Committee to F@#$%*! The Middle Class Suggests .... You Guessed It .... Increasing FICA Taxes, To "Balance Fiat"

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

I don't know how these evil or deranged idiots keep a straight face anymore. Pete Peterson may be paying them a bundle for their collusion.

For those who don't yet know, "Fix the Debt" is a euphemism for "Neuter the Fiat"

We must neuter fiat, to balance fiat?  Do any of these dimwits ever stop and ask themselves what "fiat" means?

from: Campaign to Fix the Debt <info@fixthedebt.org>
For Immediate Release
July 22, 2015 

Fix the Debt Reacts to the Social Security Trustees Report 

The Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports today showing that despite modest improvements in their projections, both programs are in financial jeopardy. The Trustees project the Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance program to exhaust its reserves by 2035, the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund to be depleted by 2030, and the Social Security Disability Insurance to become insolvent by late 2016. On a combined basis, the Trustees project the Social Security program to run out of reserve funds by 2034, which is a year later than previous projections but less than two decades from today. At that point, all beneficiaries would face an immediate 21 percent benefit cut, which would grow over time to a 27 percent cut. 

“How many times do the Trustees need to warn us about this before we take their concerns seriously?” said former Sen. Judd Gregg, co-chair of the Campaign to Fix the Debt. “2034 is not that far away – it means today’s 60-year-olds will be 79, and today’s 48-year-olds are just reaching the normal retirement age. And the cost of waiting will only make the fixes harder. We don’t need to shore up this program just for our children; we need to do it for ourselves as well.” 

According to the Social Security Trustees, the combined programs face a shortfall of 2.68 percent of payroll – meaning the 12.4 percent payroll tax would need to be increased by just over one-fifth or benefits cut immediately for all current and future beneficiaries by about one-sixth to make the program solvent for 75 years. By the 75th year, the Trustees project the combined shortfall will grow to 4.7 percent of payroll. 

“The message the Trustees delivered today should resonate all over the country and especially in the presidential campaign,” said Fix the Debt Co-Chair and former Gov. Ed Rendell. “The disability program is only a year from insolvency and the other programs aren’t far behind. If we don’t fix these programs soon, it’s the most vulnerable who will pay the price. We need a sense of urgency in Washington to fix these programs so they are sound and secure now and in the future.”

For more information, contact Press Secretary Jack Deutsch at deutsch@fixthedebt.org.

For more information about the [Committee to F@#$%*! The Middle Class], please visit www.fixthedebt.org.

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So "both programs are in financial jeopardy." Right. Anyone ever felt that national fiat was in jeopardy? That means that every other national policy, heck, even the will of the people, is in financial jeopardy. What, exactly, does it mean to say that our public will is in financial jeopardy? It seems that the Farce can have a strong effect on small minds. That's all I sense.

This is right out of a perverted version of an old fairy tale used to manipulate the gullible. In the original version, Chicken-Shit-Little tried to convince all the neighbors that they were running out of fiat [Public Initiative]. Why? Various versions have been cleaned up for nursery rhymes, but they all involve some aspect of a crook crying wolf, to see how many dimwits step forward to be voluntarily fleeced.

A foolish population and their Public Initiative are soon parted.

Our SEC & NSA seem more worried about Nigerian scammers, when far greater sums are extracted from honest citizens by our own Committee to Neuter the Fiat, aka, Control Frauds, aka Committee to F@#$%*! The Middle Class.

Why?  Ask the people you voted for, from county commissioners to POTUS, and EVERYONE in between.

Gut Private Financial Savings By Neutering the Fiat? Why Voluntarily Go Under The Knife Of Deranged Fiscal Surgeons?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Excised. Cut off. Snipped. Removed.

Is this really what you want for your private, financial savings?

Yet that is EXACTLY what the Committee to Neuter the Fiat is relentlessly advising.

For any relation between a CURRENCY ISSUER and the aggregate of all CURRENCY USERS, the accumulating currency held (for distributed liquidity) by a growing population and economy is (for purely sophist reasons, aka, an oddity of history) called the currency issuer's "debt."

For an analogy, as YOU grew from an egg-cell to an adult did you accumulate a runaway "debt" to yourself, for all the growth you issued to yourself?

And did it matter how that "debt" was denominated (i.e., in kg or pounds, cell number, hemoglobin molecules, ATP molecules, calories distributed, etc, etc, etc)? 

Accountants could argue yes to both, purely based on the invented rules of Double-Entry Bookkeeping. 

Yet that still doesn't mean that you have to pay back to yourself every calorie (or atp molecule) of "debt" to yourself, simply because double-entry bookkeeping has no way to account for the simple act of creation. Pity. 

So such arguments about national "debt" are purely semantic, and ignored by logical people, who've continuously evolved more human culture for tens of thousands of years, despite that runaway "Debt."

Yet these pathetically misguided dimwits at the CNF cleverly argue that the average national wage rises as "private savings falls" - and use that claimed correlation to argue for national austerity.

Like an OCD Luddite, they just won't stop.

Yes, their argument is EXACTLY equivalent to claiming that average cellular nourishment rises during your childhood development & growth spurts if net caloric intake falls. Doh!

By that logic we should rush to starve our developing embryos, fetuses & children - not just impose austerity on our still-growing electorate and national culture!!!

Didn't we start giving up on quack doctors and leeches back in the Dark Ages? Apparently not completely. The last bastion of Quackery is in political lobbies and the orthodox economists they hire.

Could it be that the "average" wage rises during austerity or recession precisely because those who can hoard everything possible during times of panic, when human cultures unleash the quack Luddites, the always-outmoded cultural analogue of an autonomic nervous system? In physiology, we call that "shock" - or when the circulatory system arbitrarily & preferentially shuts down delivery of assets to "peripheral" extremities in order to preferentially preserve supposed "critical organs."

The NET wages certainly can't fall as "National Debt" falls, because those 2 figures are - by the rules of Double-Entry Bookkeeping - equal to the penny. So the stark reality is that the Luddites at the CNF are playing games with the definition of "wages," precisely to confuse their victims.

Yes, Maud, it's true. In large human cultures struggling to retain affinity despite never-before confronted population numbers, any OCD dimwit uncontrollably hoarding static assets still tends to assume that they are therefore more important than citizens who are instead developing dynamic assets, like teamwork (i.e., return-on-coordination).

Not just how, but for what purpose or goal.

Yet the OCD Luddites persist, even though their view has long been known to be exactly ass-backwards, by every tribal culture in history, plus the members of our own DoD, who argue that survival tracks the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision-making (i.e., teamwork). That's right, the most basic axiom of teamwork, and of every social species, recognizes the primal importance of adequately provisioning every team member as well as possible, so that increasingly large strings of static assets can be used in novel permutations, as dynamic assets.

Yet here is the Committee to Neuter the Fiat outright advising that average soldier provisioning actually increases, and improves the Army, when the Generals hoard all the weapons. Were they born in a barn?

Admittedly, they sometimes alter their tune, and advise that when teams sense opportunity, that ever team member takes whatever provisions they can grab, and go home with it. As if that helps, or hurts less.

Why don't they just just make their message more blunt, and promote treason?

Ok, lets ignore the CNF, and instead re-orient to logic and reality.

The reality is that organized teams can do amazing things, by organizing aggregate or Public Initiative.

Public Initiative is otherwise known as national fiat.

And national fiat is denominated, on-demand, as fiat currency - a freely floating indicator denominating the coincidental outcomes of team accomplishments. 

Therefore the volume of fiat currency coincidentally corresponds to the volume of private financial savings, which tracks net national success. More precisely, it is the distributed, private savings of the US Middle Class that counts.

Distributed private financial savings is analogous to the fat reserves of the average human. That's what provides the freedom and ability to express distributed innovation, audacity and invention. It's what allowed American Ingenuity, off and on, for 200 years.

And here's an actual committee dead set on Neutering the Fiat (i.e., reducing the volume AND distribution of private financial savings, which they happen to call a "national debt").

Why is this all occurring? Simply because they are feeble-minded sophists either not capable of dissociating semantic diversity from specifically maladaptive sophism, or not willing to bother to stop and actually think? Either that, or they're actively mis-using semantic diversity as propaganda.

Yes, it's exactly as though large segments of our national policy apparatus - supposedly our nation's "brains" - have been incapacitated by a cultural stroke. Luckily, a human culture, unlike a discrete human CNS, is capable of continuous, unlimited regeneration. Yet regenerative capability doesn't help unless we actually implement it. Let's get on with clearing out these dead, wooden-heads, before our country falls over and fractures something more real than their private savings!

The solution is simple. Don't be too lazy to try one of the following suggestions.

1) Stop and actually think for yourself.

2) Or at least quit listening to and voting for gullible erbils asking you to run in cages for them.

3) Or actively speak out against their willful or possibly Innocent Fraud propaganda.




"Most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all." Michael Rivero

Is the Committee To Neuter Fiat In League With Kotlikoff?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)





Is the CNF smart enough to co-hatch a feeble conspiracy? This particular fixation on nominal threats may be just brain-dead enough to be within their reach. :(

If you restate their words with accurate, context-relevant semantics, their entire panic is deflated:

"On Highways and VA, Congress Continues Piling up [Real Assets] and [Private Financial Savings]."

That doesn't sound so bad. Other people call that "Nation Building."

Nevertheless, Maya MacGuineas, president of the [Committee to Neuter Fiat], said the following:

"Congress has passed and the President is about to sign two bills that increase the national debt for no other reason than lawmakers seem utterly unwilling to pay the nation's bills. The highway bill pays for 60 percent of its $11 billion trust fund deposit through a budget gimmick known as pension smoothing, which temporarily reduces companies' pension obligations. It raises revenue in the first six years but costs money after that. While the Senate originally wisely rejected this gimmick, the final bill falls back on it.

Congress dawdled for months knowing that a deadline was approaching and instead of addressing the chronic highway funding shortfall, it waited until the last minute, rejected the responsible gimmick-free approach suggested in the Senate, and passed an easy fix so it could leave town.

On top of that, Congress passed a VA reform bill that would add an additional $10 billion to the national debt. Taking care of our veterans should be a top national priority, and the recently passed legislation is a tremendous improvement over the hugely expensive blank-check approach previously supported. But there is no good reason Congress could not have identified the pay-fors to make sure the legislation was fiscally responsible.

Things that are worth doing, are worth paying for. Unfortunately, Congress seems more comfortable making dumb decisions on a deadline - so they can go home and campaign - than smart decisions in a timely fashion."

Huh? 

Wouldn't it be easier & shorter to simply say that Congress is deciding what the country needs to, and appropriating the currency that allows everyone to contribute their part ... with adequate tempo and agility?

Maybe Maya ought to look up the definition of dumb, and relate it to the context she's speaking within? Can someone ask her how a democracy able to invent and create things ... also manages to invent & create the currency notation that denominates all the endless static and dynamic assets that all its citizens exchange? If necessary, break that up into small, "Dick & Jane" sentences, and give her 8 years to work through them.

Walter Shewhart is probably turning over in his grave. Not to mention Ben Franklin, Marriner Eccles & Beardsley Ruml.

Exporting Stasis: Euro-zone Politics & Social Instability Seem To Be Inching Towards A Showdown

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

Time to say goodbye? Shauble Calls on Italy to Pursue Structural Reform

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble called on Italy to pursue its ambitious structural reform efforts if it wants to boost its economic-growth prospects. “Especially since growth forecasts for Italy have been reduced recently, it’s important to reform and cut the debt level convincingly,” he said. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has presented ambitious and broad-based reforms, he added. “The Stability and Growth Pact is the foundation for politico-economic cohesion in Europe,” said Mr. Schäuble.

Euro-zone politics & social instability seem to be inching towards a showdown over making a simple choice. Neuter the fiat? Or allow cultural growth? Seems like an easy choice, for those able to think clearly, so what, exactly is Schäuble demanding? Three distinct interpretations come to mind, but they're all guesses.

#1 Is Schäuble calling for every country to be a net exporter, like Germany? Really?

It's hard to imagine a collection of stereotypical engineers ... who nevertheless won't admit that the sources/sinks of production/consumption (not the dimensionless liquidity units) have to roughly balance in a growing global economic system.

There still seems to be a widespread inability to separate liquidity units from saving units. Schäuble isn't the only one blind to the obvious.

Fiat currency is NOT the right vehicle for stable, long-term savings.
That is WHY the linguistic terms "asset appreciation" & "interest rate" were invented!
Labor wages can't be the ONLY variable that "inflates!"

I blame our outmoded education system - & Germany's too - for not including something so fundamental as a basic part of education. There is a difference between dynamic & static assets, and how they are denominated. Failure to grasp that is half killing many aspects of policy.

#2 On the other hand, perhaps Schäuble is drawing a line in the sand & saying - for EEU "politico-economic cohesion" - that there can be only one .... net exporter? Fine. He still doesn't come out & acknowledge the required, running sectoral balance between production & consumption - and the tolerance limits for deviations from it, in the form of demand leakages (savings). Has anyone met this guy, and hence have any idea what he's really thinking?

#3 Do you suppose that Schäuble's master plan is to export static assets to the future? :) Instead of exporting increasing options to future generations? Perhaps he has a point worth considering ... for maybe 5 seconds. Just imagine where we'd be if our grandparents had put every Model-T into long term storage, instead of using them at the time. :)  Fine again! If Schäuble's message is really all that valuable, surely the Europeans should just put HIM into cold storage, and preserve his valuable message for some time in the future, when his descendants will clamor to stop doing whatever they're doing, and instead do less. :)

He might want to take an extra pair of pj's to the cryo chamber, in case the slumber party lasts longer than he expects. Good way to export pj's too! :)

All joking aside. It's no longer clear what structure Schäuble is keen on reforming, but his own brain circuits might be the best place to start. It's rumored that vigorous exercise of both body & logic ward off Alzheimers and preserve the ability to think clearly.

Exporting clarity & Context Awareness? What a novel thought!  :)  Now that might be a way for Germans to have their exports and increase their dynamic value too!

There Has To Be A Campaign To Make These Dingbats Stop Trying To Neuter the Fiat

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)





There's a new farce playing on L Street.

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Fiat?

starring NEUTER THE FIAT as arch Deficit Terrorist

If you're afraid of fiat, then of course the CBO's outlook on fiat is frighteningly predictable.

Previous generations were easily frightened by these type of Budget Slasher movies, but younger generations expect more initiative, and more sovereign action. So let's hope & pray that this play runs for only a short time before audiences lose interest.

And if a corporation is a person, surely a culture and an economy are animals too. Do we really want to emasculate AND defeminate both our economy and culture? Why not just drain all the private savings too? Oh, because they'd already be gone, as a consequence of neutering the fiat. I'd advise getting a second opinion before letting these dingbats go on a nip and tuck spree.

The following news release has been edited for clarity, with out-of-context semantics replaced with context-relevant semantics.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: [Neuter The Fiat] Campaign

[NEUTER THE FIAT!!!]

For Immediate Release
Date: July 15, 2014
Contact: Jack Deutsch (deutsch@[NeuterTheFiat].org, 202-735-2801)

[Neuter the Fiat] Says CBO's Long-Term Budget Outlook Frightening and Predictable 

The Congressional Budget Office's new long-term budget projections show debt on an unsustainable long-term path. Under CBO's current law projections, [then IF NOTHING CHANGES - even though it always does] debt will grow from less than 74 percent of GDP in today to 80 percent by 2025, will exceed the size of the entire economy in the mid-2030s, and will double GDP after 2080. 

Maya MacGuineas, head of [Neuter the Fiat], made the following comment:

"This report shows just how dire the long-term [private financial savings] situation is. The government's official scorekeeper itself says these [private saving] levels 'would ultimately be unsustainable.' Anyone that looks at the current situation and thinks our [private financial savings] problem is solved just isn't paying attention. 

Unfortunately, the cost of this [private financial savings] isn't abstract. As CBO explains, it would lead to slower growth, higher interest rates, and less flexibility for the government to address new challenges. In only a quarter of a century [if nothing else changes, though it always does], income per person could be $2,000 to $5,000 lower as a result of our growing [private financial savings] levels. 

The [gold-std] lining in this report is that policymakers still have time to act. CBO explains that if policymakers act soon, the [private financial savings] could be reduced with smaller and more gradual changes that can improve economic growth and give people time to plan. 

But if Washington continues to kick the can and avoid dealing with the long-term drivers of our [private financial savings] , the magnitude of changes that will be necessary and the risk of a fiscal crisis will be greater. That's something this country just can't afford."

###

[Huh!? What currency system are these people from?]

For more information about the [Neuter the Fiat] Campaign, please visitwww.NeuterTheFiat.borg.

[Neuter the Fiat] Campaign | 1899 L Street, Suite 225 | Washington | DC | 20036

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Meanwhile, in the chart below, can they neuter one part without neutering the obligately yoked parts? I'd rather they experiment on themselves, and prove it it a self-neutering clinical trial, before practicing on the rest of us. Where's the Federal Dingbat Administration when we need one?