guest post by Joel O’Bryan PhD
NPR news is running this story on Green New Deal financing by writer Scott Horsley:
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled out her “Green New Deal,” calling for clean energy, universal health care and guaranteed jobs, one of the first questions she got was: How do you plan to pay for it?
The New York Democrat argued that ambitious programs can easily be financed through deficit spending.
“I think the first thing that we need to do is kind of break the mistaken idea that taxes pay for 100% of government expenditure,” Ocasio-Cortez told NPR’s Morning Edition in February.
In doing so, she shined a spotlight on a once-obscure brand of economics known as “modern monetary theory,” or MMT.
The NPR story by Mr Horsley goes on to try to describe in populist terms what MMT is:
There was something of an Oprah effect when she (AO-C) said that,” said economist Stephanie Kelton of Stony Brook University. “People immediately probably started Googling ‘modern monetary theory’ to find out what she was referring to.
Run that Google search and you’ll quickly find Kelton herself. The economist, who advised Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, is one of the best-known evangelists for the theory. Kelton says paying for big government programs is the easy part. If Congress has the will, the Federal Reserve can effectively print the money.
If Congress authorizes a few billion dollars of additional spending, or a few hundred billion dollars, then the Fed’s job is to make sure that those checks don’t bounce,” Kelton told NPR.
Well, right there our “economics expert”, the person who advised Socialist Bernie Sanders, tells a whopper. While the US Congress can and does spend with abandon, it is not the job of the Federal Reserve to “fund the government and “make sure that those checks don’t bounce.” That job goes to the US Treasury, an executive branch under the Secretary of the Treasury, reporting to the President.
The roles of the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury are fundamentally different. The US Treasury has existed since the US was founded in 1789, the first Secretary of Treasury being Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the US Constitution. The US Treasury manages revenues (via the IRS primarily, but also things like import duties) and pays (via revenues and borrowing) the bills for appropriations made by Congress – it is the US Treasury that actually writes the checks to pay the bills. The US constitution expressly says this in the Appropriations Clause:
“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”
Article I, Section 9, Clause 7
Secretary Hamilton brought discipline to the young US Government by ensuring war debts were paid to foreign governments. This earned the US government much needed international trust and future support when the British were still intent on re-taking the “colonies” when the time was right. Without that trust, things might have turned out much different in the War of 1812 when the US had to repeal the British Army from US soil once again. International financial trust is vitally important to the strategic position of any nation in our interconnected world today even more so than in 1812.
Since its creation in 1913 by an act from Congress, the Federal Reserve is a quasi-independent agency that is congressionally empowered to promote the stability of the US dollar. Congress’s latest amendment to that act directs the Federal Reserve to “Promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”
The Fed carries out this responsibility primarily via adjusting short term interest rates that banks and chartered financial institutions are charged for over-night loans and how much they’ll receive in interest for “parking” their liquidity (funds not invested elsewhere) with the Federal Reserve banking apparatus. Via these many complex banking transactions, the Fed’s rate controls are the levers on the amount of US dollars flowing in the banking system, and thus encouraging economic growth or pulling it back to keep inflation in check and thus stabilizing the US dollar’s value. The Fed currently does not have a role in “to make sure that those checks don’t bounce” as Ms Kelton falsely claims. That is the US Treasury’s job — always has been, and unless some serious amendment of the US Constitution occurs, it always will be.
That Ms Kelton, supposedly a highly educated academic, makes such a fundamental mischaracterization of the role of the Federal Reserve simply cannot be chalked up to ignorance. I’ll leave it to the reader to ascertain what the proper characterization of Ms Kelton’s assertion might be. That Scott Horsley of NPR, a long-time reporter there, would repeat her mis-characterization of the Fed without challenging it, as a journalist should do when dealt an obvious whopper, likely speaks to Mr Horsley’s motives and/or his own ideological blinders.
…
Now back to the topic of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and how it’s adoption by the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the US Treasury via Congressional spending would (not “might”) fundamentally alter our entire financial system stability and the promise the US Treasury makes when other’s buy-up US debt instruments in order to fund US government deficit spending as envision by GND and MMT advocates.
To start one must understand the foundational difference of monetary policy versus fiscal policy. Monetary policy is generally consider the setting short-term interest rates to control the amount of liquidity in the banking system. In the longer term this serves to stabilize the US dollar’s value relative to foreign currencies by controlling inflationary growth. The Fed is supposed to carry out these rate actions independent of concerns or desires from the two political branches, Congress and the US President, and it generally does so for themes part.
On the other hand, Fiscal Policy is set by the US Congress via appropriations (spending) and authorizations to the US Treasury to borrow money (via sales of bonds, T-bills, etc). A current news topic lately is indeed the current “debt ceiling” authorized by Congress to the US Treasury to borrow to pay the bills is rapidly being approached again according to recent reporting on discussions between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. But that’s another story, for another time.
The key point is the US Treasury must borrow (offer bonds/T-bills/notes to buyers at interest rates to attract them to the auctions with their money) to fund deficit spending as part the US Congress’s fiscal policy for the federal government. In the bond market where the Treasury operates everyday, the buyer’s demand a suitable rate of return on the money they lend to US Government. But without the trust that US government won’t just “start printing money” on wild spending demands from Congress, many lenders wouldn’t endure the risk and would walk away and put their money elsewhere to work for them. Those lenders that don’t walk-away will demand very high interest rates under the very real risk of high inflation/erosion of US dollar value compared to other currencies like the Euro, the Japanese Yen, etc. Such high interest rates to the US Treasury sales it would set in motion what is termed “fiscal dominance” at the Federal reserve. Fiscal dominance is where normal monetary policy of dollar stability, controlling inflation concerns are replaced by simply a re-write of the Fed charter by Congress to simply “assist the US Treasury in printing money.” In other words, the fiscal demands of paying for things like GND and Medicare-for-All overrides the normal monetary policy of dollar stability, thus the term “Fiscal Dominance” is very bad place for a government to find itself. As the downward spiral would be a trap that would be extremely painful to reverse.
Once the bond market’s confidence in the US Government’s “full faith and credit” is shattered by an adoption of MMT to pay for everything the Progressives want, high inflation will return to the US, just as it was in the late 1970’s economic malaise of “stag-flation”. Maybe even hyper-inflation if the economic insanity goes on too long. This is because any human run market is governed as much by human behavior and psychology as it is real values. Just look at how the crypto-currencies (Bitcoin, etc) undergo daily wild swings simply based on psychology for proof of that statement. And long-term values of the US dollar would be shattered by simply printing dollars, regardless of what useful idiots Ms Kelton, Bernie Sanders, or AO-C claim.
High inflation (and its worse form, hyper-inflation) rapidly destroys savings accounts as bank CD and money market interest rates do not keep up with the rising cost of living for those living on their fixed incomes and retirement accounts. This is how the Left intends on stealing the Trillions of dollars the US middle class has tucked-away in their IRA’s and 401k’s. They don’t need to change the laws on IRAs or 401k to actually taking the money via altered tax codes, that would provoke a vicious middle class backlash at the ballot box for Democrats. The Progressives simply plan on doing it by stealth, by adopting MMT which will destroy private retirement accounts’ values with high (hyper) inflation as they print Trillions of dollars without going to bond markets to pay for every socialist wish list item they can imagine to buy more political power, and leaving the Federal Reserve powerless to stabilize a plummeting US dollar value on the world’s currency markets.
This is exactly how Venezuelans were lured to support Hugo Chavez’s socialism for so many years as their country lurched towards the ruin it now suffers, by promising people free stuff while the government stole their future and their savings from Venezuela’s once vibrant middle class right under their noses. It was all fun and good times until they literally ran out of OPM (the bank accounts they were stealth stealing from essentially became worthless via inflation). It just happened faster in Venezuela than it would in the US because they had to borrow money in foreign currency. That the US has what many economists call a “fiat” currency doesn’t change that ultimate dynamic, it just would delay the outcome, and make a recovery from an MMT adoption catastrophe even harder than Venezuela’s will ultimately prove to be.
That Socialist Bernie Sanders openly admired and praised the Chavez government’s stealing their citizens’ futures is also why he embraced the economic theft of MMT for the US, as advocated by Ms Kelton at Stony Brook his campaign economic policy advisor in 2016. And it is now MMT that the economic illiterates like Congressperson Ocasio-Cortez (a Sander’s ally) also embraces to “pay” for their Green New Deal destruction of the US economy and work ethic … Venezuela-style.
Climate Change and the “green” policy prescriptions offered for it have not been about the “science” for several decades now. Climate Change is the economic vehicle by which progressive democrats and outright socialists like Sanders and AO-C intend to take-over the country. They are using irrational “climate crisis” fear-mongering on an ill-informed populace, promises of OPM-paid “free stuff” which thus they will drive the US into the dirt with all the misery, despair, and deprivation that socialism always brings. MMT is magical money drug that they intend to use to bring that destruction in the pursuit of their raw political power.
Joel O’Bryan, PhD
Tucson, Arizona
AOC is a bimbo. I’m sure that she thinks money comes from the ATM. The more twaddle she and her bestie Bernie spout, the more convinced I am that he is not the only incompetent twit in the room. He’s simply one of many, and she is right behind him in line.
She has a degree in international economics? How did she manage that? Who did she snowball into giving her that? As dumb as she is about the world in general, and the fact that she’s doing what her “handlers” tell her to do, she has the lasting value of a wad of dried chewing gum.
However, the louder she and Bernie shout, the more aware we can be (if we so choose) of the damage they will cause. If she wants to turn a thriving economy into a cesspit, we need that awareness to push her right into failure.
Never take anything for granted. It’s too easy to lose what you value most.
Thanks for the article.
As horrifying as it is, AOC graduated from Boston University. Well, some of us have considered BU to be hopelessly overrated for decades. Now we have firm empirical proof that a BU education confers negative educational value, a situation once considered impossible. It was always a debatable proposition as to whether an education could make you smarter. Now it is obvious that an education can make you dumber.
Her degree is two-fold – International Relations, and then, Economics.
The International Relations portion explains her chumming around with those vicious anti-Semites and Israel haters who are also part of AOC + 3.
The Economics portion explains her BFF status with the communist Bernie.
Word on the street in Boston is that AOC went by the name of Sandy Cortez. No need for Pretentious-First-Name Hyphenated-Last-Name.
Boston University has a lot to answer for with AOC.
There is a cautionary tale here as well. What if BU does the the Sciences that it has done to the Liberal Arts, which is producing graduates with negative knowledge? If BU produces Biology, chemistry, physics graduates with the same negative knowledge, within 10 years our modern high tech society will collapse into a near singularity then explode as the core goes Nova.
This is the true warning of AOC and Boston University.
‘The Congressional Excess Card”
Don’t leave home without it!
Clerk: “Will that be cash or charge?
General Custer: “Charge!!!”
Just more of the Progressive War on the poor and middle class.
A primer on what MMT is and is not, is an article by Karl Smith (descendant of Adam?) in National Review The Uses and Abuses of Modern Monetary Theory. Article is at
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/modern-monetary-theory-abuses-and-uses/
My synopsis https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/01/13/mmt-magical-money-theory/
Minor spelling error: “…when the US had to repeal the British Army from US soil once again…”. Should be repel
Maybe they were trying to de-legitimize the British Army?
I remember my teacher in my HS freshman Political Science class back in ’68 or ’69 saying that, “The beauty of deficit spending is that you owe the money to yourself.”
That didn’t make sense then. It doesn’t make sense now.
I don’t know about inflation. I do know that the value of money has decreased dramatically. For instance, in the 1950’s, a family could have a nice home and live comfortably off a single income. Today, in some areas both husband and wife have to work long hours to pay for place not much bigger than a hotel room. I have met many people who lived in New England, sold their home that they were able to buy when the value of the dollar was higher, move to one of the southern states and buy a bigger house with enough money leftover to significantly add to their retirement.
I don’t know about inflation. But if you ask me, I believe it has been massively understated and it is different for different parts of the country.
I’m in the process of selling my small (2 bed 1 bath) house in metro Boston and moving to Phoenix where I can buy a 3 bed 2 bath house for about 80% if the market price for my current house. And by way of a bonus, pay 1/3 as much in RE taxes.
I’ve been in my current house for 21 years — I’d have paid it off if I hadn’t replaced the roof and renovated the bathroom in the past 2 years. Oh well…
Forward to our glorious tomorrow…
http://holocaustonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/weimar-currency.jpg
The world has been here before… but this time the jew haters advocating national scale socialism are advocating economic destruction rather than profiting from it…
The more pertinent question is why AOC thinks the Green New Deal needs to spend all that money just to reduce carbon emissions by a gigantic amount. Electric cars are the obvious future and there is no need for govt to spend money for the transition of the fleet – it will occur naturally. As to power production, we already have 30% carbon free power via conventional nuclear and hydro. Disregard solar and wind – they aren’t needed or desired for the electrical grid. The future power will come from molten salt nuclear reactors and they can be built and installed very rapidly, practically anywhere. Less than a trillion dollars will build enough molten salt reactors to provide 70% of current demand plus the demand required by an electrical transportation fleet.
Voila! Obama spent two $trillion during one of his terms and accomplished nothing.
It is not about creating carbon free power but about creating very expensive power. A former US president wanted it to sky rocket.
Joel
Who – what holds the current 22 trillion, and advancing by 1.2 trillion this year, and continuing to accelerate, USA debt.
Does the Federal reserve supplt-support any of that debt?
Regards
Of total, 73% was public debt last year, of which 40% was owned by foreign investors and governments, for 29.2% overall.
https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124
Excellent article Joel. I would like your opinion on the current push for the minimum wage to be $15/hr.
In my view, that is nothing more than a SS take increase without the political pain of actually having to pass a tax hike. If everyone who currently makes less that $15/hr gets the pay increase, the federal government gets a massive influx of SS dollars. And that increase comes directly out of the pocket of all business owners. Not only do the businesses have to fund the wage increase, they must match the SS deduction taken from the employee. All without any increase in productivity or gross income to balance the new expenditure.
It will make everything you buy more expensive also for those people now earning 15 dollars. It will make it much more difficult to find a job for those without skills not worth the 15 dollars they cost. Many will lose their job and some businesses could even close or leave the country. So it will be a lose lose result.
<blockquote.and it generally does so for themes part.
“for the most part” perhaps?
Auto complete is killing ya dude.
Joel,
Thanks so much for the overview. Well done. I’m having trouble understanding the connection between MMT and the devaluation of middle America’s savings. I mean, I understand that savings would be effectively wiped out by MMT, I just don’t understand how that equates to “theft” by the government.
I assumed that the devaluation is more of a Thanos-snap than a theft…all the wealth vanishing out of existence rather than being consumed by the government. Can you offer any additional insight into this so I can understand it better?
Thanks,
rip
Get a better spell checker. So many misspelled words.
Joel’s summary starts with AOC’s statement about a concept that taxpayers pay “100% of government expenditure”.
Which reminds of Ludvig von Mises quip that if government can obtain all the funding it needs through the printing press, then taxation only exists to confiscate wealth. That’s from his weighty “On Human Action”.
With a bachelors in Geophysics I got into mining exploration and made some money on a stock deal. Rather than working in the bush I joined an investment dealer, more than 50 years ago. In the early 1970s I got interested in how the financial markets really work. Spent about 6 month reading economics. Wrong! This is essentially the history of ideas.
The history of financial markets is profound. Booms and busts. And on severe examples of the latter some intellectual will come up with the theory that more credit from some invented agency will make a credit contraction go away.
The 1618 Crash was severe with the hardship of high unemployment, Edward Misselden theorized that more credit would make it go away. The reckless banker, John Law, said as much in the early 1700s. Then the esteemed editor of the “The Economist” said the same thing in his “Lombard Street” published in 1873 at the height of that bubble. As usual the contraction was lengthy and in 1884, Brit economists began calling it the “Great Depression”. This lasted until 1896 and was still being analyzed as the “Great Depression” until as late as 1939. When intellectuals were at last diverted by the next Great Depression.
Then with the Post-1929 contraction, Keynes confected the same stuff as Misselden. Hayack has stated that Keynes was ignorant of financial history.
Market history records the big events, which recur.
Boom in commodities ( 1711 and 1929 are examples. Then a great bubble (1720 and 1929). There are four in between and the key commodity boom completed in 2008 and another great bubble seems to be completing at about a decade out.
All of the great bubbles were followed by lengthy contractions and high unemployment.
In setting yet more recurring patterns, all five of the great bubbles as they occurred in London peaked in May-June. After churning around in the summer, all, repeat all, crashed in the fall.
Financial market history was on the path to a magnificent bubble, which is being accomplished.
It now seems to be on the path to a classic contraction, the first step of which would be the sudden discovery of a liquidity problem after late August.
This will trash the current follies of central banking which is approaching MMT anyway. But such notions have been around since at least 1618.
Some of this history can be reviewed at
http://www.bobhoye.com
Evidently no one remembers when Germany printed excessive amounts of money to pay war reparations. Inflation got so bad it required a wheel barrow or more full of money to buy a single loaf of bread.
My step-Grandpa came to the US between WW1 and WW2.
He said he remembers when the price of a glass of beer went from 4000 marks to 8000 marks overnight.
Such conditions set the stage for the power struggle between the Russian backed Communist and the “home-grown” Nazis.
(I feel a “moderation” coming on.8-)
Gosh, nobody here seems to know any history. Germany did NOT print excessive amounts of money to pay war reparations. You think the allies would have accepted marks in payment? They wanted gold which Germany did not have. The bill for financial reparations hung around until Hitler said, “Fogedda about it.”
During and right after WWI over 1,000,000 Germans died from starvation. Germany simply did not have enough arable land to feed its people and the allied sea blockade prevented it buying it elsewhere. Food prices went through the roof. Then there were reparations in kind which required Germany to send steel and cattle to France and the UK. But these were the only things that Germany was producing in any quantity. When Germany failed to send the steel, in 1923, France invaded the Ruhr and seized the steel mills. They forced the workers to work without pay and took the steel back to France. There was clearly no way to increase S. But people were starving. So the Weimar government began to print money. Of course, this raised prices further and we got 1,000,000,000 mark stamps. But it is important to note that inflation caused the printing of money. Then the printing of money caused more inflation.
History shows that hyperinflation is not caused by the excess printing of money, by excess government spending, but by some other factor. Then as prices rise, governments do begin printing money, usually because its citizens are starving, but the economy is constrained so this exacerbates the inflation. Let’s look at some examples:
In 1972, the anchovy harvest off the coast of Peru failed. Since anchovies form one of the principal component of livestock feed, ranchers had to buy other food like corn & wheat to feed their valuable stock. This shortage raised the price of food worldwide. Then we had the oil embargo which not only raised the price of all products made from oil, but more generally of all products that had to be transported. Adding more money to the economy would not have increased production and just would have raised prices even further.
In Venezuela, oil was practically their only product. When the price of oil fell 60%, S fell correspondingly, and they got instant hyperinflation which they exacerbated by printing more money.
In Zimbabwe, the farms were taken from those who knew how to run them and given to those who didn’t. S fell, and printing more money could not increase it.
And so on.
I forgot to say that S is production.
My mind must have made all that up about ‘wheelbarrow loads of marks to buy bread’ then.
Why not cite as being in error the poorly written history (in text books) we were force-fed instead?
How am I supposed to know how you learned all the false stuff you know? You might have made it up.
Try google before commenting.
Anyway you seemed to have missed my main point that the Weimar inflation was not CAUSED by the excessive printing of money. Excessive amounts of printing was done in response to inflation caused by the shortage of food. That caused further inflation.
re: Leonard Charlap
“How am I supposed to know how you learned all the false stuff you know? You might have made it up.”
Because I’m telling you; I don’t have ‘a dog in the race’; when it comes to a German inflationary period after WW1 and before WW2 so it makes no difference to me. The argument you have, therefore, is the HISTORY as WRITTEN by others and NOT my recall or REPRESENTATION of same.
“Try google before commenting.”
Non-sequitur; Google does not access my memory, man; I recall IMAGES from the damned TEXTBOOKS, man.
“Anyway you seemed to have missed my main point that the Weimar inflation was not CAUSED by the excessive printing of money. Excessive amounts of printing was done in response to inflation caused by the shortage of food. That caused further inflation.”
At this point, I think you are in error on all this. Change my mind; Cite some “period” articles translated from original German or something … At the moment, and for the time being, you are coming off as a “goof ball”.
I am not sure what you doubt. That a million Germans died from starvation? That Germany had to pay reparations in kind? That Germany productive capacity was ruined by the war especially in regards to food?
I thought we were talking about MMT. It says that if you create money when the economy is constrained, that will cause inflation. I am saying that Weimar is an example of this, not a counterexample to MMT.
Also I said Germany printed money anyway because it had an humanitarian crisis. People were starving.
You claim of “wheelbarrows full of money” in no way contradicts any I said. What does contradict history is that Germany printed money to pay the financial reparations. The Treaty of Versailles (signed in 1919) and the 1921 London Schedule of Payments required Germany to pay 132 billion GOLD marks in reparations to cover civilian damage caused during the war. They could not PRINT GOLD marks. In 1933 Chancellor Adolf Hitler cancelled all payments. They had only paid about 19 or 20 billion marks at that point.
There are tons of references. A standard is Boemeke, Manfred F.; Feldman, Gerald D. & Glaser, Elisabeth, eds. (1998). Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-62132-8. Look at page 424.
The problem with this article is that IRAs and 401Ks would not decrease in value during inflation. On the contrary, they would increase in value, because inflation is a general increase in prices. Most of the holders of financial assets are the wealthy and old. Meanwhile, the poor and young earn cash wages and have most of their savings im cash with little to no assets. Therefore, they would lost their purchasing power and the value of their savings as a result of inflation.
Of course they would decrease in value. The monetary amount would be the same but the value of that monetary amount would decline.
Deficit spend all you want. The Net Interest was $240 Billion in 2016. It could be $500 Billion in 2020, nearly 100% increase in 4 years.
Mask everything else, but Net Interest payments will eat up the budget and crowd out all the feel good programs very quickly.
Someone should point out to AOC that when the Weimar Republic tried this, they ended up with the real Hitler.
Hitler was in Jail. He came to power in 1933 after the start of the Great Depression which was DEFLATION, not INFLATION.
Republicans and the few responsible Democrats in the House have been trying to broadcast the seriousness of the Debt Crisis all summer (a real potential country killer…and world economy killer).
The MSM easily kills this communication effort by simply ignoring the issue…no coverage…no discussion. The press will be the economic death of us…and is working 24/7/365 to destroy our basic freedoms. Anyone not fighting the press today is unAmerican.
Crucially, Trump has not been directing any energy (Tweets, etc.) on behalf of this critical issue. It’s not a fun issue to run on…telling parasites that they will have to back off…telling producers that they will be asked to pay more…telling predators that their prey is broke. A Trunp second term would open the door for some real action, but I’m not optimistic. If the Democrats win…you’d best find some acreage to grow some survival food on.
The profligate Democrats love the prospects of an economic collapse. They (foolishly) see the coming economic collapse as a great opportunity for taking over power with false promises of a GRAND SOCIALIST RECOVERY. Of course, this will only prolong the misery nearly forever…just like the Roosevelt New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by a decade (saved by a bloody war).
The connection between MMT and socialism is tenuous at best. MMT actually acknowledges the connection between budget deficits and inflation and therefore interest rates. What the MMT “experts” fail to recognize is the importance of productivity and productivity growth. There is a canyon of difference between borrowing money to enhance productivity and borrowing money while stifling productivity.
MMT is probably, for the most part, correct. The mistake is thinking that it can be used to justify reckless economic policy
The only thing I would add to your thorough explanation Joel, is that AOC, Sanders, possibly Pelosi and Schumer, Trudeau, Macron, and many other ‘leaders’ are Globalists. They are not Democrats, Liberals (Canadian government) etc. They are supporters and promoters of the UN’s (and EU’s) efforts to control humanity through one or two ‘world governments’. It is the latest default to Tyranny and Oppression that is humanity’s entire history, until Freedom and Democracy came along recently. As jefferson said,” the Price of Freedom is Vigilance”. Globalists, as all other Tyrants before them as well as present-day dictators, do not trust citizens of countries to ‘do what Globalists think is best for the planet’. Hence, always through deception, they plot and strategize how to gain power, because they couldn’t persuade anyone used to individual freedom to go along with their plan to re-take power from citizens and have it only in government.
I agree with you that ‘climate change’ is the main vehicle that Globalists are using to transfer wealth to fund their Globalist Agenda of ‘sustainable everything’ to ‘save the planet’ from Humanity. Trudeau can’t open his mouth without mentioning ‘climate change and emmissions’, and his government bought a proposed pipeline owned by private industry – so that it would never be built, while pretending he is going to get it built. At the same quashing all other proposed new pipelines in Canada by supporting environmentalists/Indigenous objections. Any amount of deception is justified to Globalists – because they see themselves as more knowledgable, competent, and morally superior to ordinary citizens.
For years now, I have been wanting to get a few thousand Zimbabwean million dollar bills (billion dollar bills would be acceptable, too) and hand them out in poor neighborhoods, on buses, etc.
Who wants a million dollars?
To teach them that what they really want is goods and services–and somebody has to produce those.
When producers can keep more than half of what they make (80% is better), then there is abundance for everybody.
Clean energy is an imaginary carrot and eco-totalitarian world government is the goddamn stick! The fascist green new deal is insane but everyone’s covering it like it’s not. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes without the little boy, so on and on it goes with no end in sight. Fu@king Clownworld!
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” – Jeremy Rifkin, New York Times journalist on climate change
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.” – Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
The entire idea “printing money” is a form of taxation. Instead of a real, durable good that has some intrinsic value you have a piece of paper that represents virtual value. Since inflation of at least 2% is the goal of the FED, your printed money is constantly devalued – a form of tax.
What the brilliantly stupid people who believe you can just print more money do not get – this is also a taxation on anyone that holds wealth in the form of printed money or its electronic equivalent. Sure you can print money and devalue the money already out there, but that hurts the poor and middle class, but not the rich who own real properties like companies.
So instead of taxing the “rich” to pay for their grand new deal, they tax the middle class and poor. The poor do not need to worry as they will become the most powerful voting block (given democrat policies) and therefore will get increased subsidies, which yes are payed for by the remaining middle class. Given a few years to work its magic, and you now have a lot of poor, very few middle class, and a few inordinately rich people – i.e. you have reproduced any South American country’s demographics.
Now the poor rise up, insist on socialism to take more from the rich, the rich flee, and you have Venezuela. Yeah, go idiots!