World economic group calls for global exchange of tax information to fight evasion
What? Yet another group urging us to worry about getting access to enough fiat? BMHOTK!
Hiding in plain sight? The 1% has us all looking for where THEY are hiding OUR fiat ... while all the while the REAL DAMAGE is that THEY are tricking us into over-taxing and under-funding OURSELVES! Nothing's missing except our ability to see what we're really doing to ourselves.
I mean, REALLY! Do you mind stopping long enough to spend a few CNS cycles on the supposed logic supposedly at work here? Are we humans, or are we marionette-mice, dancing around at the pull of mind-numbingly vapid propaganda?
If we're gonna listen to imagination, let's at least shoot for re-scanning the imagination of the entire 99% every year, and selecting the best from their output. Why settle only for Central-Planning-level imagination, from the few stiffs making up the 1%? Consider sampling enough views to assemble what we could call "Comprehensi-ganda," not just the Propa-ganda supporting the view of only one, arbitrary lobby. Central Planning, no matter how smooth talking, is still Central Planning. A pose, by any other name, will still stink as much as the failed outcome we're now experiencing. For our nation to survive, you, yourself might want to learn to routinely discriminate alluring enticements from actual outcomes?
As a start, imagine the following as at least one alternative.
Nearly all nations are operating in fiat currency systems, where their population's only goal is stay safely within national tolerance limits, roughly midway between deflation and inflation. Call it continuously "Right-sizing the National, Fiat Currency Supply."
How do WE do that? What indicator metrics should we use? How about our Output Gap? If you're initially outraged by this suggested logic, then please answer the following questions honestly. Do you ever REALLY stop to think about what "fiat" means, and what "fiat currency" means? Where does fiat currency come from? Can we "run out of fiat? And, do we have to borrow fiat to get it? Seriously? And you've been talked into worrying about who ELSE to tax? To get more fiat?
Instead of worrying excessively about that fraction of either corporations or the 1% whose fiat ISN'T being taxed ... might it not be a wee bit logical to instead focus on the 99% of us who are ALREADY OVERTAXED AND UNDERFUNDED? Why not simplify, rather than further complicate things?
Instead of arguing over what complications to add, why not simply stop doing some of the existing stupid?
Instead, we have nearly all of our attention directed everywhere EXCEPT less FICA/Medicare/Income - and purely FIAT - taxes arbitrarily imposed on the poor and our disappearing Middle Class! And it's all done to supposedly get more of what we don't need more of! The whole approach of supposedly taxing to obtain fiat is an embarrassing oxymoron, folks. You've all been had. For 4 generations now. Yes, we need unlimited access to our own fiat, by free, fiat use of fiat currency. The solution is to use our fiat responsibly, not fraudulently. That is our challenge. There's no going back. We can't survive with slow policy in a world that demands more national agility every day.
So, back to the topic of even more "tax-recovery" programs.
Pardon me for being cynical enough to suspect that it seems curiously self-serving that colluding national and international bureaucracies should work so hard to convince the already (by fiat) over-taxed that the (by fiat) un-taxed should be taxed a wee bit more too. ESPECIALLY when any tax on corporations will simply be passed on as price increases to consumers!
Is this dissembling yet another way to trick the rubes into insisting on indirectly taxing themselves EVEN MORE? Ya think?
Divide, confuse and conquer?
Divide, confuse and conquer?
Listen. Even if all that bureaucratic stupidity is just Innocent Fraud and/or ignorance, it's still holding down the Middle Class, and maintaining our huge and growing Output Gap. Instead of wasting endless decades tuning what's not needed ... let's just stop the stupid?
Would y'all like an easier way to cut through all the verbiage from these Gordian-Knotheads? Here's one suggestion to chew on.
Simply cut taxes on the poor and Middle Classes, to the same OR LOWER levels granted to corporations!
Then let the 1% scream bloody murder about continued dilution of the 1%'s depreciating fiat by the 99%'s constantly emerging fiat.
Bring it on!
It's a fight to the fiat.
The 1% simply cannot rule the 99% if the 99% simply refuse to cede ownership of their own fiat.
"What," the 1% will scream? "Who will you Bond ourselves to, to get permission to access your own fiat?" Surely they joke? The answers to that are as brain-dead simple as they are diverse. Here's one imaginative response - just to see if they can really think. Declare a Selective Service Overdraft, and require all citizens to register their fiat by age 18! :) While you're considering that, be sure to familiarize yourself with how fiat currency operations already work.
Meanwhile, what about the slow or disinterested readers who want their freedom but do not want to have to know about currency operations - any more than they want to have to know about proctology details? For those citizens, we can make up campaign posters, saying things like "Uncle ROC wants YOU - to support the ultimate showdown with the BureauCrock, and it's evil, leading social proctologist, Pete Peterson."
We could even have some fun - at THEIR fiat expense - while freeing ourselves from the social proctologists! How about these, as some slogans to use in a Comprehensi-ganda campaign?
"Treasury the OverDraft!" That might be our rallying cry.
"Tell Pete to stick HIS fiat where the sun don't shine! WE don't need to borrow it!"
"No interest in Pete's fiat. Got our own!"
"We have nothing to fear but fear of fiat itself!"
"Long live the Public Initiative!"
"Fiat, don't fail us now."
"Uncle ROC wants YOU! - in order to make a more perfect union!"
If the 1% want to tax anything, let them tax Occam's Razor until it wears thin, and gives THEM a close shave. For once.
Perhaps a few video caricatures would also help?
Life is like a box of fiat?
It's useless unless EVERYONE opens their own box ...
AND takes the initiative to select some for themselves ...
AND actually leverages their own fiat - by making more of their own decisions ...
AND compounds the power of their fiat by actually coordinating their fiat with the fiat of others.
Or, you can actually believe Pete Peterson's bonkers statement that we're all out of fiat, and have to BORROW HIS, at inflated rates.
Ironically, either approach is an option, depending upon YOUR use of your own fiat. You may choose, by personal fiat, to act as though your "box of fiat" were empty, and hence live your life as a fiat sharecropper to Boss Peterson, while getting progressively deeper in fiat debt to the Koch Brothers company store.
Or, you may select, also by fiat, to act as though you were born with fiat, to use and compound at will, while exploring the options which YOU choose.
Fiat is as fiat does?
Would y'all like an easier way to cut through all the verbiage from these Gordian-Knotheads? Here's one suggestion to chew on.
Simply cut taxes on the poor and Middle Classes, to the same OR LOWER levels granted to corporations!
Then let the 1% scream bloody murder about continued dilution of the 1%'s depreciating fiat by the 99%'s constantly emerging fiat.
Bring it on!
It's a fight to the fiat.
The 1% simply cannot rule the 99% if the 99% simply refuse to cede ownership of their own fiat.
"What," the 1% will scream? "Who will you Bond ourselves to, to get permission to access your own fiat?" Surely they joke? The answers to that are as brain-dead simple as they are diverse. Here's one imaginative response - just to see if they can really think. Declare a Selective Service Overdraft, and require all citizens to register their fiat by age 18! :) While you're considering that, be sure to familiarize yourself with how fiat currency operations already work.
Meanwhile, what about the slow or disinterested readers who want their freedom but do not want to have to know about currency operations - any more than they want to have to know about proctology details? For those citizens, we can make up campaign posters, saying things like "Uncle ROC wants YOU - to support the ultimate showdown with the BureauCrock, and it's evil, leading social proctologist, Pete Peterson."
We could even have some fun - at THEIR fiat expense - while freeing ourselves from the social proctologists! How about these, as some slogans to use in a Comprehensi-ganda campaign?
"Treasury the OverDraft!" That might be our rallying cry.
"Tell Pete to stick HIS fiat where the sun don't shine! WE don't need to borrow it!"
"No interest in Pete's fiat. Got our own!"
"We have nothing to fear but fear of fiat itself!"
"Long live the Public Initiative!"
"Fiat, don't fail us now."
"Uncle ROC wants YOU! - in order to make a more perfect union!"
If the 1% want to tax anything, let them tax Occam's Razor until it wears thin, and gives THEM a close shave. For once.
Perhaps a few video caricatures would also help?
Life is like a box of fiat?
It's useless unless EVERYONE opens their own box ...
AND takes the initiative to select some for themselves ...
AND actually leverages their own fiat - by making more of their own decisions ...
AND compounds the power of their fiat by actually coordinating their fiat with the fiat of others.
Or, you can actually believe Pete Peterson's bonkers statement that we're all out of fiat, and have to BORROW HIS, at inflated rates.
Ironically, either approach is an option, depending upon YOUR use of your own fiat. You may choose, by personal fiat, to act as though your "box of fiat" were empty, and hence live your life as a fiat sharecropper to Boss Peterson, while getting progressively deeper in fiat debt to the Koch Brothers company store.
Or, you may select, also by fiat, to act as though you were born with fiat, to use and compound at will, while exploring the options which YOU choose.
Fiat is as fiat does?
9 comments:
It's very frustrating that under the current arrangements that our government has permitted itself, it cannot deficit-spend without issuing interest-bearing securities, and swapping those securities with the affluent for their non-interest-bearing dollars. It's a rich-get-richer scam that adds an extra and unnecessary price stability constraint on government spending.
Granted, the interest rates on those securities are currently extremely low, so it doesn't matter all that much, but there is enormous political pressure coming from the plutocrats to allow those interest rates to rise.
To really unleash the power of fiat money, we could use some structural reform in the system of public finance.
Sorry folks. I am no MMT expert and I don't regard myself as such, so I better be upfront about it. I'm sure you guys know a lot more than me on this matter.
Further, I may be mistaken, but I think I can see why you blokes are so sceptic about these "tax the rich" initiatives.
To wit: the crux of your argument is that a government issuing its own fiat currenty does not need to collect any taxes, nor borrow any money, in order to spend, as it creates its own money. Further, tax collection simply destroys fiat.
I think I understand all that and in a world where governments acted according to the MMT logic, perhaps I'd be more open to your reasoning.
But this is not the world we live in. In the world we live in, governments chose to act as if they needed to collect taxes/borrow money in order to spend.
I know that is crazy.
But this is how things are and as long as things are this way, and speaking on my behalf alone: tax the bastards until the pips squeak.
So, sorry about that, but this is my position until governments decide to abide by the MMT logic. To do otherwise, to me, is like putting the cart before the ox.
Besides, taxes are not only meant to fund the government. Taxes are supposed to reduce inequality.
Magpie, MMT doesnt really say that the federal government doesn't need to collect taxes. In effect it just says that, for a given size government, it doesn't need to collect as much tax revenue as a lot of people think it does.
I stand corrected then.
But I still think to have these people owning huge sums of fiat is like having a drunk chimp with a machine gun, fully loaded.
"But I still think to have these people owning huge sums of fiat is like having a drunk chimp with a machine gun, fully loaded."
Magpie, I agree and there's a bunch of us here that consistently advocate taxing the bejabbers out of excess saving (the rich).
It appears to go against the MMT grain but most of the "cut taxes" is the same as "more spending" impicitly assumes cutting taxes on the worker...the source of aggregate demand.
Cutting taxes on the rich makes them richer compared to the rest of us.
Personally, I believe it is a necessary component of the progressive taxation model, which was implemented to keep the wealthy from moving beyond control by the system.
Instead we see taxation characterized as a punitive measure reather than a necessary one to preserve democracy and capitalism.
But I still think to have these people owning huge sums of fiat is like having a drunk chimp with a machine gun, fully loaded.
Magpie, I agree with that based on the relationship of wealth to power. Economics without analysis of both rent and power is simply nonsense. MMT ally Michael Hudson, a member of "the UMKC school," is one of the go-to guys on this. There are two ways to deal with this, taxing away economic rent (Hudson) or land rent (Mosler) and regulation, which is a lot of what Mosler's reform proposals are aimed at. There's too much extraction leading to economic inequality that is disruptive to demand and distributive prosperity, leading to accumulation of political power by the wealthy, leading to social disharmony and dysfunction at the bottom. So I would not say that MMT doesn't address this.
MMT is description of the operation of monetary systems, which is politically neutral, a Keynesian macro theory based on demand and full employment, which is left-leaning, and policy proposals by individual economists, which vary on the spectrum from center-left (Mosler) to radical left (Mitchell). Hudson would likely also be classified far left.
To summarize MMT:
1. Taxes create demand for the currency so that govt can move private goods and services to public use.
2. According to functional finance taxation withdraws net financial assets from non-govt, while spending increases consolidated non-govt NFA in aggregate.
3. This holds true operationally in a non-convertible floating rate system, although govts can choose to impose restraints politically, such as budget balancing that requires spending to be offset by taxes. This is limited affect on the govt fiscal balance in that tax receipts and automatic stabilization vary across the cycle. implying that the fiscal balance is at least in part endogenous rather than discretionary.
This is the case operationally with all currency sovereigns.
The balance of spending and taxation is a political choice.
MMT economists are Keynesian in that they hold that running full employment solves most of economic issues, and that it is possible to balance growth, employment and price stability fiscally. This is a policy choice.
In making this choice, an added factor is that spending results in incentive and taxation results in disincentive. So the MMT policy prescription is to fund public purpose and positive externality, and defund what detracts from public purpose and negative externality. But again, what constitutes public purpose is a political choice.
Should add that in a system in which wealth collects at the top and is saved, then either more $NFA has to be provided by govt to support demand by offsetting demand leakage, or taxation and spending has to be configured through redistribution away from saving at the top to spending at the bottom since the saving consumption rate is vastly different.
The purpose of saving is provision for the future. Govt needs to provide $NFA to accomodate a reasonable level of provision throughout society.
Saving beyond reasonable provision is hoarding. Hoarding disrupts circular flow and needs to be discouraged.
No one's saying to NOT tax the uber-wealthy.
Just saying that the - so far unsuccessful - fixation on THAT ALONE, has kept us from doing the similarly necessary but not sufficient step ... STOP OVERTAXING AND UNDERFUNDING THE REST OF OURSELVES!
Why can't we do two things at once? It's easily within the human repertoire.
the cartoon here sums things up pretty well
http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2011/08/taxation.html
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