Tag Archives: austerity

Stop the Kabuki: It’s About “the Great Betrayal”

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Joe Firestone | 30 comments

MSNBC continues on with its campaign to cast the Tea Party Republicans in the role of principal villains in the imminent Government budget/ government shutdown crisis and the likely coming debt ceiling crisis. The teabots, you see, are using the Republican majority in the House to demand more austerity in government and defunding of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). They’re using their bloc of votes in the House, along with the Hastert rule requiring a majority of the majority Republican caucus to veto any possible compromise vote of the whole House on a budget or a continuing resolution that would get bipartisan majority support keeping the government open past October 1.

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30 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged #PCS, $60 Trillion Coin, 14th Amendment, austerity, bill black, debt ceiling, debt limit, debt limit crisis options, debt-subject-to-the-limit, default, deficit spending, grand bargain, great betrayal, High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, kabuki, MMT, modern money theory, President Obama, public debt, Yves Smith

Money and Morality

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Devin Smith | 20 comments

By Brian Werner

Notions of money, debt and morality have a long history together (see Graeber and Atwood). Money and the desire for it is usually connected with greed and immorality like in the often paraphrased “The love of money is the root of all evil” from the New Testament book 1 Timothy. But what if a better understanding of what money is can help our country to be moral?

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20 Comments

Posted in Guest Blogger

Tagged austerity, food stamps, money, morality, right of food, SNAP

Money is not true wealth (Part I)

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Devin Smith | 15 comments

By Glenn Stehle

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

The events of the 1590s had suddenly brought home to more thoughtful Castilians the harsh truth about their native land – its poverty in the midst of riches, its power that had shown itself impotent… For this was not only a time of crisis, but a time also of the awareness of crisis – of a bitter realization that things had gone wrong. It was under the influence of the arbitristas that early seventeenth-century Castile surrendered itself to an orgy of national introspection, desperately attempting to discover at what point reality had been exchanged for illusion….

The arbitristas proposed that Government expenditure should be slashed…

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15 Comments

Posted in Guest Blogger

Tagged austerity, money, wealth

Declaring the Grand Bargain Dead Is Premature

Posted on August 31, 2013 by Joe Firestone | 34 comments

By Joe Firestone

Stories in The Washington Post and the New York Times have some in the blogosphere proclaiming that it’s time to celebrate the death of the Grand Bargain, and others at least raising a question about its death. I’ll go on record as saying that celebrating its death is definitely premature.

It is so because we’ve yet to go through the budget or continuing resolution-passing activities coming up in September, and also have yet to go through the debt ceiling conflict to come in October. Mainstream Washington commentators believe John Boehner is determined to avoid a government shutdown crisis of the budget/CR conflict and that one or the other will be passed before October 1. Assuming they’re right, that still leaves the matter of the debt ceiling “crisis,” which the same commentators are saying will happen because Boehner has to promise his tea party caucus a chance to coerce the Administration, if he’s going to get their acquiescence on the budget/government shutdown matter.

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34 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged #PCS, $60 Trillion Coin, austerity, debt ceiling, debt limit, debt-subject-to-the-limit, default, deficit spending, High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, Jack Lew, MMT, modern money theory, President Obama, public debt, Secretary of the Treasury

Jack Lew: Avoiding Default Is Your Responsibility Too

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Joe Firestone | 12 comments

By Joe Firestone

With the end of the Summer break, now comes the return of the debt limit dance. From Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew’s letter to John Boehner:

“Congress should act as soon as possible to protect America’s good credit by extending normal borrowing authority well before any risk of default becomes imminent.

“Based on our latest estimates extraordinary measures are projected to be exhausted in the middle of October. At that point, the United States will have reached the limit of its borrowing authority, and Treasury would be left to fund the government with only the cash we have on hand on any given day, The cash balance at that time is currently forecasted to be approximately $50 billion.

“. . . A cash balance of approximately $50 Billion would be insufficient to cover net expenditures for an extended period of time. And, on certain days, net expenditures could exceed such a cash balance.

“. . . Protecting the full faith and credit of the United States is the responsibility of Congress because only Congress can extend the nation’s borrowing authority . . .“

OK. So, only Congress can extend the nation’s borrowing authority. But it doesn’t follow from that fact that protecting the full faith and credit of the United States is solely the responsibility of Congress.

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12 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged #PCS, $60 Trillion Coin, 14th Amendment, austerity, debt ceiling, debt limit, debt-subject-to-the-limit, default, deficit spending, High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, Jacob Lew, MMT, modern money theory, President Obama, public debt, Secretary of the Treasury

NEP’s William Black appears on HuffPost Live

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Devin Smith | 1 comment

William Black appeared on HuffPost Live with Mike Sacks on the Four Massive Economic Threats episode. Black discusses sovereign currencies vs. austerity.

1 Comment

Posted in William K. Black

Tagged austerity, sovereign currency

The Five Worst Reasons Why the National Debt Should Matter To You: Part Four, Three REAL Reasons

Posted on August 27, 2013 by Joe Firestone | 10 comments

By Joe Firestone

This is the concluding post in a four part series on the “Top” reasons why the national debt should matter. In Part One, I considered “Fix the Debt’s” claim that high levels of debt cause high unemployment and argued that this is a false claim. In Part Two, I followed with a review of the historical record from 1930 to the present and showed that it refutes this claim throughout this period, and that there is not even one Administration where the evidence doesn’t contradict “Fix the Debt’s” theory. In Part Three I showed that the other four reasons advanced by “Fix the Debt” also had very little going for them. In this part, I’ll give reasons why the national debt does matter, and why we should fix it without breaking America, or causing people to suffer.

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10 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged $60 Trillion Coin, austerity, bernie sanders, CBO, CPC Budget, debt-to-GDP ratio, deficit spending, High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, HVPCS, John Conyers, medicare for all, MMT, modern money theory, national debt, Peter G. Peterson, “Fix the Debt”

The Five Worst Reasons Why the National Debt Should Matter To You: Part Three, The Other Four Worst Reasons

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Joe Firestone | 4 comments

By Joe Firestone

In Part One of this series, I considered “Fix the Debt’s” claim that high levels of debt cause high unemployment and gave a few reasons why this is a false claim. In Part Two, I followed with a review of the historical record from 1930 to the present and showed that it refutes this claim throughout this period, and that there is not even one Administration where the evidence doesn’t contradict “Fix the Debts” theory. In this part I’ll continue my examination of the other four “top reasons” why “Fix the Debt” insists that the National Debt should matter to you.

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4 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged $60 Trillion Coin, austerity, CBO projections, debt-to-GDP ratio, deficit reduction, deficit spending, High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, HVPCS, interest rates, MMT, modern money theory, national debt, Peter G. Peterson, Social Security, unemployment, “Fix the Debt”

The Five Worst Reasons Why the National Debt Should Matter To You: Part Two, the Record Since 1930

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Joe Firestone | 13 comments

By Joe Firestone

In Part One, of a critique of the most important of “Fix the Debt’s” reasons for “Why the National Debt Should Matter To You,” I asserted that high debt levels haven’t caused high unemployment in the United States, and that, if anything causation was in the other direction. I didn’t want to disturb the flow of the argument there with a relatively lengthy survey of some of the numbers in the historical record since the 1930s. But let’s test the idea that High debt causes fewer jobs and lower wages in the United States by looking at that record now.

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13 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged austerity, debt-to-GDP ratio, deficit spending, fiat currency, GBC, goldilocks economy, Government Budget Constraint, MMT, modern money theory, national debt, Peter G. Peterson, sectoral financial balances, unemployment, “Fix the Debt”

The Five Worst Reasons Why the National Debt Should Matter To You: Part One, High Debt Levels and Jobs

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Joe Firestone | 28 comments

By Joe Firestone

I came across a post from the “Fix the Debt” campaign last month called “The Top Five Worst Reasons Why the National Debt Should Matter to You.” It’s a post full of debt/deficit lies that cry out for correction. That’s what I’ll provide in this series. Continue reading →