All Life Is Problem Solving

Yesterday, as reported in Money News, Moody’s made me laugh, with the following pronouncements: ” . . . it could move a step closer to cutting the U.S. Aaa rating if President Barack Obama’s tax and unemployment benefit package becomes law. . . . “The plan agreed to by Obama and Republican leaders last week […]

[Read more →]

The national debt exists today because when the nation went off the Gold Standard in 1971 and adopted its present non-convertible fiat currency system, Congress did not repeal its mandate requiring that the Government back all its deficit spending with already existing borrowed dollars whose convertibility was covered by our holdings of Gold. This Congressional […]

[Read more →]

I’m sick and tired of hearing progressive icons like Bernie Sanders, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, and many, many others, talking about the evil of leaving an enormous national debt, now at $13 Trillion plus to our Grandchildren. And I’m especially tired of hearing Congresspeople and Senators complaining about this. The reason why I’m tried of […]

[Read more →]

There’s a flood of reaction out there among Progressives and other Democrats criticizing the recent “tax deal” on grounds that President Obama was rolled again and got far too little for his agreement to extend the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy, and agree to Estate tax rates of 35%. I share that opinion. But […]

[Read more →]

Today I was favored with a message from Organizing for America (OFA). They asked me to listen to a video clip from the President explaining the deal he made with the Republicans. The President spent a lot of time explaining the process he’s gone through and the constraints he’s under, and what it was possible […]

[Read more →]

In a reply to my post on a progressive deficit reduction plan, a commenter suggested that holding Federal interest costs at the rate of .0226 in the coming years would “crush” retirees and savers, and throw them under the bus. Presumably, the commenter feels the same about the possibility I brought up of eliminating interest […]

[Read more →]

Even though I deny that there is a deficit/debt/debt-to-GDP ratio problem, I thought I’d get in on the fun everyone is having this month and offer my own deficit reduction plan. It prescribes 1) Keeping average interest rates at 0.0226; 2) finding a way to increase the growth in nominal GDP from an average annual […]

[Read more →]

Self-styled “progressive organizations” and commentators have been releasing their own deficit reduction plans in reply to the plans released by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici, and The Peterson-Pew Commission. These new plans, were released by the Institute for America’s Future, Citizens Commission on Jobs, Deficits, and America’s Economic Future and […]

[Read more →]

In a recent post I wrote about “The Real Solution to the Fiscal Sustainability Problem.” But I was just kidding, folks. That was a solution only for people who think that Fiscal Sustainability means controlling the growth of the national debt, and stabilizing and reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio. That view of Fiscal Sustainability, however, doesn’t […]

[Read more →]

The Problem The biggest problem for Americans in our time is the increasingly dangerous threat to open society posed by the trend toward plutocracy and its effects on the political system. George Soros described the antecedents of these threats in The Age of Fallibility (pp. 100-101): “Gradually, the methods developed for commercial purposes found a […]

[Read more →]