Web of Debt

Bernanke's Idea's on Budget Deficits vs Functional Finance

Annual Budget Deficits and eventual National Debt Ratios to National Annual Economic Output (or annual Gross National Product) do not amount to crucial measures of national economic performance.

Crucial measures are living standards -- including health, wealth, freedom, and peace, as they detail human happiness, security, longevity, etc.

In the current crises we have unemployment, homelessness, hunger, ill health, and casualties of war, etc,. to contend with.

If we would accomplish our objectives, we would minimize the misery and maximize the statistics that prove this World was the best place to live -- and a quick death was not better than spending your life on Earth.

Keynes gave us the concept of a monetary system of production. Lerner gave us the idea that deficits were not the problem with monetary systems of production: rather price levels were the problem:

..... If necessities remained affordable, deficits could reach the sky to reflect our intention to use money to motivate people to produce enough to end poverty and produce the kind of things that lead to peace and human health and happiness and not the very opposite.

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Interest on loans and profits on sales are incidentals. A monetary system of production can work as well with these as it can without them.

Debt is the result of law not of economics. Any web of debt can be traded in for equity as we see in General Motors just this week.

If the team in Washington does not soon create the jobs and economic security voters cannot live without, we will see a Congress in 2010 that looks for more effective people than now inhabit office.

Having shored up our banking system, it is time to pay directly to employers money enough for them to employ all our people in need of a job:

..... The things for them do must be established by peace (and defense) contracts-- consumer desires are secondary to national security.

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The greatest unmet need today are treaties among nuclear armed great nations NOT to conduct an arms race for control of space -- and instead, to work for economic democracy and political democracy too.

In our Web of Debt sphere of academic interest, is is time to absorb the doctrines of Functional Finance and to educate the public in the wide variety of monetary systems of production that Congress can chose to do a credible job of meeting everyone's economic needs.

Meet the needs of people and the planet. And keep our system as simple as possible. Our current worst disease is the Internal Revenue Code. Repeal that -- and begin to manufacture money to match our capacity to produce all we need.