Anyone Worried Yet? CBO "Warns" That One Indicator of Public Initiative Is Set To Rise Sharply

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson, hat tip to Alice Marshall)

Federal "Deficit" Is Set to Rise Sharply, CBO Warns

So? No reason to panic. Just relabel this article as "CBO Says Indicator of Public Initiative Set To Rise Sharply"

Unless taxes rise just as sharply, that also equates to "Net Private Financial Savings To Rise Sharply" - which doesn't sound so scary.

How well that rise in private liquidity is distributed is the bigger issue - which too few are talking about. If there's too much income & wealth disparity, it's very much analogous to generals hoarding all the weapons. On paper they still have an army, but in practice it's toothless. Same for an economy. If too few are allowed to hoard most of the currency, the first thing lost is national agility.

What's really happening here is that the CBO staff are Semantic Weasels and sophists, and they're crying about a nominal wolf at a fictional door. The only question savvy citizens should be answering is "WHY are they crying that."

Deficit Doves Crowded Out By Semantic Weasels: FUD Over Public Investment, Private Savings, Distributed Liquidity and Public Initiative

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Result of Jane Sixpack listening to the Brookings Institute?  "Glazing Speed."

Here's what the Brookings Institute Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy says:

The Federal Debt: All The Brookings Institute Thinks You Need To Know In Three Minutes, [Of Either Ignorance or Innocent Fraud, Or Worse.]

Is the federal debt really a crisis that demands immediate attention? The headlines suggest it is, but to understand the debt we must first put it into context.

A new three-minute video from the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy boils down the facts about the outlook for the federal debt by tracing the recent ups and downs (yes, downs) of the projections for federal borrowing over the next decade. You can watch it here:
 

The animation presents the 10-year forecast for the federal debt made before the recession, how it rose when the recession hit, and how it rose still higher after Congress enacted President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the fiscal stimulus of 2009. Despite the outlook brightening in 2013 with the tax increase on upper-income Americans, and a slowdown in the pace at which health care spending is rising, we’re not out of the woods yet.

As part of the Hutchins Center’s mission of improving public understanding of major budget issues confronting the U.S., the video explains projections of the federal debt made by William Gale, the Arjay and Francis Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy at Brookings, and Alan Auerbach, Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law at the University of California, Berkeley. I hope you enjoy.

Sincerely,

David Wessel
Director, the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy
Senior Fellow, Economic Studies
@DavidMWessel

Oh. My. Fiat!!!  With Fiscal and Monetary Policy "Experts" like this .... who needs enemies?

Notice the clever repetition by these sophists of NOMINALLY scary terms - most of them wrongly defined, if at all. Federal debt? Budget Issues? Not out of the woods yet? Federal Debt as the difference between what a nation invests in itself and what it takes in in taxes?

And did I mention federal debt? 

No wonder this promotes fear, uncertainty and doubt. Yet citizens should be asking WHY sophists say there's a wolf at the door, and NOT how big it is.

At best, such "expert" sophist advice only increases public confusion by continuing to promote use of muddled semantics to discuss something as simple as the spreadsheet called a fiat currency system. With all due respect to David Wessel's civic loyalty, perhaps Deficit Dove is not an appropriate description. Semantic Weasel may be more appropriate. This guy could serve as the Undertaker for the Middle Class. He's all sympathy and understanding, as he nevertheless gently guides the widow's hand to sign over all of the family's remaining assets, to provide for the "properly grand burial" of the deceased Middle Class.

In reality, his condescending words only serve to grossly distort understanding of what are actually very straightforward methods for denominating any and all forms of inter-citizen credit, and hence any and all forms of distributed and Public initiative. 

Instead, Jane & Joe Sixpack could and should be urged to pay attention to which local, regional and national efforts are beneficial for our aggregate, and then Just Do It! What matters is our quality (including tempo) of distributed decision-making. We can always denominate any and all of the diverse tasks we agree to do for one another, in pursuit of national goals. So for Fiat's sake, quit confusing people with twisted semantics!

You don't efficiently recruit people to be pragmatically agnostic by endlessly telling them that there is no Devil, no God, no angels ... and that they aren't going to hell.

All that does is imprint in their minds the archaic terms which emerging adaptive pressures demand they forego using as their primary social construct. There's a reason why separation of state and religion evolved. It works.

Separation of ideology and fiat currency operations works too - if people will only keep them separated.

As always, there is a better way - and it is plainly obvious. To help more citizens see that, at least use accurate semantics to orient people to a context that's changed since their old textbooks were written.

And then cease, forever, the use of broken semantics and endless amounts of data-minus-context when trying to build an informed electorate. That's a slow train than never arrives .... in time to matter.

1) There is no REAL federal debt. Only private savings accounts offered by the public through government institutions.

2) There is no "Federal Borrowing". Only expression of Public Initiative. (Who could we borrow fiat from? Cheerleaders? Optimists? OCD patients?)

3) There are no "major fiscal budget constraints". Only aggregate investment of Public Initiative in public services and private saving reserves, to provide distributed liquidity.

4) Fiat is NOT dependent upon how many taxes we collect from ourselves! Taxes only serve to help regulate distributed aggregate demand and express aggregate policy.

Data without context is meaningless.

And, so is our perception or ideology without cultural agility and adaptive outcome.

Is David Wessel joining Erskine & Bowles in launching an Erble Logic Society?

Steve Hawkes — Biggest drop in savings for 40 years, Bank of England figures reveal

Bank figures show £23 billion taken out of long-term savings in past 12 months, equivalent to £900 for every UK household

Telegraph
Biggest drop in savings for 40 years, Bank of England figures reveal
Steve Hawkes, Consumer Affairs Editor
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

Should Americans Be Required To Save?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Depends on the context. For example.

Should Americans be required to save ... for corporate welfare? *

Right concept? Wrong application of logic?

Or would Albert Camus approve of this absurd question, posed for the right reason?

Corporations know know how to invest your fiat BETTER than you do? Why not let more citizens decide, on their own, which corporations to invest THEIR FIAT in ... privately? If we have income disparity and wealth disparity, don't we have freedom disparity?

* Corporate Welfare

The Misinformed Want to "Fix" Our Private Savings

Fix the [Private Savings]

I've heard of the blind leading the blind, but backwards? Why?

Spay the Private Currency Saver? ....   Liquidate the liquidity?

How many times, from John Law to Ben Franklin to Abe Lincoln to Marriner Eccles to Beardsley Ruml to Warren Mosler have sane people pointed out that a Fiat Currency Issuer's entirely virtual accounting "deficit" = Currency Users nominal "savings"?

This is NOT a problem of math, accounting or logic. It's purely and simply a problem of competing marketing campaigns. So far, the money-disinformation campaign has won nearly every round, since ~1650.  Luckily, they haven't won EVERY round.  We're still here.

We don't need more information. We need a dead serious campaign design, by professional campaign designers.

This is NOT an issue of Currency Operations. It's an issue of Political Operations and Propaganda Operations. Capiche?

Fixing an Economic Herd? No thanks.

Our dynamic mix of economic steeds is not a herd of mares and stallions to be "fixed." We do not need intellectual geldings in policy offices. All that does is purposely bypass insanely great national and cultural options, solely so that self-styled national handlers lacking situational awareness may more leisurely lead our country inexorably into oblivion. National castration does NOT produce a viable survival path in a Cultural Adaptive Rate race. We need accelerated Cultural Recombination, not sterile obsolescence. National Options are a terrible thing to waste.
That is NOT why past and present citizens founded the USA. There is a better way.

Our deficit is in Situational Awareness, not in fiat. How the heck does one even produce a deficit in fiat? Virtually, by doing less than nothing? Ok, then a virtual deficit in fiat involves letting others do your thinking for you. That's how you submit to being ruled by a herd of intellectual geldings - and their few handlers.