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Flagrancy

to Reason

The sudden emergence of an extraordinary, ruthless, antagonistic flaunting of US power is hard to understand, all the more so since it fits neither with long-tested imperial policies developed during the cold war, nor the interests of the US economy. The policies that have recently prevailed in Washington seem to all outsiders so mad that it is difficult to understand what is really intended. But patently a public assertion of global supremacy by military force is what is in the minds of the people who are at present dominating, or at least half-dominating, the policy-making in Washington. Its purpose remains unclear.

All the old blogs
are gone now

or the people
are different.

    i declare thee:

    Captain Obvious. Henry Blodget has wrapped it up very nicely.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-10-14 22:51:59 CST | link


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-09-19 13:13:02 CST | link


    a kiss-up, kick-down sort of country:

    Yves Smith:

    One frequent and frustrating line that often crops up in the comments section of this blog is that American labor has no hope, it should just accept Chinese wages, since price is all that matters. That line of thinking is wrongheaded on multiple levels. It assumes direct factory labor is the most important cost driver, when for most manufactured goods, it is 11% to 15% of total product cost (and increased coordination costs of much more expensive managers are a significant offset to any savings achieved by using cheaper factory workers in faraway locations). It also assumes cost is the only way to compete, when that is naive on an input as well as a product level. How do these “labor cost is destiny” advocates explain the continued success of export powerhouse Germany? Finally, the offshoring,/outsourcing vogue ignores the riskiness and lower flexibility of extended supply chains.

    This argument is sorely misguided because it serves to exculpate diseased, greedy, and incompetent American managers and executives. In the overwhelming majority of places where I lived in my childhood, a manufacturing plant was the biggest employer in the community. And when I went to business school, manufacturing was still seen as important. Indeed, the rise of Germany and Japan was then seen as due to sclerotic American management not being able to keep up with their innovations in product design and factory management.

    But if you were to ask most people, they’d now blame the fall of American manufacturing on our workers. That scapegoating serves to shift focus from the top of the food chain at a time when executives have managed to greatly widen the gap between their pay and that of the folks reporting to them.

    I'm sure it'll look less like scapegoating after a group backed by 81 major companies -- including McDonald’s, Lowe’s, General Dynamics, American Airlines, IBM and General Mills -- changes the law so that management doesn't have to report its compensation to shareholders.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-09-05 20:30:08 CST | link


    debt:

    Philip Pilkington interviews David Graeber at Naked Capitalism. Graeber mixes it up in the comments, which are worth reading.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-09-01 19:18:47 CST | link


    these french fries are too salty, fucking unions:

    This argument between education reformers Diane Ravitch and Steve Brill on Book TV is great, the host and subject spend much of the interview battling heroic internal struggles against powerful inclinations to rip the other's throat out with their teeth, which makes the otherwise dry recitation of competing facts into something more entertaining, like a boxing match or an episode of jackass.

    It might even be informative, too, but my take away is that even with Brill's final chapter revisions to hundreds of pages of union bashing and the usual "break the union and privatize the schools" organized money approach to looting public education funding, he and his ilk have a thorough ideological commitment to doing nothing about childhood poverty. Impressively they place an even higher priority on that commitment than their commitment to excusing management for the outcomes of contract negotiations and blaming anything they don't like on teachers' unions.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-09-01 15:40:37 CST | link


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-22 20:42:59 CST | link


    oligarchy forever:

    William Hogeland:

    Robert Morris' [the founding father, who declined Washington's appointment to Sec. Treasury and suggested Alexander Hamilton in his stead, etc.] ... daily effort was to crush the American popular-finance movement and elevate the bondholders. ... While Morris and the other investors (yes, "other" -- Morris was not only Congress’s Superintendent of Finance but also perhaps the biggest investor in the congressional debt he "superintended") portrayed their bondholding in terms of patriotic sacrifice, the investing class had actually turned up its nose when Congress first offered bonds in 1776, at a measly 4%, payable in Congress’s poorly managed currency. The investors came in only when Morris arranged for a French loan to underwrite federal bonds at 6%, payable in bills of exchange issued by big European banking houses and backed by their metal reserves, as good as gold. And he got Congress to accept its crap currency in exchange for the bonds! Quite a payday -- for the banking and creditor class.

    Morris did manage to attract investors -- by and large the friends of Robert Morris. He kept the French deal secret but leaked it to his cronies, establishing a blue-chip sector of founding public debt held by high-finance government insiders. Morris then spent a decade trying to get that debt funded via national taxes, "opening the purses of the people," as Morris put it, in order to pay a small group of investors reliable 6%, in the equivalent of metal, tax free.

    ... The important point is that both liberaloid and rightist claims on founding positions are always, by nature, unnuanced, thus false, because the realities of founding positions don’t support anyone’s hopeful foregone conclusions regarding politics today.

    The brain trust ... who framed the Constitution in order to grow the nation by funding a domestic national debt sought deeply regressive taxation and the consolidation of wealth.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-21 16:05:20 CST | link


    social security is a ponzi scheme:

    if it's built on a foundation of fraud.

    And, he should have added, you still don't really know to whom you owe that mortgage payment. Or who legally owns the house. Doomed. There's a little grade in the road. We're going for the coasting record.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-19 01:01:06 CST | link


    three cheers for neoliberal beer:

    Jimmy Carter was our first neoliberal president, antecedent of the world to come, and the problem with neoliberalism is that everything looks like a nail. Deregulation and privatization is the answer to any functioning public system, regardless of whether it makes daily life less bureaucratic or improves market signals or generates any sort of efficiencies at all. Wave the hand and the market will provide, and what it doesn't this or that insufficiently funded allowance will be more than enough to fairly redistribute the gains of the redistribution. Here's your retraining allowance kid, go back to school, work hard, and earn your newly required state certification to be a dog groomer.

    The only unalloyed good I think everybody can agree on, the one 100% success of neonatal neoliberalism, was drug liberalization. I'm going to go enjoy the fruits of our long march to freer beer.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-18 16:57:26 CST | link


    awaken mustakrakish, the lake troll, awaken, awaken, awaken:

    Apparently Warren Buffet said something about his taxes being too low for the 50 billionth time and now everybody suddenly cares, one way or the other.

    Ten years ago Bill Gates Sr. got 120 millionaires to sign his petition opposing the Bush estate tax cuts and their creation of an even worse idle aristocracy than we already have: Buffet refused to sign because it didn't go far enough.

    In 2003 he complained that his property taxes were too low in California, and that the dividend tax cuts were unfair and regressive.

    "If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning," he said in 2004, complaining that effective corporate rates were too low.

    In 2006 people stopped talking about how Buffet should just give more money to the government if he likes taxes so much and instead blathered on about Buffet's gift of much of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. "Isn't that nice," everybody nodded in agreement, "rich people are so awesome."

    In 2007 he complained that his employees were paying twice the effective tax rates that he and his fellow billionaires do, and it is, finally, that complaint that struck at the heart of our nonsensical, indefensible tax structure.

    Many people support a flat tax, calling it a "fair tax". You can ignore the original and subsequent arguments for the progressive taxation of privilege and rents. You can go ahead and ignore the thoughts of the more liberal founding fathers who need not be quoted. You can ignore the more conservative founding fathers, of whom you may need some reminding. You can ignore that the primary expense of the state is, one way or another, the protection of property, and that those who have benefited most by that protection, and likewise have the most to lose, should pay some greater share in return for its favors. You can ignore the uncontroversial economic fact of the decreasing marginal utility of every dollar of income, and that to tax a fair share of the last dollar requires a higher proportional levy than that on the first.

    But nobody comes out and openly supports regressive taxation, because such a policy is morally and ethically and politically depraved, worse itself than the original sin of taxing anybody at all.

    And what Warren Buffet has been complaining about for years is that we have had, for a long time, a regressive tax system, justified in its existence only by the fallacy of argumentum ad accountum, in which the middle and upper classes pay higher effective rates than the kleptocratic class of the uber-rich, who barely pay the effective tax rate of a janitor earning a little over the federal poverty line.

    Reading the commentary on this recent complaint you'd think people just woke up at the bottom of a swamp, unable to fathom the fact that we have an incredibly regressive tax system that robs everybody and gives to the incredibly wealthy, making them incredibly wealthier.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-18 15:41:31 CST | link


    inflation:

    One of the causes of inflation, any textbook will tell you, is a general decrease in supply. Idle, unproductive resources, say 15 million of them, and historically low capacity utilization, will generate inflation no different, all things being equal, than printing too much money to put them back to work.

    I've never witnessed an inflation hawk, or anybody else for that matter, complain about the inflationary force generated by shortfalls in production.

    We could also talk about the CFMA and the Fed's printing money to re-inflate asset prices pushing rich people's money into rolling speculative long positions in commodities markets and pushing up the consumer price index, but even if the financial sector wasn't the pit of unmitigated fraud that it is, you'd expect a little inflation from all this idle capacity after national income has (mostly) recovered: somebody is making money again, but that money is self-evidently chasing fewer goods and services than it could be.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-18 09:42:29 CST | link


    rick perry is a red:

    As I was saying, Republican executives have no problem saying all the wrong things and doing the right thing. Private employment down? Rail against government and increase public employment. The rubes won't care because you invoke the mystic chants of the order of the skewed laffer curve and have the R in front of yer name. They can't be expected to care about facts when there are miracles involved.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-17 12:59:39 CST | link


    SHORTER KRUGMAN:

    "Fears of hyperinflation are good when you create them by printing money to buy treasury debt but they're bad when you create them by printing money to, say, buy treasury debt."

    I'm not completely sold on neo-chartalism, but grant that outside econ textbooks the basic premise is beyond dispute. It's something of a relief that now that Paul Krugman has finally stopped offering strawman arguments that MMT doesn't predict inflation he's instead resorted to making completely incoherent, self-contradictory arguments about the dangers of printing money.

    In any case I'm pretty sure the neo-chartalist responds to inflation (or, presumably, strong signals thereof) by cutting deficits -- is this not their point, that you raise deficits until you hit either some arbitrary level of employment or some arbitrary level of inflation, whichever comes first, not some arbitrary level of fear, "uncertainty", debt ratio, or interest paymens -- so Krugman's new argument is still sort of an Aunt Sally.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-16 15:29:46 CST | link


    well, that's one way of putting it:

    Reviewing the rules on the Affordable Care Act's monthly tax credits (paid directly to the private insurer) for folks below 400% of the federal poverty line Timothy Jost notes that they may end up owing large lump sums in repayments at the end of the year if their annual income rises, and if they end up above the thresh hold they would owe the entire $5,000 subsidy back at the end of the year. This would, needless to say, damage household finances.

    Don McCanne of PNHP comments:

    There is a profusion of complexities in the Affordable Care Act that adversely impact patient-consumers, many of which Professor Jost has described in this and other articles. Although, as an academic, he has limited his advocacy to supporting rules that benefit patients, we don’t have to limit our own advocacy so narrowly.

    The Affordable Care Act is an abomination of inequitable and unjust administrative complexities and waste that can never achieve an equitable health system that serves everyone.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-15 17:27:21 CST | link


    it's crazy, but it just might "work":

    I've been joking for a while that we'd seriously be better off with some wingnut Republican President because since Ford -- and Nixon wasn't all that shy either -- they've done nothing but run huge deficits. They always find some bullshit excuse to ignore the smell of their own shit and blow it out the top, and at this point it's probably more important to run large deficits than, well, insert any remaining pet cause they might actually be worse on than Obama.

    So I enjoyed reading this from Keith Newman:

    [Modern Monetary Theory, neo-chartalism] is not just theoretical. In effect its greatest practitioner, without admitting to it, has been the Republican Party in the U.S., but only when in power: it cuts taxes to the wealthy and increases spending on prisons, the military, and war, and lets the deficit increase. And it works.

    A Democratic President in thrall to Wall Street combined with an intransigent GOP congress is about the worst possible fiscal combination we could have. I'm pretty sure it's worse for financial reform, too, which is more important for anybody who still has a job, but carrying on about that seems greedy when there are tens of millions of people who need income. I prefer moochers and welfare queens to those embroiled in counterproductive toil, so I hesitate to say they "need work". Democratic congress, Republican white house, is the order of the election. It won't do anything to stop our conversion into a banana republic, to the extent that there's anything left to convert, but hey, the republic was doomed anyway.

    Which brings us to a complaint: nothing I've read from the chartalists addresses what an Austrian would call the misallocation of capital or a Keynesian would call who knows what, the "animal spirits" of government directed unutilized resources, perhaps. They have their individual preferences, of course, but the theory seems neither here nor there. Yes, you could put everybody back to work building more houses than we know what to do with and bombing sand into glass like W. did, but what are we going to do with the extra houses and surplus glass? Where are we going to hide the bodies? And the answer springs forth: we will hide the bodies in glass houses.

    update: Ah, it is made explicit, Bill Mitchell:

    The reality is that whatever the government does (using its opportunities) – big or small, surplus or deficit, whatever – will have implications for what the non-government sector does. If they run surpluses then the non-government sector runs deficits. We have to get down to that level of understanding and acceptance before we can discuss other matters that might reflect our values.

    When they talk about financial assets I have to keep reminding myself that they're not talking about real assets, or real liabilities compared to financial liabilities. They're not talking about the market value of the collateral, or the inflation adjusted value of the debt instrument. Fair enough, but can't net financial liabilities be created when you're keeping the books in an ocean of fraud?


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-15 01:54:55 CST | link


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-13 21:36:58 CST | link


    shock doctrinal:

    The question becomes: Why is S&P given so much credence?

    The ratings agency has not been particularly important because of its predictive powers. Ratings agencies were part of a system that urged governments around the world to slash social programs and loosen regulations on business for fear of the wrath of international investors.

    In the early 1990s, according to Canadian investigative journalist Linda McQuaig, Canadian corporate executives encouraged ratings agencies to threaten a downgrade of their nation’s credit as an inducement for cutting social spending and lowering high-end tax rates. It worked.

    And today we are seeing that Republicans use ratings agencies to support their conservative agenda: that the government can’t spend so much on entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security. Benefits of public employee unions must also be slashed, public assets privatized and the disruptive power of unions countered.

    The government, this argument insists, needs to be run like a business — and rated like one. That would make sense to S&P, whose parent company is run by Terry McGraw, who moonlights as a leader of the Washington corporate powerhouse, the Business Roundtable.

    S&P’s downgrade may ultimately provide cover for the Democrats leadership, as well. They now have the excuse that can justify to supporters why they have no choice but to break promises made to senior citizens, unions and the public. For example, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer has been giving speeches for years advocating entitlement cuts.

    So S&P is offering these politicians an excuse for a remarkably unpopular action.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-13 18:51:24 CST | link


    the magical land of matt bai:

    Why does Matt Bai have a job at the New York Times? It's obvious he doesn't read the paper or pay any attention to the news. He despairs of the awful partisan rancor that makes it harder for our leaders to join together in fucking us in the goatass with unity:

    You could have put a lot of Washington Democrats up on that stage, and asked them if they would have accepted $10 in new taxes or new stimulus in exchange for $1 in cuts to Social Security, and you probably would have gotten much the same response: hell, no.

    Obama *just* offered the same cuts to social security that his half-democrat debt commission did, a .03% reduction per year in the COLA, reducing SS by some $112B over the next 10 years (and much, much more in the infinite horizon by which social security is routinely, mistakenly declared bankrupt, thanks to the wonders of compound interest). He offered that $112B in cuts in exchange for an increase of... $1T in new tax revenue over the same period. That's a $1.12 cut to $10 in revenue. The Democrats just fucking offered exactly what Matt Bai postulates here and it was the Republicans, bless them, who said hell no.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-12 13:52:49 CST | link


    better late than never, even if it's too late for most people:

    Biggest fucking no-brainer in this entire clusterfuck finally being considered.

    Converting foreclosures into rentals could have been done before the families were kicked out onto the street, but that'd be socialism for people who need it, not people who bought it.

    This could bring in a couple billion a year in revenue, and by removing inventory from the market shore up home prices far more efficiently than the $20+ billion tax credit or the fuck knows dollar HAMP scam that's subsidizing banks to dick around their customers even more than usual.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-10 02:34:47 CST | link


    that strain of skepticism about the government should probably be taken with a grain of skepticism:

    Some anonymous senior Democrat whines about the mean hippies:

    The role of Democrats should not be to convince people that government is great; it should be to help people reach their potential -- and government is a tool to do that. There has been a strain of skepticism about the government in the American character since the founding. Only the New Deal changed that significantly, but we have been returning to the norm ever since then.

    This is the core of the left's critique -- the country doesn't agree with us, so take what political capital you have and use it to convince people to agree with us. But the presidency is not a Brookings lecture series; it's about governing the country and making a difference.

    Government in the hands of this president is a good tool to help people reach the potential limits of their sanity, perhaps, extraordinarily rendered semi-fatuous or violently insane or just from listening to the worst speech writing in a generation.

    Is it really outside the scope of the job to explain to his clueless constituents what the government does? Damn near half of us think medicare just falls out of the sky like a rainbow of skittles. Easiest marks on the planet and this asshat is pretending to fret over the con. It doesn't cost any political capital to explain what the government spends taxes on while the President is exhorting us that he is powerless to help anybody because governments do not create jobs. He invested his political capital selling out the Treasury to the banks, conning home owners into HAMP, and buying the Heritage Foundation's healthcare reform bill from the insurance and drug sectors. Perhaps that's paying off in campaign donations, but it's not doing much to help anybody else.

    And a Brookings lecture series? This President? I can't call it the pot and the kettle or I'll be called a racist, so we'll merely refer to the appeal to hypocrisy. What is called a speech by this administration is nothing but a maundering lecture of the kind you'd give a six year old who's asking questions you don't know the answers to. 'On the one hand eat your peas, on the other hand tighten your belt. Now, I know some people will say it won't do any good to fill ourselves full of peas first and tighten our belts later, and it's going to be a little unpleasant for everybody, but that is how we will meet the stringent conditions of destiny's victory. Jesus bless the conglomerated banks of 'murka.'


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-07 02:24:18 CST | link


    campaign finance deformities:

    Next the Supreme Court will cite the success of voluntary disclosure when determining whether the government has the authority to enforce transparency requirements -- were it ever again to attempt to require any -- in campaign funding.

    It's sort of perpetually amazing how conservatives will argue for some seemingly sensible, less good alternative one decade and then abandon it the next -- declaring to heaven almighty that it is communism and tyranny -- once liberals are stuck advocating for that alternative rather than accepting something even worse. So we have the Heritage Foundation's mid-90s healthcare reform bill denounced as Kenyan socialism and nowhere to go on campaign finance but opaque volunteerism. By 2020 liberals will be fighting to keep markets self-regulated rather than self-deregulated.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-06 05:05:25 CST | link


    great minds think alike:

    Sam Smith:

    Let's transfer Social Security & Medicare out of their trust funds and into the general budget. Then let's take the budgets of the Pentagon and the War on Terror and put them into a trust fund, complete with employer/employee deductions from each pay check so we'll know how much they are costing us.

    My thoughts almost exactly. We should really just be funding the entire Pentagon apparatus with a surtax that shows up on your paystub for a unified war budget. I think it would cure us of a great deal of the cognitive dissonance that allows conservatives to accept certain insights of Keynes only in the context of military spending.

    Study after study shows that people are grossly misinformed about where their tax dollars go -- they think it's all welfare and foreign aid and corrupt waste (and in the defense budget a great deal is after all exactly that) -- and this gross information failure that creates so much incoherence in our politics could be in large part remedied with simple line-item withholding. Just breaking this chart down at the department level would be a good start. Conservatives will still have a hard time understanding the difference between insurance and welfare programs, and most still won't know what most of these departments actually do with the money, but at least people will look at that pay stub and see some glimmer of reality.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-05 18:36:10 CST | link


    dear closeted socialists, it gets better:


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-04 17:54:40 CST | link


    manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis:

    Civil oligarchy is an impersonal, institutionalized government in which the law is stronger than any individual. ...

    Wealth defense is a constant even in civil-oligarchy regimes that have robust welfare states. In Finland, for example, the top 0.5 percent of the population owns 71.6 percent of the capital market, compared with 41.4 percent in the United States. The Scandanavian countries have high taxes, but these are consumption taxes, which burden the entire citizenry rather than concentrating on the rich. The extremely rich have always managed to ensure that they shared their tax burdens with the merely prosperous. Similarly in America, where the top tax bracket starts at $250,000. Bill Gates pays the same nominal rate as his dentist.

    Once the various methods of tax avoidance are taken into account, it becomes clear that America’s tax system is actually regressive: in 2007, the top 1% of taxpayers paid an effective rate of less than 24%. The top 1/10 of 1% paid less than 22%. The top 400 incomes paid less than 17%. (246) The marginal rate for some hedge fund managers, five of whom earned more than $1 billion in 2007, has been zero, because they operated through offshore partnerships that let them defer taxes. ...

    America’s oligarchs are unusually greedy: the Bush tax cuts, a major source of our huge federal deficit, were spearheaded by rich Republicans who decided that their enormous gains in the 1990s boom just weren’t enough for them. Winters can’t account for this, because, as he himself shows, oligarchy is a constant across civil regimes. America’s fetishizing of the wealthy and powerful, its contempt for the weak and needy, and its eagerness to thwart its own legitimizing narrative of equal opportunity (as I write this, college aid for the poor has just barely escaped the budget ax), needs a different explanation....

    Winters offers a valuable perspective on how inequality persists, but he can’t explain the peculiar cruelties of modern American politics.

    I think I find this dissuasive. Since the founding of the republic we've had something of an oligarchy, by this standard, and the problem we face now is an oligarchy that's been muscled over by the kleptocracy of high finance and doesn't seem to realize it.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-04 17:21:53 CST | link


    managing government finances "just like families do":

    What really irritates me is that you know that a sizeable majority of these tools going on about austerity and managing household finances have never seen a credit card bill they couldn't pay in their fucking life. And a majority of the rest are actually the kind of people who run up a million dollar bill at a jeweller's just because they can.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-04 15:51:05 CST | link


    labor gap :

    if the employment to population ratio were the same as it was before the banks destroyed the economy we'd have 12 million more jobs right now. If the employment to population ratio stays where it is now that number will keep rising by about 1.8 million per year due to population growth. The loss in tax receipts from, say, 12 million shitty $35k/yr jobs, is approximately the $100 billion they've cut from the budget. We've done fucked ourselves Jim, get up and hump yourself.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-04 13:57:55 CST | link


    Dear Wall Street:

    It's your bed, we wish you'd unchain us from the bedposts so you could sleep in it.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-04 13:22:32 CST | link


    they said it couldn't be done:

    Bank offering negative interest to depositors.

    The cost of borrowing overnight in this market tumbled below zero Thursday, after starting the day at around 0.08%.

    That's some serious flight from risk.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-04 13:04:16 CST | link


    and always whirling, whirling, whirling:

    This bit of official GOP agitprop is so on target and so withering you kind of have to give them some credit: "Pivoting in circles". As near as I can tell the press corps' cliche of calling a politician's attempt to talk about something else not a segue or spin or turn but a "pivot" started with W, but I guess that's just another way in which the Barry never falls far from the Shrub.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-04 01:04:43 CST | link


    "It was the price of liberty. The faith of America has been repeatedly pledged for it, and with solemnities, that give peculiar force to the obligation":

    William Hogeland on 'constitutional conservatives' and the public debt:

    The Constitution came about precisely to enable a newly large government -- a national one -- to tax all Americans for the specific purpose of funding a large public debt. Neither Alexander Hamilton nor his mentor the financier Robert Morris made any bones about that purpose; James Madison was among their closest allies; and Edmund Randolph of Virginia opened the Constitutional Convention by charging the delegates to redress the country’s failure to fund -- not pay off, fund -- the public debt, by creating a national government.

    Beginning during the War of Independence, and continuing throughout the 1780s, American nationalists committed themselves to a small class of upscale high financiers (largely identical with the American nationalists), who had bought bonds from the confederation Congress in hopes of earning regular, tax-free, 6% interest payments -- not in the Congress’s crashing paper currency but in hard, cold metal or its equivalent, stable bills of exchange. Morris, Hamilton, Madison, and others believed that swelling the debt to immense proportions would make a coherent nation out of thirteen squabbling states and make that nation a player on the world economic stage. Their plan to do so depended partly on making military-officer pay a pension, thus turning the entire officer class into public bondholders -- and giving Congress new power to tax all Americans to support that debt.

    Hamilton is often reflexively presented as finding inventive ways to pay down the national debt. His real accomplishments were of course “funding and assumption” -- absorbing the states’ war debts in the federal one and funding that huge obligation via nationally collected and nationally enforced taxes.

    Hence the all-important provisions of the Constitution giving Congress very broad powers to tax and acquire debt. To 18th-century American nationalists across the political spectrum -- to our founders and framers, that is, from Hamilton to Madison, from Morris to Randolph, from the financiers to the planters -- national taxing and borrowing were ineluctably connected to the very purpose of national government.

    Nobody has to like it. But the original intent of the Constitution involved sustaining and managing public debt via taxation.

    ...

    It’s hard to imagine liberals bringing to debt-ceiling and balanced-budget debates the painful realpolitik of our national origins, which show the Constitution existing, originally, to finance the investing class and yoke that class’s interest (in every sense) to national power.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-02 20:06:55 CST | link


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Maps of War
StrategyPage
UN Peacekeeping

national defense
Defense and the National Interest
Inspector General of the DOD [mil]
Nuclear Policy Research Institute
Sunshine Project

military assistance
Econ. Allied for Arms Reduction
Fed. of American Scientists
[us arms transfers]
[gov. documents, crs]
Defense Security Cooperation Agency [mil]
[arms sales notification]
[customer guide]
[EDA Database]

econopolitics
Center for Economic and Policy Research
Center for Popular Economics
Congressional Research Center
Drumm Major Institute
Earth Institute
Economic Policy Institute
Focus on the Global South
Global Trade Watch
inequality.org
Levy Institute
Molinari Institute
Political Economy Research Institute
real-world economics review
U-Tex Inequality Project - UTIP

pro-globalization
capital ownership group
clcr
itdg
global justice movement
ripess
world social forum

anti-globalization
Bretton Woods Project
FTAA
IMF
OECD
WB
WTO

sustainable development
Apollo Alliance
CSF
Oxfam International

human rights
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
International Crisis Group
Witness

human relief
CIVIC
DWB/MSF
ICRC
Mercy Corps
UNICEF

anti-federalism
Second Vermont Republic

palestine
Breaking the Silence.
Courage to Refuse.
Foundation for Middle East Peace.
If Americans Knew.
International Solidarty.

peace, drugs, and war
American Friends Service Committee
American Gulf War Vets
Drug Policy Alliance
Economists for Peace and Security
Iraq Veterans Against the War
Friends Committee on National Legislation
From the Wilderness
Nonviolence International
Notre Dame's Sanctions Project
Traprock Peace Center
Veterans Against the Iraq War

civil liberties
ACLU
Center for Constitutional Rights
Elec. Freedom Foundation [EFF]
Elec. Privacy Info Center [EPIC]
Privacy International

state corruption
Transparency International

gender equality
RAWA
NOW

racial equality
NAACP

labour
American Rights at Work
Fair Trade Federation [*]
International Centre for Prison Studies
International Confederation of Trade Unions
International Labor Rights Fund
Labour Research Association
SweatShop Watch
Take Back Your Time
Work Less Party

land
Ag Policy Center
Center for Rural Affairs
Corporate Agribusiness Examiner
Groundswell
Environmental Working Group

ecology
carbontradewatch
Basel Action Network
Buffalo Field Campaign
EPA
Global Warming in Pictures
Journal of Int. Wildlife Law and Policy
Organization & Environment
North Pole Observatory
Republicans for Environmental Protection
Rocky Mountain Institutes
Society for Ecological Restoration
Union of Concerned Scientists
World Wildlife Fund, International

schooling
Education Commission of the States
NCES
PBS - School Funding

unschooling
Growing Without Schooling
Sudbury Valley School

the republic
Center for Responsibe Politics
Century Foundation
CREW
Democratic Freedom Caucus
FairVote: Election Reform
Federal Election Commission
Follow the Oil Money
Open Congress
Government Information Awareness

death and taxes
Taxpayers for Common Sense
Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights

faith in social justice
Ontario Consultants
faithful america
American Council for Judaism
Jewish Council on Urban Affairs

anti-absurdo-capitalism
Reclaim Democracy

hangdogs and bloodhounds
Alternative Press Center
Democratic Media
Consumers Union
CorpWatch
FAIR
Journal of Electronic Publishing
Media Lens
Media Matters
Media Reform Network
Media Transparency
MoveOn
Project Censored
PR Watch
Public Citizen
Spinsanity

health
physicians for a national health program
healthcare now!
single payer action

technology
Center for Science in the Public Interest
Free Software Foundation
Register
Science
Slashdot
The Daily WTF
Worse Than Failure

polling
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
Harris Poll
PEW Research Center [party identification]
PIPA
Polling Report
PollKatz - George II Averages
Polstate - Illlinois
National Council of Public Polls
RetroPoll

econ data
Center For International Comparisons
[Penn World Tables]
BEA Digital Library
Data Buffet
Derived M3
Economic Time Series
Executive Compensation Data
Gapminder World
GPI: Progress Indicator
Groningen Growth & Development Center [GDP Per Hour]
Inflation Calculator
EPI JobWatch
Luxemborg Income Study
Purchase Power Parity adjusted GDP and Per Capita GDP
UN Human Development Indicators
UN Population Info Network
UN World Population Database
US Bureau of Labor Statistics
[real earnings]
[Employment Situation Summary]
[Legacy Statistical Graphs]
US Bureau of Economic Statistics
US Dollar Index (CEC)
US International Trade Commision: Tariff Info Center
World Bank Development Data
World Bank Inequality Data

government services
Bureau of Democracy
Census Bureau
Congressional Budget Office
General Accounting Office
Office of Foreign Assets Control
National Health Expenditure Data

sanitized
Congressional Research Service
cryptome
Harvard Project on Cold War Studies
NARA (CIA)
National Security Archives
NSA @ Chadwyck
Public Information Research
Studies in Intelligence, CIA

reference desk
US Government Spending
Nation Master Country Statistics
Polity IV Project
1up Info Country Guide
Columbia Encyclopedia
dkosopedia
Hartford World History Archives
Investor Glossary
Library of Congress
The Presidential Recording Center
ReadPrint Library
Snopes Urban Legends
Wayback Machine
White, Matt - 20th Century
Wikipedia
WHOSIS
World Info by E.G. Matthews

online libraries
Project Gutenberg
Cornell's 'Making of America'

the gospel according to labour
anarchist archives
anarchist FAQ
anarchism.net
anarcho-syndicalism 101
mutualism
the voluntaryist

beards and mops
benjamin tucker
joseph proudhon
lysander spooner
lucy parsons
mother jones
the labadie collection

from the shell of the old
Arizmendi Bakery
Ithaca Health Alliance
Mondragon CC
South End Press
US Fed. of Worker Cooperatives