• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Best political system (and how to get there).

But we are far from this realm. In the real world you have to use taxes to fund the government.

Nobody is suggesting that taxes are unnecessary. Only that they need not be equal to spending - a deficit is not only acceptable, it is essential to avoid disaster. Which is the exact opposite of the situation that prevails in a household economy.

You've got this totally wrong. Some money creation--the printing presses--is necessary to avoid disaster in a growing economy. That's not the same as saying deficit spending is required.

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Uh hunh. That's why we have a trillion dollar deficit and 2% inflation. The quantity theory of money makes assumptions which are not present in the real world ie that the velocity of money remains constant, employment is full, the economy is at full productive capacity. None of these conditions hold in the real world. If there are sufficient goods and services to absorb the spending, it won't cause inflation. And it's not.

Not to mention, yet again, that when running a trade deficit, the only way the private sector as a whole can increase its financial assets(cash, treasuries, money) is if the govt spends more than it taxes back.

The deficit and national doomsayers doomsayers have been yammering forever, but it hasn't happened.

But this all missed the point - the difference between nominal and real resources. If the real resources are available, financial or fiscal constraints are self imposed.

Borrowing != printing presses. Your argument doesn't address the actual situation.

And you say it hasn't happened? Off the top of my head Zimbabwe and Venezuela. That's what happens when you fund your government with the printing press.

It hasn't happened here, tho according to the deficit scolds, we should have slid off into oblivion long ago.

Combine commodity shocks with corruption and incompetence and you get your examples. Not by simply deficit spending.

And what actual situation are you talking about?

You still use deficit spending as an example of what happens with the printing presses.

As for deficit spending causing trouble--Greece. Their economy imploded when they couldn't borrow anymore.
 
You've got this totally wrong. Some money creation--the printing presses--is necessary to avoid disaster in a growing economy. That's not the same as saying deficit spending is required.

- - - Updated - - -

Uh hunh. That's why we have a trillion dollar deficit and 2% inflation. The quantity theory of money makes assumptions which are not present in the real world ie that the velocity of money remains constant, employment is full, the economy is at full productive capacity. None of these conditions hold in the real world. If there are sufficient goods and services to absorb the spending, it won't cause inflation. And it's not.

Not to mention, yet again, that when running a trade deficit, the only way the private sector as a whole can increase its financial assets(cash, treasuries, money) is if the govt spends more than it taxes back.

The deficit and national doomsayers doomsayers have been yammering forever, but it hasn't happened.

But this all missed the point - the difference between nominal and real resources. If the real resources are available, financial or fiscal constraints are self imposed.

Borrowing != printing presses. Your argument doesn't address the actual situation.

And you say it hasn't happened? Off the top of my head Zimbabwe and Venezuela. That's what happens when you fund your government with the printing press.

It hasn't happened here, tho according to the deficit scolds, we should have slid off into oblivion long ago.

Combine commodity shocks with corruption and incompetence and you get your examples. Not by simply deficit spending.

And what actual situation are you talking about?

You still use deficit spending as an example of what happens with the printing presses.

As for deficit spending causing trouble--Greece. Their economy imploded when they couldn't borrow anymore.

As did the economy of Kansas.

Greece is not a sovereign currency issuing nation.

Greece is most certainly not anything like the Federal USA.

The EU has not imploded.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
You've got this totally wrong. Some money creation--the printing presses--is necessary to avoid disaster in a growing economy. That's not the same as saying deficit spending is required.

Deficit spending is money creation.

Other than by making payments in excess of receipts, how else would the currency issuer put money into the economy? Leave cash under bushes for people to find?

If you mean the bond issues aren't required, you're absolutely right. They have a different purpose.
 
The simple unchanging Truth is this:

A higher deficit -- an "economic stimulus" -- has a short-term result of producing more economic "growth" and "job creation" which eventually runs up the federal budget, 5 or 10 years later, so that there is no net long-term improvement in the economic numbers. But there is always the short-term improvement in those numbers, and thus an instant gratification benefit.

And Trump's current increased deficit can explain the improved numbers we're seeing, because such deficits do produce those short-term gains, like higher "growth" etc. But the only way to keep it going is to run up still more debt in the future.

Ehe... nope. The point of economic stimulus is to prevent the market from collapsing completely in a sudden crash. Stimulus packages were introduced following the depression. Once there's been a near total collapse of the market it takes a very long time to get the wheels spinning again. A stimulus can act as a temporary plug in a sinking boat, to keep it afloat until we reach harbour.

This is a weakness in a democratic system. In an economic collapse people become very extreme in their political views. Extreme political views almost always lead to violence and war. So for a democratic country (or groups of countries) this is very dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. War is incredibly expensive for all involved. Even trade wars. Like what Trump is doing now.

But if you use stimulus packages at any other time than in a serious market collapse then that's just burning money for no reason. Whenever the government gets involved to move money from one person to another about 1/3 of that money is wasted. For the economy as a whole it's almost always better for the government not to get involved.

I don't see that you are rebutting him at all.

He's saying that a stimulus is only of a benefit in the short term but in the long run you're no better off because of the costs. (Same as using a credit card to buy something. You get it now, you get the payments down the road.) You're saying it should only be done to avert economic disaster--which is in no way incompatible with what he's saying.
 
You still use deficit spending as an example of what happens with the printing presses.

As for deficit spending causing trouble--Greece. Their economy imploded when they couldn't borrow anymore.

Another indication you don't know what you're talking about. Greece is not a currency issuer. Greece is analogous to a US state. State and local govt's are revenue constrained, limited by tax revenue and federal revenue sharing; the US govt is not. The US would have to start borrowing in foreign currencies to become like Greece.
 
Regardless of what money is issued or printed by whom: why do we allow these decisions to be made on our behalf, in secret, by people who don't have our interests at heart and have no incentive to make good on their promises to do right by us?

That's the basic question at the heart of Marxism, I think. How have we been convinced that we should step aside and let others decide the course of the majority of our lives on our behalf, as if we don't know much better than they do how things should be run? Especially given the lack of overlap between the people who are most deeply affected by economic policies (workers who are dependent on wages and market forces to survive) and the people who devise and eventually enact economic policies(elected state officials who are usually far wealthier than the people they represent). We just accept this as the way things must be, and instead devote our energies to debating about deficits.

There is a strange dichotomy between the workplace and the public sphere. At work, we do not expect any democratic influence behind the major directives of the companies that employ us. We can chip in our two cents if asked, but in the end the choices are made by the owners and shareholders, who have this power because they have access to money, not because they work the hardest at whatever the company is supposed to do. In the public sphere, we demand at least a veneer of democracy, and at least in the USA, we are quick to regard what we have as the best system possible, worlds apart from the cruel dictatorships we sometimes go to war with. However, the same cruelty is never recognized in the context of where we spend the majority of our lives and expend the majority of our energies: at work.

The other aspect of this dichotomy is the difference between public and private concerns when it comes to planning. Within a business, rational strategy is an absolute necessity in order to be successful, and everything from the layout of the firm to the individual roles of its employees is expected to follow a plan set out in advance, with an eye to the future and contingencies for every risk. But between businesses, there can be no planning, only the anarchy of market competition and winner-takes-all posturing for dominance. Any suggestion that the activities of multiple companies should be coordinated together to meet shared goals, rather than pitted against one another at the mercy of unpredictable swings in the economy, is taken to be an affront to personal freedom. Yet, within a company, we are happy to participate in whatever plan has been handed down by the bosses, even though the plan is not a plan for how to make everybody's life better, it's a plan for how to make the bosses the most profit. We enthusiastically play our parts in these arrangements while simultaneously rejecting the notion that a social plan on the scale larger than an individual business, aimed at maximizing the well-being of all rather than the few who are in charge, is something worth doing.
 
Regardless of what money is issued or printed by whom: why do we allow these decisions to be made on our behalf, in secret, by people who don't have our interests at heart and have no incentive to make good on their promises to do right by us?

That's the basic question at the heart of Marxism, I think. How have we been convinced that we should step aside and let others decide the course of the majority of our lives on our behalf, as if we don't know much better than they do how things should be run? Especially given the lack of overlap between the people who are most deeply affected by economic policies (workers who are dependent on wages and market forces to survive) and the people who devise and eventually enact economic policies(elected state officials who are usually far wealthier than the people they represent). We just accept this as the way things must be, and instead devote our energies to debating about deficits.

There is a strange dichotomy between the workplace and the public sphere. At work, we do not expect any democratic influence behind the major directives of the companies that employ us. We can chip in our two cents if asked, but in the end the choices are made by the owners and shareholders, who have this power because they have access to money, not because they work the hardest at whatever the company is supposed to do. In the public sphere, we demand at least a veneer of democracy, and at least in the USA, we are quick to regard what we have as the best system possible, worlds apart from the cruel dictatorships we sometimes go to war with. However, the same cruelty is never recognized in the context of where we spend the majority of our lives and expend the majority of our energies: at work.

The other aspect of this dichotomy is the difference between public and private concerns when it comes to planning. Within a business, rational strategy is an absolute necessity in order to be successful, and everything from the layout of the firm to the individual roles of its employees is expected to follow a plan set out in advance, with an eye to the future and contingencies for every risk. But between businesses, there can be no planning, only the anarchy of market competition and winner-takes-all posturing for dominance. Any suggestion that the activities of multiple companies should be coordinated together to meet shared goals, rather than pitted against one another at the mercy of unpredictable swings in the economy, is taken to be an affront to personal freedom. Yet, within a company, we are happy to participate in whatever plan has been handed down by the bosses, even though the plan is not a plan for how to make everybody's life better, it's a plan for how to make the bosses the most profit. We enthusiastically play our parts in these arrangements while simultaneously rejecting the notion that a social plan on the scale larger than an individual business, aimed at maximizing the well-being of all rather than the few who are in charge, is something worth doing.

I don't agree.

Planning is a poor way to get a good result in most circumstances, and can only be really effective at very small scales, where all the variables are known to the planner, and unexpected disruptions can be communicated back to that planner and the plan modified in real time to cope with changed circumstances.

Medium sized companies are at the very largest end of the scale where central planning can be made to work. Most large companies resolve this by structuring themselves into divisions that are largely independent, often by both function and geography. But that leads to the well known problem of siloed thinking, and the 'left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing', leading to the twin evils of inefficiency, and the bureaucracy that is intended to mitigate those inefficiencies.

The solution, in both cases, is to forget about trying to plan the activity at the low level, and to instead plan only the broad strategy. In place of planning, you introduce signalling systems that tell the different parts of the company what to do and when, based not on some master plan, but rather on the actual events. The Japanese pioneered the use of a system called 'kanban', in which each worker (or work unit) in a factory knows what to do next not because the boss says 'Now make a thousand widgets', but because when the next process on the line starts running short of widgets, they send a 'widget card' back up the line that says 'Make 1,000 widgets'.

In its simplest form, a kanban can be as simple as having two bins of parts. Both hold the same number of parts, and that number is equal to the maximum number of parts used in the time it takes to obtain another bin of that part. When a bin is empty, you send it to be re-filled. In principle, you should never run short of that part. The empty bin itself is the signal to make more.

More complicated systems are needed as the complexity of the process being controlled increases; Tickets that indicate the priority of different tasks get passed around - if a green ticket comes in at the same time as a red one, you act on the red one first. The rules are kept as simple as possible; The actual activity being prompted by these rules is highly complex, and far more efficient than a central planner could have achieved.

When you get to a really high level of complexity, you can set priorities as numbers - the highest numbers get dealt with first, and lower numbers get dealt with last (if at all). The number you put on tickets you issue is constrained, so each individual workstation must decide how badly they need supplies, and number their kanbans accordingly.

The ultimate kanban is called a 'dollar'. You get them from the people and organizations that you supply stuff to, and can use them to get stuff from your suppliers. Each individual is responsible for setting their own priorities, and deciding how many dollars to offer to a suppler in exchange for a given good or service. These signals automatically prioritize the production of those things which are in greatest demand - there is no shadowy 'planner' imposing his will on the system; Just strategic re-prioritization of certain goals, by removing dollars from parts of the system that have too many, and injecting dollars into parts of the system where they are too scarce.

We call this 'taxation' and 'spending', but it's actually just adjusting priorities. People get all steamed up about having some of 'their' dollars taken away in taxes, and given to someone else as welfare - but actually, the dollars all belong to the people running the system, and they can and should redistribute them to achieve the strategic direction that they were elected to pursue.

We observe that, in the absence of this strategic rebalancing, dollars tend to accumulate in fewer and fewer parts of the system, simply because having dollars makes getting more dollars easier. However some people sincerely believe that this is an acceptable or even desirable situation. Others sincerely think that having equal numbers of dollars in each person's hands is a good thing - having failed to realize that this describes a static (ie not working at all) economy. The reality is that we must have a middle ground to achieve maximum efficiency in getting resources from where they are, to where they are needed. And we have been successfully employing that strategy since the end of commodity money - with some wide variations due to the foolish pursuit of one or other of the extreme ideologies, or more commonly due to a lack of understanding of these fundamental facts about what the economy IS - it's a signalling system that is supposed to tell everyone what the best use of their time and effort is right now, in order to implement the wider strategy of society as determined by our leaders. In a representative democracy, that strategy should, in principle, largely reflect the aggregate view of the people.

Central planning not only does not work on a large scale - there are sound reasons to expect that it cannot work - like weather forecasting, the ability to make long range predictions requires a level of accuracy in the inputs and an amount of processing power that is physically impossible to achieve over longer planning horizons. Tomorrow's weather forecast is likely to be right. A forecast four days ahead is better than guessing. A forecast a month ahead is not better than guessing.

Money is a signal. That's ALL money is. It's not property - it's worth nothing until you spend it. our wealth is a tally of how much we have put into society, above and beyond what we have taken out in goods and services. To the extent that we feel that individuals have unfairly high or unfairly low tallies, we can (and should) take away and destroy the excess money held by the rich (ie tax them); And create money and distribute it to the poor (ie pay them welfare). These two activities are not, and need not be, linked at the strategic level.
 
Regardless of what money is issued or printed by whom: why do we allow these decisions to be made on our behalf, in secret, by people who don't have our interests at heart and have no incentive to make good on their promises to do right by us?

The Fed does seem to have the interests of the US at heart. People don't like it when they raise rates but it's better in the long run when they do.

That's the basic question at the heart of Marxism, I think. How have we been convinced that we should step aside and let others decide the course of the majority of our lives on our behalf, as if we don't know much better than they do how things should be run? Especially given the lack of overlap between the people who are most deeply affected by economic policies (workers who are dependent on wages and market forces to survive) and the people who devise and eventually enact economic policies(elected state officials who are usually far wealthier than the people they represent). We just accept this as the way things must be, and instead devote our energies to debating about deficits.

Marxism--leaving the decisions to the most popular. Never mind whether they are competent or not. There's a reason the Fed is shielded from politics!!
 
Does money "creation" or "printing money" have to mean new debt?

You still use deficit spending as an example of what happens with the printing presses.

As for deficit spending causing trouble--Greece. Their economy imploded when they couldn't borrow anymore.

Another indication you don't know what you're talking about. Greece is not . . .

Is there anyone who really knows what they're talking about, on how govt "creates" or "prints" money?

I want such a person to answer this: Since the year 1900, has the U.S. ever created any money without borrowing it, or tying it to debt? If it's always by changing interest rates, isn't that debt in some form? Why does there always have to be new DEBT when new money is created?

I.e., what about "printing" it in the same sense as running it off the presses, without anyone borrowing anything from anyone?

Didn't the U.S. "print" money during the Civil War which had nothing to do with debt? And didn't Germany do this in the 1920s? And haven't some other countries done it more recently, where they simply ran the presses, literally? (If it led to disastrous consequences, this only means they printed too much, not that "printing" it is always wrong or has to cause hyperinflation.)

Is there a way to "print" money, in this sense, other than literally printing currency/cash? I.e., to increase the money in circulation (e.g., during a time of deflation), but not doing it with any form of issuing debt which has to be repaid?

Aren't there some cases, maybe rare, when it would be better to "print" it, in this sense, without fooling with any interest rates or any borrowing, without this or that interest rate being lowered or raised, but simply putting dollars into circulation with no one owing back anything later?

It seems there must be some such way to increase the money supply, if necessary in a rare case, and yet whenever "printing" money is described, it's always the Fed increasing or decreasing the interest rates.

Is that the only way money can be "created" or "printed"? Why?
 
The simple unchanging Truth is this:

A higher deficit -- an "economic stimulus" -- has a short-term result of producing more economic "growth" and "job creation" which eventually runs up the federal budget, 5 or 10 years later, so that there is no net long-term improvement in the economic numbers. But there is always the short-term improvement in those numbers, and thus an instant gratification benefit.

And Trump's current increased deficit can explain the improved numbers we're seeing, because such deficits do produce those short-term gains, like higher "growth" etc. But the only way to keep it going is to run up still more debt in the future.

Ehe... nope. The point of economic stimulus is to prevent the market from collapsing completely in a sudden crash. Stimulus packages were introduced following the depression. Once there's been a near total collapse of the market it takes a very long time to get the wheels spinning again. A stimulus can act as a temporary plug in a sinking boat, to keep it afloat until we reach harbour.

This is a weakness in a democratic system. In an economic collapse people become very extreme in their political views. Extreme political views almost always lead to violence and war. So for a democratic country (or groups of countries) this is very dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. War is incredibly expensive for all involved. Even trade wars. Like what Trump is doing now.

But if you use stimulus packages at any other time than in a serious market collapse then that's just burning money for no reason. Whenever the government gets involved to move money from one person to another about 1/3 of that money is wasted. For the economy as a whole it's almost always better for the government not to get involved.

I don't see that you are rebutting him at all.

He's saying that a stimulus is only of a benefit in the short term but in the long run you're no better off because of the costs. (Same as using a credit card to buy something. You get it now, you get the payments down the road.) You're saying it should only be done to avert economic disaster--which is in no way incompatible with what he's saying.

I think stimulus packages, when used in deep recessions are long term beneficial. But usually they aren't. Another problem with stimulus packages is that you have to invest it in the right stuff. If you invest it in the wrong stuff, you've just made a bad problem worse. This is what really wrecked the post colonial African economies. They went full Keynes and it went super sour.
 
You still use deficit spending as an example of what happens with the printing presses.

As for deficit spending causing trouble--Greece. Their economy imploded when they couldn't borrow anymore.

Another indication you don't know what you're talking about. Greece is not . . .

Is there anyone who really knows what they're talking about, on how govt "creates" or "prints" money?

I want such a person to answer this: Since the year 1900, has the U.S. ever created any money without borrowing it, or tying it to debt? If it's always by changing interest rates, isn't that debt in some form? Why does there always have to be new DEBT when new money is created?

I.e., what about "printing" it in the same sense as running it off the presses, without anyone borrowing anything from anyone?

Didn't the U.S. "print" money during the Civil War which had nothing to do with debt? And didn't Germany do this in the 1920s? And haven't some other countries done it more recently, where they simply ran the presses, literally? (If it led to disastrous consequences, this only means they printed too much, not that "printing" it is always wrong or has to cause hyperinflation.)

Is there a way to "print" money, in this sense, other than literally printing currency/cash? I.e., to increase the money in circulation (e.g., during a time of deflation), but not doing it with any form of issuing debt which has to be repaid?

Aren't there some cases, maybe rare, when it would be better to "print" it, in this sense, without fooling with any interest rates or any borrowing, without this or that interest rate being lowered or raised, but simply putting dollars into circulation with no one owing back anything later?

It seems there must be some such way to increase the money supply, if necessary in a rare case, and yet whenever "printing" money is described, it's always the Fed increasing or decreasing the interest rates.

Is that the only way money can be "created" or "printed"? Why?

Money IS debt. They are synonymous.

:rolleyes:

The government 'printing money' is indistinguishable from the government 'creating debt'.
 
Regardless of what money is issued or printed by whom: why do we allow these decisions to be made on our behalf, in secret, by people who don't have our interests at heart and have no incentive to make good on their promises to do right by us?

That's the basic question at the heart of Marxism, I think. How have we been convinced that we should step aside and let others decide the course of the majority of our lives on our behalf, as if we don't know much better than they do how things should be run? Especially given the lack of overlap between the people who are most deeply affected by economic policies (workers who are dependent on wages and market forces to survive) and the people who devise and eventually enact economic policies(elected state officials who are usually far wealthier than the people they represent). We just accept this as the way things must be, and instead devote our energies to debating about deficits.

There is a strange dichotomy between the workplace and the public sphere. At work, we do not expect any democratic influence behind the major directives of the companies that employ us. We can chip in our two cents if asked, but in the end the choices are made by the owners and shareholders, who have this power because they have access to money, not because they work the hardest at whatever the company is supposed to do. In the public sphere, we demand at least a veneer of democracy, and at least in the USA, we are quick to regard what we have as the best system possible, worlds apart from the cruel dictatorships we sometimes go to war with. However, the same cruelty is never recognized in the context of where we spend the majority of our lives and expend the majority of our energies: at work.

The other aspect of this dichotomy is the difference between public and private concerns when it comes to planning. Within a business, rational strategy is an absolute necessity in order to be successful, and everything from the layout of the firm to the individual roles of its employees is expected to follow a plan set out in advance, with an eye to the future and contingencies for every risk. But between businesses, there can be no planning, only the anarchy of market competition and winner-takes-all posturing for dominance. Any suggestion that the activities of multiple companies should be coordinated together to meet shared goals, rather than pitted against one another at the mercy of unpredictable swings in the economy, is taken to be an affront to personal freedom. Yet, within a company, we are happy to participate in whatever plan has been handed down by the bosses, even though the plan is not a plan for how to make everybody's life better, it's a plan for how to make the bosses the most profit. We enthusiastically play our parts in these arrangements while simultaneously rejecting the notion that a social plan on the scale larger than an individual business, aimed at maximizing the well-being of all rather than the few who are in charge, is something worth doing.

I don't agree.

Planning is a poor way to get a good result in most circumstances, and can only be really effective at very small scales, where all the variables are known to the planner, and unexpected disruptions can be communicated back to that planner and the plan modified in real time to cope with changed circumstances.

Medium sized companies are at the very largest end of the scale where central planning can be made to work. Most large companies resolve this by structuring themselves into divisions that are largely independent, often by both function and geography. But that leads to the well known problem of siloed thinking, and the 'left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing', leading to the twin evils of inefficiency, and the bureaucracy that is intended to mitigate those inefficiencies.

The solution, in both cases, is to forget about trying to plan the activity at the low level, and to instead plan only the broad strategy. In place of planning, you introduce signalling systems that tell the different parts of the company what to do and when, based not on some master plan, but rather on the actual events. The Japanese pioneered the use of a system called 'kanban', in which each worker (or work unit) in a factory knows what to do next not because the boss says 'Now make a thousand widgets', but because when the next process on the line starts running short of widgets, they send a 'widget card' back up the line that says 'Make 1,000 widgets'.

In its simplest form, a kanban can be as simple as having two bins of parts. Both hold the same number of parts, and that number is equal to the maximum number of parts used in the time it takes to obtain another bin of that part. When a bin is empty, you send it to be re-filled. In principle, you should never run short of that part. The empty bin itself is the signal to make more.

More complicated systems are needed as the complexity of the process being controlled increases; Tickets that indicate the priority of different tasks get passed around - if a green ticket comes in at the same time as a red one, you act on the red one first. The rules are kept as simple as possible; The actual activity being prompted by these rules is highly complex, and far more efficient than a central planner could have achieved.

When you get to a really high level of complexity, you can set priorities as numbers - the highest numbers get dealt with first, and lower numbers get dealt with last (if at all). The number you put on tickets you issue is constrained, so each individual workstation must decide how badly they need supplies, and number their kanbans accordingly.

The ultimate kanban is called a 'dollar'. You get them from the people and organizations that you supply stuff to, and can use them to get stuff from your suppliers. Each individual is responsible for setting their own priorities, and deciding how many dollars to offer to a suppler in exchange for a given good or service. These signals automatically prioritize the production of those things which are in greatest demand - there is no shadowy 'planner' imposing his will on the system; Just strategic re-prioritization of certain goals, by removing dollars from parts of the system that have too many, and injecting dollars into parts of the system where they are too scarce.

We call this 'taxation' and 'spending', but it's actually just adjusting priorities. People get all steamed up about having some of 'their' dollars taken away in taxes, and given to someone else as welfare - but actually, the dollars all belong to the people running the system, and they can and should redistribute them to achieve the strategic direction that they were elected to pursue.

We observe that, in the absence of this strategic rebalancing, dollars tend to accumulate in fewer and fewer parts of the system, simply because having dollars makes getting more dollars easier. However some people sincerely believe that this is an acceptable or even desirable situation. Others sincerely think that having equal numbers of dollars in each person's hands is a good thing - having failed to realize that this describes a static (ie not working at all) economy. The reality is that we must have a middle ground to achieve maximum efficiency in getting resources from where they are, to where they are needed. And we have been successfully employing that strategy since the end of commodity money - with some wide variations due to the foolish pursuit of one or other of the extreme ideologies, or more commonly due to a lack of understanding of these fundamental facts about what the economy IS - it's a signalling system that is supposed to tell everyone what the best use of their time and effort is right now, in order to implement the wider strategy of society as determined by our leaders. In a representative democracy, that strategy should, in principle, largely reflect the aggregate view of the people.

Central planning not only does not work on a large scale - there are sound reasons to expect that it cannot work - like weather forecasting, the ability to make long range predictions requires a level of accuracy in the inputs and an amount of processing power that is physically impossible to achieve over longer planning horizons. Tomorrow's weather forecast is likely to be right. A forecast four days ahead is better than guessing. A forecast a month ahead is not better than guessing.

Money is a signal. That's ALL money is. It's not property - it's worth nothing until you spend it. our wealth is a tally of how much we have put into society, above and beyond what we have taken out in goods and services. To the extent that we feel that individuals have unfairly high or unfairly low tallies, we can (and should) take away and destroy the excess money held by the rich (ie tax them); And create money and distribute it to the poor (ie pay them welfare). These two activities are not, and need not be, linked at the strategic level.

The Pentagon is larger than most medium-sized companies, and would not think of surrendering its decision-making approach to the whims of market forces--for example, if the division of the armed forces with the most wealthy members were able to simply purchase the ability to perform whatever maneuver or strategy they wished, and the only way to prevent that would be if another division could secure more wealth for itself and outbid them. It is rationally, obviously acknowledged within the Pentagon that such chaotic tactics are completely at odds with the high stakes of their operation.

Multinational corporations operate in much the same way from the perspective of who does what, when, why, and for how long. When the profit of a giant company is on the table, every expenditure is carefully weighed from a holistic perspective against the possibilities of harming the bottom line. To your point, this is not always possible given the unpredictability of economic forces under capitalism. But no CEO would tolerate the suggestion that next year's supply budget be dictated by the anarchy of internal competition among rival finance departments who only care about their own prestige. The CEO wants unified, cooperative action executed in a logical way by a team that works together. I am just pointing out that we readily accept this kind of intentional planning (and expect it from our bosses) when done by individual organizations, both state and private, from small to large, even as we acknowledge their primary goals are not to make life better for their workers or citizens, but to increase profit or entrench political power. It's not a feasibility problem, because the most unfeasible way of doing things is already what is being done, and for the wrong reasons!

We only need to apply the same willingness to deliberate on large scales to matters that are actually important to the majority, like: how much food should we produce this year, who needs it the most, how many houses should we build, who should live in them, what kind of transportation infrastructure is best to get people where they want to go, does everybody have the basic necessities of a clean and comfortable existence, is there any need to produce vast surpluses of electronic goods that will go obsolete in two years, and so on. As of right now, every single one of those matters is largely decided by the market, with state intervention to partially fill in the many gaps. We have hungry people and dumpsters full of food, homeless people and billionaires with dozens of empty mansions, able-bodied workers and work to be done, money to pay them, but nobody to initiate it because there isn't enough profit to be made. This is the consequence of leaving the vast bulk of the factors that directly impinge upon the livelihoods of everyone in the hands of competitive forces tied to fluctuations in consumer and investor confidence.

Your suggestion that the dollar is a signaling mechanism is laughably inadequate. Spending does not equate to need when huge swaths of the population lack the ability to signal their preferences via spending, and a tiny minority has the ability to send billions-fold louder and more insistent signals to the producers of goods and services to highlight their own preferences. You concede as much by acknowledging the need to periodically re-balance the distribution--that's planning. But it's planning only to a certain arbitrary point, stopping short of the kind of planning that wouldn't accept as a given the natural concentration of wealth that requires such interventions.

There was a time where the tasks before us were so resource-intensive and complicated that we had to rely on some kind of kanban to tell us what to do next. Capitalism has enabled technological progress to the extent that our surplus of resources and actual output is so gigantic that we have to stop applying scarcity-appropriate planning tactics to an abundance environment. The simple fact is that we already have everything we need, we already know who needs it most, we already know what is being discarded for foolish reasons, but we are superstitious about planning so we invent excuses for why the ultimate mechanisms responsible for producing and distributing our bounty should get hashed out on Wall Street or subverted by advertising firms. That sector is all about following the kanbans, and it isn't helping anybody but itself.
 
Regardless of what money is issued or printed by whom: why do we allow these decisions to be made on our behalf, in secret, by people who don't have our interests at heart and have no incentive to make good on their promises to do right by us?

The Fed does seem to have the interests of the US at heart. People don't like it when they raise rates but it's better in the long run when they do.

That's the basic question at the heart of Marxism, I think. How have we been convinced that we should step aside and let others decide the course of the majority of our lives on our behalf, as if we don't know much better than they do how things should be run? Especially given the lack of overlap between the people who are most deeply affected by economic policies (workers who are dependent on wages and market forces to survive) and the people who devise and eventually enact economic policies(elected state officials who are usually far wealthier than the people they represent). We just accept this as the way things must be, and instead devote our energies to debating about deficits.

Marxism--leaving the decisions to the most popular. Never mind whether they are competent or not. There's a reason the Fed is shielded from politics!!

How is that working out? Does everybody have a satisfying job, plenty of leisure time, access to health care, quality education, child services, and transportation across the country? No? Are we materially lacking in any of the resources that we'd need to change that? No? Then, why the fuck should anybody be impressed by what the Fed does with interest rates?
 
You still use deficit spending as an example of what happens with the printing presses.

As for deficit spending causing trouble--Greece. Their economy imploded when they couldn't borrow anymore.

Another indication you don't know what you're talking about. Greece is not . . .

Is there anyone who really knows what they're talking about, on how govt "creates" or "prints" money?

I want such a person to answer this: Since the year 1900, has the U.S. ever created any money without borrowing it, or tying it to debt? If it's always by changing interest rates, isn't that debt in some form? Why does there always have to be new DEBT when new money is created?

I.e., what about "printing" it in the same sense as running it off the presses, without anyone borrowing anything from anyone?

Didn't the U.S. "print" money during the Civil War which had nothing to do with debt? And didn't Germany do this in the 1920s? And haven't some other countries done it more recently, where they simply ran the presses, literally? (If it led to disastrous consequences, this only means they printed too much, not that "printing" it is always wrong or has to cause hyperinflation.)

Is there a way to "print" money, in this sense, other than literally printing currency/cash? I.e., to increase the money in circulation (e.g., during a time of deflation), but not doing it with any form of issuing debt which has to be repaid?

Aren't there some cases, maybe rare, when it would be better to "print" it, in this sense, without fooling with any interest rates or any borrowing, without this or that interest rate being lowered or raised, but simply putting dollars into circulation with no one owing back anything later?

It seems there must be some such way to increase the money supply, if necessary in a rare case, and yet whenever "printing" money is described, it's always the Fed increasing or decreasing the interest rates.

Is that the only way money can be "created" or "printed"? Why?

Of course not. There's no reason to issue debt along with deficit spending, except we've (almost) always done it that way. It's a legacy of the gold standard.

"Positive" or "debt free" money, its advocates call it.
 
Regardless of what money is issued or printed by whom: why do we allow these decisions to be made on our behalf, in secret, by people who don't have our interests at heart and have no incentive to make good on their promises to do right by us?

That's the basic question at the heart of Marxism, I think. How have we been convinced that we should step aside and let others decide the course of the majority of our lives on our behalf, as if we don't know much better than they do how things should be run? Especially given the lack of overlap between the people who are most deeply affected by economic policies (workers who are dependent on wages and market forces to survive) and the people who devise and eventually enact economic policies(elected state officials who are usually far wealthier than the people they represent). We just accept this as the way things must be, and instead devote our energies to debating about deficits.

There is a strange dichotomy between the workplace and the public sphere. At work, we do not expect any democratic influence behind the major directives of the companies that employ us. We can chip in our two cents if asked, but in the end the choices are made by the owners and shareholders, who have this power because they have access to money, not because they work the hardest at whatever the company is supposed to do. In the public sphere, we demand at least a veneer of democracy, and at least in the USA, we are quick to regard what we have as the best system possible, worlds apart from the cruel dictatorships we sometimes go to war with. However, the same cruelty is never recognized in the context of where we spend the majority of our lives and expend the majority of our energies: at work.

The other aspect of this dichotomy is the difference between public and private concerns when it comes to planning. Within a business, rational strategy is an absolute necessity in order to be successful, and everything from the layout of the firm to the individual roles of its employees is expected to follow a plan set out in advance, with an eye to the future and contingencies for every risk. But between businesses, there can be no planning, only the anarchy of market competition and winner-takes-all posturing for dominance. Any suggestion that the activities of multiple companies should be coordinated together to meet shared goals, rather than pitted against one another at the mercy of unpredictable swings in the economy, is taken to be an affront to personal freedom. Yet, within a company, we are happy to participate in whatever plan has been handed down by the bosses, even though the plan is not a plan for how to make everybody's life better, it's a plan for how to make the bosses the most profit. We enthusiastically play our parts in these arrangements while simultaneously rejecting the notion that a social plan on the scale larger than an individual business, aimed at maximizing the well-being of all rather than the few who are in charge, is something worth doing.

I don't agree.

Planning is a poor way to get a good result in most circumstances, and can only be really effective at very small scales, where all the variables are known to the planner, and unexpected disruptions can be communicated back to that planner and the plan modified in real time to cope with changed circumstances.

Medium sized companies are at the very largest end of the scale where central planning can be made to work. Most large companies resolve this by structuring themselves into divisions that are largely independent, often by both function and geography. But that leads to the well known problem of siloed thinking, and the 'left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing', leading to the twin evils of inefficiency, and the bureaucracy that is intended to mitigate those inefficiencies.

The solution, in both cases, is to forget about trying to plan the activity at the low level, and to instead plan only the broad strategy. In place of planning, you introduce signalling systems that tell the different parts of the company what to do and when, based not on some master plan, but rather on the actual events. The Japanese pioneered the use of a system called 'kanban', in which each worker (or work unit) in a factory knows what to do next not because the boss says 'Now make a thousand widgets', but because when the next process on the line starts running short of widgets, they send a 'widget card' back up the line that says 'Make 1,000 widgets'.

In its simplest form, a kanban can be as simple as having two bins of parts. Both hold the same number of parts, and that number is equal to the maximum number of parts used in the time it takes to obtain another bin of that part. When a bin is empty, you send it to be re-filled. In principle, you should never run short of that part. The empty bin itself is the signal to make more.

More complicated systems are needed as the complexity of the process being controlled increases; Tickets that indicate the priority of different tasks get passed around - if a green ticket comes in at the same time as a red one, you act on the red one first. The rules are kept as simple as possible; The actual activity being prompted by these rules is highly complex, and far more efficient than a central planner could have achieved.

When you get to a really high level of complexity, you can set priorities as numbers - the highest numbers get dealt with first, and lower numbers get dealt with last (if at all). The number you put on tickets you issue is constrained, so each individual workstation must decide how badly they need supplies, and number their kanbans accordingly.

The ultimate kanban is called a 'dollar'. You get them from the people and organizations that you supply stuff to, and can use them to get stuff from your suppliers. Each individual is responsible for setting their own priorities, and deciding how many dollars to offer to a suppler in exchange for a given good or service. These signals automatically prioritize the production of those things which are in greatest demand - there is no shadowy 'planner' imposing his will on the system; Just strategic re-prioritization of certain goals, by removing dollars from parts of the system that have too many, and injecting dollars into parts of the system where they are too scarce.

We call this 'taxation' and 'spending', but it's actually just adjusting priorities. People get all steamed up about having some of 'their' dollars taken away in taxes, and given to someone else as welfare - but actually, the dollars all belong to the people running the system, and they can and should redistribute them to achieve the strategic direction that they were elected to pursue.

We observe that, in the absence of this strategic rebalancing, dollars tend to accumulate in fewer and fewer parts of the system, simply because having dollars makes getting more dollars easier. However some people sincerely believe that this is an acceptable or even desirable situation. Others sincerely think that having equal numbers of dollars in each person's hands is a good thing - having failed to realize that this describes a static (ie not working at all) economy. The reality is that we must have a middle ground to achieve maximum efficiency in getting resources from where they are, to where they are needed. And we have been successfully employing that strategy since the end of commodity money - with some wide variations due to the foolish pursuit of one or other of the extreme ideologies, or more commonly due to a lack of understanding of these fundamental facts about what the economy IS - it's a signalling system that is supposed to tell everyone what the best use of their time and effort is right now, in order to implement the wider strategy of society as determined by our leaders. In a representative democracy, that strategy should, in principle, largely reflect the aggregate view of the people.

Central planning not only does not work on a large scale - there are sound reasons to expect that it cannot work - like weather forecasting, the ability to make long range predictions requires a level of accuracy in the inputs and an amount of processing power that is physically impossible to achieve over longer planning horizons. Tomorrow's weather forecast is likely to be right. A forecast four days ahead is better than guessing. A forecast a month ahead is not better than guessing.

Money is a signal. That's ALL money is. It's not property - it's worth nothing until you spend it. our wealth is a tally of how much we have put into society, above and beyond what we have taken out in goods and services. To the extent that we feel that individuals have unfairly high or unfairly low tallies, we can (and should) take away and destroy the excess money held by the rich (ie tax them); And create money and distribute it to the poor (ie pay them welfare). These two activities are not, and need not be, linked at the strategic level.

The Pentagon is larger than most medium-sized companies, and would not think of surrendering its decision-making approach to the whims of market forces--for example, if the division of the armed forces with the most wealthy members were able to simply purchase the ability to perform whatever maneuver or strategy they wished, and the only way to prevent that would be if another division could secure more wealth for itself and outbid them. It is rationally, obviously acknowledged within the Pentagon that such chaotic tactics are completely at odds with the high stakes of their operation.

Multinational corporations operate in much the same way from the perspective of who does what, when, why, and for how long. When the profit of a giant company is on the table, every expenditure is carefully weighed from a holistic perspective against the possibilities of harming the bottom line. To your point, this is not always possible given the unpredictability of economic forces under capitalism. But no CEO would tolerate the suggestion that next year's supply budget be dictated by the anarchy of internal competition among rival finance departments who only care about their own prestige. The CEO wants unified, cooperative action executed in a logical way by a team that works together. I am just pointing out that we readily accept this kind of intentional planning (and expect it from our bosses) when done by individual organizations, both state and private, from small to large, even as we acknowledge their primary goals are not to make life better for their workers or citizens, but to increase profit or entrench political power. It's not a feasibility problem, because the most unfeasible way of doing things is already what is being done, and for the wrong reasons!

We only need to apply the same willingness to deliberate on large scales to matters that are actually important to the majority, like: how much food should we produce this year, who needs it the most, how many houses should we build, who should live in them, what kind of transportation infrastructure is best to get people where they want to go, does everybody have the basic necessities of a clean and comfortable existence, is there any need to produce vast surpluses of electronic goods that will go obsolete in two years, and so on. As of right now, every single one of those matters is largely decided by the market, with state intervention to partially fill in the many gaps. We have hungry people and dumpsters full of food, homeless people and billionaires with dozens of empty mansions, able-bodied workers and work to be done, money to pay them, but nobody to initiate it because there isn't enough profit to be made. This is the consequence of leaving the vast bulk of the factors that directly impinge upon the livelihoods of everyone in the hands of competitive forces tied to fluctuations in consumer and investor confidence.

Your suggestion that the dollar is a signaling mechanism is laughably inadequate. Spending does not equate to need when huge swaths of the population lack the ability to signal their preferences via spending, and a tiny minority has the ability to send billions-fold louder and more insistent signals to the producers of goods and services to highlight their own preferences. You concede as much by acknowledging the need to periodically re-balance the distribution--that's planning. But it's planning only to a certain arbitrary point, stopping short of the kind of planning that wouldn't accept as a given the natural concentration of wealth that requires such interventions.

There was a time where the tasks before us were so resource-intensive and complicated that we had to rely on some kind of kanban to tell us what to do next. Capitalism has enabled technological progress to the extent that our surplus of resources and actual output is so gigantic that we have to stop applying scarcity-appropriate planning tactics to an abundance environment. The simple fact is that we already have everything we need, we already know who needs it most, we already know what is being discarded for foolish reasons, but we are superstitious about planning so we invent excuses for why the ultimate mechanisms responsible for producing and distributing our bounty should get hashed out on Wall Street or subverted by advertising firms. That sector is all about following the kanbans, and it isn't helping anybody but itself.

Well you appear either not to have read what I wrote, or not to have understood it.

Money IS a signalling system. That's not a moral position, it's a fact.

It's also not a claim that it's the only good or the only workable signalling system; And your agreement with me that it's unworkable if there are people without the ability to signal the market because they have no money is a good illustration of that point. That you appear to think that this contradicts me is a concern.

Yes, we need to either get dollars from the wealthy and give them to the poor, or the poor will have nothing.

As to the Pentagon, you could hardly pick a better example of a hugely inefficient and wasteful economy than the military. Waste is expected and tolerated by the military - efficiency and/or profitability are not amongst their objectives.

And many corporations are run as mini dictatorships. But that's not an indication that this is the only, nor even the best, way to do it. Most really large companies have internal markets, where different divisions can buy goods or services from each other. That they are not run solely via this mechanism is not relevant to my argument at all.
 
I don't see that you are rebutting him at all.

He's saying that a stimulus is only of a benefit in the short term but in the long run you're no better off because of the costs. (Same as using a credit card to buy something. You get it now, you get the payments down the road.) You're saying it should only be done to avert economic disaster--which is in no way incompatible with what he's saying.

I think stimulus packages, when used in deep recessions are long term beneficial. But usually they aren't. Another problem with stimulus packages is that you have to invest it in the right stuff. If you invest it in the wrong stuff, you've just made a bad problem worse. This is what really wrecked the post colonial African economies. They went full Keynes and it went super sour.

The post colonial African economies were wrecked by the very nature of how they came to be. Independence wars tend to bring the ruthless in war to power, not those skilled in running a country. (And it's even worse when they are overthrowing local governments.) (Note that nearly bloodless revolutions like we saw in Eastern Europe are another matter, those often turn out ok.)

- - - Updated - - -

How is that working out? Does everybody have a satisfying job, plenty of leisure time, access to health care, quality education, child services, and transportation across the country? No? Are we materially lacking in any of the resources that we'd need to change that? No? Then, why the fuck should anybody be impressed by what the Fed does with interest rates?

The fed controls the overall pace of the economy to keep it running smoothly rather than the violent cycles that came before. It has nothing to do with whether some are left behind.
 
If "printing" money = creating debt, then who is the lender to whom it is owed?

Why does there always have to be new DEBT when new money is created?

I.e., what about "printing" it in the same sense as running it off the presses, without anyone borrowing anything from anyone?

Didn't the U.S. "print" money during the Civil War which had nothing to do with debt? And didn't Germany do this in the 1920s? And haven't some other countries done it more recently, where they simply ran the presses, literally? (If it led to disastrous consequences, this only means they printed too much, not that "printing" it is always wrong or has to cause hyperinflation.)

Is there a way to "print" money, in this sense, other than literally printing currency/cash? I.e., to increase the money in circulation (e.g., during a time of deflation), but not doing it with any form of issuing debt which has to be repaid?

Aren't there some cases, maybe rare, when it would be better to "print" it, in this sense, without fooling with any interest rates or any borrowing, without this or that interest rate being lowered or raised, but simply putting dollars into circulation with no one owing back anything later?

It seems there must be some such way to increase the money supply, if necessary in a rare case, and yet whenever "printing" money is described, it's always the Fed increasing or decreasing the interest rates.

Is that the only way money can be "created" or "printed"? Why?

Money IS debt. They are synonymous.

:rolleyes:

The government 'printing money' is indistinguishable from the government 'creating debt'.

How is "printing" money the same as creating debt, i.e., issuing bonds which must be repaid?

I.e., WHO IS THE LENDER to whom something is owed by the government when it prints money, like Germany printed it in the 1920s? In the case of bondholders, the principle owed to them has to be paid back to them by a fixed date. But who is owed the money which is "printed" by the government? How does the government pay them back, like it does the bondholders when it repays principle to them? How does a government DEFAULT on its debt it owes from having "printed" money, like Germany printed currency in the 1920s?

If only a small amount is printed (unlike Germany did), so the value of that currency decreases 1 or 2 percent, who is owed something which has to be paid to them by a certain date?

If a billion dollars is created by issuing bonds, then 5 or 10 or 15 years later those bondholders are paid back that billion, plus interest. They have to be paid this, or the issuer is defaulting on the debt.

But what if a billion dollars is created by "printing" currency, or by increasing the dollars in circulation without issuing bonds. Who is owed that billion dollars, and how are they paid back? What is the "default" if something doesn't happen by a certain date, as in the case of bonds which must be repaid by a certain date?

What if only enough is "printed" in order to prevent DEFLATION of the currency, and no more. Who is owed that amount which was printed? I.e., who must be repaid in order to avoid default? If there's no creditor who must be repaid, then how is that the same as "debt"?
 
When the govt creates money, it carries the liability, or debt. Meaning it's obligated to accept its own currency as payment for taxes or other fees.

Money spent into existence and not taxed back(IOW the national debt), is an asset to its owners and a liability to the govt.
 
Why does there always have to be new DEBT when new money is created?

I.e., what about "printing" it in the same sense as running it off the presses, without anyone borrowing anything from anyone?

Didn't the U.S. "print" money during the Civil War which had nothing to do with debt? And didn't Germany do this in the 1920s? And haven't some other countries done it more recently, where they simply ran the presses, literally? (If it led to disastrous consequences, this only means they printed too much, not that "printing" it is always wrong or has to cause hyperinflation.)

Is there a way to "print" money, in this sense, other than literally printing currency/cash? I.e., to increase the money in circulation (e.g., during a time of deflation), but not doing it with any form of issuing debt which has to be repaid?

Aren't there some cases, maybe rare, when it would be better to "print" it, in this sense, without fooling with any interest rates or any borrowing, without this or that interest rate being lowered or raised, but simply putting dollars into circulation with no one owing back anything later?

It seems there must be some such way to increase the money supply, if necessary in a rare case, and yet whenever "printing" money is described, it's always the Fed increasing or decreasing the interest rates.

Is that the only way money can be "created" or "printed"? Why?

Money IS debt. They are synonymous.

:rolleyes:

The government 'printing money' is indistinguishable from the government 'creating debt'.

How is "printing" money the same as creating debt, i.e., issuing bonds which must be repaid?

I.e., WHO IS THE LENDER to whom something is owed by the government when it prints money, like Germany printed it in the 1920s? In the case of bondholders, the principle owed to them has to be paid back to them by a fixed date. But who is owed the money which is "printed" by the government?
Money isn't owed. Goods and services are owed. Money is debt, not credit. It's a signal that says 'the economy owes the bearer $1 worth of stuff'.
How does the government pay them back, like it does the bondholders when it repays principle to them?
The government doesn't. The entire economy does.
How does a government DEFAULT on its debt it owes from having "printed" money, like Germany printed currency in the 1920s?
By ceasing to use the currency in favour of a new one - like Germany did in the 1920s.
If only a small amount is printed (unlike Germany did), so the value of that currency decreases 1 or 2 percent, who is owed something which has to be paid to them by a certain date?
Money doesn't have an expiry date.

The bearer of money is the one who is owed something.
If a billion dollars is created by issuing bonds, then 5 or 10 or 15 years later those bondholders are paid back that billion, plus interest. They have to be paid this, or the issuer is defaulting on the debt.

But what if a billion dollars is created by "printing" currency, or by increasing the dollars in circulation without issuing bonds. Who is owed that billion dollars, and how are they paid back? What is the "default" if something doesn't happen by a certain date, as in the case of bonds which must be repaid by a certain date?

What if only enough is "printed" in order to prevent DEFLATION of the currency, and no more. Who is owed that amount which was printed? I.e., who must be repaid in order to avoid default? If there's no creditor who must be repaid, then how is that the same as "debt"?
If the economy produces more stuff than there are debt tokens to indicate to whom that stuff should be distributed, then the value of the tokens increases, and $1 buys more stuff. If more tokens are issued than there is stuff to swap them for, the value of the tokens decreases, and $1 buys less stuff.

The total money in circulation has a value equal to the total goods and services in circulation. Wealth is an indication of what proportion of all goods and services are owed to the holders of that wealth. Money isn't property; it's a placeholder for future property - aka 'debt'.

Thank you for demonstrating that you have no clue what money is or how it works; Could you please stop commenting on economics until you have made an effort to learn this? It's really not complicated; But you have obviously been so badly wrong for so long that you find the simple truth impossible to believe.
 
When the govt creates money, it carries the liability, or debt. Meaning it's obligated to accept its own currency as payment for taxes or other fees.

Money spent into existence and not taxed back(IOW the national debt), is an asset to its owners and a liability to the govt.

Thus showing you utterly missed his point.

The national debt isn't from spending it into existence. The national debt is money borrowed from people--that's what treasury bills and treasury bonds are.

What's simply spent into existence is only about 10% of what's borrowed and in practice will never need to be redeemed.
 
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