Why Isn't There A Committee Reporting That Our "Corporate Welfare Trust Fund" Is Insolvent?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson - in memory of the writings of Robert Eisner.)





[Committee for Frozen Fiat] REPORT:

ANALYSIS OF THE 2014 SOCIAL SECURITY TRUSTEES' REPORT

According to these geniuses, the Trustees show that The Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund is (as they already pre-decided):

* on the brink of insolvency (it wouldn't have mattered WHAT the report said)  

* projected to be exhausted in 2033 (assuming borrowing of more fiat - don't ask how, or why, that occurs either). 

* "Imbalanced" over 75 years -  to the tune of 2.88 percent of taxable payroll, or 1.02 percent of GDP.  (Heck - it's probably out of balance with Ayn Rand and the cosmic background radiation too, and a great many other anomalies, but who's counting?)

* facing a gap between Social Security spending and revenues that will grow from 1.3 percent of payroll (0.45 percent of GDP) this year to 3.9 percent of payroll (1.4 percent of GDP) by 2035 and 4.9 percent of payroll (1.7 percent of GDP) by the end of the 75-year window.

Oh ... my ... gosh! Liars & Innocent Frauds and Perma-DTs, Oh My! Can you visualize these dweebs trying to generate some fiat, and then imagine the semantic difficulties they're saddling future generations with?

They just drone on & on, with endless, invented data irrelevant to context.

How can fiat be exhausted? Don't ask. They have no answer, so they conveniently avoid asking themselves to face reality. They're lost in a crusade to balance what must evolve.

What does an "imbalance" in the fiat mean? Maybe only yodeling political Yoda's can sense that particular disturbance, since a politician's strength flows from the Farce? Curiously, there is no mention of what % of GDP goes to Corporate Welfare, aka "Policy."

Riddle me this Blather Man: why is Social Security the ONLY component of fiat that is [supposedly] funded by a tax on fiat?

So why AREN'T there formal Committees:

a) reporting that Our Corporate Welfare Trust Fund is insolvent?

b) reporting something equally implausible - that our nation's trusty Public Initiative Fund is insolvent?

c) reporting on the mythical gap between fiat "revenue" and fiat itself? [If you have to ask where fiat comes from ... you can't afford it? :( ]

d) explaining how, exactly, a nation generates the fiat revenue that fuels fiat? [Public Initiative?]

You'll never hear the Committee for Frozen Fiat (CFF) commenting on any of those basic sanity checks. Actual thinking does not seem to be in their repertoire, so it's no surprise that they display no sign of Logic-101 either. They have one campaign, and a one-track mind.

At this point any reasonable human should be wondering: "Why don't we just send clowns to Congress, and to staff all federal agencies too?" [Don't answer that unless you're ready to face the answer - it may not reflect well on the voters.]

Meanwhile, this CFF choir seems to have unstoppable momentum - irregardless of reality, or desired outcomes.

An old saying holds that "People will do anything in their power to avoid thinking."

Apparently, shameless politicians will do even more than that, and invoke negative-thinking or straw-concepts, not just lack of thinking. Worse, our foolish electorate will let them! The outcome? If we don't do anything about the real FUDeral Deficit, we might scare ourselves to death with complete nonsense.

What NON Sense! Precisely Calculating The Culmination Of Another Flawed Concept.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

In yet another breathtaking display of clueless cunning, another wit has precisely calculated the culmination of another flawed concept.

"Indeed, the invisible ruler of the Federal Reserve is the market’s future expectations of inflation."

You don't say!

There's a flaw here, of course. What part of FIAT don't these people understand? It's been 80 years now, since fiat currency and inflation fears have been officially & absolutely decoupled even from fiat interest rates. You'd think they'd catch on.

Yes, it may still be a fiat policy to pay an interest rate on our every fiat fiscal policy decision ... but, like all fiat, that swings on a whim. You'd think we'd have more interest in our group survival than in our nominal currency interest rate, but people obviously get confused about these concepts, and refuse to sort them out.

Our bigger fiat problem is our fiat expression of fiat ignorance. Namely, our fiat insistence on fiat NON context-awareness.

This is an oxymoron, of course. To adequately close off all emerging avenues of context awareness denotes an ability to detect said avenues, in order to close them!!!

This is getting interesting, from a pathologists point of view. What do we call pathologists who study and treat cultures, not just individual physiologies? Sentient citizens? Do we have enough of those to matter?

Leaving that issue aside, let's ask some more diagnostic questions, in the interim. How do culture-wide oxymorons propagate? By some inverse cultural-prion disease, where malformed memes act as the prion? Seems backwards, but complicated things happen in complex systems.

However this willful group ignorance occurs, we're left with the curious phenomenon of an entire electorate afraid to acknowledge all aspects of the image bouncing back from it's own operational mirror. Such selective sensory filtration - willfully feigned partial blindness - is called Munchausen by Proxy syndrome in other settings. We have it on a cultural scale.

This is curious beyond rational belief. Being our own bully and stealing our own lunch doesn't sound so bad, in theory. In practice, however, if our lunch currency is only stuffed into bulging cultural-cheek-pouches (purely nominal banking reserves), and never reaches the Middle Class cultural stomach, can we still truthfully tell ourselves that we're even eating our own lunch?

You'd have to ask the Lunch Havers, or their proxies.

Our culture needs MORE than just an advanced semantic immune system (to help select adaptive memes faster). It needs an effective ParadigmAntic immune system, to accelerate discrimination of self-paradigms (that aid survival) and non-self-paradigms (that lead to dead ends, i.e., to us dead).

Without more collective deliberation, we're running around randomly, in the process of dissociating, not coordinating.

Precisely Managing Nonsense, With Double-Entry Accounting

Commentary by Roger Erickson

John Maynard Keynes once wrote of Hayek’s book Prices and Production:

“The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 … It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam.” (Keynes 1931: 394).

The Horror of Rothbardian Natural Rights

One has to be aware of the purpose of evolving aggregates before assuming definitions for natural flows, and managing them with double-entry accounting. Otherwise, you end up rigorously managing nonsense.

Sense vs non-sense comes ONLY by the selection pressure of combining feedback from all channels, existing and emerging. There is no adaptive path in the natural world that isn't bounded by dynamic equilibria between locally conflicting forces, and local perspectives.

In the end, you can't square double-entry accounting with quantum mechanics. That should remind us to never lose track of the fact that it's accounting that has to yield to reality, not the other way around.

This reminds me of three, simple, ancient truths.
* Data is meaningless without context.
* The difference between [operations] & theory is greater in practice than in theory.
* Theory soon becomes meaningless if not constantly serving actual aggregate [not sub-group] operations.

The definition of logic itself is looking for consistency in explaining unpredictable reality. Logic simply maps theory to discovered operations, and in the process selects sense from nonsense.

Interestingly, that seemed to be recognized by members of the Brain Trust who advise the FDR administrations through the astounding number of pragmatic experiments which they utilized, even though it was clear that they, themselves couldn't adequately model a completely new paradigm from the methods which context forced them to adopt, by trial and error. That had to wait for the operational summary called MMT.

STUART CHASE: SEMANTICIST EXTRAORDINARY

Chase, Stuart - Tyranny Of Words [pdf; $9 fee in USA]
  (Ironically, available here too, from Germany, free.)

One lesson is that we always need a survivable ratio of leaders and experimenters in policy offices responsible for our survival, and that we soon die if we instead fill those leadership offices with risk managers. We're always executing experiments on ourselves, no matter what we do. So we may as well have as leaders people able to rapidly learn from many mistakes, rather than those opposed to any change whatsoever, and terrified of making a mistake. The ultimate mistake is to not generate survivable ones as a survivable rate!