Richard Sale — "Back to Jackson"

Why Trump and Sanders.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

"Back to Jackson"

Richard Sale

Thomas Klitgaard and James Narron — Crisis Chronicles: The Man on the Twenty-Dollar Bill and the Panic of 1837

President Andrew Jackson was a "hard money" man. He saw specie—that is, gold and silver—as real money, and considered paper money a suspicious store of value fabricated by corrupt bankers. So Jackson issued a decree that purchases of government land could only be made with gold or silver. And just as much as Jackson loved hard money, he despised the elites running the banking system, so he embarked on a crusade to abolish the Second Bank of the United States (the Bank). Both of these efforts by Jackson boosted the demand for specie and revealed the soft spots in an economy based on hard money. In this edition of Crisis Chronicles, we show how the heightened demand for specie ultimately led to the Panic of 1837, resulting in a credit crunch that pushed the economy into a depression that lasted until 1843.

FRBNY — Liberty Street Economics
Crisis Chronicles: The Man on the Twenty-Dollar Bill and the Panic of 1837

Thomas Klitgaard, vice president in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group, and and James Narron, senior vice president in the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Cash Product Office

What if we paid off the national debt?

NPR releases secret report prepared during the Clinton administration about paying off the national debt with the surplus it had accumulated.

Nixed. Why? They concluded that too little debt was a problem.

Full report in PDF, Life After Debt

What If We Paid Off The Debt? The Secret Government Report (with audio) by by David Kestenbaum at NPR

The US only paid down the national debt once, under President Andrew Jackson. It was followed by a depression.

When The U.S. Paid Off The Entire National Debt (And Why It Didn't Last), also at NPR

See also L. Randall Wray, The Federal Budget is NOT like a Household Budget – Here’s Why