6. June 2010 by admin.

Any way you look at it, Americans are overtaxed.  There’s a tax for gasoline, and a tax for buying a car.  There’s taxation when you get paid, and taxation when you spend.  If you own a corporation, you have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for being a corporation, and if you just own a business, you have to pay taxes for unemployment funds.  If you buy a home, there’s a tax, and if you just sit in your home, there’s another tax.  If you’re in Washington State, you have to pay extra taxes for buying liquor and cigarettes, and if you want a carbonated beverage, you have to pay a special tax for that, too.  And the taxes are for one purpose: to ensure that the things our government pays for are paid for.

Now, it’s fairly obvious to everyone that despite our massive amounts of taxation, we’re still not meeting our budgetary demands (Currently, we’re facing a yearly deficit of 1.5 trillion, on top of last year’s 1.4 trillion.  To put this in perspective, our Fortune 500 only has a yearly net income of 391 billion dollars).  And despite the fact that we can’t pay for everything we want, both parties keep promising tax breaks to specific people.  Republicans want to tax everyone less, Democrats claim to want less taxation for the poor (a bizarre statement, since most truly poor people pay nothing in federal income taxes), and both sides use these arguments against their opponents every time an election season comes around.  This is especially ironic, since our progressively mounting deficit is being met with a political demand: that the person receiving the majority’s vote never win on the promise to responsibly raise taxes across the board. Read the rest of this entry »

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11. April 2010 by admin.

With welfare, traditional American ideas have generally differed in one of two ways: either the lazy and immoral poor must be able to leech the public treasury through a liberal system of welfare, or we must let the truly unfortunate fall through the cracks with a more libertarian approach.   Either way, the American public has been forced to deal with one of two evils.  And quite frankly, neither one is just.

But supposing we could devise a compromise between the two systems, in which the moral poor could receive a hand up without giving the immoral poor a hand-out, we could strike a deal which both Republicans and reasonable Democrats would appreciate.  The funny thing about this compromise is that, for Christian conservatives, the answer has been under our noses almost since the beginning of civilization. Read the rest of this entry »

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26. February 2010 by admin.

When Americans believed in Truth, they used to say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  That is to say, just because a plan of action has a noble purpose doesn’t necessarily guarantee a noble outcome, kinda like the plan to save homeowners from the horrors of foreclosure.  While appearing as a noble goal upon first glance, after a deeper look at the policy is taken, whether due to miscalculation or corruption we find that the only people truly benefiting from his attempts are powerful bankers.

To clarify before making my point, having a banking system is healthy, but investment lending and consumptive lending are two completely different things.  While investment lending lends money for the purpose of potentially increasing the income of the borrower either through business or education, consumptive lending does not potentially increase the wealth of the borrower.  Borrowing money to go to school should result in a higher income for the borrower, after which he or she should be more financially secure than before.  On the other hand, consumptive lending for televisions has no effect upon the borrower’s income, while allowing him to buy something he couldn’t otherwise afford. Read the rest of this entry »

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10. January 2010 by admin.

A short while ago, I found myself in a conversation with an organic soap-maker at the Pike Place Market.  To be fair, his soap was very high-quality stuff, but I found one serious problem with it: the soap was exorbitantly priced.  Since I was dealing with the soap-maker himself and had the option of purchasing a slightly lower quality soap in bulk for a far more affordable price (less than $5 a bar, thank goodness), haggling seemed my best option.  So haggle I did.

What I found was that the soap-maker couldn’t sell me on the quality of the bar at that price, and he knew this–as he didn’t put up much of a fight.  But what he then said to me has puzzled me ever since: the reason I should buy the soap, he said, was because he paid his soap-makers $18 an hour, which is more than I currently make at the moment.  Not sold on the idea, I smiled, declined, and took off.  I’d later go on to buy about 17 more bars for about three bucks more. Read the rest of this entry »

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24. October 2009 by admin.

Everyone knows that liberal politicians get into power by promising to fight the rich for the sake of the poor, which is known as populism.  Modern liberals like Barack Obama tell us they want to jump start the economy with government spending, which will create more jobs.  They promise to increase forms of public welfare and expand things like health-care for everyone, because it’s going to benefit you–the little guy–mostly at the expense of the bourgeois.  Of course, anyone with at least a little economic common sense knows this is a bunch of bunk. In fact, by looking at numbers we can find their policies are helping few other than the rich, especially in the long term.

A)  The Liberal Flat Tax

Because the government doesn’t actually have the money to support the entire economy and pay for social entitlements and two occupations, liberal economists like Paul Krugman claim the answer to our problems is quantitative easing, or the government’s inflation of the dollar to jump-start the economy and pay for socialist programs like health-care.  This, he claims, would circumvent the problem of debt, as any reasonable person understands that debt ruins financial entities, and moral people realize that funding today’s poor with the future poor’s money–also known as putting it on the baby’s tab–is fundamentally unjust.  It places our needs above theirs.

Read the rest of this entry »

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24. June 2009 by admin.

A lot of people are being told that Americans are getting screwed by our government’s rescue plan, but most Americans don’t really know how.  To give the reader a good example of why this bailout reeks of “mismanagement,” all we’d have to do is look at banks and their excess reserves.

Now, as a little background information, every US bank dealing with more than $43.9 million is ordered by the Federal Reserve to have roughly 10% of their deposit money as reserves on hand (12).  This means that if people put $100 in the bank, the bank has to have about $10 on hand and can lend the remaining $90 to other people.  Allowing banks to hold only a fraction of their loaned amount on hand is known as fractional reserve banking, and it essentially allows banks to create money (something that you and I would be thrown in jail for.  Check that last link out)(1)(2). Read the rest of this entry »

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29. January 2009 by admin.

Waking up in the middle of the night with a revelation isn’t always a fun thing. Sometimes, it happens on a night when you were counting on making up for the sleep you lost during the last few nights, and sometimes you wish you could forget about whatever it is, and go back to dreaming about multicolored and magical Shamwows with beards and beautiful voices (!).

Fortunately for us, revelation wasn’t something yours truly could shake off, and I wanted to bring it to you so that you could prepare yourselves for what’s coming: massive disappointment in Republican AND Democratic leadership on two major issues, and potentially the collapse of our entire economic system. Those two issues are immigration for Republicans and the green movement for Democrats, both reforms being economically impossible under our current banking system. I’d like to tell you why, through the lens of a man named Chris Martenson. Read the rest of this entry »

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2. January 2009 by admin.

Last month the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a statement that they didn’t have enough funds to properly invest in failing countries around the globe, and that they were going to have to “print” money to keep entire sections of the world afloat (1)). Since the world decided that a collective shrug would be a valid response, we can safely assume one of two options:

1)the majority of the western populace is ignorant and apathetic
or
2)western media outlets have decided to downplay the philosophical significance of the event

So why’s this such a problem?

To give a little background, the IMF was created in 1944 to facilitate global economic development, acting as a central bank to the world (2). A central bank’s main function is to provide relief to failing banks, acting as a last source of credit, and within a fiat currency system having the ability to basically “print” money into existence (9). The IMF is a little different, though, because it’s an international organization that focuses on lending money to failing countries instead of banks, giving a list of changes that the recipients have to make, known as the “Washington Consensus(3).” When countries receive money, they then have to agree to implement the changes deemed necessary to stimulate their economies and ensure a return on the IMF’s investment (privatization and reduction of trade barriers are common requests).

Now, the problem with our current situation is that the IMF, an international body of officials you didn’t vote for, has decided to print money, which acts as a form of taxation because it will reduce buying power and the value of savings, all through inflation of the currency it prints. After all, when more money is available within a system, people will have to pay more for the things they want. Some advocates of the proposal have suggested this may be a good thing, since it can be said that the same inflationary function that reduces savings also reduces debts, and both American society and government are insolvently in debt (4)(5)(6). Philosophically and economically, though, this is incredibly backward. Read the rest of this entry »

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2. January 2009 by admin.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to repeat the same thing everyone else has been repeating for the past umpteen years: the media is lying to you, and you’re being sold something that isn’t only a lie, but is killing the economy. The bad news? Nobody knows what the heck that means. It’s almost as empty a statement as “all politicians are liars:” Everybody says it because it makes them fit in with the cool guys, not because they actually know what politicians are lying about.

As such, I’d like to tackle this issue from the viewpoints of an average American citizen in 2008, calling to light the various misunderstandings with which this current administration has had to deal.
Before I start, though, it should be mentioned that anyone who’s only expecting a purely Democrat-directed grilling is in for a surprise, mostly because the problems we’re dealing with today are so heavily ingrained in both parties that it’s completely impossible to escape by using traditional partisan politics, even though the media and common consensus would have you believe it’s Bush’s fault, and the blogs would have you believe it’s Clinton’s.

Oh, and by the way, I’ve placed stars next to economic concepts that you can easily find in Wikipedia, just in case any readers aren’t familiar with the concepts and would like more information. All the other information will be used from respectable sources, so feel free to dig around in the links. That being said, allow me to tell you why the economy is Bush’s fault, why it isn’t, and why Americans are generally wrong.
Misunderstanding #1: Our unemployment levels are out of control

The first gigantic lie regarding our economy is that right now—in September of 2008—we have more unemployed people than ever before, and there are hordes of people roaming the streets incapable of finding jobs.

This is total garbage.

Actually, we averaged about a 6% unemployment rate in September according to the Department of Labor Statistics, which is better than we had through half of the 90’s when the media was reporting a “good time” (1). Furthermore, at one point in 2007 our unemployment rates were at a cozy 4.5%, almost at the lowest level we had ever achieved through the 90’s, which is very near something known in the world of economics known as “full employment*”. Read that again in case it didn’t soak in. Read the rest of this entry »

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