Monday, August 7, 2023

Today's Bee Letter: Proving once again there's no cure for the common scold

8/7/23 in the Sacramento Bee p. Z7-1 George Will writes "A fiscal crisis awaits--here's a provocative idea for heading it off"

George Will writes we need to revive the Obama Simpson-Bowles Commission to fix the “insolvency” of Social Security and Medicare. What he doesn't mention is that the U.S. is a sovereign, fiat currency creator. Sovereigns never run out of money, even if taxes do not compensate for additional spending. Taxes make the money valuable, they do not provision federal programs. (Where would people get dollars to pay taxes if the government didn’t spend the dollars out into the economy first?) 

Even “the maestro” Alan Greenspan schooled Paul Ryan about this when Ryan proposed privatizing those programs. As early as 1945, a director of the Federal Reserve, Beardsley Ruml, made a famous speech to the ABA, asserting that since the end of the gold standard, "Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete."

George Will is so far behind the times, next he’ll be advising us about how to make dinosaur stew.

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