One of the most irritating things about the deficit hawk/austerity literature, is that it uses the ideas of “fiscal sustainability” and “fiscal responsibility” in an ideological way, without ever really analyzing or explaining these labels. It’s almost as if the austerians know that if they clearly and directly stated what they meant by these terms, and how their meanings were actually related to the ideas of “sustainability” and “responsibility”, then flaws in their whole ideological and policy framework would be very clear to everyone else.

Of course, if you read any of the austerian literature you soon learn that they think fiscal sustainability and responsibility both relate to the impact of government spending on the federal deficit, the public debt subject to the limit, and the debt-to-GDP ratio, and to no other impacts of fiscal policy.” But the austerians never really explain why these three numbers are relevant for fiscal sustainability and responsibility. Instead, they take the relationship as obvious to all, and start evaluating fiscal policies on the basis of past and projected deficit, debt, and debt-to-GDP ratios. Invariably, regardless of the nation in which you find them, they end up advocating for lower taxes for the wealthy, less regulation for corporations, and sacrifices of Government programs and the social safety net; all this based on the ideas of fiscal sustainability and fiscal responsibility that they’ve never even explained to an incurious and uncritical media, but very bought media, or to the public.

Because of the very great importance of the fiscal sustainability/fiscal responsibility/fiscal crisis/solvency rhetoric, the first session of the Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter-Conference covered the topic “What Is Fiscal Sustainability?” and the primary speaker was Professor Bill Mitchell of the University of Newcastle. Audios, videos, presentation slides, and transcripts for the presentation are available at selise’s site and a slightly different version of the transcripts is available from Corrente as well.

[I’m leaving this sticky because our enemies don’t sleep. If you end up eating Grand Bargain™ cat food because Robama concocts some sleazy deal in the lame duck session due to a Shock Doctrine-style manufactured crisis, the people who engineered the crisis will be the same people who organized this shindig. Know them, and know their lies! —lambert]

Well, it’s Springtime in DC. Time for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s annual event. The Fiscal Summit, to be held on May 15, better named the Fiscal Cesspool of distortions, half-truths and lies, is a propaganda extravaganza designed to maintain and strengthen the Washington and national elite consensuses on the existence of a debt crisis, the long-term ravages of entitlement spending on America’s fiscal well-being, and the need for long-term deficit reductions plans to combat this truly phantom menace. The purpose of maintaining that consensus is to keep an impenetrable screen of fantasy intact in order to justify policies of economic austerity. that have been impoverishing people and transferring financial and real wealth to the globalizing elite comprised of the 1% or far less of the population, depending on which nation one is talking about.

The 2010 Fiscal Summit

The first “Fiscal Summit” was held in Washington, DC on April 28, 2010. It was lavishly funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and included many “big names” associated with “fiscal sustainability” and “fiscal responsibility,” including Bill Clinton, who appeared along with personalities from Peterson’s stable of deficit hawks such as David Walker, Alice Rivlin. Robert Rubin, Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, and Paul Ryan. Its purpose was to spread the deficit hawk message of Peter G. Peterson, including various myths of the world-wide austerity movement:

Obama is now promising jobs to American workers. But there is a COLOSSAL catch. Savaged wages and benefits.

Repeat: SAVAGED!!!

Exactly what the one percenters have been lusting after and now enjoy coming to fruition from a DEMOCRATIC President, of all creatures, who has managed to hoodwink the American citizenry into not seriously noticing. You put the rhetorical emphasis on JOBS .... yadda yadda yadda ... then who seeks more reality-troubling negative details as to how this will come about. Who seriously applies individual critical thinking in this hysterical climate of political gamesmanship and mass corporate disinformation?

Apparently our Democratic president thinks he can keep up the big lie beyond his election in November. Sadly, I wouldn't make book against that.

It’s a trope with our politicians, including the President, his likely Republican opponent Mitt Romney, and an emerging third party candidate over at Americans Elect and NoLabels, Pete Peterson’s long-time Sancho Panza, David Walker. The trope says that the Government is just a family, even though it’s a very big one, and that, like any family, it has a “household” budget, called the Government budget.

Well, the legislation implementing “The Buffett Rule” has been voted down in Congress as we all knew it would be. But so what? The Federal Government doesn’t really need your money, since it can generate all the money it needs to pay off the national debt and also close any gap between tax revenues and Federal spending that Congress may want to legislate for the foreseeable future.

There’s no problem of Federal solvency. There hasn’t been since 1971, when the US went off the Gold Standard! The idea that we risk insolvency is just a fantasy of people who won’t acknowledge that the US Government is the monopoly supplier of fiat currency to the non-Government sector of the economy, including all of the private sector.

However, even though your money isn’t needed by the Government, it is very badly needed to help fund two things, I’ll describe below. But, before I do that, since your patriotism has moved you to advocate for higher taxes for yourselves, I hope and expect that you will be motivated to spend the same amount in the two areas of activity where your money is most needed and would be much more effective in bringing the United States back to the state of a healthy democracy, than it would be if you and and other similarly situated patriots paid it to the Government in taxes.

I know you’ve frequently heard the Republican response to your proposals for higher taxes on very wealthy people like yourselves, namely that if you’re so sure that higher taxes on the very wealthy are the right thing to do, then you can always contribute the additional money to the government, if you really want to. Well, my view is that you can equally well, and with much greater effect on restoring fair and effective functioning to our democracy, contribute that money directly to activities that will change key background conditions that are driving our democracy towards plutocracy right now. Here are the two areas of activity.

An angry Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein had this to say about Obama’s certification last Sunday of the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

President Obama called it a win-win. No, it's a lose-lose for workers. It's a deadly assault on the freedom of Colombian workers to organize, as well as on the freedom of American workers from unfair competition from workers who make poverty wages because they are violently repressed.

A few days back, the President had some remarks on taxes, fairness, “The Buffett Rule,” “fiscal responsibility,” and making real choices with real consequences. From my point of view, informed, in part, by the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) approach to economics, these remarks were so wrong-headed, that I’m afraid I can’t let them pass without a rebuttal. Below is a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on some of his remarks.

The President:

During the past few months the results of polling suggest that Barack Obama will be re-elected. But they also show that his support is shallow and could be shaken easily by an economic downturn during the next 6 months.

Obama Administration Pushes to Privatize Poultry Inspection

It’s hard to listen to the doomsday rhetoric of Austerians like Paul Ryan and intermittently the less hysterical, but equally mythical narratives of the President when he talks about deficit/debt reduction, when you know better; when you know that both are talking about a bogeyman that doesn’t exist. Here’s Ryan, the Republican wunderkind:

“We face a crushing burden of debt. The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy, and grow to catastrophic levels in the years ahead.”

Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein calls out the Obama administration that the transfer of wealth to the 1 percenters is still happening despite statistical spin over minimal incremental number shifts in jobs reports. Growing citizen impoverishment continues despite election pr-hype from both of the legacy parties.

Stein is offering a serious Green New Deal to loosen and eliminate the merciless grip of greed of the 1% dooming the balance of the 99% not there already, to a life of poverty. Stein accuses both Democrat and Republican leaderships of coaxing the citizenry to ignore the unignorable at its own peril.

It is called the “Jump-Start Our Business Startup Act”, and according to Joseph Kishore of wsws the awkward terminology to form the acronym J-O-B-S “was the only nod the framers gave toward actual job creation. In reality, it is simply another corporate handout.” It reduces regulations on new businesses, which should inspire massive distrust in our citizen-betrayed hearts!

Is there no end to the shamelessness of our pimped out politicians?

The Disconnect

It’s hardly news that there’s a very wide chasm between voters, lawmakers and political parties. The rage in America reflected in the Republican primary contests is palpable. And there’s also rage among progressives as well, though it’s not finding an outlet in the Democratic Party. The same is true in Europe, where we see unrest in many nations. People in developing nations are demanding democracy, and making some progress too. But, everywhere one looks in developed countries, democracy is retreating, and Michels’s (p. 400) “Iron Law of Oligarchy” is triumphant.

In the U.S. most Americans believe lawmakers don’t care what they think, Congress’s approval rating is at an all-time low, and most Americans believe the major parties won’t represent them. Neither tries to match its policies to a majority of voters’ preferences, and both continuously support laws that seem designed to benefit large corporate interests and the 1%, but not working Americans. There are now more unaffiliated voters than party-affiliated ones, and major party candidates often win elections with only 25% of potential voters.

Most voters want most federal incumbents defeated, but legal constraints on minor parties and candidates typically ensure their defeat, whether they are “insurgents” from within the party, or candidates from third parties. This skewing of electoral outcomes leads voters to think that they have to vote for major party candidates, or “waste” their vote. Angry voters alternate election cycles between major party candidates to “punish” incumbents. But the new “winners” ignore what voters want, just as the old ones did. So, how can we repair this disconnect? How can we make office holders accountable and representative again?

The claim of Austrian school economists that “there is no macroeconomics” because the political-economic system at the macro level is explainable in terms of the aggregated attributes and activities of political-economic agents at the micro-level of that system is false, silly, and ignores the findings of many other sciences! That’s because macro-level behavior includes structural and holistic properties of these systems that are not explainable by individual level phenomena or aggregations of them.

Obama has signed the FAA Reauthorization Bill. The UAW, Steelworkers, Transportation Communications Union (IAM) and Teamsters along with at least 15 other major trade unions objected to the bill.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein declares she would have vetoed the bill. She describes Obama’s approval of the anti-union changes to the Railway Labor Act as a “betrayal of working America."

Jill Stein is calling out Obama, the darling of the Nuclear industry, not only for his corporate cronyism but also for a reckless regressivism.

Dr. Stein marked the first anniversary of the Fukushima meltdown, citing the tragic deaths involved as well as the straggering $250 BILLION cleanup costs. To Stein this is clear evidence that an “immediate move to a 100% renewable economy” MUST BE MADE. She observed that the Obama White House “has shown it has learned nothing,” since it is still promoting nuclear power plants while other progressive countries are dramatically moving away from them especially since the Japanese nuclear disaster. Stein:

John Carney commented on a post by David Brooks and a follow-up by Randy Wray. Brooks says that a tax credit is essentially the same as Government spending and used an example from David Bradford, a Princeton economist, of the Pentagon wanting to acquire a new plane and paying for it with a tax credit.

Randy comments on the idea this way:

Re-POST of 7/2/09, FDL

“Whatever you do to the least among us, you do unto me.”

Jesus would be an advocate for a universal Single Payer Plan. If Jesus were in the Senate today, only he and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders would be backing S 703 for Single Payer. If Jesus were in the House of Representatives, he would have 80 possible comrades on his side on this issue backing HR 676. Jesus was used to standing tall in a true moral minority. Sometimes in a minority of one.

Jesus was a messenger for truth, justice and compassion. And as what happens to most effective messengers telling serious truth to serious power, Jesus was betrayed and crucified. Jesus rose up again.

Izvestia:

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with many potential ramifications for American and international law, and for corporate responsibility for human rights around the globe. The justices will be asked to decide whether the corporations to which they have been extending the rights of individuals should also be held accountable for crimes against human rights, just as individuals are.

...in September 2010, a divided Second Circuit ... held that only individuals, and not corporations, can be sued under the statute.

After stating his general approval for Dylan Matthews’s, MMT post on Ezra Klein’s blog, and his agreement with MMT on the issue of solvency, a big point that MMT’s been trying to get across to the mainstream for years, Jared brought forth a number of points of disagreement, which I’ll reply to based on my interpretation of the MMT perspective.

Tax Cuts Hard to Unwind? Not If You Legislate Properly!

This post concludes my critical evaluation of Dylan Matthews’s, post published on Ezra Klein’s blog called “You know the deficit hawks. Now meet the deficit owls.”

This post continues my critical evaluation of Dylan Matthews’s, post published on Ezra Klein’s blog called “You know the deficit hawks. Now meet the deficit owls.”

Other Issues

Here’s the next exchange envisioned by Dylan:

Obama urges corporate tax cut, closing loopholes

The president proposed cutting the top corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent.

This post continues the critical evaluation of Dylan Matthews’s, post published on Ezra Klein’s blog called “You know the deficit hawks. Now meet the deficit owls.”

The Inflation/Hyperinflation Bogeyman