will still be a federal tax collector, still writing rules and splitting hairs and auditing those from whom it collects.
If I have a retail business with billions in sales, and I contribute from my no-longer-taxed profit/income to support a Tea Party group, what would prevent the Federal Transactions Audit Service from doing to me what the IRS has been doing the last few years? They would need a different excuse, but they’d find one easily.
The same would hold true in a corporate-only tax system, of course.
BBH, I’m not sure why you assume that services and property values would take such a big hit up front. You have to figure that a locality could cut some percentage of low-value value services without materially affecting quality of life and property values for most taxpayers. As further cuts were necessary, local entities would have to look for efficiencies or alternative service providers. Maybe this means outsourcing street maintenance to private contractors. Maybe it means turning over library staffing and programming to the Friends of the Library who keep insisting how important it is, and letting neighbors mow the grass at the local ball field instead of paying union wages. Maybe it means going back to volunteer fire departments, and giving the ambulances back to private ambulance services (Mother, Jugs and Speed is a fun movie, dammit!). It might even mean breaking the education monopoly. Certainly, letting private charities back into the areas they’ve been driven out of would go a long way toward cutting Human Services budgets.
In the end, I’m thinking you could put a hell of a lot of bureaucrats out of work before most taxpayers would notice a difference.
Just as an aside, I went hunting (with the browser find function) in Madison’s Notes on the Constitutional Convention for the first occurrence of the term “tax”. It happens to fall on Sat. June 2, the eighth business day of the Convention, in a paper written by “DOCr. Franklin” and read by delegate Wilson (owing to Franklin’s age and infirmity), the paper having to do with the “salary” of the Executive. I heartily recommend it to you for the insights Franklin exposes there.
Yet another argument for abolishing the IRS and the 16th Amendment, not necessarily in that order. Much of the overhead of private charities comes from complying with IRS documentation requirements because of the rules concerning non-profits.
Nor is that only a hazard with income tax laws; charities distribute to the needy. What are the odds that a federal consumption-tax collection agency wouldn’t find a need to document that the recipients aren’t paying under the table (with later contributuions out of gratitude, or even giving of their time) for what they receive?
There’s only (almost) a couple of trillion in the budget now., so you can’t take a few trillion out of it.
I have no problem with a corporate income tax, as corporations are (legally and morally) creations of the state. They owe their very existence to the government, so paying for the privileges they get (certain types of legal immunity for their owners, for instance) is entirely within bounds.
My biggest problem with a personal income tax is that it is, as Alan Keyes points out, a slave tax. It assumes that your efforts, labor and smarts are property of the government, some part of the profit of which the munificent state will allow you to retain.
All of you who want to eliminate withholding, the best reason to eliminate it is that when tax day rolled around (Apr 15 or Nov 1 your choice), literally tens millions of taxpayers would not have the cash on hand to pay their taxes, most of them Democrats. The ensuing chaos, both of gov’t finances and politics would be incredibly amusing, presuming you weren’t one of the unprepared. It’s bad enough to have to pay tens of thousands to the taxman, it’s much worse when you don’t have it.
As far as taxing only new vs all goods, any tax system will have a fraud rate. My thought is that the actually poor almost never buy things new. The higher up the economic ladder you go the greater the percentage of one’s purchases are new. It’s a simple way not to impose upon those who are less able to pay, as well as allowing a contentious objector not to be part of the system.
Finally, I would rescind the federal voting franchise of any individual who regularly receives a check from the federal government. If you are dependent on how the gov’t spends money, your inherent conflict of interest precludes your involvement in politics. I would exempt elected officials and military personnel only. No employees, no welfare recipients, no people receiving disability, Federal unemployment, or Social Security. Six months after your stop receiving the checks, you can vote again.
make that conscientious, not contentious
Really though, if you’re that dedicated, you’re probably both.
Danby
do military members get to vote?
and SocSec recipients are not welfare recipients until their benefits exceed their 14% work-time contribution.
oops.. sorry, saw your exemptions
Jeff: For instance, it is my understanding that a “fair tax” scheme would require a constitutional amendment, unlike a “flat tax” scheme.
I think you could implement something very like the fair tax using old-school excise taxes; just apply them to a much wider variety of goods and services than their historic targets (e.g., alcohol and tobacco). Exemptions for food, medicine, etc. would be easy enough, if that were desirable (many jurisdictions already have such exemptions for their state and local sales taxes). Those have been held constitutional many, many times.
If at all possible, though, you’d want to repeal the 16th amendment. You could set the income tax rate to zero, but it’d always be there as a temptation (pretty soon we’d be paying the excise taxes AND the income tax if we weren’t careful).
I would like to see a flat tax on income. No import duties. No estate tax (double taxation and commitment of those who inherit a business or farm to extra debt before they even get the business). No sales tax as that lends itself to rent seeking and social control through exemptions. make the rate low enough to shrink the government to the point where it only does those things the constitution REQUIRES (not allows through omission). Anything above that that a politician wants the can fund out of their own pocket. And the flat tax would have to kick in over a certain amount to be set by those smarter than me. Although , since the minimum amount of money required to sustain a reasonable life differs from region to region, maybe taxes should be collected at the state level and the states decide what gets sent to Washington. I’d also repeal the 17th amendment at the same time as the 16th. Senators would once more represent the interest of the states.
Ok. First, abolish corporate income taxes. It gets passed on to their customers (the consumers or eventually the consumers anyway). This also reduces the need for corporate loopholes and exemptions and attempts to hide/keep money away from investments in the U.S.
Second, apportion taxes upon the states – therefore the federal government only has 50 taxpayers to worry about. Apportionment as such: $15 per person per year PLUS $.10/sq ft for ALL capital improvements (public or private, residential/commercial/industrial) PLUS $7.50/acre of land within the state borders multiplied by the population density of the state – this balances large low population states like Wyoming and small high population states like Rhode Island. This would encourage the Federal government to devolve land back under state control. It would also raise about $1.9trillion per year. This covers all ‘Constitutional’ spending EXCEPT medicare and social security with a reduction of spending back to 2008 levels.
Medicare/social security – replace federal withholding for both (and excise taxes) with a 7.3% federal sales tax on retail sales (except food). This covers both SS and medicare (which should be block granted to the states).
The apportionment refocuses taxation between the states and the federal government and the sales tax use for ‘entitlements’ makes it clear that we are paying directly for it…eliminate SS and medicare and there would be no need for the sales tax (and SS could be eliminated in 60 years if we stop providing it for those 34 and younger now)
Sorry…forgot the 17% flat tax all income with only ONE exemption – $1750 tax credit on wages (per wage earner) – this effectively exempts the first $10k of income, $20k for couples.
If you stop ALL federal taxation for 1 year, while reducing federal spending back to 2008 levels (not entitlements), it will add $2.5 trillion into the economy (cost us about $2.1 trillion in extra debt). Stimulus direct to businesses and consumers ($2t to consumers, $500b to business) which would also increase sales tax revenues to states….
Forget national sales tax. Go with a “transaction” tax. Buy or sell property? 1 percent to the state. Buy groceries, medicine, alcohol? 1 percent to the state. Merger/acquisition? 1 percent to the state. Repeal the 16th and apportion costs of federal govt to states based on population. No exemptions for anything.
Balanced budget amendment. All fed duties specifically required by constitution. Nothing else. No federal “programs.” Fifty state laboratories of democracy.
In the other thread I pissed off all good, as I called them, Republicans who insisted that personal income tax was preferred. The fact it exposes the individual to the full force of the State and the fact it pays nothing of substance went unaddressed. As was the nature of the Corporate State and its cronyism and subsequent ruin of both the economy and the entire middle class.
It’s just the subjectively, pragmatically preferred option in times like these. Yes, these.
Fine.
So how about this: Explain how a personal income tax doesn’t run afoul of the pillar of individual rights.
They’re dozens of trillions of dollars upside down. Are they another example of acceptable Republican statism? Throw me a bone here because I really don’t get this.
p.s. all fed reps who propose or vote for an increase in the 1 percent rate are in eligible to run for office again. No federal pensions for anyone.
INELIGIBLE! D’oh, fat fingers, Vicodin, wine.
Property is profit even when sold at a loss and/or sold distinct from registered real estate trade? Is that a founding principle?
And, in the continuing saga of my constitutional rewrite, no bills allowed that are longer than the original constitution.
Jho, who said anything about profit? If you want to make a transaction, pay for it. Not a founding principle, a way to (simply) raise revenue to run the country on constitutional principles.
i’m leaning to a fed gov’t that gets it’s money from the states or excise taxes. it seems more constitutional. the only time i should be in contact with the fed gov’t is if i’m military or need a passport. but then the whole 20th century proggtard created fed gov’t would have to be destroyed. so on to other day dreams.
Apparently no one yet.
I just find astounding the support for taxes on personal time spent laboring and taxes on personal property under the aegis of constitutional validity. To say nothing of the assumed but deeply flawed pragmatics of both.
Property tax is not a founding principle. In fact, neither is a tax on private transactions.
JHo, any income tax is bad, m’kay? Corporate income tax instead of personal income tax is worse.
If you say so. See also.
The stock market’s Amazing Technicolor Trajectory owes to the Fed’s, shall we say, business stimulus. This is not a feature.
JHoward….unfortunately, we have committed to SS/medicare and many people rely on that – so, to honor that commitment, we keep them for the time being, but end it for those 34 and younger – they have time to consider alternatives (I have a prorated application for 35 to 50, unchanged for 50+). There are considerably less expensive alternatives to medicare beyond the scope of this discussion thread.
Once SS and medicare are gone, the sales tax and income tax would no longer be needed either leaving just the apportioned tax on the states.
Art. I, Sec. 2, Cl. 3:
*** Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five and Georgia three. ***
Why were the Indians excluded as not taxed? And while we’re here, what does “direct Taxes” mean there?
JHoward, it is not actual stimulus paid by the Fed gov TO business or consumers, it is the absence of having to pay those amounts to the Fed Gov, it allows the $2.5t to stay in the hands of the consumer/business.
sdferr, the indians were ‘sovereign nations’, not part of the Union. Direct tax means owed by the State to the Fed gov rather than taxation upon the citizen collected by the state for Fed gov. The apportionment could be raised by each State in whatever manner it chose: Income, sales, property, head tax….
until you define what the current fed gov’t should be constitutionally doing, how to fund the beast is meaningless.
At about a hundred trillion in arrears — over seven years of the entire output of the states — they rely on mercy and largesse, not solvency. This is no small problem and I propose that in the fuller perspective, the Titanic must be seen sinking, prompting a heck of an alternate strategy than welding up some tears here and there.
Noted.
“If you want to make a transaction, pay for it.”
Sure, and the government could issue stamps that you could buy and attach to every transaction receipt to make sure you’d pay it. They could call it the “Stamp Act”.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
for no particular reason: ” mr.
gorbachev”baracky tear down that wall”JHoward, $1.6 trillion a year with stopping new entrants at 35 and prorated 35-50, covers SS til it ends. Both apportionment, sales tax, SS and medicare plans, along with specific program spending cuts is provided in my FY 2014 Federal Budget Proposal delivered to Congress back in April.
What Blake said – flat tax PLUS consumption tax (excluding things like food, medicine, etc.). That’s it. It’s both fair (flat tax) AND progressive (rich folks spend more so consumption tax revenues are much higher from the rich). The taxes are collected on payday and the consumption tax at time of purchase. Revenue pours in regularly and can be reasonably well predicted (X% of GDP plus Y% of gross economic activity of the taxable sort).
No IRS, no filings, nada. Thousands or tens of thousands of tax accountants and attorneys have to find new jobs. Revenues would likely go UP in this scenario; I don’t know what the percentages of each should be but some smart people could figure out values that would guarantee increased revenue while the tax burden is lowered (Laffer Curve squared).
I think Darleen is spot-on when she writes that people don’t “feel the pain” when they never see the money before the gov’t gets it, but I don’t trust people to be responsible enough to write that check. Under those circumstances, the hypothetical gov’t tax agency has to hire people to collect from people whose checks bounce, or forget to pay, etc. etc. I like to keep it simple, reliable, and predictable.
Kindly elaborate. Also, re: this, and more importantly, what it portends.
And this.
“What Blake said – flat tax PLUS consumption tax ”
see if you don’t define the problem, you’re just funding this current iteration of proggtardia
Consider this story as an anti-thesis to Obamacare/Medicare.
I produced a FY 2014 Federal Budget, including tax reform, entitlement reform and specific program spending levels/cuts. Printed it and had it HAND-DELIVERED the offices of Boehner, Reid, Majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Budget committees, various Congresmen including Rand Paul, media outlets (CNN, Fox, Rush, Beck) on Feb 11th, one week after the deadline for Obama to deliver his (and 2 months before he actually did).
It is available for purchase or download (free) from my site FY2014
“I produced a FY 2014 Federal Budget,”
it would be better to produce a size of the 2014 fed gov’t. define the problem.
The FairTax is the one that I like the best, because it combines the removal of tinkering with the taxing power (by repeal of the 16th Amendment) by Congress with a tax on consumption rather than on income. The prebate helps to eliminate the tax from hitting the poorest, but also gives it to everyone, which in turn encourages the reporting on of household size and other data that is useful for governance. There are a few “losers” in this system, but they are few and the system is by far better than the current.
The combination of “it is based on consumption”, “you politicians can’t screw with it”, “the poorest are shielded from its effects”, “there is no prebate ‘cliff’ that encourages staying poor for any benefits of taxation”, and “it is only on new items of consumption” is great. But as has been pointed out by many, the Congress would most likely rather not give up their great power of tinkering with the tax code.
So we ram it down their throats via Article V.
After that settles in, we continue with a well-focused reform of the Federal level of government through continued Article V action. Let the laboratories of invention loose again, as someone mentioned earlier.
Bazinga!
Okay, here are my 2 cents, Jeff.
I see two issues here as you lay this out. First, how to move towards a better system (by rhetoric, partial legislation, etc). Second, what might that better system look like.
Towards the first (moving towards a better system), let’s start with Milton Friedman. He rather famously stated that one doesn’t reform government by electing better people, one does so by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.* That’s pure public choice theory but let’s shift the focus from the politicians to the people. Getting from here (bad system) to there (better system) then would be about getting the tax incentives right for the citizens.
In my mind it’s the opposite of Sunstein’s nudging. He proposes to make these incentives invisible so that the populace decides it wants what Sunstein-types want. I’d propose (along with many before me) that we make the incentives as visible as possible so that the populace can best decide what their representatives should do.
So, to get from here (bad) to there (the better) I’d use every incremental option available that forces people to make relevant cost benefit analyses on what they want from government vs what they’re paying for government. Getting rid of payroll tax withholding does this. Always in the back of your mind you’d be able to see what you couldn’t buy because you had to keep money in reserve for the government. (Which Friedman himself would understand. He invented it and later wanted to get rid of it.) A sales tax would do this as every purchase made would be a chance to consider whether or not the government should have that money on each carton of eggs. Simplicity works this way as well. It’s easy to make a cost benefit analysis when the terms themselves are simple. 15%? That seems high to me.
So, I’d propose incrementalism on any and all fronts that fit those criteria above.
Now, what should we be moving towards? To state the obvious, all tax schemes have their flaws. A class I took once basically convinced me that none of them are up to the task because humans are so damn crafty and dynamic (both as tax collectors and and taxpayers). A flat tax without withholding is better than the worse. So is a sales tax. They each have their own flaws — a flat tax needs a governmental income report and a sales tax creates a largish incentive for secondary black markets) — but they do consistently require people to think about what the government wants from them.
once again find the level of fed gov’t then only then find a source to fund it. fair vs flat is accepting the current system. the current 20th century proggtard fed gov’t must go.
“So, I’d propose incrementalism on any and all fronts that fit those criteria above.”
that’s the prob. you want to fund the current system. the current system is bankrupt. define the problem. there’s is no need for the epa et al because states already do this. dismantling the 20th century proggtard state is the agenda. mr baracky tear down this state.
*
well just my $0.02 bh. that and a rsm link plus $5.00 will get a coffee at starbucks.
on old work, you got to gut it before you build something new.
newrouter, that was the method I used: determine what functions were appropriate for government to actually do, then establish a funding level, THEN determine a method to fund it that made the funding and the spending clearly connected – only the SS and medicare issues were handled slightly different as neither is a constitutional authority…
I don’t have a problem with your 2 cents, nr.
But, when you say something like, “you want to fund the current system”, that’s simply false. And it’s not worth the candle for me if we can’t get past even the first exchange without having such a fundamental inability to communicate.
” determine what functions were appropriate for government to actually do, then establish a funding level,”
so epa is at $5 mil and is basically a data collection center?
” having such a fundamental inability to communicate.”
well i think the tax stuff is a dodge from having to confront the excesses of the current proggtard fed gov’t. you radically cut fed gov’t then talk funding the beast. hope all is well with the fire stuff.
Point taken, Spies. But if the stamp tax was the only tax in place, I suspect the colonists might have lived with it.
Point being, one tax to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. The congress, of course.
Thanks, nr. As things stand now it seems the current Ansul system can stay without too much tinkering, maybe a half day from the electrician.
that’s my prob. with paul ryan and his dc wonkishness. he accepts the current system and wants to “fix” it. to hell with them.
mr. ryan has a “10 year” fix for the current situation. well mr. ryan, please no, maybe dead in 5. it is like the roobes :selling a non solution. go big or go home.
ANY proposal that can’t be implemented within one Congressional session (2 years), is not feasible.
“ANY proposal that can’t be implemented within one Congressional session (2 years), is not feasible.”
hi barackycare
Except newrouter is right:
The willful failure of the ostensible right to grasp the gravity of current monetary policy failure and its paralleling fiscal trajectory is breathtaking.
“ANY proposal that can’t be implemented within one Congressional session (2 years), is not feasible.”
clueless gop take note
If I had to guess I’d say Cruz will follow Ryan following Roobs from election day conservatism to midterm statism in one easy step. It’s almost like it’s a formula.
Define the problem. It has a lot of heads.
If you’re looking for the Emperor of America who can fix these problems in the near term given the voting habits of the citizens, that’s not me.
i don’t know if i’m “right” but the fed gov’t should not be a tool to attack your political enemies. at that point fu commie
– Theres an old story about a canoe filled with indians that finds itself swamped with water to the point where any atempt to bail will be enough to sink it, so everyone sits perfectly still hoping they drift to the edge of the river bank and safety, only to encounter a water fall just as they’re about to touch land.
– I think we’re some where in that general vacinity, everyone afraid to act for fear of collapsing the whole shiteree, but knowing full well that at some point there’s a water fall in our future.. The answer of course is for each indian to carefully raise a leg slowly in the air and then bail with cupped hands until things are safe again.
– In other words the system needs to be dismantled, including the amendments that created it, and the control has to be given back to the electorate/states so that the FED is dependent.
– Only way it will ever change or work.
This thread is now a worthless forum.
“If you’re looking for the Emperor of America who can fix these problems in the near term given the voting habits of the citizens, that’s not me.”
nah just an honest discussion. it is not the fed gov’t tax rate. sorry roob and paul.
“This thread is now a worthless forum.”
why. it ain’t the tax number that is the problem. tracy and ryan did their best with a bs fed gov’t. time to move on no?
I fear that’s the heading we’re never going to leave, bh. Considering that the present time presents probably the finest opportunity in most of our lifetimes to regain just one significant hunk of sanity, it’d be nice just to find a sizable, DC-writing cohort agreed on what that constitutional ethic should be.
It’s a shame that the topic is trendy enough only once about every quarter century to warrant that conversation. Actual reform is even rarer.
“This thread is now a worthless forum.”
yep the fed gov’t should be the sole provider of student “loans”. mr bh there is so much to hack that the islamofacists boys in england are happyfeet
It’s a shame that the topic is trendy enough only once about every quarter century to warrant that conversation. Actual reform is even rarer.
– Which is why Howard, we need a Constitutional Congress every so many years by edict/clause, so these problems don’t get so bad they’re unfixable. And yes I know all the hazards, but sometimes the bite is worse than the remedy.
That’s correct, and while it’s also a view popular enough not to be shot down from the right, look how necessary components of it can devolve into conjecture and pragmatism. That’s part of what I was on about in the other thread.
I’m with newrouter. Taxation is the wrong discussion. Make it a fucking 100% of everything and it ain’t going to fund the spending that buying votes costs.
Criminalize public unions, slash the size of government 20% across the board, then we can talk about funding. At this point discussing taxes is like looking for a buyer for your car in the parking lot of an indian casino ‘cuz dammit, that jackpot is just a few more pulls of the handle away and you’ve borrowed all you can get and pawned everything else already.
Addicts discussing their next score is not the way to recovery.
“Which is why Howard, we need a Constitutional Congress every so many years”
i disagree: the current game has empowered the statists through fed gov’t spending. before that you need to shut down the “system”. give them a “constitutional” anything enables the proggtards
Jeff asked questions specifically on the issues that I responded to.
So, fruitless and frustrating.
You have to reform the monetary world first, LBascom. I can assure you everything else is window dressing.
Addicts discussing their next score is not the way to recovery.
– And that is why I focus on getting rid of the alligators, and leave Pelosi’s swamp for a more proficious time. Besides, as well noted by others here, if you take away the power a lot of the “problems” automatically disappear anyway. Why worry about dealing with things that will be eliminated by rote.
“I’m with newrouter. ”
allan ackbar good luck
i disagree: the current game has empowered the statists through fed gov’t spending. before that you need to shut down the “system”. give them a “constitutional” anything enables the proggtards
– Of course first things first. But if you’re saying we’re so far gone the majority want the insanity of socialism then bh is right. This forum is useless.
Reforming taxation is both necessary and partial, bh. It’s only a component but restoring this country cannot be done without it.
“Jeff asked questions specifically on the issues that I responded to.”
true but we be talking stuff about the hows and whys
Taxation is exactly the only topic of discussion if you ask me. This for all kinds of reasons, not least because taxation is exactly where every single individual wants what’s fair to himself — justice in his relation to the state — and can easily be found to fight to get it. Only look at the intensity of interest just blooming on the heels of the exposure of the IRS as a political weapon.
Look too to the formation of the move to revamp the American architecture of government: it was the collapse of the inadequate Articles of Confederation regarding taxation that provided the impetus. Taxation is the means to self-preservation underlying the modern scheme of natural right expressed in the Declaration, itself built upon the universal fear of violent death, which in turn laid the foundation of the right to life, with the other rights following in rational train. It was unjust taxation that spurred the Founders to revolt against the crown. As politics goes, nothing else is quite as fundamental.
I’m not totally convinced fiat money is the root problem as you do JHoward, at least if I understand your position correctly.
IE, if we were to have, say, a gold based economy, that would make it a zero sum game instead of the infinite wealth creating system we have now, which, by the way, has created a standard of living where the “poor” suffer obesity, and a shortage of air conditioning repair men in the summer.
The problem as I see it is corruption of the system, not a flawed system to start with.
” This forum is useless.”
really? we are not allowed to state what orangeman must do? or the “PARTY” eff the party. no moe games. hi islamofacists.
we have to abolish the irs cause they’re actively fascist like the cia and michael bloomberg, just not as gay
” This forum is useless.”
Never said that. This forum is pw. It’s one of two blogs I go to everyday. An individual thread can also be a forum and that’s what I stated.
And, yes, for me, it has.
i will make this thread unuseless brb
“It was unjust taxation that spurred the Founders to revolt against the crown. As politics goes, nothing else is quite as fundamental.”
Well, taxation without representation. I think taxation is necessary for government, so the only way to limit taxes is to limit government. THAT is the issue. Talking tax rates is like discussing the temperature of a sick kid. Yes it’s relevant and serious, but it’s a symptom nonetheless. the important discussion is what is causing the fever.
okey doke
one to a customer
I give you a tv show!
a tv show featuring one Amy Acker
your welcome
*you’re* welcome I mean
also it has someone called “Jeri Ryan” in it as well – she is said to be a comely lass
“bh says May 31, 2013 at 9:37 pm
This thread is now a worthless forum.”
your prob is like tracy coles (sp) and paul ryan’s you think money. i think function.
– Levity in this instance won’t save our marbles.
– Even if its a fairytale, once the perception is widespread that the gov is not dependent we’re lost, no matter what the system.
and mr bh you can’t get to constitutional fed gov’t without taking apart the 20th century proggtardia.
” no matter what the system.”
yea chuck schumer and sanfrannan i fear
Just as long as we all understand that Article V is a nuclear exchange under MAD doctrine conditions.
I wasn’t speaking of tax rates Lee. I can’t disagree that manifold injustices swirl around the issue of taxation as such, nor that equally fundamental questions of who controls have been raised as the architecture the nation once had has been a long-time gradually and lately precipitously abandoned. Yet it seems to me the focus on taxation as the nexus of our most particular relation to our government offers our best opportunity to raise any and all questions of the meaning of self-rule to the foremost.
– MAD worked, albeit somewhat distortedly, so don’t knock it.
“Just as long as we all understand that Article V is a nuclear exchange under MAD doctrine conditions.”
yep cold war gov’t. still fighting the commies in the gov’t. the clowns at the rnc should be attacking EVERY level of the fed gov’t. but they’re too media attuned.
– Which raises yet another area of contemplation, given that the US system is such a key linch pin in the world economy, although somewhat less so because of Chine, etc. Namely what happens in relation to other countries if a serious reform was actually implemented.
” MAD worked,”
cambodia too see also vietnam
Too many factions would want to see a Convention fail for MAD to work is what I would predict.
Doesn’t mean I’m opposed to the idea, just that everyone needs to understand that there is no United States coming out the other side of a Convention.
” Namely what happens in relation to other countries if a serious reform was actually implemented.”
eff them or who cares?
Seems to me the recent drama over sequestration illustrated the banality of discussing the funding of government. What may appear to be opportunity is likely a tar baby in my opinion.
I think the issue, the ONLY issue, is the very legitimacy of the government.
It may be a harder sell to ask if the government is acting under the authority granted to it by the constitution, than to ask if the IRS is providing good “customer service”, but it’s by far the more honest and key question.
Oh, that was in response to sdferr.
eff them or who cares?
– That only works if you’re energy independent among other things.
I hear people asking whether to abolish the IRS, rather than to ask whether the IRS is providing good customer service, which latter is surely a joke in this context, right?
so this thread should be about what is cut in the fed gov’t no? or the taxes to pay to such a gov’t?
“- That only works if you’re energy independent among other things.”
the proggtards notwithstanding we,(usa) are that in every way. the effin aholes want slaves.
I think BH makes a lot of sense, by the way. It’s going to be easier to persuade people that the government is too damn big (and the taxes too damn high) if you’re constantly being required to contribute (sales tax, VAT tax) or to pay out of pocket (no withholding income tax) on a quarterly basis.
– The statists and ruling class have systematically spent the last 120 years building a firewall ment to frustrate any attempts at real change, so piecemeal has been designed to fail. You have to wholesale dismantle to overcome that. No other way.
Piecemeal has been designed to fail because the statists and the ruling class want wholesale dismantling too. That’s why a Constitutional Convention is mutually assured destruction.
Yeah, the IRS provides customer service like a bank…robber.
I don’t see the abolition of the IRS as realistic. There has to be some sort of office for the accounting of those necessary taxes I mentioned, however the revenue is collected. Fair tax. flat tax, whatever, there needs to be a department to handle the accounting.
It’s the corruption of the office, not the office itself that’s the problem IMHO. And it’s the corruption of the system the legislature put in place that’s the problem, not the basic concept of taxes itself.
To be perfectly honest, and please, brace yourself, I don’t really have a huge problem with the taxes I pay as a less than $100k/yr household. Where I have a problem is GE and Microsoft paying zero taxes, and the deficit they are borrowing against the next generation to fund the retirement of this one. I mean, I don’t care about lower taxes, I just want them to balance the budget and quit fucking borrowing.
“. Where I have a problem is GE and Microsoft paying zero taxes,”
good for them how do i do it?
“. Where I have a problem is GE and Microsoft paying zero taxes,”
do they use the passport office much?
“I just want them to balance the budget and quit fucking borrowing.”
me i want to destroy the 20th century proggtardia.
the taxes what people pay on their GE and Microsoft dividends generate more revenue than our greedy fascist slut of a government deserves
Oh, and for the record and to answer Jeff’s question, I like a flat tax. You make $20 or $20 billion, 10% goes to the government, and the state and feds can decide how much of that goes to who. No deductions, no credits, no sales tax (which is regressive), just a flat 10%.
– There are worse things than mutally assured destruction Ernst. If you think what comes out of a CC won’t be America, think what America will look like in short order if we drift to that waterfall without acting.
– I had a Prof state once that any countries economic health can be summed up “in the number of meals the average citizen is away from civil war at any given moment”. As things stand, just keeping it simple, the store shelves would empty out within three days. That gives the average family maybe two weeks with careful rationing before we break down completely. Not much buffer there.
– Of course you can always take the tack that, as Captain Ramius said, “Sometimes a little revolution can be a good thing”, but the aftermath would leave us looking more like Bosnia than America.
mr jeff wants to discuss tax code i be axing what be funded? horse cart peeps? tracy?
Funny you should mention Bosnia, because my guess is a Constitutional Convention will leave the U.S. looking more like the former Yugoslavia than like the former Czechoslovakia.
Now that doesn’t mean I’m dismissing the idea out of hand, but we should be clear-eyed about what the outcome of invoking Art. V will likely be.
– In this case I think its clear that should we sit and let it happen the bite will be far worse than almost any cure you’d care to name, and I’m not minimizing the severity of the bite, quite the contrary.
i like how the “proggtards” can do 2 year “revolutionary rule” but the faggots/pussy/sissys of the gop can’t
– Although in general I’m optimistic about the future, in spite of all the Armageddon signs, I’m afraid we’re going to do it the hard way.
– America is a victim of too much success to act.
mr jeff wants to discuss tax code i be axing what be funded?
I think the questions are related newrouter. It’s easy to justify government programs that other people are paying for.
Remember that piece about Niall Fergusson saying that we either need to raise taxes by 60% or cut spending by 30%? It’s going to be easier to get people to go with the 30% cut when they know it’s their taxes increasing by 60% too, and not just some 1%er —who probably didn’t earn those riches in the first place, according, to Fearless Leader.
I would much rather pay a consumption tax at the retail point of sale. Doubt i would be in favor of exempting anything either. Technically you aren’t poor unless the govt says you are poor and that really is not their concern. I would be in favor of the various states collecting said consumption taxes and passing along the feds share as apportioned through a balanced budget. I would like Senators to be appointed by their respective state legislations and represent the state as the founders intended. I would like to see a cap on campaign spending, even if that meant free airtime in the form of debates from the tv and radio media. It shouldn’t cost a billion dollars to run for president or 100 million to win a senate seat. Devolve the fed and allow the states to pick up what services their citizens would like to see continued.
That’s because the GOP isn’t a revolutionary party newrouter.
We are not their customers, we are the plants from which they harvest the crop to turn over to their customers. To them they provide very good customer service, customized even.
“That’s because the GOP isn’t a revolutionary party newrouter.”
except for slavery
It’s going to be easier to get people to go with the 30% cut when they know it’s their taxes increasing by [60%]….
– Thats getting less workable with each passing day. We’re already down to 53% or so paying taxes, other than local tariffs at the state level on sales. Much lower and you’ll never get a majority that won’t vote themselves free shit. The Dems/Progs have manipulated things into a perfect storm. At this point, echoing Ernst’s fears about a CC’s outcome, I’m not at all sure its fixable.
As I said earlier it is not about the revenue. The Internal Revenue Service is not about the revenue they are about providing service to those in power. What that service is is determined by those in power. They ask, hint, sorta kinda imply, what they want and the IRS does whatever they want done.
Obama simply had to say, “Who will rid me of this troublesome Tea Party?” and the IRS and other services worked overtime to do his ridding. Imply you don’t like Jews and Israel and they get the treatment too.
No bothersome orders, in writing, to be subpenaed and bite you. Just some speeches of little note.
It likely isn’t. But some of it will be salvageable.
sorta like the titanic
– In related news…..How to setup a smoke screen and slow roll any investigation…(From “Rules for radicals”)
– Give the boys plenty of time to sanitize the paper trail.
– Flood the process with piles of irrelevant material.
– Make sweeping statements that on casual inspection imply you’re going overboard to cooperate.
– Smile a lot, but avoid smirking.
For years I was one of those people that said we needed to cut government….but pressed for specifics, I answered like many others: kill NEA, Education, Energy, HUD….but never knowing if there was ANY value in any of them. So, I sat down with the budget, 1,242 programs and looked at every one of them. SOME had value, not many, but across the board cut of departments? Baby, bath, water….
I cut programs that did not have Constitutional support or were better managed at the state/local level. All the ‘independent’ crap that was left, gets moved under Constitutional departmental control. THEN, when what was left, I looked at how much funding they needed. SOME funding was appropriate, I picked – arbitrarily – 2008 as a baseline and put everything back to that plus inflation to come to a funding level. That gave me an amount necessary to raise via ‘taxation’. And I tried to make it reflect what was being paid for and for people to SEE the cost.
The problem is not just form of taxation, or taxation level, or government size, or how government spends – they are all inter-related. Addressing one – like suggesting the Fair Tax will solve problems, or elimination of the IRS will fix things isn’t enough – it is ‘screwing at the margins’. BTW, for the Fair Tax to be revenue neutral right now would require a 43% rate…how do you think that would affect retail sales?
BTW, I first called my proposal the Apocalypse Plan….because it would take an Apocalypse to get DC to implement it….
See what government we NEED, determine an appropriate funding level for that, then determine a way to tax sufficient to raise that and do it without setting the foundation for repeating the same mistakes….
Obama offered no plan, Ryan and the GOP offer no plan.
BTW newrouter….fixing has to be implemented within 2 years/one Congress – screwing up can take as long as we let it….
Fiat money’s system is inherently insolvent and if you find that a matter of opinion, than you’re progressivized the issue. It’s not subject to opinion and cannot be dismissed as a relative point of view. It’s as real as physics.
Not grasping it is my issue with the right, who defends the status quo as the country is blown apart at the seams. Even numbers like hundreds of trillions of dollars somehow roll off backs as if they were rhetoric. They’re not.
So you do understand the problem, if only to contradict yourself about what it is and repeat the divisibility myth. Indeed you can’t have bubbles and parabolic curves without having bubbles and parabolic curves.
The question is if the right will ever join up against that or if it’ll go right on seeing it as a simultaneous feature and bug if it sees it at all.
Indeed. Now expand your scope and see the important causes and effects.
It’s a manipulating parasite on the world economy, in a world-sized currency war and Ponzi network the net result of which are the gross redistribution of wealth and ruination of whole individual economies. It’s not even hidden.
Source
The effect of corporatizing the State has not been a boon to the individual, either to his wealth or his liberty. The right needs to thoroughly rethink its assumptions.
No, I wouldn’t really say I understand the problem exactly, and don’t understand at all your asserting I contradicted myself, nor the divisibility myth.
I do think you overestimate your own understanding of the problem, and simplify it down to the obvious (to you) prime evil.
From your own link:
Again, I’m not so sure our monetary system is the evil you see it as, as much as the abuses on the system (runaway entitlements, baseline budgeting, sketchy tax code manipulation by politicians, global shenanigans, etc.) At root the problem is a government that has swelled past it’s constitutional limited role.
I don’t know, I’m not claiming to be anything other than a rank novice when it comes to economics, but I do know this country has become incredibly wealthy, and I see the problem as not so much the federal reserve, but that we aren’t able to audit the federal reserve.
Could it be that among the problems besetting modern political thinking is a too narrow focus on economy as such? That a dogmatic belief in method (science!) has led the modern political thinker astray, to such an extent that once common concepts in politics are practically lost, becoming simply unavailable for use precisely at the moment they are needed most? Could be.
economic freedom used to be a meaningful concept what helped drive policy in our once-great dessicated slut of a country
Personally, I believe the moment of our undoing was the legalization of public sector unions. That one poison pill changed the whole structure of self governance and the concept of individual sovereignty, creating a collective with an interest in self promotion and increase, directly negotiating against the citizen and the private sector that produces wealth.
Until public unions are outlawed, nothing substantial will be done to reverse our disastrous course.
Public-sector unions were a consequence of government growth before becoming a cause of it; they’re a positive-feedback mechanism.
Government has become an evil because it has accumulated power. Solving the problem of taxes and tax collectors, and problems of defiant ignorance passing for education or government employee unions becoming a fifth estate, become moot if the government ceases to nourish would-be petty tyrants.
Merely fiddling with the tax system amounts to conceding the size and power of Leviathan and hoping to use the One Ring against Sauron.
You’d said:
A gold-based economy, to use your example, is not indivisible and does not necessarily preclude fractional reserve banking. If you want currency bubbles because they “create wealth”, you could still have them blown over a core of commodities.
Those simple constructs aside, the point is that the present system is mathematically insolvent. Having inflated, it cannot rebalance itself. I recall the late Ric Locke also coming to the realization that a system of interest-bearing debt money is inherently unable to survive. It is fundamentally parabolically insolvent.
This isn’t economics, its money. I invite you to reread Steven LaChance at one of my links: You simply cannot derive some quadrillion dollars of cross-linked, unsecured debt — dollars being debt — and think the system can recover itself. It cannot, but before it fails it redistributes vast sums away from productive owners. This is Too Big to Fail, and permanent QEs, and ten nations at a time needing transfusions and then never recovering.
And it’s role must never be to debauch its own currency — go reread the Framers on money and banking too, also linked.
But you’ve cited demand side debt, not creation side insolvency. The problem is not short-term debt and in fact new debt is all that’s keeping the system alive. It’s time to realize that: If not for QEInfinity’s roughly $80B a month in what amounts to new money, that heroin being the primary export the US sends to itself and the world, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Charles Hugh Smith is right: It is all falling apart. It has to: It’s fundamentally synthetic, unnatural, and parabolic. It is the largest, most pernicious phenomenon of the Progressive movement and it has been for one hundred years.
You may be right McGehee, but government grew fast starting with the first Roosevelt, and it wasn’t til JFK when they were legalized. I can’t help but think there was something else in play that made it happen.
Electing a cult figure for president maybe, that doesn’t seem to be a good idea ever, not just now…
I doubt that Ric maintained any such thing, but would be happy to look at any evidence to that effect.
I asked Ric to consider if a fractional reserve system using fiat money could reconcile itself, sdferr. Considering its nature, I don’t doubt at all that he found that it cannot.
Of course, I’ll say anything to make a point.
Any evidence, Jho? Anything in writing will do, being as that’s what writing is for. Otherwise, what?
*debt needs to be self-liquidating to balance the system. All loans — which in fractional reserve, is to say all money — need to be repaid with no residual balance.
In a one-currency fiat system with interest-bearing fractional reserve expansion but no other countervailing income, there is no self-liquidating mechanism. A residual balance is always created from interest, which compounds within an expanding monetary base needed to service it and provide the “growth” fiat/fractional reserve is typically called upon to provide.
The only end game is to declare an end to stimulative expansion at some finite date, and dismantle the system and write off all outstanding debts, which is to say, to retire all debt-money: When debt absorbs all currency in the system, that currency ceases to exist and the remaining debt is left to be divided among the creditors.
“Just as long as we all understand that Article V is a nuclear exchange under MAD doctrine conditions.”
This is a common misconception of Article V, that it has to be an open forum for amending the Constitution. A state can come forward with a specific Amendment, say “repeal the 16th Amendment”, and then put that to its people, or its legislature for passage. When it does, and 2/3rds of the other states agree, it then is returned to the states for a 3/4ths approval then – bam – Constitution amended.
Many folks think that you have to open up a convention to an open forum to suggest any number of amendments, this is not true. Article V does not go into details about what constitutes a “convention”. Since this power of defining what constitutes a convention is not in the Constitution, then (according to the 10th Amendment) it is left up to the states, and the people.
The states just have to make sure they define the concept of a “convention” as the sole issue before it and no others. Any state disagreeing can vote against the proposed amendment, but, if 2/3rds agree, then it will be considered an officially proposed Amendment and returned to meet the 3/4ths threshold.
This is how the states can change the game in spite of Congressional disapproval. I have a feeling we will be hearing more about this on Mark Levin’s show as the summer goes on.
You’re asking me to document Locke? I’m comfortable with your finding me fishily suspect for my not having bookmarked the occasion. Of course, if my resources are right, perhaps Ric could merely find good sense and the maths agreeable, were he here.
If you mean the theory in general, I provided resources.
I’ve also found that comprehension is a function of open-mindedness and common sense, so sometimes it takes us a few stabs to get the gist.
You’re asking me to document Locke?
That’s what I’m asking.
I seem to remember Ric arguing ALL money was fiat by it’s nature.
I believe where you run into trouble Jhoward, is you’re long on condemning the current system, and short on any alternative, or how to get from here to there.
If you are going to do away with fiat money, the only alternative is to base currency on a hard asset, such as gold, which is finite and tends to gravitate towards large holdings, wiping out any concept of a middle class.
Is the way I see it, FWIW.
Fractional lending is not in itself bad, evil, self-defeating in an economy. The gold standard did nothing to prevent boom/bust cycles in the economy. Even gold is a fiat currency – it has no intrinsic value. (this is not a mainstream position…)
Securitization of debt opened pandora’s box (but the problems existed IN pandora’s box to begin with). Federal government expansion into daily interaction with individual citizens may have been the creation of pandora’s box under FDR. The institution of individual taxation was just the lubricant needed.
We are where we are not because of ONE choice, but a culmination of thousands of incremental steps, each deemed ‘necessary’ at the time and of little consequence by itself. Consider a ladder, climbing each individual step does not increase the risk relative to the previous step but the overall risk can become staggering…that is where we are now…near the top of a long ladder we started climbing 100 years ago. Climbing back down is considerably harder than the assent.
Which, govt growth or govt unions?
The unions wanted access to the federal employee roster to expand their numbers because between the New Deal and the postwar recovery the roster was ballooning faster than ever. Democrats owed a lot to unions’ politicking prowess and wanted to keep their support.
If so, he would have had to stretch the meaning of fiat to epic proportions and far beyond the connotation intended (heh) by those coining the term “fiat money.”
Money is whatever two people agree to exchange for a good or service, that is not itself a good or service. It is, in fact, a form of language, signifying value it does not actually have. In that sense it can be called “fiat” by definition, but that word is not generally applied to shiny metal or sparkly rocks.
“Which, govt growth or govt unions?”
The legalization of public unions.
Until the fifties, even unions widely agreed that collective bargaining had no place in government.
It’s starting to look like we need geoffb to come to our rescue and recover the relevant Locke comments.
Wasn’t around back then, but I suspect the push was in reaction to Taft-Hartley.
You’ve switched tactics then. For want of an alternative we accept fiat’s regular collapses, each preceded by unimaginable thefts by Big Money and then debt write-offs sufficient to bankrupt entire swaths of the former economy.
Which basically describes one way getting there from here, so maybe it’s a feature and not a bug. But this isn’t harmful to founding American ideals, rights, liberty, and property.
Meh. You’ve just perfectly described the end state of fiat, attributing it to sound money.
Like I keep saying, the right doesn’t much give a shit about something apparently it insists is sacred, solvent private enterprise. How is the stretch of a lifetime, but there it is. It’s like talking to the wall.
I don’t hold anything about money to be sacred, but tell me, if JHoward could wave his magic wand and create the perfect and proper currency system, how would it work?
It would be the end state regardless, if one believed history could end.
Everything collapses — industries, empires, universes…
Some things are less a matter of accepting than a matter of living while you can. Conservatives make lousy utopians because we recognize this.
Once again: It’s debts — again, it’s instruments are debt — are insolvent. It’s controls are reckless, thieving, and unconstitutional, and its conclusion is always ruinous.
Myth. Money is not founded by the belief that it has a property that prevents folly. Conversely, fiat, which is falsely believed to prevent bubbles, is responsible for bankrupting entire economies.
Gold is, however, not spontaneous. If cannot be spawned by exclusive central policy thus to grease crony profits except by a criminality significantly less palatable to the underclasses, if it’s possible at all. Gold does not blow bubbles in entire industries and economies, and it does not one day evaporate, leaving trillions of dollars in debts created just by it’s existence as a preferred unit of manipulation and corruption.
It is entirely a mainstream position that gold is an agreed measure of wealth of some instantaneous value unrelated to its not being food, clothing, or housing. It is most certainly not a fiat currency in that it cannot be spontaneously spawned by government, bank, or central policy. Gold is an undebauchable unit of trade whose cost to produce and universal regard have always made it a suitable currency.
It is persistent misconception that cartoons hard money advocates as failing to recognize gold’s nature. On the other hand, it’s quite common for them to waste little time bothering to discuss how all money is equal.
The greatest irony for the right is that it persistently uses every dodge, exploded myth, and evasion to deny that it greatly prefers a policy that more than any other, defines unlawful, unrepresented, exclusive, central Progressive ideology: That man shall operate the Framer’s Nature and that free markets, economies, fortunes, and lives are thus eternally best left to a synthetic and artificial force almost entirely misunderstood by it’s advocates.
And it does this in the face of its own financial ruin and the abolition of its right to not be stolen from and oppressed.
Like this maybe?
Visigoths and primitives, all.
Good night.
See, here’s where I get confused. Is fiat money the problem, or fucked up politicians?
‘Cuz it seems to me no matter what monetary system you have, fucked up politicians will still be fucked up.
“Gold does not blow bubbles in entire industries and economies.”
The former Spanish Empire might beg to differ.
They were granted (effective) clear title to half the planet (the Portuguese were given the other half). They put their primary focus on importing what they thought was wealth, but what they were actually importing was gold and silver. It ruined them.
The British did not make that mistake.
“fucked up politicians will still be fucked up.”
Oh, yes. Gold and silver currency has been debased many, many times. The pound sterling was originally just that: a full pound of sterling silver.
JHoward, debt is not ‘unconstitutional’, certainly my debt, or the debt of others/corporations or even states is not unconstitutional. Debt is not intrinsically evil.
Using any standard for currency, fiat or gold, even food both exposes the failings of currency and its benefits. Again, it is not intrinsically good or bad. I disagree that gold can not be spawned by government. The creation of a gold coin of set value is fiat….that can extend to other measures/values.
Neither of us are likely to change the other’s point of view, but to suggest that having a different point of view is uninformed or supportive of progressive values doesn’t do your argument any justice….
LBascom, yes.
:)
The Federal Reserve coexisted with the gold standard for decades. Currency series that pre-dated the Federal Reserve were already debt instruments obliging the Treasury to exchange the note’s value in gold or silver to the bearer.
The problem with a precious-metals standard is that to some people under certain circumstances the metal is worth more, subjectively at least, as a commodity — which means the Treasury will have to meet its obligations.
FDR obtained a ban on the private ownership of gold bullion expressly to put a stop to this — but when the debt instrument can’t be redeemed, it might as well be fiat money.
Going off the gold standard allowed the money to be based on the nation’s real wealth, that created by its people in goods and services. It returned money to its roots, as a medium of exchange signifying the value of what is actually being traded.
…which is all the more reason why politicians’ attitude that all money belongs to the government, is offensive in the extreme — as is the reckless manner in which they authorize the printing of more notes when there is no concurrent growth in real wealth to support it.
They genuinely believe the rain follows the plow, that all they need to do is print the money and the wealth will sprout spontaneously.
LBascom. Try this thread from the linked point on down to the bottom.
Nice. It seems my memory still serves.
I really miss Ric.
Have I ever mentioned he responded to my first internet comment right here at PW, which, for better or worse (depending on your appreciation for my comments) is responsible for by continuing haunting of the place.
Not only about he smartest man I ever knew, but magnanimous and unwaveringly kind. A true class act.
It took a lot to get Ric upset, and even then, he barely showed it.
i love mr. ric more than beans he’s one of them ones what doesn’t die
unlike jonathan brandis
nobody remembers jonathan brandis
I still feel terrible about how when Ric passed I thought someone was trolling in his comments to give us the “fake” news.
Didn’t want to believe it had happened that quickly so I didn’t believe it, I guess.
he said about the panic attacks
and that haunts me
mom and dad both died of lung infirmities, but there was never any panickings involved
I don’t think Mr. Ric got the best care
I think they sent his lung cancered ass home alone with a cheap-ass oxygen bottle and a phone number to call
Mineral Wells can do better than that I think
or at least they should aspire
The panic attack element is just brutal.
Damn it.
I said the system’s controls were.
Gold cannot be created by policy. It cannot be synthesized. It cannot be spawned. It can only be purchased at cost or stolen by force.
Fiat currency of fiat value is created by unrepresented policy involving central commercial banking in an unstable equation. A coin of certain market value may be minted by Congress in a self-liquidating system of trade.
The instantaneous price of gold is not declared, although granted if you knew the subject well you’d see just how close to jamming it into compliance with central fiat Big Money is. (You may even recall when in the illustrious, free American history gold was ruled illegal for the dependent debt and wage serf to own. McGehee does)
They jam it into some temporary compliance by rigging paper contracts.
Let’s try a thought experiment. The Spanish set out to increase their gold reserve. They fund ships and crews, explorers and armies. They return them enriched to a gold-based economy in a gold backed world.
The Crown’s holdings increase and as with all monies, they use them to fund whatever the Crown deems. Internal economies are stimulated and external economies are engaged. Prosperity improves and some measure of dilution presumably decreases the price of gold.
As a condition of exploration, however, costs accrued and were paid, they being in labor and resource. As a condition of monetary function, velocity was increased but debts were liquidated.
Since nobody has bothered to address the fundamental problem with fiat paper — setting aside it’s inherent corruptability — nobody has granted that the difference between it and our Spanish experiment is that the former is incapable of balancing and the latter is.
In other words, the problem with fiat is not debasement, it’s debauchment. Rome debased money expressly because the precious metal in money had a value only dilution could overcome in what the States thought was its interest.
The US has terminally debauched currency, using a system of wealth redistribution within a system mathematically impossible to reconcile the debts thereof.
As for fiat’s inherent corruptibility, my raising that point as the verifiable height of Progressivism hasn’t raised any eyebrows so I suppose doing so again will also fall on deaf ears. Once having had a myth accepted, it’s hard to argue against its central fallacy.
I was with you up to here. The value of what’s actually being traded is the point: As such it’s about a quarter quadrillion dollars of debt demarcated in three cent dollars.
You folks need to get your heads wrapped around inherent insolvency. Then fiat currency being debt.
We can come back to the best definition of Progressivism later.
No, created wealth can be converted to gold or a gold based currency for the purpose of trade and then stored in other goods kept for their own purposes. Going off the gold standard allowed the money to be based on vapor, courtesy of Washington, DC.
JHoward, I get that your position is all the rest is irrelevant until we address the debt/currency/standard issue in a meaningful way but my opinion is that only if Japan, Europe AND the United States did so would it hope to work and I don’t think it would work even in that case. I would suggest that your thinking on the issue far exceeds mine but we are too far from a ‘barter’ economy into a transactional economy and too globalized (but not enough to have a single currency).
As my budget plan may be too ambitious to implement, the gold standard exceeds even that by a wide margin. Yes, I am working within a system you find inherently progressive – but I see it as corrupted rather than unstable.
How does that work, Pablo? How is it possible to create wealth when there’s a fixed amount of gold to tie its worth to?
So is gold-standard (“sound”) currency, since it ties the wealth of a nation, not to its production, but to its holdings in soft, shiny metal.
…which is a market commodity whose value can be manipulated.
What I fail to see is what the hell difference does it make what the currency is based on when the politicians are spending far beyond what they take in revenues, to the tune of about 40 cents on the dollar and forever rising. It’s the interest on the debt that’s going to kill us, and that model would kill us regardless what the currency is based on.
It’s like you already gambled away your paycheck, and now you’re arguing about whether to bet your kids piggy bank on poker or blackjack.
IIRC Spain didn’t ruin its gold-based currency quite as thoroughly as it did its silver-based currency.
They mined a shitload of silver in the New World and its value declined substantially due to an increase in supply. They did bring some gold back home, too, but it wasn’t anywhere near as much.
Hardly: Gold is production, that being much of the point.
Again: Fiat, debt-money is lent into existence, to be inflated by fractional reserve, incurring unsettled interest in an insolvent scheme that invariably fails, and all the while tied to arbitrary central policy, bubbles, and corruption.
Clearly gold has none of those issues. Gold is not debt. It is a convenient medium of intermediary exchange. i.e., money. It’s a commodity, a resource, a historically valuable artifact of human desire, and an exception to a closed, single-currency scheme.
Which ironically is what anti-gold fiat buggers usually say it is, it not being food, clothing, horses, or land.
Since you brought up Ric Locke, here’s his response (h/t geoffb) from nearly five years ago:
One more “money” quote…sorry
They’re parallel: It’s the insolvency that’ll kill us and it’s LaChance’s cross-linked collapses that’ll be the knives — think of the collapse du jour, whether Greece, Cyprus, Italy, or Ireland. Those are failing monetary counterclaims.
The cross-linked hazard of debt-money and its nearly innumerable derivatives in the big casino banking system are fundamentally different than debt limited by a solvency ceiling of deposits, collaterals, resources, or other undebauchable holdings.
Think of the myth of indivisibility assigned to gold, and its “problem” of insufficient capitalization, which actually is real and valid for the pro-fiat construct it’s used to support: A pre-existing base of economic activity, newly inflated by fiat into a market to induce shops, malls, and infrastructures produces rapid “wealth”. It produces velocity, actually, and velocity naturally produces those principles and interests that must be self-liquidating if the system is solvent.
We can roughly call this Keynesianism. However in a closed fiat/fractional reserve system, once this phenomenon occurs its debts are not self-liquidating and mathematically it must be reinflated in order to stand.
This is the US today. It’s used banking to alter the relationship between money as exchange in an open, self-liquidating monetary system and made it a vehicle requiring infinite expansion of a closed, eventually insolvent new system.
Hence the three-cent dollar and that unsettled debt, including the FNRs themselves. Add in political influence, which is the finest means of blank-check funding the socialist progressive State, and you see around you just what we’re experiencing.
The big problem comes when a perception of there being enough shops, malls, and infrastructure is joined by a sufficient call for a sufficient number of debts — including money itself — and the system experiences insufficient countervailing solvencies and mathematically goes Jenga.
On the other hand, an economy built on deposits, resource and labor-based growth, open trade, and currency competition where debt is self-liquidating is sustainable. It’s also much harder or maybe impossible to derive hundreds of trillions of dollars in social program debt from a roughly $15T total annual hard-monied output.
An economy built on the artificiality of single-fiat is explosive but unstable. Explosive growth is fiat’s best selling point, one raised in this thread. It’s just not stable, and by now it’s heroin.
Ric’s or your or any one’s theories on the nature of value and exchange are soon enough irrelevant. These are discussions on the simplest, foundational aspects of money, and not on its trajectory when it’s unmoored from solvency and used as a synthetic liquidity in a unbalanced system. I’m on about the latter.
Whether oats or oil, paper or papyrus, exchange is a temporary phenomenon, one existing as a means to transfer, not account. I’m not pointing us to exchange; I’m pointing us to monetization systems and how they can be fundamentally different even if instances of trade within them carry on or do not carry on.
Meya used to post here how the velocity of money was the proof of monetary concept. It is not either, other than if it slows sufficiently — which is today’s real hazard — it’ll induce collapse in a mathematically unstable system. Not collapse for want to velocity itself, but collapse by avalanche as the system cannot cover claims as they occur.
(At some point after I replied to Ric to urge him to consider the nature of the management of such a system — the points I’ve made above about the corruptions and ills inherent to a central policy system I recall I asked him if a system would survive its inability to self-liquidate its debts. As I recall he thought it over and found it could not.)
I’m not appealing to Ric’s authority. I’m appealing to the simplest arithmetic and thought experiments, they being widely known to these discussions.
Exchange and value and shifting market perceptions and trust in money are not the thing, meaning that to everybody’s point here today, indeed it doesn’t matter what the money is. What matters is how its system of creation and liquidation behaves and balances. And of course, the opportunities it presents between those event horizons to be screwed with beyond all reason and comprehension, typically to wreak havoc on classical liberalism and everything it stands for.
You brought up Ric (and still want to enroll his agreement without cite and against the evidence that is cited), and now say his ideas are irrelevant. People point out our problem is the corruption of the system that is the problem, and would be a problem under any system, and you say that but a parallel phenomenon.
I’ve come to the conclusion debating the point with you, especially after seeing the same argument with nearly identical trajectory five years ago, is like trying to nail jello to the wall.
It’s a futile endeavor I’m weary of, and will retire from debating it further, not on the merits of your argument, but on it’s lack of substance.
“Let’s try a thought experiment. ”
No, let’s look at actual history: the Spanish empire actually did that.
Bringing back vast quantities of gold (and especially silver, as Slartibartfast pointed out) set off a disastrous inflationary spiral in Spain that utterly crippled their economy. High prices forced manufacturing and trade off-shore to what would soon become the new masters of the world: the Netherlands and Great Britain. Spain is an irrelevant backwater to this day
The idea that gold is inflation-proof is nonsensical. All it takes is one big strike, or one improvement in the extraction process. Observing historic prices after major gold strikes bears this out.
Do you know how much gold is on the continental shelves? Neither does anyone else, but they’ve been mining the beach at Nome for over a hundred years, and are now mining in the ocean itself. It’s a safe bet that there’s vastly more gold in the ocean than has ever been mined on land; it’s heavy, and tends to flow downhill. The heaviness also causes it to concentrate.
Somewhat longer term: do you have any idea how much gold is in even a small asteroid? Hint: lots.
There’s also the fact that a gold standard would give vast economic clout to two countries of which I am not particularly fond: Russia and South Africa (didn’t like them when they had the apartheid regime, don’t like them now).
What would I personally like to see as a replacement for fiat money? A standard based on a basket of commodities. Gold could be one of them, but oil, wheat, rice, semiconductor-grade silicon, and lots of other things should be in there too. If a shortage or surplus developed in one, it could be removed or revalued without horrible economic dislocations.
Actually, if one must have a single standard, semiconductor-grade silicon would be as good as any and better than most. It’s about as durable as gold (and more valuable, depending on the grade). No one country has a monopoly. The raw material is everywhere. Energy costs are the major factor, and anything that makes energy dramatically cheaper (thus inflating the silicon currency) is likely to make us more prosperous in any case. But I still think a basket would be better.
In order to dismiss important questions about the nature of the problem you take a lot of liberties with what I’ve said, Lee. If you want to accuse me of misrepresenting Ric, that’s up to you. I can’t know if that’s what you and others intend, but that’s a reasonable reading from this perspective of that particular red herring.
The nature of trust as a component of trade is still not the issue, no matter how many times its brought up. Everything is trade; it’s called a market. Anything can be money too.
Reducing anti-fiat arguments to matters of trust and trade are diversions. It’s abundantly self-evident that declared money runs economies. My points wouldn’t exist if it weren’t.
What matters is what I’ve pointed out too many times to bother to count. If I’m wrong you can show how and where: As for a “lack of substance”, I can’t come over there and get your calculator out for you. Just because I could explain the physics of flight doesn’t mean someone can grasp it before they’ve seen it happen.
I’ve been sufficiently complete. Your incomprehension is not my concern, so maybe we’re in alignment at least on how this conversation ends.
You create wealth by creating widgets or providing valued services or whatever it is you do that others value, which you then trade for gold/currency/whatever. Then, you convert that into a house and a car and some land and an art collection and guns and ammo and whatever else you like. All of that stores your wealth without needing to be represented by a sequestered amount of gold/currency. The gold/currency can go back into the trading economy to facilitate other transactions.
I’m sure it is, as I discussed in that same post. It’s the idea that fiat is collapse-proof that’s nonsensical, all the while fueling disastrous progressive policies like only it can. It’s almost like a hand-in-glove relationship, that.
I’ve already addressed your point. This isn’t about balancing systems. Hell, it’s not even about bulletproof physical standards. They don’t exist.
Exactly, although anything preventing arbitrary, political, policy-based control works, provided the system is solvent. What we have, however, is the worst of all possibilities: It’s Bitcoin but without the security, the trust, the decentralized ownership, the inherent numerical proofs, or any of the resulting attractiveness.
What it is are digits you don’t see or control through your representatives or even your government, and it’s happening against your particular political best interests in a system guaranteed to fail so perfectly that it’ll usher in your worst monetary nightmare.
Which is to say power and influence. If you think classical liberalism is hard now, wait.
Isn’t that what the DOW is?
Just a little thought: does anyone think Obama and company would be any less of a threat to our nation if our economy was on the gold standard? The political system is out of control. Starve it of it’s funding and ability to manipulate the financial markets and some of the corruption will die.
That is the nature of my proposal – cut government, put control back towards the states/locals and make funding more transparent. These things help regardless of the currency foundation….
link
I think that’s just a smidge off.
You create wealth by creating widgets or providing valued services or whatever it is you do that others value, which
you then trade for gold/is represented by currency/whatever.Then, you convert that into a house and a car and some land and an art collection and guns and ammo and whatever else you likeCorrection, does anyone think Obama and company would be any less of a threat to our nation if our monetary system was sound?
Yeah, I do. Without any question whatsoever.
The salient questions are why are hundreds of trillions parked on the sidelines, why are nearly a hundred billion a month in permanent QE being pumped into major indices, why have trillions more been transferred away from the private sector, why is the middle class disappearing, why are real unemployment and inflation way over ten percent, why is half the nation on assistance, and why is this prosperous nation hundreds of trillions — not $16T — on the wrong side of the ledger while suffering an endless series of bubbles.
Or more succinctly, why isn’t the majority asking the right questions. Or paying attention to what’s right in front of them.
Sound money, or fiat money, it matters not a whit when politicians add $1 trillion to baseline budgeting on a whim, don’t bother operating under a budget for years on end, raise the debt ceiling by rote to borrow money for to pay off the electorate.
Gosh, if only gold was the standard!
“It’s the idea that fiat is collapse-proof that’s nonsensical”
Who is making that argument? No one here that I’ve seen, and no one who has the faintest clue about history.
“Exactly, although anything preventing arbitrary, political, policy-based control works”
No. The fundamental problem with any single-commodity standard is that there IS NO CONTROL. The supply of gold (or any other precious metal) is largely determined by purely arbitrary factors (i.e., some random guy notices shiny bits in his mill pond) rather than by economic growth or contraction.
There were panics and crashes galore in the days of gold and silver standards. Spain was merely the most extreme case that comes to mind (going from owning half the friggin’ planet to a bankrupt international joke within a couple of hundred years is pretty extreme), but there’s no shortage of other examples.
The banking panics of 1792, 1796–1797, 1819, 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857, 1866, 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1896, 1901, 1907, and 1910 all occurred on gold or silver standards.
The recessions of 1796–99, 1815–21, 1836–38, 1839–43, 1857–58, 1873–1879, 1882–85, and 1893–1896 all occurred on gold or silver standards.
And that’s just in the United States (some of these affected the wider world as well, of course).
I seem to recall commenting in this thread something along the lines of, “everything collapses.”
I must have imagined it.
what does slog look like after it collapses?
Forests and trees, Lee,
And SBP, I guess you’re a monetary progressive…and I just one of “a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.” Progressivism’s central problem is its denial of any physical manifestations of reality that interfere with its view of a nice, managed, man-over-nature Utopia.
You know with the impossibly wealthy elites, the underclass grist for its mill, and nothing in between. Like Zimbabwe.
Or at various times and to various degrees Rome, China, France, Germany, Argentine, Finland, Italy, Mexico, Thailand — influencing Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and South Korea — and Russia.
Nite all.
* – Maurice Maeterlinck.
There’s a long term pattern here to discern if you’re willing, folks.
Find the common denominator.
We could ask ourselves what Pascal would ask.
Has Jeff created a den of progressives? That’d be a strange thing, wouldn’t it be? Unlikely, even.
Folks, when JHo talks about debt money he’s talking about that particularly evil process of savings deposits becoming loans. This is what a bank does.
The way that you and I earn interest on our savings and others obtain a loan to purchase their cars or houses or the plow for the farm is the fatal flaw that he’s talking about. Lending money with interest. Take away all the handwaving and blather and that’s what we’re talking about.
It’s nonsense. Total nonsense. Don’t be a rube.
JHoward, in your vision of an economy based on a gold standard, is the value of gold fixed or allowed to fluctuate?
bh, government is necessary, it must be funded. The means of doing so should reflect what is being supported and by whom. If defense of the nation benefits the states, then let the states pay for it, if monitoring international trade is a government authority, then those that buy and sell over the international border should pay for it.
I think you’re talking to someone other than myself, Tracy. My last string of comments had nothing to do with any of that.
HANNITIZED!
Damnit
Hannitized, etc.
This whole conversation is still redolent of Señor Bonesteel.
Ok I am just giving up html-fu for the night
We could compile a list of all these terrible people filled with progressivism, intent-stealing, and assholish-ness, Slart.
Or, we could just notice the rather obvious pattern that JHo is always involved.
Actually, our currency is issued as a loan from the Federal Reserve. So, it is actually debt. Not all fiat money is issued that way, but ours is.
If you have the time, you might want to watch the video at this link.
Now, I have not vetted this fully, so I only assume they are telling the truth. I kind of summarize the video here.
Yikes. I said Pascal above but meant Occam.
On the plus side, I didn’t go back and change my comment after being called on it. I noted it myself.
I just fully re-read my blog entry linked above, and I talk out of my ass about fractional reserve banking at the end. I know almost nothing about it; it just sounds squirrely to me.
You’re killing me here, cranky.
Is that what JHo has meant by debt money in relation to fractional reserve lending? No. He means the interest on loans.
If you say so, bh. I am really not sure what he’s talking about.
I have Sowell’s economics book, but I haven’t read it. I know almost nothing that I haven’t picked up around here.
That’s why the conspiracy theories replicate themselves.
At the simplest level fractional reserve lending takes depositors and introduces them to borrowers. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing more.
If there was a total reserve you couldn’t lend money. If there was no reserve you couldn’t take your deposited funds back out when you wanted to pay the cable bill or the rent.
” government is necessary, it must be funded. ”
what parts of the fed gov’t are necessary? that’s the real discussion. hey it is sunday and all the “non essential” services of the fed gov’t were shut down. maybe start there.
Taking a step back, I do understand why you wouldn’t understand what JHo was saying, cranky.
For me JHo isn’t JHo though. I’ve been hearing about these sorts of crazy newsletter ideas for about 20 years now.
“fractional reserve” has fun ring to it. is the fire stuff ok?
When in doubt ask very simple questions. That’s a good general rule. Don’t accept blathering and metaphysical squid ink that avoids those specifics.
Here’s a question to ask, can a bank lend out more in loans than it has in deposits?
Don’t accept nonsense. Ask for the specifics.
well no, but in a bernake economy why not. he’ll prime the pump.
bh: “If there was a total reserve you couldn’t lend money. If there was no reserve you couldn’t take your deposited funds back out when you wanted to pay the cable bill or the rent.”
Yep.
JHo: “A gold-based economy, to use your example, is not indivisible and does not necessarily preclude fractional reserve banking.”
Boy howdy does it not. Fractional reserve back goes back at least to the medieval goldsmiths, if not before. And yes, sometimes there’d be an invasion scare or whatever and everyone would show up at the goldsmith’s shop on the same day wanting Grandma’s five silver florins back. It wasn’t any prettier than it is with fiat money.
“And SBP, I guess you’re a monetary progressive”
If by “monetary progressive” you mean “believes that the amount of money circulating in an economy should have some actual relationship with the amount of goods and services in that economy, rather than fluctuating with the fortunes of some tobacco-chawing prospector with a mule, or (less benignly) with the policies of whoever the current masters of South Africa and Russia might be”, then, yeah, guilty.
I have to admit I don’t read some posts very carefully, especially once they become laden with insults.
down in the weeds. do you have a solvent fed gov’t?
in addition: do you have presently a fed gov’t within constitutional boundaries?
Is the perfect the enemy of the good? Apparently.
I mean, it should be obvious that prices cannot remain stable in an expanding or contracting economy without a change in the money supply, yes? And it should be equally obvious that both extreme inflation and extreme deflation can be very, very bad*, yes?
*To the economy as a whole; the person with lots of debt will clearly benefit from inflation, while his fellow with lots of cash will clearly benefit from deflation. Unfortunately, extreme inflation gets you Zimbabwe or the European Central Powers post-WWI, while extreme deflation gets you the Great Depression.
I commiserate. I do the same most times. The hectoring begins to grate though when it starts being placed so randomly on Jeff’s readership.
Clearly many of use are not quite bright enough for those few who are actually in the know.
Yep.
well the gold or the bernake standard is not relevant. do you have a fed gov’t that understands it’s role? see eu.
indeed i wonder about the devaluation of the rule of law. kinda devalues everything no? see black panther party.
the eco system don’t be working without the “rule of law”. see contracts
I should have your email address, D.
I’ll probably be in your area in about two couple weeks. I’d like to get one of those juicy lucy’s (spelling) but I can be talked out of it if stranger options are on the table. Could we maybe get Squid and Ernst?
Two weeks. We can do this.
gm?
Turns out I don’t have your email address anymore, cranky. Just got bounced back.
it was fractional drywall i’m sure
I will be in Minnesota in about two weeks. I’ll be drunk. There will be sausages hanging like ornaments from my torso.
Be there. You. Yes, you. Be there.
Close To The Edge
Yes.
“I mean, it should be obvious that prices cannot remain stable in an expanding or contracting economy without a change in the money supply, yes?”
why is it contracting or expanding? who determines the rate?
additionally if one part is expanding and another is contracting kinda of zero sum no?
Up in the comments above I have a certain concern that I’ve possibly insulted cranky without thought. If so, it might just be that I’m a dumbass.
“why is it contracting or expanding?”
Oil price shocks. New technology. A communist in the White House. Unseasonable freezes. The Chinese government playing games. Millions of reasons.
“who determines the rate?”
There isn’t any way of controlling it in the large, as near as I can tell. All attempts have failed, generally with miserable results.
Clearly there are things you can do to increase the likelihood of expansion (e.g., not electing communists, lowering tax rates) or contraction (the inverse) but the planned economy is a dream.
That doesn’t mean that tying the economy to a commodity that is fixed (or unpredictable) in quantity, with no fractional reserve banking (which, as bh has pointed out, is basically the same as “no banking”), is going to make things better, though. It would make it far worse.
Would making it harder for people to run up their credit cards be good? Maybe. Would making it harder to get the money to build a new factory or bring a new field into production (oil or agricultural) be good? The hell it would.
bh: “Yes.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have said “obvious”. It may be obvious to you and me, but apparently not to some others. :-)
We’re remarkably simpatico, SBP. In the past I’ve offered Amsterdam vs Spain and the secondary use of credit notes to serve a similar example.
History. Learn it.
Likewise, I’m also fond of a an underlying basket of commodities when it comes to broadly based currencies.
Cheers.
Also, cheers to Lee.
He saw what he saw and he wasn’t moved from fear of being thought stupid when facing the resultant blizzard of bullshit.
hi sanfrannan, boxesofrocks, feinstodge
Members of Congress responded to Pollock by expressing widespread concern that many of the wealthiest Americans had consolidated too much economic power.[18]
“Oil price shocks.”
really? a fed gov’t that is opposed to drilling is influenced by muslims do tell?
to be clear: islam be evil. hey baracky like it.
“really? a fed gov’t that is opposed to drilling is influenced by muslims do tell?”
I’m not sure what you’re asking here.
It doesn’t matter whether the Middle East is getting “exciting”, Barky cuts off the fracking, the Peak Oil cult turns out to be right, or something else entirely. If the cost of energy goes up, the cost of everything that requires energy (i.e., just about everything there is) is going to go up. Is that not clear?
Now, without government interference, an oil price increase would result in many ladies and gentlemen going out and busting ass to get more oil to sell (assuming they could get the capital to do it — a new oil field costs billions, with a B, and you aren’t going to get someone to give you that kind of money for free). Is that not also clear?
If, however, the government prevents new oil fields (or feasible alternatives, such as nuclear) from being developed, everyone will become poorer.
I honestly don’t see why this is a difficult concept.
I had to get a new domain, bh, when the company holding my old one went under.
I’m now at cranky-d dot net instead of dot com. Everything else is the same.
Thanks, man. I’ll shoot you a line tomorrow afternoon.
Cute. But fallacious.
And again.
Unbelievable…
Then my work here is done. And to think I had the temerity to try and correct anyone.
With friends like these…
Hell, don’t except anything when you can reinterpret and make yourself out to be some Einstein for it.
Now I’ll always confuse genius with arrogance.
Well then. Proof by appeal to conventional acceptability.
And on that note, enough.
It’s not so much the lack of smarts; it’s that you’ve permitted Progressivism to introduce foreign substances into your bodily fluids.
An epic thread, bookmarked &c.
It’s not all that our monetary system is fatally flawed, be it backed by hard metals or by bushels of corn or by paper or electronic documents. Whatever means we use to calculate our worth, that worth will be lessened by Gov’t taxation; what happens after the collection (the (re-) distribution) is the bigger problem.
We allow politicians to direct the destination and rate of flow of fire hose-quantity funding, much of it to favor friends and punish enemies. With a dedicated Chicago Community Organizer in power, that effect is magnified and limited only by how his opposition is willing to respond.
So, allow me to slightly fix Danby’s…
…by which I mean the non-temporary, so-called “safety net” funds by which a dirty socialist “Community Organizer” uses to attain power.
We can’t fix this until we limit the flow rate and quantities of post-tax monies. Since that’s already been abused for multiple decades, seems a hard reset is in our future. No ‘easy button’ exists.
JHoward, sorry I am so ignorant for your discourse.
I agree that the current situation is one of insolvency and that the current response of increasing liquidity is making the situation worse while ignoring the actual issues. I don’t see a gold standard or any other hard currency standard as being able to fix the problem or stop it from happening in the future. Our insolvency is based on asset values rising beyond a reasonable/sustainable level and the debt created to support them. Once the value is no longer accepted, the debt is left with no way to manage it. There is not enough asset base to support the debt and ‘making’ more currency can’t ever be enough – which I gather is your basis for ‘unable to balance’ or clear the debt. The only solution is to repudiate the debt – but it is the debt (securitized) that supports our current system/levels and such a repudiation of the foundation of trillions ‘is unthinkable’ to those whose ‘currency’ is debt.
I get you see the problem source exists much further back in time than the 1980s, but I don’t. Your problem is debt as money and the largest source of that is securitization of debt and the use of leverage. Neither of which are solved, or even limited by a gold standard (or any other standard) as long as debt can be used as money. Given I don’t believe a modern economy can function without debt, your ‘solution’ isn’t….unless your solution is to do away with debt.
I agree the current levels are unsustainable, repudiation of the debt WILL happen, one way or another. Solvency will reassert itself the choice is, managed or catastrophe. The powers that be (central banks, EUC, Fed, Abe) have thrown their lot in with ‘catastrophe’ and we are along for the ride.
It must really suck being too hip for the room.
You make me laugh often, McGehee.
“Proof by appeal to conventional acceptability”?
That was so NOT what that was.
“Also, cheers to Lee.
He saw what he saw and he wasn’t moved from fear of being thought stupid when facing the resultant blizzard of bullshit.”
Cheers bh. Fear of being thought stupid disappears once all doubt has been removed. ;-P
Heretic. Keep that up and you’ll be ridiculed for violating the room. And we laughed and laughed and laughed.
Or you might emerge from this blizzard of bullshit.
The organic solution to progressivism is likewise anarcho-capitalism. The solution to the original topic is to remove the private individual from all legal tax hazard.
The solution to the drug war is to stop. The solution to subterfuge and a globe of bad will is to get out. But I’m not proposing these things because establishment conservatives see instead their own props and constructs — and not a little ironically, love funding these enormous failed plans with more of the same fiscal abyss leveraging I’d hoped to discuss here.
They’re not deflected by negative numbers up in the hundreds of trillions because, Program. And numbers with endless zeroes are what being American is all about, as is the half trillion a year in interest paid to globalists. Ben and Paul know this and they’ll tell you too.
I’m not proposing either a gold standard or zero debt systems. I’m proposing a realization that by now this monster is the number one carnivore there is and it exists in defiance of classical liberalism, the nation, and any sense about how systems should seek equilibrium so as to honor a liberty that insists on it to survive.
I’m saying what I said in this thread, and I’ve reduced the simplest element of debt money failure to language even the monetary proggs in the room should have been able to grasp.
Apparently not, although hahahaha and look at the bullshit so I guess it wasn’t all a waste, even if the nation soon shall be. The myth of money supply is ingrained enough that an entire fiscal condition and economy willfully based on a hundred years of driving out the middle class, creating the best crisis yet not to go to waste, and driving wealth to the top and serfdom to the bottom isn’t evident enough to debunk it. From there, of course, we could document oceans of more specific evidence of what’s happening and why but if the core problems aren’t grasped, and if denial is this strong, why bother.
Upthread you mentioned Obama. Just as bad money and Keynesian myth and Socialism are perfect bedfellows, he’s the ultimate system tool so I’m with you. But he’s nowhere near this powerful.
This thread has been informative for me, and it’s confirmed fears that the ostensible right is as wrong on this system and its inevitable trajectory as it has been that old Socialism like government school and the SS system is just great stuff.
The biggest picture says that the nation always had a limited lifespan. Just how and why we’ll only see in hindsight.