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Saturday 19 September 2015

Perhaps the Jade Helm people aren't so mad after all...

Ho hum
“Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures which confer powers on the President, such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires the Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done only once in the nearly forty year history of the Act.”

Sunday 13 September 2015

Why you can't hand out land value tax as citizens income

You can of course - the title is clickbait :b
However it would be probably be better if the citizens income is slightly less than the land value tax. Stick with me.
The reason is the same as why you don't "tax the rich" and hand it out as citizens income.
Yes this "boosts" the "productive economy." But there are limits - real resources limits.
You can't "print prosperity" unless you are wasting resources ;)
Rentiers tend to be very rich (yes, I know there are Poor Widows in Mansions) and save a lot. Taxing these savings is not an inflation control. It does not control the flow of real goods and services, which is induced by money changing hands.
Yes a lot of money is earned unproductively through rent-seeking. But not a lot of stuff is consumed and its the stuff that matters.
It's a bit like the "tax the rich" idea to "fund the NHS." Doctors have to be trained, or stolen from abroad.
Inflation is a function of the flow of money and not the stock.
So Mark's proposal is really equivalent to "handing out" LVT as Citizen's Income, plus a citizen's income "printed."
Yes, a few resources are wasted (e.g. FIRE industry.) But that is not enough.

What I am ready looking for is a dynamic model like this instead of a static model like the VAT models Mark uses. This is my challenge to the Georgists :)

Saturday 12 September 2015

The way to beat MMT and enforce fiscal discipline

There is a very simple way to beat MMT, when you think about it. It is a very simple flaw.
It is the "savings are Voluntary Tax" bit.
And the flaw is thus...
The government cuts taxes for the rich. Yeah, so what? You say.
The rich save the money.
The govt then makes an explicit quid pro quo that if taxes are to be cut, rich people must spend (some of the) money on a variety of things including the things poor people buy. The poor people are then crowded out.
You can make this a condition of a Labour government being elected (or austerity ended.) Or just do it all the time.
The money saved from the tax cuts can be shuffled to various tax havens.
Rich people are too worried about saving money and don't realise the power they actually have - spending the money.

EDIT: What is this post about? Am I trying to be evil? No. This is about rent seeking. You have to end rent seeking. Rent seeking is not a problem because they save the money, right? Well yeah but what if they don't. Most of the time you save but you spend when there is any action to stop rent-seeking.