November 15, 2017 ~ The United States embraced the principle of a gold standard – a dollar whose value was linked to a defined quantity of gold – from 1789 to 1971, a stretch of 182 years. During this time, the U.S. was the most successful of any major country, expanding from thirteen war-ravaged states along the Atlantic seaboard to a world economic superpower, with the broadest and wealthiest middle class the world had ever seen. The U.S. dollar was the premier international currency, and New York was the world’s financial capital.
If the U.S.’s gold standard policy was a mistake, as nearly all academic economists claim today, shouldn’t there have been some evidence of that, after nearly two centuries? Shouldn’t there have been some kind of negative consequences? Shouldn’t there have been some other government, somewhere, that did even better, with a different approach? Continue reading
Christ Purging the Temple
My grandfather was born on April 19, 1915 in a dirty, one-room shack in the town of Bonham, Texas. Given the era, they had no electricity and no running water. And the family considered themselves fortunate that both mother and baby survived childbirth.
Is it just a coincidence that a large number of talking heads in the corporate media have all suddenly decided to start blaming Donald Trump for causing a “recession”? During the four years of the Biden administration those same voices insisted that there was no “recession” on the horizon even though homelessness was setting record high after record high, demand at food banks surged to levels never seen before, inflation was out of control, home sales plunged to extremely depressed levels, stores and restaurants were closing all over the nation and debt levels were breaking records.
The year (2009) will most likely expire without commemorating the centenary of a most momentous event in history that figures prominently as the main cause of the Great Financial Crisis of the century. This event was the so-called legal tender legislation in 1909. The bank notes of both the Banque de France and the Reichsbank of Germany were made legal tender by law, first in France and then, a very short time later, also in Imperial Germany. The rest of the world followed suit. In this way all roadblocks were removed in the way of financing the coming world war through credits and monetizing the resulting debt through the issuance of bank notes. 
We’ve often heard the term “gravy train” lately in reference to the Democrat Party’s corrupt method of raking in taxpayer dollars for themselves. The gravy symbolizes money, of course and the train has been steadily delivering it to the Democrats for many decades. 
After multiple failed attempts to “repeal and replace” the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), US President Donald Trump’s administration now hopes to achieve its first legislative victory with a massive tax giveaway that it has wrapped in the language of “tax reform.” To that end, Republicans in the US Congress have just unveiled a bill that, if enacted, could vastly widen the deficit and increase the public debt by as much as $4 trillion over the next decade. 
Congress recently passed the so-called “supplemental” spending bill, wasting billions of your tax dollars supplementing the already swollen $2.3 trillion 2003 federal budget. Congress loves the annual supplemental bill, because unlike other spending bills, the supplemental does not fund any particular federal departments or agencies. This means members and the administration can find a home for pet spending projects that would not be permitted in a defense or education bill. This year, however, the supplemental also provides convenient cover for the big-spenders to quietly increase the federal debt ceiling. 
