[ExI] Even India and Haiti do it better

[Omar Rahman]

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>>> ?In your view, if printing more money to pay off debts is an option (poof, debt disappears in a puff of smoke (just give the unemployed their former pay)) why aren?t we doing that?
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> spike
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>> On Behalf Of SR Ballard via extropy-chat
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Even India and Haiti do it better
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>> ?I don?t have a good answer to that because that?s essentially what we?re doing?SR Ballard
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> Clearly not enough.  If all we need to do is print money, then we should not be paying taxes.  We should just print the money that would have been paid in taxes.
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> It is remarkable no one discovered this marvelous theory before now.
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> spike
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Fiscal discipline is indeed something that helps maintain the value of our money. In that situation we quite literally trust that our money is being well spent.

We all know that turning on an endless firehose of money is the financial equivalent of a ‘perpetual motion machine’. But isn’t that what has been going on for decades of deficits? And NOW you want some fiscal responsibility?

There is another flip side to fiscal responsibility, paying taxes. The whole deficit spending/‘perpetual motion machine’/Ponzi economics which endorses bailouts for corporations simultaneously doesn’t tax them. Win-win, in the sense that the corporations win twice. Quite literally ‘less is more’, the government will be better off by not having THEIR money. (It’ll trickle down and magically multiply! Ponzi much?)

Deficit spending *SHOULD* be reserved for crises like the present pandemic.

We have been running deficits for decades all the while income inequality has been increasing. In a country with all the technology, resources, and food that the US has, somehow people can’t manage a couple months of quarantine?

It isn’t because the US can’t it’s because the US won’t. The defence production act, CDC guidelines, Pandemic task forces, stockpiles of masks and ventilators. It was all in place until the ‘make government small enough small enough so that we can drown it in a bathtub’ crowd deliberately got rid of it all.

That’s been the clearly articulated plan for a long time, it wasn’t a secret.

As I write this there is the second confirmed case of covid-19 in the President and Vice-President’s staff. For a supposed germaphobe Trump has been rather blasé about the whole thing; I wonder how President "I don’t need to wear a mask to the mask factory.” Trump will react tomorrow. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll start to act systematically to implement the plans that were put in place years ago after countless hours of scientific research.

Who the hell am I kidding, he’ll probably be tweet storming about deep state conspiracies to infect him. And urging people to pick up guns rather than masks.

Here’s another economic equations for you all: as the value of a gun in one hand goes up the value of money in the other hand goes down.

If you think the economic situation is bad just wait until some bunch of paranoid ‘Liberate State XYZ’ protesters start using those weapons that they bring.

Does anyone want to give me some sort of over/under on the if vs. when of one of the protests ‘going loud’?

Put down the guns: that way I’ll have more trust that you won’t shoot me.

Put on a mask: that way I’ll have more trust you won’t infect me.

More trust = more money.

It is so so simple really,

Omar Rahman