California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

It's Not Biden's Job to Reduce Inflation. That's Jerome Powell's Job.

by John Lawrence

Republicans are so stupid. They blame Joe Biden for not doing something that's not his job to do. Furthermore, the way Powell is going about his job requires him to create more unemployment, to reduce economic activity. That's the traditional way to reduce inflation. So getting rid of inflation requires more economic pain not less. Then if there is a recession, they'll blame Joe Biden, not Jerome Powell, for that. As far as house prices being out of sight for more and more people, how about blaming the hedge funds and other entities that are bidding up asset prices. Eventually houses will be unaffordable for the masses of people which will turn the American people into renters and basically debtors. Is that Joe Biden's fault or the fault of hedge finds and other cash flush investors who are entering this market? In fact they are in the process of cornering this market. Higher interest rates are also hurting would be home owners and car buyers. Is that Joe Biden's fault or Jerome Powell's fault for raising interest rates? Joe Biden has no control over interest rates. The American consumer is all about me, me, me not what is best for the country as a whole.

Biden has done more than any President since Lyndon Johnson to improve the economy with the Chips Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan and more. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office – including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. It's the first time the US government has had an industrial policy. He kept the economy afloat during the COVID lock down. The US economy has been left to free enterprise for too long. With deregulation this has allowed corporate entities to pollute, to create dangerous products, to do nothing about carbon dioxide emissions.The government was just supposed to be hands off and let corporations run wild, all in the name of maximizing GDP. Well there are more important things than maximizing GDP like saving the planet from global warming. It is all ready too late to do that. It's only a question at this time of how bad it will get before some of the measures that are being taken today will kick in and save the planet, hopefully, from complete destruction. Each year heat waves and floods are getting more severe. Each year is hotter than the previous year. How important is it to maximize GDP under these conditions?

During World War II, the government made sure that the economy was completely focused on the war effort. Consumer consumption was kept low in order to support the war effort. Today with an even larger danger looming, the economy is going on its merry way with so many elements of it not focused on climate change. In fact I call it the Taylor Swiftization of the economy. Entertainment including professional athletics are very large components of GDP. Nero fiddling while Rome burned is nothing compared to what is happening today. Perhaps the energy going into these frivolous sectors should be refocused on climate change. But the American people don't even all agree that climate change is even a serious situation. They want more fossil fuels, more drilling, more pipelines, more gas production. Fortunately, some states like California are doing more like outlawing gas powered cars by 2035. However, 2035 is too late. Too little, too late is the story of the world's response to climate change. So major disasters will continue with the government's fiscal budget increasingly committed to bailing out these disasters. FEMA, by the way, is bankrupt, and insurance companies no longer want to insure.

Off the Top of My Head

San Diego On the Way to Solving Homeless Problem

by John Lawrence

With a combination of safe sleeping and safe parking areas and also converting motel rooms into single occupancy units (SROs), San Diego is heading in the right direction for solving the homeless situation. This is combined with an ordinance that prohibits sleeping in public areas including sidewalks. Finally, a workable solution that gets the homeless off the streets, provides them with some amenities including sanitation facilities and makes the streets and city sidewalks safe for pedestrians again. As a tourist destination San Diego can't afford the spectacle of back to back tents crowding city sidewalks, and the provision of amenities in safe sleeping areas or city sponsored SROs makes the homeless at least somewhat better off than they are without any amenities on public sidewalks. The San Diego Union reported:

The properties being considered include three hotels and one apartment building.

One of the hotels is a 62-unit Ramada Inn on Midway Drive, which the Housing Commission agreed to pursue at its May 12 meeting when it unanimously agreed to apply for $18 million in Project Homekey funding. The estimated purchase price would be $11.6 million, equating to about $182,000 a unit, but adding kitchenettes and other upgrades would increase the overall cost to $29.5 million, or $469,000 a unit.

The city also is submitting a joint $4 million application with Wakeland Housing and Development Corp. to purchase a vacant 13-unit apartment building in Ocean Beach. Purchasing the building would cost $4.5 million, but rehabilitation expenses would increase the cost to $6.8 million, bringing the per-unit cost to $525,000.

The other two properties are a 107-unit Extended Stay America Hotel on Murphy Canyon Road for $40.7 million and a 140-unit Extended Stay America Hotel on Mission Valley Road for $52 million.

Essentially the city is taking the responsibility for providing public housing, something that was abandoned during the Reagan administration. The most dramatic cut in domestic spending during the Reagan years was for low-income housing subsidies. Reagan appointed a housing task force dominated by politically connected developers, landlords and bankers. In 1982 the task force released a report that called for “free and deregulated” markets as an alternative to government assistance – advice Reagan followed. In his first year in office Reagan halved the budget for public housing and Section 8 to about $17.5 billion. And for the next few years he sought to eliminate federal housing assistance to the poor altogether.

Public housing was stigmatized due to failed projects like Cabrini-Green. Cabrini–Green was home to 15,000 people, mostly living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings. Crime and neglect created hostile living conditions for many residents, and "Cabrini–Green" became a metonym for problems associated with public housing in the United States. Now cities like San Diego are forced to take up the fallen banner for public housing under the metonym of  "housing the homeless". The state of California, however, is providing most of the funding.

Other cities have had no problem in providing low cost rental housing. Take Vienna for example, a city which has largely solved the worldwide crisis of soaring rents:

Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor. In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.

People living in Vienna's social housing pay as little as 3% of their monthly salaries on rent. To boot the availability of low cost public housing keeps costs in the private housing market down.

In 2015, before they bought an apartment on the private market, the Schachingers were making about 80,000 euros ($87,000) a year, roughly the income of the average U.S. household in 2021. Eva and Klaus-Peter paid 26 percent and 29 percent in income tax, respectively, but just 4 percent of their pretax income was going toward rent, which is about what the average American household spends on meals eaten out and half a percentage point less than what the average American spends on “entertainment.” Even if the Schachingers got a new contract today on their unit, their monthly payments would be an estimated 542 euros, or only 8 percent of their income. Vienna’s generous supply of social housing helps keep costs down for everyone: In 2021, Viennese living in private housing spent 26 percent of their post-tax income on rent and energy costs, on average, which is only slightly more than the figure for social-housing residents overall (22 percent). Meanwhile, 49 percent of American renters — 21.6 million people — are cost-burdened, paying landlords more than 30 percent of their pretax income, and the percentage can be even higher in expensive cities. In New York City, the median renter household spends a staggering 36 percent of its pretax income on rent.

The article goes on:

Real estate is a place where money literally grows on tree beams. In the last decade, the typical owner of a single-family home acquired nearly $200,000 in appreciation. “Another word for asset appreciation is inflation,” the academics Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings write in “The Asset Economy,” “an increase in monetary value without any corresponding change in the nature of the good itself or the conditions of its production that would make it scarcer or justify an increased demand for it.” That inflation is creating a treacherous gulch between the housing haves and have-nots. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that, in 2019, the median net worth of U.S. renters was just 2.5 percent of the median net worth of homeowners: $6,270 versus $254,900. Last year, as higher interest rates slowed home sales and caused prices to plateau (and even soften in some overheated cities), the asking price of the median U.S. rental reached $2,000 a month, a record high, according to Redfin. Inflated rent prices line the pockets of landlords while preventing renters from saving for a down payment and ever getting off the treadmill.

Inflation in asset prices, particularly real estate, is causing more people, especially senior citizens, to fall into homelessness. The recent rise in interest rates which supposedly are aimed at curbing inflation have done nothing to bring the cost of housing down. In San Diego county, real estate is still appreciating in value despite the Fed having raised interest rates to highs not seen in recent years. It has done nothing to stop investors and hedge funds that pay cash. I reported previously:

In a deal with the Conrad Prebys Foundation, Blackstone Group, CEO'd by Steven Schwarzman, is buying 5800 rental units in San Diego. According to the San Diego Union, "The deal makes Blackstone one of the biggest real estate holders in San Diego County. It already owns $4.5 billion in assets here — including Legoland and the Hotel del Coronado. The transaction, which also includes Los Angeles-based investment firm TruAmerica as a partner, is expected to close in the next few weeks. The sale of the apartments was praised by Dan Yates, the president of the Conrad Prebys Foundation, who said the portfolio was assembled by Conrad Prebys — a San Diego developer — himself. Yates said the money from the deal will be used for grants primarily in San Diego."

Investors pay cash t buy up cheap rentals, and, therefore, the rise in interest rates doesn't affect them. They don't pay interest. They then give the tenants a 30 or 60 day notice depending on how long they've lived there. Then they refurbish the apartments and rent them out for twice the previous rent. This is the so-called "gentrification" of San Diego neighborhoods. This is why low cost rental units are disappearing just as all the SROs have disappeared. The policies now taking place by the city and county of San Diego to provide converted hotel housing and safe sleeping and parking areas will counteract this trend of higher and higher rents producing more and more homelessness. It's a policy that needs to be continued and increased. It cannot just be a one-off. Eventually, it will put a damper on the private rental market just as it did in Vienna.

Off the Top of My Head

Government Deficit Spending Is Not the Problem: Lack of Labor and Physical Resources Is

by John Lawrence

Since the US dollar is a sovereign fiat currency, the US can never run out of dollars. The debt ceiling is a totally artificial limit which results in the US hoisting itself on its own pitard. According to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as espoused in The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, the only limit on government spending is inflation, and inflation is concerned with the amount and nature of resources available to soak up the money injected into the economic system by the government. According to this theory it makes sense that a lack of labor resources could lead to inflation. Consider that right now there is a shortage of air traffic controllers, and this is leading to a cancellation of flights. If there were more air traffic controllers available, the number of flights could be increased, and more economic activity would ensue. The constraint on flights available because of the lack of air traffic controllers leads to inflation because the money charged for each available flight can be increased. Essentially there is a bidding war for the available flights. If any resource including natural resources like steel and cement is not sufficient for the demand for those resources, then the price of those resources will increase leading to inflation. Right now in the US labor is becoming a scarce resource especially labor of the type necessary in the essential economy, that is the economy of goods and services necessary for the continuation and enhancement of everyday life. As more labor is developed for essentially useless services like the entertainment and social media industries, plumbers, electricians and carpenters are not available for useful services, and, therefore, the cost of those services increases.

Which brings us to Biden's Inflation Reduction Act which allocates $370 billion to rebuild infrastructure and fight climate change. These are all necessary and vital goals, but the question should be asked are the resources for this amount of spending sufficient or will this spending be inflationary. To put it more succinctly is the blue collar labor sufficient for the job? If not, the price of labor will be bid up and the spending will be inflationary. More and more these days students are encouraged to go to college where they end up after graduation working for Wall Street or hedge funds or in the entertainment/social media industry. They are not encouraged to go to vocational technical schools to become carpenters, plumbers and electricians. So they go into industries which are not essential to the real economy. There are shortages of labor for the real economy everywhere we look. In order to overcome these shortages, it would be necessary to step up legal immigration since immigrants by and large fill the jobs Americans don't want to do, and by and large Americans don't want to perform any kind of the less glamorous and remunerative type of labor necessary for production in the real economy. Also outsourcing has made it unnecessary for Americans to perform labor in the real economy. We rely either on immigrants or foreign workers for that.

The next thing is that all this infrastructure rebuilding is going to contribute to global warming as well as reducing it. Rebuilding all the bridges of America will require large amounts of steel and cement. Steel and cement production produce large amounts of carbon dioxide which is emitted into the atmosphere. The International Energy Agency estimates that direct CO² emissions due to crude steel production is approximately 1.4 tons of CO² per ton of steel produced. The cement industry is responsible for about 8% of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions — far more than global carbon emissions from aviation. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, after the U.S. and China. So rebuilding America's infrastructure will contribute to global warming while at the same time attempting to reduce global warming. The fact is that alternatives to steel and cement which do not produce greenhouse gasses are not available. Research on these topics needs to be stepped up. But more research in areas like artificial intelligence, of the kind which has no use in the amelioration of global warming, takes place while productive research into materials to replace steel and cement languishes. Also while more electric vehicles are being produced, the electric energy to power these vehicles is coming from power plants that still use fossil fuels to produce it. One form of greenhouse gas production is being traded for another. Nothing is gained unless all energy generating power plants are using renewable and non carbon dioxide producing fuels.

The problem is that limited resources both in terms of labor and physical resources will hamper efforts both in repairing American infrastructure and building infrastructure which reduces the amount of greenhouse gas production. Stephanie Kelton writes: "That's why MMT recommends a different approach to the federal budgeting process, one that integrates inflation risk into the decision making process so that lawmakers are forced to stop and think about whether they have taken the necessary steps to guard against inflation risk before approving any new spending. MMT would make us safer in this respect because it recognizes that the best defense against inflation is a good offense. We don't want to allow excessive spending to cause inflation and then fight inflation after it happens. We want agencies like the CBO helping to evaluate new legislation for potential inflation risk before Congress commits to funding new programs so that the risks can be mitigated preemptively. At its core  MMT is about replacing an artificial (revenue) constraint with a real (inflation) restraint." The artificial revenue constraint is the debt ceiling!

In the above passage the words "inflation risk" could also be replaced with "greenhouse gas emission risk." The CBO should evaluate both kinds of risks. So as the economy becomes more electrified in terms of electric cars and buildings, we need to think about the fact that the electricity generated by these increased demands needs to come from non carbon dioxide emitting sources. Also substitutes must be found quickly - in other words research needs to be stepped up - to find substitutes for steel and cement. To boot, non polluting energy sources must be found for ships and planes. Both human and physical natural resources must be taken into account. Have all these things been thought through?

Off the Top of My Head

The Solution to the Debt Crisis: Tax the Rich

by John Lawrence

Republicans want Biden to cut back spending. Democrats should want to increase taxation on the rich. The debt can be ameliorated either by reducing spending or increasing taxation. The debt is a result both of overspending and undertaxing. For all those who care about the size of the debt, they should be as concerned about undertaxing to the same extent they are concerned about overspending. Since the three wealthiest people in the United States — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett —now own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 160 million people or 63 million households, the obvious culprit here is not overspending, it's under taxation of the rich. In addition to taxing the incomes of the rich, there needs to be instituted a wealth tax. Whoa, you say, this would discourage entrepreneurs who are responsible for inventing the next big thing which is what contributes the most to the American economy. We don't need another gadget; we need all hands on deck to fight global warming. This is being done by Joe Biden's infrastructure bill which is a government, not a private, solution. Private entrepreneurship is less important in a period of global warming than large scale government solutions. Therefore, discouraging entrepreneurship, except that which supports a solution to global warming, is actually a positive development.

America’s top 25 billionaires — a group the size of a major league baseball team’s active roster —together hold $1 trillion in wealth. These 25 have as much wealth as 56 percent of the population, a total 178 million people or 70 million households. The solution to government debt is to go where the money is and tap that. When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton simply replied, “Because that's where the money is.” By the same token, the solution to the national debt is for the government to go where the money is: billionaires and Forbes 400 corporations. Americans don't need any new gadgets to spend their money on. In the World War II era consumption was both voluntarily and manditorily reduced in order to put more resources into the war effort. The war on global warming is even more important than World War II because, if we lose this war, the survival of the whole human species is at risk. Put simply we need to reduce consumption of the gadgets and entertainment provided by the private sector and increase expenditures on large scale projects which can ameliorate global warming. Of necessity those projects and that spending has to be initiated by government in cooperation with the private sector, but government has to lead the way and provide the money.

Income inequality is a major problem of American society. This problem can be resolved and the resources to prevent global warming provided for by taxing the rich. The problem is to reduce American consumption which is 70% of the US economy and increase government spending as long as that increased spending is spent on the solutions to global warming. At the same time the national debt can be reduced. The national debt in and of itself is not a problem, but interest on the national debt is. There are other solutions to decreasing the interest such as having the Fed create the money by quantitative easing. Instead of the Fed's depositing this money in the accounts of the big banks, it would deposit the money in the Treasury's account. "The whole idea of Modern Monetary Theory is that since a sovereign entity can borrow in its own currency, it can print more money when it needs to pay off all its debt. The central bank just needs to keep interest rates low," says Robert R. Johnson, professor of finance at the Heider College of Business at Creighton University. But there's the rub. As the Fed raises interest rates to control inflation, interest on the national debt also increases. That's why a mechanism needs to be found by which the Fed creates the money to run the government instead of the Treasury borrowing the money.

So in the meantime taxing the rich seems to be the best policy in order to bring the national debt down, to reduce economic inequality and to provide the money for government programs to combat global warming.

What Does the Fed’s Jerome Powell Have Up His Sleeve?

by Ellen Brown

Posted on December 10, 2022

The Real Goal of Fed Policy: Breaking Inflation, the Middle Class or the Bubble Economy?

“There is no sense that inflation is coming down,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at a November 2 press conference, — this despite eight months of aggressive interest rate hikes and “quantitative tightening.” On November 30, the stock market rallied when he said smaller interest rate increases are likely ahead and could start in December. But rates will still be increased, not cut. “By any standard, inflation remains much too high,” Powell said. “We will stay the course until the job is done.”

The Fed is doubling down on what appears to be a failed policy, driving the economy to the brink of recession without bringing prices down appreciably. Inflation results from “too much money chasing too few goods,” and the Fed has control over only the money – the “demand” side of the equation. Energy and food are the key inflation drivers, and they are on the supply side. As noted by Bloomberg columnist Ramesh Ponnuru  in the Washington Post in March:

Fixing supply chains is of course beyond any central bank’s power. What the Fed can do is reduce spending levels, which would in turn exert downward pressure on prices. But this would be a mistaken response to shortages. It would answer a scarcity of goods by bringing about a scarcity of money. The effect would be to compound the hit to living standards that supply shocks already caused.

So why is the Fed forging ahead? Some pundits think Chairman Powell has something else up his sleeve.

The Problem with “Demand Destruction”

First, a closer look at the problem. Shrinking demand by reducing the money supply – the money available for people to spend – is considered the Fed’s only tool for fighting inflation. The theory behind raising interest rates is that it will reduce the willingness and ability of people and businesses to borrow. The result will be to shrink the money supply, most of which is created by banks when they make loans. The problem is that shrinking demand means shrinking the economy – laying off workers, cutting productivity, and creating new shortages – driving the economy into recession.

Demand has indeed been shrinking, as evidenced in a November 27 article on ZeroHedge titled: “The Consumer Economy Has Completely Collapsed – ‘It’s A Ghost Town’ for Holiday Shopping Everywhere.” But retailers have cut their prices about as far as they can go. While the rate of increase in producer costs is slowing, those costs are still rising; and retailers have to cover their costs to stay in business, whether or not they have customers at their doors. Rather than lowering their prices further, they will be laying off workers or closing up shop. Layoffs are on the rise, and data reported on December 1 showed that U.S. factory activity is contracting for the first time since the lockdowns of the Covid-​19 pandemic.

It is not just activity in shopping malls and factories that has taken a hit. The housing market has fallen sharply, with pending home sales dropping 32% year-over-year in October. The stock market is also sinking, and the cryptocurrency market has fallen off a cliff. Worse, interest on the federal debt is shooting up. For years, the government has been able to borrow nearly for free. By 2025 or 2026, according to Moody’s Analytics, interest payments could exceed the country’s entire defense budget, which hit $767 billion in fiscal 2022. That means major cuts will be needed to some federal programs.

Breaking the “Fed Put”

In the face of all this economic strife, why is the Fed not reversing its aggressive interest rate hikes, as investors have come to expect? Former British diplomat and EU foreign policy advisor Alastair Crooke suggests that the Fed’s goal is something else:

The Fed … may be attempting to implement a contrarian, controlled demolition of the U.S. bubble-economy through interest rate increases. The rate rises will not slay the inflation “dragon” (they would need to be much higher to do that). The purpose is to break a generalized “dependency habit” on free money.

Danielle DiMartino Booth, former advisor to Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher, agrees. She stated in an interview with financial journalist and podcaster Julia LaRoche:

Maybe Jay Powell is trying to kill the “Fed put.” Maybe he’s trying to break the back of speculation once and for all, so that it’s the Fed – truly an independent apolitical entity – that is making monetary policy, and not speculators making monetary policy for the Fed.

The “Fed put” is the general idea that the Federal Reserve is willing and able to adjust monetary policy in a way that is bullish for the stock market. As explained in a Fortune Magazine article titled “The Stock Market Is Freaking Out Because of the End of Free Money – It All Has to Do with Something Called ‘The Fed Put:’”

For decades, the way the Fed enacted policy was like a put option contract, stepping in to prevent disaster when markets experienced serious turbulence by cutting interest rates and “printing money” through QE [quantitative easing].

… Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Fed had supported markets with ultra-​accommodative monetary policy in the form of near-​zero interest rates and quantitative easing (QE). Stocks thrived under these loose monetary policies. As long as the central bank was injecting liquidity into the economy as an emergency lending measure, the safety net was laid out for investors chasing all kinds of risk assets.

… The idea that the Fed will come to stocks’ aid in a downturn began under Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. What is now the “Fed put” was once the “Greenspan put,” a term coined after the 1987 stock market crash, when Greenspan lowered interest rates to help companies recover, setting a precedent that the Fed would step in during uncertain times.

But the “free money” era seems to be over:

The regime change has left markets effectively on their own and led risk assets, including stocks and cryptocurrencies, to crater as investors grapple with the new norm. It’s also left many wondering whether the era of the so-​called Fed put is over.

Off the Top of My Head

The Mid Terms: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire

by John Lawrence

Voters are going to vote Republican because they don't like the economy. Really? What have the Republicans proposed to do about that? Cut social security and Medicare. Yeah, that'll fix the economy all right. Give more tax breaks to billionaires? That'll fix the economy for sure. Take away Biden's forgiveness of student loan debt? That'll really fix it. "Kitchen table" voters don't like inflation? What are Republicans proposing to do about that? The only tool in the arsenal for inflation cutting is the Fed's raising interest rates and the Fed is independent of both parties. Besides the only tool the Fed has is probably not the right tool for fixing this inflation. But it will eventually destroy what seems to be a pretty good economy despite inflation. The biggest way to fight inflation is to end the war in Ukraine which will bring gas prices down. Additionally, all the weaponry that is being "given" to Ukraine is really being bought from US weapons manufacturers and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin. This is pouring more money into the American economy at a time when money needs to be extracted from the American economy to fight inflation. The Fed's raising of interest rates is an attempt to increase unemployment which is the traditional way that the Fed fights inflation. The so-called Philips curve says that inflation is directly caused by too much employment, and, if you increase unemployment, it will bring inflation down. There is a direct correlation between unemployment and inflation. So the Fed, although no politician will say it, is trying desperately to increase unemployment. This hurts poor people the most, and, whether it will decrease inflation under the present circumstances, is debatable.

However, the war in Ukraine amounts to a protracted stalemate. As long as the west supplies Ukraine with weapons and North Korea, Iran and China supply Russia with weapons, the war will continue. No one on either side wants to talk peace. Each side wants to win at all costs. So the war will drag the world economy down into inflation and recession. Russia holds the winning cards in terms of its ability to literally destroy Ukraine from the air regardless of what is happening on the battlefield. This is not World War II where success on the battlefield was the key to winning the war. It's more like World War I where trench warfare and stalemate predominated. Territorial Russia remains virtually untouched since the rules are that the war will be entirely fought on Ukraine's territory, and the west to its credit doesn't want an expansion of the war. In the final analysis this gives Russia the advantage. Ukraine is fighting a defensive war, and Russia is fighting an offensive war. It's likely that neither party will run out of resources. That means the longer the war goes on, the more of Ukraine will be destroyed. There needs to be a peace commission and a peace process in which both sides can air their grievances and aspirations. What makes the most sense? I'm sure there is a possible way out, but neither side seems to want to compromise in the interests of ameliorating the lives of the Ukrainian people and getting back to normalcy. For each side their national pride is more important than the lives of their citizens.

Joe Biden could propose a solution to the war which would also go a long way to ameliorating inflation. Unfortunately, Biden is only interested in demonizing Putin. This is not a productive way to create peace. Biden is only fueling the war, and Putin won't back down due to pride. The more Putin is demonized, the more his hackles are raised. The west should be trying to lower Putin's hackles, not raise them. Ukrainian lives hang in the balance. Russian soldiers' lives are also in the balance although Russian civilians so far have escaped most of the suffering. Ukraine taking back real estate will not in the final analysis win the war because Russia can lob missiles into Ukraine ad infinitum. Only a peace process, compromise, consideration for civilian lives and reintegration of Russia into the world community will make it possible for people in that region of the world to again lead normal lives. Winning the war for either side is not a realistic option.

Off the Top of My Head

Republicans Hate Socialism ... Except When They Need Help Themselves

by John Lawrence

When Superstorm Sandy hit, then Congressman DeSantis voted against giving help to New York state. Now after the Hurricane Ian disaster, Governor DeSantis is asking the Federal government for every dollar he can possibly get. This is typical Republican behavior. After all socialism is about helping people. Republicans want every ounce of help they can get for themselves while denying it to others. All of a sudden DeSantis is Joe Biden's best friend. Joe wants to help people, but he should think twice about helping DeSantis. First of all a hard look should be given to rebuilding on hurricane prone barrier islands. DeSantis, of course, wants the increased economic activity that rebuilding will entail for construction companies especially if the Federal government pays for it. Building Back Better in hurricane prone areas is not good economic sense. And it will cost a fortune in an inflationary era while only adding to inflation as the Federal government injects more money into the economy.

Robert Reich wrote in a recent email:

"No Republican governor has been more vocal in his opposition to what he describes as “socialism” than Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis. “I stand against socialism,” DeSantis thundered in Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial election. “Socialist policies have failed time and time again.” In June, DeSantis signed an education bill directing Florida’s Department of Education to develop a curriculum educating students on the evils of socialism (as well as communism)."

But now, when his state needs the money, DeSantis is either a full on socialist or a full on opportunist who, once he gets his, will be against anyone else getting theirs. In 2013 DeSantis said: "I sympathize with the victims of Hurricane Sandy and believe that those who purchased flood insurance should have their claims paid. At the same time, allowing the program to increase its debt by another $9.7 billion with no plan to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere is not fiscally responsible." So now after Hurricane Ian, which will run into the tens of billions, is giving the state of Florida the money DeSantis is requesting from the Federal government "fiscally responsible"? Reich poses the question: "So, would DeSantis call any form of government assistance to those in need “socialism?” Obviously, not when it's his ox that's being gored. DeSantis' hypocrisy is immense here, but it will probably work for him. He will take credit for "getting Florida and Floridians back to normal" as he enters the 2024 Presidential contest. Before Biden gives DeSantis all the money he wants, DeSantis should do a mea culpa, stating that he was wrong to vote against disaster relief for New York state after Superstorm Sandy.

DeSantis website headlines: "Governor Ron DeSantis Requests President Biden Approve Major Disaster Declaration and 100 Percent Federal Cost Share for 60 Days for Hurricane Ian" This isn't the first time that DeSantis has used Federal cash to tout his own agenda. Just prior to the fatal hurricane, DeSantis held a press conference in Jacksonville where he gave $1,000 checks to individual firefighters and law-enforcement officers that were being made available through this year’s state budget. Of course he didn't mention that this was cash the state of Florida got from the American Rescue Plan, Federal money which provided more than $8.8 billion to the state of Florida.DeSantis will likely continue to bash President Joe Biden and the Democrats for pushing policies that he says have caused inflation — which includes the massive spending included in the American Rescue Plan. I've got news for Gov. DeSantis: if he cared about inflation, he would take the money to recover from Hurricane Ian out of state taxes instead of letting the American taxpayer foot the bill while all the time giving Joe Biden no credit. He will take all that for himself.

 

Off the Top of My Head

The Way to Cure Inflation: More Immigrant Workers

by John Lawrence

There is a supply shortage which means that there is not enough supply to meet consumer demand. At the same time there is a worker shortage. The worker shortage causes the supply shortage as companies have to cut back on their supply of product because they don't have enough workers to make more. They have to pay workers more because they are in a competition for workers. So there is a gap between supply and demand because there is a gap between available jobs and the supply of workers. The solution: increase the supply of immigrants to fill the demand for workers. Then companies could ramp up supply to meet demand, and wage price spirals would diminish. Instead, the government has restricted immigration. This limits the supply of workers especially those who are in demand for the lower skilled jobs. Republicans are all concerned about immigration when the solution to the inflation problem is to let more immigrants into the country to fulfill the need for essential workers. This would fill the void in the job market and increase supply of goods and services. This in turn would lower prices and go a long way to taming inflation. The Fed cannot solve the problem of inadequate supply of workers by raising interest rates. This will only tend to rein in asset prices which in and of itself is a good thing since housing and rents are too expensive. But it will not increase the supply of commodities for which there is more demand than supply.

After noting that reversing the Trump tariffs on Chinese products would lower inflation, Fareed Zakaria also noted the following:

The second one, he noted, would be immigration reform. This is the time to reverse more of Trump’s restrictions on immigration, many done by executive action and hundreds of which are still in effect, which have caused severe worker shortages in industries such as farming, construction and health care.

The problem, however, is not one relating to facts or logic. No one seriously disputes the validity of these claims. During the campaign, Biden lambasted Trump’s tariffs on China and much of his immigration policy. Yet after entering office, the Biden White House has behaved on these issues like a deer caught in the headlights — paralyzed by fear that any major shifts might get attacked by Republicans.

I also might add that cranking up the Cold War rhetoric regarding China is not the way to lower the price of consumer products most of which are manufactured in China. China is learning the lesson that Russia learned during their ongoing war with Ukraine. If you have a product or commodity that the west wants or needs, you can cause a lot of damage by withholding that product or in other ways making it more expensive. As Russia has made the price of gas more expensive, they have directly caused inflation in the US and Europe. One could also point out that sanctions on Russian oil by western governments have contributed to rising inflation so in that sense the Biden administration has shot itself in the foot. China could take a page out of Russia's book, and increase costs to western consumers. In fact it already has as container ships (wholly owned by Chinese companies) have raised their prices to transport goods from China to the US. The US needs to cooperate with China if it wants the trade relationships so vital to consumer spending, which is 70% of the US economy, to remain on a salutary basis.

It is to be noted that China turned the tables on the US by sanctioning Nancy Pelosi and her family after her trip to Taiwan. It's as if they're saying, "See, you guys aren't the only ones that can do sanctions." China could get into a sanctions war with the US if tensions between the two countries continue to escalate. China could take steps to increase the cost of Chinese produced consumer goods which are essential to the functioning of the US economy. Or it could even withhold some essential manufactured goods altogether. As Russia has us over a barrel with regard to gas prices, China could put us over a barrel with respect to any number of consumer goods that we are dependent on them for. On the other hand, if we cooperated rather than competed with China, that might go a long way to solve the climate change problem. Ditto for Russia. Those 2 countries have a lot to do with whether or not planet earth gets a handle on climate change. Can we afford not to cooperate. In the long run the fate of Taiwan or Ukraine is less important than the fate of the whole planet.

Off the Top of My Head

Will Higher Interest Rates Bring Down Inflation?

by John Lawrence

As has been pointed out by others, they will not bring down the cost of things in limited supply like gas and items in short supply due to supply chain problems. What they will bring down is asset inflation in the real estate and the stock markets. Indirectly this will stabilize the rental market. Rent is one of the biggest costs to the family budget so stabilizing, if not decreasing, rents is a good thing. Similarly, the price of houses should actually decrease as the price of mortgages goes up. For those who can pay cash this is a good thing. Sellers will have to drop their asking prices or their real estate will sit on the market unsold as people will not be able to afford the current inflated house prices as well as a much more expensive mortgage. Increased interest rates will also make business loans more expensive and some businesses will go under. This will decrease stock prices as people lose confidence in the stock market. We are not in a real estate crisis as we were in 2008, the Great Recession, since rules about who can obtain a mortgage have been sufficiently tightened. The real estate industry leading up to the Great Recession was famous for "liar loans" in which anyone could just state their income without any verification.

Renters can take heart in the fact that their rents will probably not be going up at such a rapid rate since they are at least partly determined by the price of the underlying real estate. Credit card debtors should pay off their credit cards since credit card debt is definitely going to get more expensive. People living paycheck to paycheck should not be borrowing money. The price of basic goods should come down as supply chain problems are worked out although food prices might remain high as global warming takes its toll on crop production. The cost of gas definitely should come down as production is increased in the US and elsewhere if the supply of Russian gas stays off the market.

The remnants of Biden's Build Back Better bill now repackaged as the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will help not only fight inflation but have a major impact on fighting climate change. Incentives to buy electric vehicles and heat pumps are very forward thinking and progressive pieces of legislation long overdue. However, as Yogi Berra said, "It's not over till it's over." Is Krysten Sinema aboard? Some very important aspects of this bill constitute taxing the rich, also provisions which are long overdue especially the "carried interest" loophole. Bringing the costs of health care down also helps those near the bottom rung of the economic ladder, and reins in one of the biggest causes of inflation - health care and pharmaceutical costs. Taxing the rich and the Fed's selling of Treasury bonds extracts money from the economy which has a salutary effect on inflation. The chip bill, which has already passed Congress, will increase domestic production of this valuable commodity and make the US more self sufficient while creating more jobs. Jobs are in great supply already so this part is not really needed at the present time. There is a shortage of workers.

Although some writers see raising interest rates as unproductive and even harmful, if they bring down the cost of real estate and reduce asset prices in the stock market, that might actually be a good thing. Businesses which have to pay higher interest rates for loans may not be buying back as much of their own stock, and this in and of itself might bring down asset inflation in the stock market.

Interest Rate Hikes Will Not Save Us from Inflation

Posted on July 28, 2022 by Ellen Brown on Web of Debt blog

Rather than making money harder to get, the U.S. government needs to focus on the other side of the demand vs. supply equation.

In prescribing cures for inflation, economists rely on the diagnosis of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon—too much money chasing too few goods. But that equation has three variables: too much money (“demand”) chasing (the “velocity” of spending) too few goods (“supply”). And “orthodox” economists, from Lawrence Summers to the Federal Reserve, seem to be focusing only on the “demand” variable. 

The Fed’s prescription is to suppress demand (borrowing and spending) by raising interest rates. Summers, a  former U.S. Treasury Secretary who presided over the massive post-2008 bank bailouts, is proposing to reduce demand by raising taxes or raising unemployment rates, reducing disposable income and thus people’s ability to spend. But those rather brutal solutions miss the real problem, just as Summers missed the crisis leading up to the 2008-09 crash. As explained in a November 2021 editorial titled “Too Few Goods – The Simple Explanation for October’s Elevated Inflation Rates,” we don’t actually have too much consumer money chasing available goods: 

M2 money supply surged [in 2020] as the Fed pumped out liquidity to replace businesses’ lost sales and households’ lost paychecks. But bank reserves account for nearly half of the cumulative increase since 2020 began, and the vast majority seem to be excess reserves sitting on deposit at Federal Reserve banks and not backing loans. Excluding bank reserves, M2 money supply is now growing more slowly than it did for most of 2015 – 2019, when inflation was mostly below the Fed’s 2% y/y target, much to policymakers’ chagrin. Weak lending also suggests money isn’t doing much “chasing,” a notion underscored by the historically low velocity of money. US personal consumption expenditures—the broadest measure of household spending—have already slowed from a reopening resurgence to rates more akin to the pre-pandemic norm and surveys show many households used stimulus money to repay debt or build savings they may not spend at all. It doesn’t look like there is a mountain of household liquidity waiting to do more chasing from here. [Emphasis added.]

In March 2022, the Federal Reserve tackled inflation with its traditional tools – raising interest rates and tightening the money supply by selling bonds, pulling dollars out of the economy. But not only have prices not gone down since then, they are going up. As observed in a July 15 article on Seeking Alpha titled “Fed-Induced Recession Looms As Rate Fears Roil All Markets”:

On Wednesday, the Consumer Price Index came in at a 9.1% annual rate. The higher-than-expected reading puts the CPI at a new 41-year high.

The biggest contributors to rising consumer prices are the basic necessities of food, fuel, and shelter. As households struggle to make ends meet, they are trimming discretionary spending, burning through savings, and running up credit card balances.

Businesses are also getting squeezed. On Thursday, the Producer Price Index showed wholesale costs rising at a massive 11.3% year-over-year.

When their own costs go up, producers must raise the prices of their products to cover those costs, regardless of demand. Less money competing for their products won’t bring producer costs down. It will just drive the companies out of business, as happened in the Great Depression. The Seeking Alpha article concludes:

… As both businesses and consumers are forced to tighten their belts, a slowdown looms.

And if the Federal Reserve makes another major policy misstep, then a severe recession and financial crisis may also be coming. 

Recession is already evident. The stock market has lost a cumulative $7 trillion in value this year, while the crypto market has lost $2 trillion since last November. Emerging markets are in even worse straits. According to a July 14 article by Larry McDonald on ZeroHedge, “Emerging and frontier market countries currently owe the IMF over $100 billion. US central banking policy plus a strong USD is vaporizing this capital as we speak.… A quarter-trillion dollars of distressed debt is threatening to drag the developing world into a historic cascade of defaults.” 

Every time the Fed raises rates, borrowing becomes more expensive. That means higher interest costs not only for governments but for borrowers with mortgages, home equity lines of credit, credit cards, student debt and car loans. For both large and small businesses, loans also get pricier.

To be clear, this is not the same sort of inflation that Paul Volcker was taming in 1980 when he raised the Fed funds rate to 20%. McDonald observes, “In 2021, global debt reached a record $303T, according to the Institute of International Finance .… Volcker was jacking rates into a planet with about $200T LESS debt.” [Emphasis added]

Volcker was also not dealing with the supply shortages we have today, generated by lockdowns that put more than 100,000 U.S. companies out of business; sanctions and war that cut off global supplies of fuel, food and resources; and farming crises such as that in the Netherlands, generated by overly stringent regulations. 

Higher interest rates don’t alleviate cost/push inflation caused by supply crises; they make it worse. Rather than making money harder to get, the government needs to focus on the supply side of the equation, stimulating local production to bring supply levels up. Rather than Volcker’s solution, what we need is that pioneered by Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who pulled us out of similar crises with public banking institutions designed to stimulate infrastructure and development. 

For foreign models, we can look to the infrastructure-funding central banks of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in the first half of the 20th century; and to China, which salvaged the global economy following the 2008 banking crisis with massive infrastructure and development funded through its state-owned development banks.

Off the Top of My Head

Why the Fed's Raising Interest Rates Won't Work

by John Lawrence

Inflation is a supply and demand problem. The Fed only sees it as a demand problem: there is too much demand. Therefore, it seeks to reduce the public's ability to demand by reducing wages and creating more unemployment. Problem is that businesses are short staffed. They are trying to hire more workers, not laying them off. There is no "industrial reserve army" of people competing for jobs. Businesses are competing for workers. The reason why prices are going up (hence inflation) is not that there is too much demand, but that there is too little supply. This is caused by supply chain problems which comes down to the fact that most things Americans consume are produced overseas, mainly in China. Also the sanctions on Russian gas and oil combined with Russia cutting off supplies even beyond the sanctions means that everything that is transported including consumer goods is even more expensive. The problem is that the US does not produce much of what it consumes. Again it's a supply problem. Container ships coming from China raise their rates because gas is more expensive. This makes the goods they transport more expensive. When the major things Americans consume come from China (consumer goods) and Russia (energy costs), America is at the behest of countries that it considers enemies. And so is Europe.

The traditional way of fighting inflation is for the Fed to raise interest rates and drive up unemployment. When unemployment increases, demand decreases because unemployed people don't have as much money to spend. In other words money is withdrawn from the economy. This is of course to the detriment of the unemployed people which are usually those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. But as we've seen during the pandemic, those at the bottom of the economic ladder are usually those who are indispensable workers - grocery workers, agricultural workers, truck drivers, nurses, caregivers. The economy cannot function for anyone without their services. So the only way the Fed can achieve its goal is to drive businesses into bankruptcy. Then all those workers will be in the ranks of the unemployed and be forced to underconsume. Actually, the more that Americans consume, the more greenhouse gasses are created. Underconsumption could have a very salutary effect on the atmosphere and the environment.

Another way to withdraw money from the economy in order to reduce demand is to raise taxes. Again taxes are usually raised on the poor and middle class further immiserizing them. Congress refuses to raise taxes on the rich which Joe Biden has proposed doing. This would help inflation to some extent, but the rich don't consume basic items to the extent that the middle class and poor do. So in order to reduce demand to the point where it is more or less equal to supply, money must be taken out of the pockets of the poor and middle class. The other alternative is to increase supply. But since the US is dependent on supply from foreign suppliers, this is not that easy to do. Long range, the solution is for the US to make more stuff, but corporations have settled on a model of getting stuff produced where labor is cheapest and that means overseas.

Off the Top of My Head

Biden Could Solve the Gas Crisis Today by Taking Sanctions Off Russian Oil

by John Lawrence

Sanctions on Russian oil have been an abysmal failure. Russian oil profits are up 50% from last year! Just as American and British oil corporations have been scoring record profits, so has Russia. Oil prices are set on the world market and soaring prices result in record profits for Russia. If Putin had designed the sanctions himself, he couldn't have wreaked more havoc on the US and European economies. It's time for Biden to admit that his policy of sancti0ns against Russia has failed. They haven't deterred Russia from pursuing a war of attrition against Ukraine. They have demonstrated the abject failure of using US sanctions to control the actions of other countries. They are a total lost cause now and in the future. That's the lesson of the war in Ukraine for the west.

Bloomberg reported:

Russia’s oil revenues are up 50% this year even as trade restrictions following the invasion of Ukraine spurred many refiners to shun its supplies, the International Energy Agency said.

Moscow earned roughly $20 billion each month in 2022 from combined sales of crude and products amounting to about 8 million barrels a day, the Paris-based IEA said in its monthly market report. 

Russian shipments have continued to flow even as the European Union edges towards an import ban, and international oil majors such as Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE pledge to cease purchases. Asia has remained a keen customer, with China and India picking up cargoes no longer wanted in Europe.

The IEA, which advises major economies, kept its outlook for world oil markets largely unchanged in the report. Global fuel markets are tight and may face further strain in the months ahead as Chinese demand rebounds following a spate of new Covid lockdowns, it said. 

Reduced flows of Russian refined products such as diesel, fuel oil and naphtha have aggravated tightness in global markets, the agency noted. Stockpiles have declined for seven consecutive quarters, with reserves of so-called middle distillates at their lowest since 2008.

But for all the disruption, Moscow has continued to enjoy a financial windfall compared with the first four months of 2021. Despite the EU’s public censure of the Kremlin’s aggression, total oil export revenues were up 50% this year. 

The bloc remained the largest market for Russian exports in April, taking 43% of the country’s exports, the IEA said.

So where is this "world market" that is setting the price of oil? Is it on Wall Street? I'd like to have a word with whoever is in charge of this "world market." Lord knows the US produces enough oil to supply all the US' gas needs so why not take US oil production off the world market and just sell it to the American people at a reasonable price? Oh, I guess that's not how capitalism works. Ironic, isn't it, that a formerly communist country like Russia is now profiting from capitalist markets! So even if the US, Canada and Europe are having record inflation with recessions predicted in the near future, Biden won't take the sanctions off of Russian oil, and basically this is all for spite, all because he hates Putin so much. Biden has staked American prestige on fighting a proxy war with Russia based on the almighty dollar and the power it supposedly possesses over every financial transaction going on in the world. Problem is that all the sanctions on Russia have only proven the weakness and futility of using sanctions to achieve policy goals. Russia has demonstrated that the sanctions just don't work. They haven't deterred Russia in the least. China and India have taken up the slack in Russian oil purchases.

Besides that, what Biden fails to understand is that like the US, Russia's currency, the ruble, is a fiat currency. That means that unlike China, it is not pegged to the US dollar. Russia's central bank can print as many rubles as it wants without asking US permission. The US can of course do the same thing - print as many dollars as it wants except the limiting factor is inflation. So the US can't print dollars right now, but Russia can still print rubles. That means that Russia controls Russian investment in Russia and Russian control of internal consumer markets. Imported products come mainly from China, and China is Russia's friend. Russia is demanding payment for its gas in rubles rather than dollars, and this supports the value of the ruble as a convertible currency just as Nixon's demand that the Saudis price their oil in dollars supported the value of the dollar and made the dollar the world's reserve currency.

All this boils down to the fact that Russia is in the driver's seat with respect to the war in Ukraine. It's hard to see how the unending supply of western weapons is sufficient to win the war for Ukraine now that the policy of sanctions has failed. Demonizing Putin is not a policy that is likely to have an effect on the war one way or other. Putin still has a lot of friends in the world and US inflation, while being primarily a function of sanctions on Russian oil, is also dependent on the supply chain of products coming from China, Russia's friend. Biden should be careful about whom he demonizes. After demonizing MBS, he's now about to get back in bed with him and the Saudis. Biden's Build Back Better policy could have helped the American people, and even now could fight inflation, but alas, after promising that it would be passed "in tandem" with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, it never was. What up with that?

Off the Top of My Head

Did Biden Shoot Himself in the Foot by Putting the Kibosh on Russian Oil?

by John Lawrence

If Putin wanted to ruin the US economy, he couldn't have done it more successfully than if he himself had refused deliveries of Russian oil. The US and European embargo on Russian oil has driven the price of oil on the world market sky high, and Putin is benefiting from the price increase! In fact he has made more money from the sale of oil this year than he did last year! No wonder Putin is smiling. He's laughing all the way to the bank as his war in Ukraine not only devastates Ukraine but drives inflation in the US, UK and the rest of Europe while US sanctions on Russia's economy does little or no damage. Do they really need imports from Europe or the US when China is the world's manufacturer of practically everything, and China is an ally of Russia? Not every financial transaction in the world involves the US dollar. Furthermore, Russia's blockade of Ukrainian grain is causing food prices to rise which makes for another increase in inflation. But even worse than that, countries that depend on that grain consumption will likely find their citizens going hungry further contributing to world political instability.

Biden's insane pandering to Saudi Arabia after declaring them a pariah country will not do much to lower the price of gas even if Saudi Arabia increases production to their limit. They don't have the ability to fully replace the potential supply of Russian oil. So win or lose the war in Ukraine, Putin is having a debilitating effect on the US economy while there is not that much of a debilitating effect on Russia's economy. Another reason this is so is that the Russian ruble is a fiat currency not pegged to the US dollar so the Russian central bank can spend as many rubles as necessary to keep consumers and businesses going. Even MacDonald's has been "Russianized" so that MacDonald's pull out has had little or no effect on the Russian preference for US fast food. Furthermore, Russia and China, among a few other nations, have been hard at work to limit the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) envisions a prosperous, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable Asia and the Pacific, while sustaining its efforts to eradicate extreme poverty in the region. China's Belt and Road initiative also is furthering the cause of dedollarization of the world economy. However, China's currency is pegged to the US dollar so China needs to hold dollars in its account at the Federal Reserve, but Russia's currency is fully convertible. That's how it can demand that Finland pay for its gas in rubles thus supporting that fully convertible currency. Russia, therefore, is not dependent on the US dollar. It just needs to import anything that it doesn't produce domestically and China can provide that.

Meanwhile, the US is dependent on the supply chain from China which has been disrupted lately causing more inflation. Dependency on China for most of its products while trying to cast China as an adversary is not a very good idea. The proposed Cold War with China is only pushing Russia and China closer together. Meanwhile the war in Ukraine is becoming a money pit for the US government which is spending billions and billions to give Ukraine a never ending supply of weapons. This is also inflationary because, whereas the product is shipped to Ukraine, the money is spent right into the US economy via the US weapons manufacturers. To fight inflation money needs to be extracted from the US economy hopefully by means of taxing the rich and not taxing anyone making less than $400,000 a year as Biden has proposed. Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Putin has proven that by withholding Russian oil from world markets, he can drive up the price of gas and cause inflation in car centric America.

Off the Top of My Head

Biden Alternately Fights, Fuels Inflation

by John Lawrence

Normally the government spending money into the economy is a good thing. It promotes economic growth and prosperity. But when the economy overheats causing inflation, the government needs to extract money from the economy. It does that by, among other things, raising taxes. Also the Fed, like it's doing now, raises interest rates. This puts a damper on major purchases because of interest costs. The American Rescue Plan injected a lot of money into the economy that kept the wheels turning during the worst parts of the pandemic. That was a good thing, but too much of a good thing is a bad thing. The traditional way the Fed controls inflation is to squeeze the economy in such a way as to cause higher unemployment. The Phillips curve is a theoretical economic tool that shows the relationship between inflation and unemployment, the higher unemployment, the lower inflation and vice versa. At present, however, businesses are begging for workers, not laying them off. This is good news for workers, bad news for inflation.

Biden is trying to blunt the cost of inflation to low wage workers by getting Congress to pass some of the remnants of his Build Back Better plan. However, some of these items would cause the government to spend more money into the economy causing even more inflation. Biden doesn't want to tell the truth about inflation which is that the traditional solution is to cause even more pain for low wage workers by squeezing the economy to the point that they will lose their jobs thus increasing unemployment as the Phillips curve dictates. So basically there is nothing Biden can do except to decrease government spending. Republicans would cut programs that benefit the poor and raise taxes on the middle class to do just that.

Biden is continuing to spend money into the economy by purchasing billions of dollars worth of weapons which are then sent to Ukraine. This is inflationary in and of itself. As of May 20, 2022, the US has spent $54 billion on Ukraine, and, evidently, even more will be allocated. Ukraine has become a ward of the US with the US taking responsibility not only for supplying weapons but also for keeping the whole economy afloat. All this money spent on Ukraine is money not spent on programs for the American people unless you are an employee of the military-industrial complex for which Ukraine spending has become a bonanza. Of course there are other causes of inflation than too much government spending. The loss of Russian oil is causing gas prices to rise. Chinese COVID lockdowns are exacerbating the supply chain crisis. This is not a traditional inflation, but too much government spending is certainly a part of it. Biden's good intentions of protecting the American people during the COVID pandemic by flooding the economy with money had the concomitant effect of also causing inflation. Biden will never, of course, tell Americans the truth which is that in order to fight inflation the government will have to turn around and cause them more pain especially low wage workers.

Off the Top of My Head

What Are the Implications of Russia's Pariahdom for Global Warming?

by John Lawrence

All western politicians and pundits (with the possible exception of Tucker Carlson) agree that Russia is and shall ever be a pariah state. Putin is a pariah who should be tried for war crimes. So how is the world and the community of nations going to combat our truly mortal enemy - global warming? As a major producer of fossil fuels, in order to get off the fossil fuel bandwagon, we would need Russia's cooperation. If Putin is to be a pariah, he could care less about global warming. He's probably thinking about all the resorts he could build in Siberia! Besides that, as the world warms, the tundra in Siberia is thawing releasing tons of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In recent years, climate scientists have warned thawing permafrost in Siberia may be a “methane time bomb”. But now a study by three geologists says that a heat wave in 2020 has revealed a surge in methane emissions “potentially in much higher amounts” from a different source: thawing rock formations in the Arctic permafrost. Russia and Putin could have the last laugh as the rest of the world goes up in flames and Russia adapts to a more moderate climate.

The Washington Post reported:

"The difference is that thawing wetlands releases “microbial” methane from the decay of soil and organic matter, while thawing limestone — or carbonate rock — releases hydrocarbons and gas hydrates from reservoirs both below and within the permafrost, making it “much more dangerous” than past studies have suggested.

"Nikolaus Froitzheim, who teaches at the Institute of Geosciences at the University of Bonn, said that he and two colleagues used satellite maps that measured intense methane concentrations over two “conspicuous elongated areas” of limestone — stripes that were several miles wide and up to 375 miles long — in the Taymyr Peninsula and the area around northern Siberia.

"The study was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Surface temperatures during the heat wave in 2020 soared to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1979-2000 norms. In the long stripes, there is hardly any soil, and vegetation is scarce, the study says. So the limestone crops out of the surface. As the rock formations warm up, cracks and pockets opened up, releasing methane that had been trapped inside."

Have the western politicos miscalculated or are they just playing into the Russian playbook in which the Russians are thinking 3 moves ahead on the chess board? The politicos and pundits all agree that Russia's financial lifeline is the sale of oil and gas and that the west must do everything it can do to shut off those sales starving Russia financially. But wait a minute. What they fail to understand is that Russia does not need the sale of gas or any other commodity to survive financially because the ruble is a fiat currency. The Russian central bank can print as many rubles as it likes with the only constraint being inflation. The US dollar is also a fiat currency and the US Federal Reserve can print as many dollars as it likes, the only restraints being political and again inflation which the US is now experiencing to a greater degree than Russia is. In fact the printing of Russian rubles will only tend to balance their economy and prevent it from going into recession. Meanwhile, the west, Germany in particular, struggles with replacing Russian gas and oil with gas and oil from other sources in a futile attempt to starve Russia financially. Ellen Brown has pointed out why sanctions may even be good for Russia because it forces Russia to develop sectors of its own economy rather than relying on imports from the west.

Besides Russia has a lot of friends in the world, some of them like Hungary who are even NATO members. Viktor Orban, Hungary's authoritarian leader and key Putin ally, calls Zelensky an 'opponent' after winning reelection. So while the US and Britain mainly fulminate over Russia's Putin being a pariah, not everyone in the non-western world agrees. Russia still has plenty of friends, just not in the US or Britain. Which brings is back to our original question, how can we solve the problem of global warming without Russia's cooperation even if we are not friends with them? Is it worth it to destroy the whole planet earth because of two countries engaging in a war no matter how brutal and ill founded? The west must eventually come to terms with Russia and with Putin if Putin is still the Russian leader when the war ends or watch while planet earth, not just Ukraine, goes up in flames.

Off the Top of My Head

Joe Biden's Policy: Speak Loudly but Carry a Small Stick

by John Lawrence

As opposed to Theodore Roosevelt's policy: speak softly but carry a big stick. I think Biden's policy is correct. By all means we don't want World War III. As Ellen Brown makes clear on Web of Debt blog, sanctions will not do much except hasten the day when the US dollar is not the only world's reserve currency. There are so many workarounds to sanctions, and billionaires can always replace their super yachts. Russia has a fiat currency just like the US dollar. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that a country with a fiat currency can have its central bank print as much of that currency as it wishes. The only constraining factor is inflation. Right now the US is more constrained by inflation than Russia is. There is no need for Russia's domestic economy to suffer because of inflation. Businesses can continue to receive investment loans from the central bank. International trade will continue with friendly countries like India, China, Venezuela and Turkey. Turkey is a member of NATO by the way, and India is the world's largest democracy.

Daily Sabah reported on March 11, 2022 in Turkish businesses expect progress on using rubles in trade with Russia :

"Since the currency dispute with shipping companies is causing problems in the delivery of goods passing through customs, Turkey should actively work to develop a mechanism to facilitate trade with Russia in rubles, Istanbul Chamber of Commerce (ITO) head Şekib Avdagiç said Friday. Avdagiç stated that the companies working with Russia see the withdrawal of Western countries from Moscow as a new opportunity and emphasized that it is important to enable the use of the national currency of Russia. The issue was also brought up during President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, he reiterated. Erdoğan told Putin that, apart from the euro and dollar, trade between the two countries can be carried out using the Russian ruble and Chinese yuan."

Aljazeera reported:

Mumbai, India–Indian authorities are actively considering dedicated payment mechanisms for trade with Russia to enable existing trade obligations in the wake of sanctions imposed on the Kremlin, a move that will also pave the way for cheaper oil imports to meet the country’s energy demands. In the past month, as sanctions have been imposed on Russia, the scope of a payment mechanism in local currencies has expanded from being a means to sustain ongoing trade to possibilities of deeper engagement, including increasing bilateral trade.

Of course, US authorities are managing the news here just as they are in Russia. They don't want you to know that our erstwhile ally, India, the world's largest democracy is doing workarounds to avoid US sanctions. As Ellen's article points out, we in the US may be better off once the US dollar is not the only world's reserve currency. At that point we may have to rely more on our domestic economy and infrastructure just as Russia is being forced to do now. So we won't have to be at the mercy of supply chains from other parts of the world. More stuff will be manufactured here in the good old USA, and that's a good thing.

Biggest Oil Giants Made 'Eye-Popping' $205 Billion in Profits in 2021: Report

Gas prices of more than $7.00 per gallon are posted at a downtown Los Angeles gas station on March 9, 2022. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

Now, fossil fuel giants are trying to "cash in on inflation and the crisis in Ukraine," said one critic.

 

Kenny Stancil

March 15, 2022

While millions of working people have been hurt by surging gas prices, a new analysis out Tuesday shows that 25 of the world's biggest fossil fuel corporations collectively pulled in an "eye-popping" $205 billion in profits last year—and Big Oil is exploiting Russia's war on Ukraine to charge even more at the pump in 2022 and advance its financial interests.

"All this money helps to line the pockets of wealthy oil executives who receive massive chunks of their compensation in company stock."

According to a new report from government watchdog Accountable.US, top oil and gas companies took "full advantage" of last year's sky-high prices and record profits. Fourteen firms rewarded shareholders with more than $35 billion in stock buybacks and dividend bumps.

As the report details, Big Oil has been bragging to investors about its windfall profits on recent earnings calls. Chevron, for instance, called 2021 one of its "most successful years ever." Shell CEO Ben Van Beurden described it as a "momentous year." Meanwhile, Coterra CEO Tom Jordan characterized high gas prices as "good," and Equinor CEO Anders Opedal marveled at how the industry has been "capturing value from high prices."

Last year's record profits came as average gas prices in the U.S. steadily increased—hitting around $3.40 per gallon in December 2021, up from $2.10 a year before. As consumer demand rose last year following a brief coronavirus-driven decline in 2020, shareholders pressured fossil fuel corporations to restrict supply to drive prices higher.

Oil and gas costs have soared even higher during the first three months of 2022. Since President Joe Biden announced one week ago that the U.S. would ban imports of Russian fossil fuels in response to Moscow's deadly assault on Ukraine, the average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. has continued to climb, surpassing $4.31 on Tuesday.

Given that the United Kingdom and the European Union have also taken steps to clamp down on imports of Russian oil and gas, fossil fuel executives are reportedly salivating at the prospect of forcing consumers to accept higher costs amid the war.

According to Accountable.US, the fossil fuel giants responsible for hiking prices have already announced plans to buy back nearly $80 billion in stocks in 2022, boasting of their ability to deliver "even better" returns for shareholders this year. Devon Energy, for example, said last month that doubling down on share buybacks is the "clear thing for us to do."

"All this money helps to line the pockets of wealthy oil executives who receive massive chunks of their compensation in company stock," states the report.

When Biden announced the U.S. boycott of Russian petroleum products, he stressed that this is "no time for profiteering or price-gouging."

The Congressional Progressive Caucus followed up with a call to swiftly pass legislation to prevent more "shameless" price hikes, ramp up investments in renewable energy, and raise wages and lower the costs of necessities for working families amid high levels of inflation, which 82% of U.S. voters attribute to "corporate greed."

Big Oil, meanwhile, has sought to deflect blame for worsening pain at the pump, baselessly accusing Biden—who approved more permits for drilling on public lands and waters in 2021 than former President Donald Trump did in 2017—of suppressing domestic extraction.

As Biden bragged last week, U.S. fossil fuel corporations "pumped more oil during my first year in office than they did during my predecessor's first year."

Domestic oil and gas production is "approaching record levels," said Biden, "and we're on track to set a record for oil production next year." The president, who has ordered the release of tens of millions of barrels of oil from the nation's strategic reserves, argued that any blame for untapped extractive potential should be placed on the shoulders of those who are sitting on millions of acres of federal property.

"They could be drilling right now, yesterday, last week, last year," Biden said, referring to leaseholders who possess thousands of unused permits.

Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said in a statement that "as Americans encounter higher prices to fill their gas tanks or heat their homes, Big Oil is grasping at straws to explain why they are swimming in unused leases and hundreds of billions of dollars in profits—money they hand over to wealthy oil and gas company executives and shareholders rather than struggling consumers."

Last decade's drilling and fracking boom turned the Permian Basin into the most productive oil and gas field in the world, transforming the U.S. into a major exporter of fossil fuels but keeping prices low, much to the chagrin of shareholders.

The unwillingness of oil and gas companies to boost production in recent months "has been driven by investor sentiment," Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNN last year. Wall Street, she said, doesn't want producers "to spoil the party" by expanding supply.

As Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James, told the news outlet earlier this month: "Oil and gas companies do not want to drill more. They are under pressure from the financial community to pay more dividends, to do more share buybacks instead of the proverbial 'drill baby drill,' which is the way they would have done things 10 years ago. Corporate strategy has fundamentally changed."

Herrig argued that "it's time for Big Oil to stop lying about the Biden administration's public land policies, quit using it as a cover to cash in on inflation and the crisis in Ukraine, and pass the benefits of their massive profits on to consumers."

On Thursday, as Common Dreams reported, congressional Democrats introduced the bicameral Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax. The measure would hit large fossil fuel companies with a per-barrel tax—whether the oil is domestically produced or imported—equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019. An estimated $45 billion in annual revenue would be redistributed to U.S. households in the form of quarterly rebates.

Dems Introduce Windfall Tax on Big Oil So Companies 'Pay a Price When They Price Gouge'

Andrea Germanos

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Biden said last week, "should motivate us to accelerate the transition to clean energy."

"Loosening environmental regulations and pulling back clean energy investment... will not lower energy prices for families," said the president. "But transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles powered by clean energy, with tax credits to help American families winterize their homes and use less energy—that will, that will help."

"If we do what we can," he added, "it will mean that no one has to worry about prices at the gas pump in the future."

Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that humanity has a "brief and rapidly closing window" to avoid the worst effects of the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, which is on track to exacerbate deadly extreme weather, with especially catastrophic consequences for the world's poorest and most vulnerable.

While progressives have long urged Biden to exercise his executive authority to the fullest possible extent to improve the lives of working people and help secure a livable planet in the face of staunch opposition in Congress, they also have not given up on pushing for further legislative action.

On Monday, nearly 90 House Democrats urged Biden to revive the party's stalled reconciliation package—which has been approved by the lower chamber but blocked in the Senate by every Republican plus right-wing Democrats Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.)—by prioritizing measures designed to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. 

In addition, more than 120 advocacy groups called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to swiftly translate the party's domestic priorities into a reconciliation package that can reach Biden's desk by next month.

"We cannot wait another day," said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), "to safeguard the future of humanity."

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The Fed is About to Shaft American Workers – For No Good Reason

by Robert Reich

Friday, February 4, 2022

The January jobs report from the Labor Department is heightening fears that a so-called “tight” labor market is fueling inflation, and therefore the Fed must put on the brakes by raising interest rates.

This line of reasoning is totally wrong.

Among the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages (leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing). This January employers cut fewer of these low-wage temp workers than in most years, because of rising customer demand and the difficulties of hiring during Omicron. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s “seasonal adjustment,” cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as “adding lots of jobs.”

Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices — and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.

It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.

There’s no “wage-price spiral,” either (even though Fed chief Jerome Powell has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices). To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation. Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases – making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.

Wage-price spirals used to be a problem. Remember when John F. Kennedy “jawboned” steel executives and the United Steel Workers to keep a lid on wages and prices? But such spirals are no longer a problem. That’s because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.

Only 6 percent of private-sector workers are now unionized. A half-century ago, more than a third were. Today, corporations can increase output by outsourcing just about anything anywhere because capital is global. A half-century ago, corporations needing more output had to bargain with their own workers to get it.

These changes have shifted power from labor to capital — increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages. This power shift ended wage-price spirals.  

Slowing the economy won’t remedy either of the two real causes of today’s inflation – continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods, and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) are passing these costs to customers in higher prices.

Supply bottlenecks are all around us. (Just take a look at all the ships with billions of dollars of cargo idling outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, through which 40 percent of all U.S. seaborne imports flow.) 

Big corporations have no incentive to absorb the rising costs of such supplies — even with profit margins at their highest level in 70 years. They have enough market power to pass these costs on to consumers, sometimes using inflation to justify even bigger price hikes. “A little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” the CEO of Kroger said last June. “What we are very good at is pricing,” the CEO of Colgate-Palmolive added in October.

In fact, the Fed’s plan to slow the economy is the opposite of what’s needed now or in the foreseeable future. COVID is still with us. Even in its wake, we’ll be dealing with its damaging consequences for years — everything from long-term COVID, to school children months or years behind.

The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still 2.9 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the US population, it’s 4.5 million short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.

Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down, but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6 percent in December, the first decrease since last February.

Many people are understandably gloomy about the future. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey plummeted in January to its lowest level since late 2011, back when the economy was trying to recover from the global financial crisis. The Conference Board’s index of confidence also dropped in January.

Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further. The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.

Off the Top of My Head

Oh No, Joe, Say It Isn't So

by John Lawrence

Despite prior commitments to Joe Biden and House Democrats, Joe Mancin is a "No" on Biden's Build Back Better bill which will provide child care, eldercare, universal Pre-K and more. Dr. No made his position clear yesterday. He's tired of farting around aka negotiating. Democrats need all 50 votes in the Senate to pass the bill. 49 are on board and this gives Mancin extraordinary power. It's his way or the highway. Mancin has said he would support a bill totaling $1.5 trillion, but the house and Senate Democrats have been gingerly "negotiating" with Joe for more. Here's an idea: take what you can get and go home. Cuz you ain't gonna get no mo. Let Mancin write the bill. Throw in voting rights as well, and pass both in the same bill by reconciliation. Mancin has already essentially written a voting rights bill he would support. Again it's not everything progressives want, but it's better than nuttin.

Conservatives have traditionally broken inflation on the backs of the poor. The Phillips curve which is gospel among conservative economists says that you need to increase unemployment in order to rein in inflation. Problem is at this time there is hardly any unemployment. So what else can you do to keep poor people poor? Don't give them any more government benefits. That's the ticket. Of course, progressives say the Phillips curve is hogwash. All you need to do is to extract money from the economy by taxing the rich. But tell that to rich corporation who are spending billions on lobbyists to convince quasi conservative Democrats like Joe Mancin otherwise. And then there is conservative activist Paul Weyrich who famously said, "“I don’t want everybody to vote . . . our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Translate that into economic terms and you get, "I don't want everyone to be middle class. Who would do the necessary back breaking labor to keep the economy growing if not for the poor."

So conservatives don't want the poor to vote and they also don't want them to work their way into the middle class. They want to keep the poor poor so the economy has a goodly supply of backbreaking and menial labor which it badly needs, especially if you want to buy American. Otherwise, we would have to export the backbreaking labor to other countries where there is a plentiful supply of poor people. Right now conservatives are aghast at how the shortage of labor is fueling demands for higher wages. This is a blow to their very way of life which is predicated on keeping the poor poor. They don't want to be flooded with immigrants to take the menial labor jobs so those who came in 20 years ago can progress to the middle class like Joe Biden wants them to do. The best way to keep them poor is to not give them any more government benefits.

So progressive Democrats in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate have been screwed once again. The whole deal was that both the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better bill were supposed to pass in tandem. Then after farting around (excuse me, "negotiating") for months and months, finally Joe Mancin has put the kibosh on Build Back Better after successfully delinking the two. Screwed again. Lucy with the football. So here's the solution. Stop negotiating. Let Mancin write the bill and then everybody genuflect. And while you're at it, throw  Mancin's voting rights, bill written by him, into the package and pass the whole ungodly stew by reconciliation and be done with it.

What’s Really Driving Inflation? Corporate Power

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

The biggest culprit for rising prices that’s not being talked about is the increasing economic concentration of the American economy in the hands of a relative few giant big corporations with the power to raise prices.

If markets were competitive, companies would seek to keep their prices down in order to maintain customer loyalty and demand. When the prices of their supplies rose, they’d cut their profits before they raised prices to their customers, for fear that otherwise a competitor would grab those customers away.  

But strange enough, this isn’t happening. In fact, even in the face of supply constraints, corporations are raking in record profits. More than 80 percent of big (S&P 500) companies that have reported results this season have topped analysts’ earnings forecasts, according to Refinitiv.

Obviously, supply constraints have not eroded these profits. Corporations are simply passing the added costs on to their customers. Many are raising their prices even further, and pocketing even more.  

How can this be? For a simple and obvious reason: Most don’t have to worry about competitors grabbing their customers away. They have so much market power they can relax and continue to rake in big money.

The underlying structural problem isn’t that government is over-stimulating the economy. It’s that big corporations are under competitive.

Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits. The result is a transfer of wealth from consumers to corporate executives and major investors.

This has nothing to do with inflation, folks. It has everything to do with the concentration of market power in a relatively few hands.

It’s called “oligopoly,” where two or three companies roughly coordinate their prices and output.

Judd Legum provides some good examples in his newsletter. He points to two firms that are giants in household staples: Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark. In April, Procter & Gamble announced it would start charging more for everything from diapers to toilet paper, citing “rising costs for raw materials, such as resin and pulp, and higher expenses to transport goods.”

Baloney. P&G is raking in huge profits. In the quarter ending September 30, after some of its price increases went into effect, it reported a whopping 24.7% profit margin. Oh, and it spent $3 billion in the quarter buying its own stock.

How can this be? Because P&G faces very little competition. According to a report released this month from the Roosevelt Institute, “The lion’s share of the market for diapers,” for example, “is controlled by just two companies (P&G and Kimberly-Clark), limiting competition for cheaper options.”

So it wasn’t exactly a coincidence that Kimberly-Clark announced similar price increases at the same time as P&G. Both corporations are doing wonderfully well. But American consumers are paying more. 

Or consider another major consumer product oligopoly: PepsiCo (the parent company of Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Quaker, Tropicana, and other brands), and Coca Cola. In April, PepsiCo announced it was increasing prices, blaming “higher costs for some ingredients, freight and labor." 

Rubbish. The company recorded $3 billion in operating profits and increased its projections for the rest of the year, and expects to send $5.8 billion in dividends to shareholders in 2021.

If PepsiCo faced tough competition it could never have gotten away with this. But it doesn’t. In fact, it appears to have colluded with its chief competitor, Coca-Cola – which, oddly, announced price increases at about the same time as PepsiCo, and has increased its profit margins to 28.9%.

And on it goes around the entire consumer sector of the American economy. 

You can see a similar pattern in energy prices. Once it became clear that demand was growing, energy producers could have quickly ramped up production to create more supply. But they didn’t. 

Why not?  Industry experts say oil and gas companies (and their CEOs and major investors) saw bigger money in letting prices run higher before producing more supply. 

They can get away with this because big oil and gas producers don’t face much competition. They’re powerful oligopolies. 

Again, inflation isn’t driving most of these price increases. Corporate power is driving them.

Since the 1980s, when the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.

Monsanto now sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn.

The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks, of which JPMorgan is the largest.

It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to four today, which now control 80 percent of domestic seating capacity.

It let Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merge, leaving America with just one major producer of civilian aircraft, Boeing.

Three giant cable companies dominate broadband [Comcast, AT&T, Verizon].

A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry [Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck].

So what’s the appropriate response to the latest round of inflation? The Federal Reserve has signaled it won’t raise interest rates for the time being, believing that the inflation is being driven by temporary supply bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, Biden Administration officials have been consulting with the oil industry in an effort to stem rising gas prices, trying to make it simpler to issue commercial driver’s licenses (to help reduce the shortage of truck drivers), and seeking to unclog over-crowded container ports.

But none of this responds to the deeper structural issue – of which price inflation is symptom: the increasing consolidation of the economy in a relative handful of big corporations with enough power to raise prices and increase profits.

This structural problem is amenable to only one thing: the aggressive use of antitrust law.

Off the Top of My Head

A Tree Planting Alternative for the Jobless

by John Lawrence

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proposes a Job Guarantee (JG) program that would employ the unemployed instead of just paying them unemployment insurance. This would be an automatic program whose numbers would very according to those employed in the private sector. When the private sector is supplying lots of jobs, the number in the JG would diminish and vice versa. So why not employ all those in the JG planting trees? This in no way competes with the private sector and doesn't require training or any skills whatsoever. The homeless could do it; the prison population could do it. The unemployed could do it. The pay would provide an automatic minimum wage, and the economy would be fully employed. There would be no wage inflation because people in the JG would not be competing for jobs with people employed in the private sector. When the private sector needed more workers, they could hire them out of the JG. Because these workers are employed, their work skills will not diminish like those sitting idle doing nothing but collecting unemployment insurance.

Conventional economic theory is based on the Philips curve which predicts that there must be a certain number of unemployed people in order to tamp down inflation. The inflation rate is contained based on the misery of the necessary number of unemployed people who are historically from minority communities. MMT replaces the Philips curve with an analysis that predicts that inflation can be contained and a full employment economy can be achieved because JG workers are not competing with those employed in the private sector, and, therefore, there is no wage inflation. Those workers are available for hiring out of the JG by offering them slightly more than the minimum wage which is set automatically by the government by the pay offered to those in the JG which would be a living wage, in other words enough so that they are above the poverty level. Therefore, a number of birds are killed with one stone. 1) The minimum wage is automatically set at the Federal level. 2) The unemployment compensation program and the money budgeted for it can be eliminated. 3) A full employment economy is achieved. 4) Climate change is addressed. 5) People's job related skills are not diminished as they would be if they were sitting idle.

This is from the Modern Monetary Network:

"A government job guarantee is a proposed program where the government would provide a job with a basic wage and benefits package to anyone willing and ready to work. The job guarantee is one component of an overall program to stabilize an economy. The job guarantee is financially feasible when a sovereign government’s currency uses a floating exchange rate.

"The job guarantee provides a floor for wages and benefits, creating a buffer stock of labor. The program is intended to “hire off the bottom,” i.e. those with less qualifications or skills. A job guarantee program hires people who otherwise cannot find employment. Once implemented, a job guarantee would be a permanent program, operating during good times and recessions alike.

"In times of recession, private sector employers typically lay off workers. This swells the ranks of the unemployed. Laid off workers cannot spend money, and this hurts the economy. With a job guarantee in place, laid off workers could take a job guarantee job. This would increase the size of the job guarantee workforce during recessions, and at the same time inject more money into the economy, helping to take the edge off of the recession. As the economy recovered, people would leave their job guarantee jobs and go to better-paying private sector jobs. As the number of people in the job guarantee workforce diminished, government spending would also fall.

"The job guarantee would also serve as a mechanism to ensure price stability within the economy by fixing the price of employed labor.

"The concept of a job guarantee dates back to at least the New Deal of the Roosevelt Administration. There were several programs that had job guarantee attributes, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After the Second World War, many industrialized economies embraced full employment. For example, Australia had an implicit buffer stock of jobs that were always available, both in the private and public sectors. Hyman Minsky also conceptualized an Employer of Last Resort (ELR) program during the 1960s. Most recently, L. Randall Wray, William Mitchell, and Warren Mosler have proposed a job guarantee program in conjunction with their work in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)."

So why not address climate change this way? There are never enough trees on planet earth, Workers in the Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) will never run out of work. The state governments will never have to pay unemployment compensation again, and the private sector will have a buffer stock of already employed working people to choose from when their needs arise for an increased work force. In effect the Federal government will take over the responsibility for unemployment insurance relieving the states of this burden.

Off the Top of My Head

Americans Getting Tired of All the Delays

by John Lawrence

Shit or get off the pot. Politicians of both parties are going round and round ad infinitum. A couple of Democrats are helping Republicans with their policy of making Joe Biden spin his wheels until they can take over again. They talk and talk or they don't even do that since they can't even vote in the Senate to debate something. Gridlock, political constipation and never-get-anywhereism. They just are not doing their job. They're letting 2 conservative Democrats control the party's agenda. Republicans are very pleased. They are carrying the Republicans' water. They will be even more pleased if Joe Biden gets nothing done other than what he's already accomplished which is considerable. Mitch McConnell wants to defeat Biden's entire agenda. Republicans are only too happy to sit back and let Manchin and Sinema do their dirty work. Meanwhile, China surges ahead not being restrained by any of these problems. After they delay and delay, they will be going on vacation for the August recess. They don't deserve a recess. They are proceeding at a glacial pace, and then finally they will have a vote which will not have enough Republican support to pass.

C'mon, guys. You're living in the pony express days. This is the age of computers. Expedite. Expedite. Don't spend so much time dialing for dollars. You can work remotely during your recess. These guys are overpaid for what they do, and then what they do doesn't amount to much. Juneteenth is a federal holiday. Clap. Clap. Symbolism is about as far as bipartisanship can go. MSNBC reported:

"Mitch McConnell's come under a lot of criticism for saying, at one point, he wanted to make sure that Barack Obama was a 'one-term president,'" [Wyoming Senator John] Barrasso said last Thursday at an event hosted by the Ripon Society, a centrist Republican think tank, which posted the remarks Tuesday. "I want to make Joe Biden a one-half-term president."

Problem with American Democracy: No sooner has one administration been elected, Republicans are getting ready for the next one in which they hope to regain power. So of necessity they have to do everything they can to make the current administration fail. No thoughts of doing something for the American people. It's all about defeating Democrats who just might do something constructive for the American people. Then when the Republicans get in power, they will reduce taxes on the rich which is about all they can think about doing, and they will do this without any worries or concerns about "pay fors." But anything Democrats want to do has to be covered by "pay fors."

Modern Monetary Theory explains that the US government doesn't need to tax before it can spend. The way the system works is that the Federal Reserve puts enough money into the US Treasury's account to cover any payments the US government has to make whether or not there is tax money to pay for it. The only thing to be concerned about is inflation if too much money in the economy is chasing too few goods and services or if enough human resources aren't available to soak up the spending. Most politicians are still living in the world that the US needs to tax before it can spend. They are totally ignorant in this regard. They don't know how the system actually works. The US has a sovereign currency. Therefore, it can never go bankrupt. It does not have to borrow money in the capital markets and pay the going rate of interest. It sets the interest rate on US debt. If no entity wants to buy US debt it ends up on the Fed's balance sheet where it can remain indefinitely. It never has to be paid off.

Forget about competing with China. The Chinese are running circles around the US because they don't have to deliberate ad nauseum before they act. They don't have to argue with states about states' rights. They don't go on August recess for a month when no work gets done. The US law stipulates that “unless otherwise provided by the Congress,” both Houses must adjourn no later than July 31 each year or the first Friday in August that occurs 30 days before the first Monday in September, until the second day after Labor Day. How many American get the entire month of August off?

Off the Top of My Head

The Infrastructure Bill and How to Pay for It Are Two Separate and Distinct Issues That Have Nothing to Do With Each Other

by John Lawrence

We know that the US government does not have to tax in order to spend since the US has a sovereign currency (See Modern Monetary Theory), and the Federal Reserve can just place the requisite amount of money for the infrastructure bill in the Treasury's account at the Fed. The problem is that, according to US law, if there is not enough money in the Treasury's account to pay for stuff, it must issue and sell Treasury bonds to make up the difference. These bonds then contribute to the deficit which is added to the national debt. We also know that the national debt never needs to be paid off, but Treasury bonds do need to be paid when the holder asks for the money when they come due. In addition interest does need to be paid on them. If the Fed keeps the interest rate for Treasuries at zero, this is not a problem. So why would anyone purchase Treasury bonds if they get zero interest? Well, countries that peg their currencies to the dollar (like China) need dollars in order to conduct business. Besides if someone comes to them with a basket full of renminbi and asks for US dollars, they have to be able to pay them the dollars and accept the renminbi. So there is always a market for US Treasury bonds. Even if there wasn't, the Fed would end up purchasing them and taking them onto its balance sheet where they would essentially disappear into a black hole never having to be paid back.

So what is the problem with just having the Fed create the money and place it in the Treasury's account without "paying for" it with taxes. No problem really. Joe Biden just wants to kill two birds with one stone. The first bird is the money for infrastructure. The second bird is doing something about the widening economic inequality by taxing the rich. There is no actual need to issue Treasuries in the first place except that US law requires it. The money could just go directly on the Fed's balance sheet without the intermediate step of selling Treasuries. There are however some good reasons for not taking too much advantage of this possibility. One is inflation. As more money floods into the economy through deficit spending, inflation could heat up whether or not the money comes from taxes. The other issue is that as other countries accumulate more and more Treasury bonds with or without interest being paid on them, they start to have the ability to use those dollars to purchase US assets. It's not inconceivable that a particular country - let's say China - couldn't accumulate enough Treasuries to buy up cities.

New York City has the most valuable real estate in the U.S. at $2.8 trillion — slightly more than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom for 2019. In fact, this is greater than the GDP of all but just five countries — India, Germany, Japan, China and the United States. The value of New York is comparable to the combined market value of tech giants Apple and Microsoft. China owns about $1.1 trillion in US Treasuries. If they demanded it all tomorrow, the Fed would have no problem paying them, but then they could buy up more than a third of New York City or almost all of San Francisco valued at $1.3 trillion. This could eventually become a problem so it would be better not to even make up the difference by issuing Treasuries in the first place. The alternative is for the Fed just to create the money and place it in the Treasury's account as authorized by Congress without the Treasury having to sell bonds to make up the difference between the amount of taxes and the amount of the authorization.

Then the issue becomes inflation. There is already wage inflation as employers are forced to pay more for employees, for a number of reasons, thus raising the price of products and services. This is "good" inflation since wage earners have not seen an increase in their income for 40 years. There is also "bad" inflation in that the increasing wealth of the upper 10% , and especially the upper 1%, is causing asset inflation in terms of the increasing cost of real estate and rent. Asset inflation is also happening in the stock market although it's hard to see how this is a bad thing except for the fact that about 50% of the people don't own stocks so that gap between rich and poor is only increasing. The third form of inflation occurs when there is too much money chasing too few goods and services. This could be caused by too much deficit spending. The fourth kind is the "super bad" inflation known as hyperinflation. This is the kind of inflation that affected the Weimar republic in Germany before the Second World War and also affects poor countries. It also recently affected Greece because Greece gave up its sovereign currency when it adopted the euro. Hyperinflation occurs when a country needs to borrow money from the capital markets subject to increasing interest rates. As their economy declines interest rates go up until finally they are paying more in interest than their economies can keep up with. The US can never be put in this position since it never has to go to the capital markets to borrow money. The Federal Reserve can just issue whatever money is needed and can set its own interest rate since the US dollar is a sovereign currency.

So while there are limits to the amount of prudent deficit spending, one of them is not paying for it through taxes. The US Federal government never has to tax in order to spend. It can pass a bill to build infrastructure with the only limitation being the physical and material resources that are available to do it.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/01/stephanie-kelton-explains-modern-monetary-theory.html

 

Off the Top of My Head

How to Pay For Infrastructure

by John Lawrence

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) points out that neither social programs nor tax cuts need to be "paid for." A government such as the US with a sovereign currency can issue the money without having to tax first. Taxes are only necessary to control inflation. The biggest amount of inflation in the economy right now is the inflation of billionaires' wealth assets because their increases in wealth are not taxable. The IRS only taxes workers' incomes, not billionaires increasing asset wealth. That's why economic inequality is growing by leaps and bounds, and we need a wealth tax. But as for infrastructure, the Fed can just create the money in the Treasury's account at the Fed with a few keystrokes on a computer like it did when it bailed out Wall Street in 2008.

In The Deficit Myth, Stephanie Kelton writes (circa 2015):

"No one [on Capitol Hill] questioned the significant need for infrastructure investment. A trillion dollars, while ambitious, would have only taken a bite out of the problem. No one blanched at the price tag, but there was considerable debate about whether (and how) to pay for it.

"Before I tell you about that debate, it's important to understand what those words mean to lawmakers and their staffers on Capitol Hill. In truth, there is only one way to pay for anything. All federal spending is carried out in exactly the same way - that is, the Federal Reserve credits the appropriate bank account(s). But in Washington speak, you "pay for" your spending by showing that you can "find" enough money to cover the cost of whatever it is you're proposing to spend. It's all a game, really, and it's rooted in the flawed mental model [that the government needs to tax and/or borrow before it spends] that holds back so much of our potential. To avoid adding to the deficit, lawmakers look for ways to cover the costs of their proposed spending without borrowing. That means they usually go looking for new tax revenue."

As Kelton points out, the US doesn't need to tax before it can spend. Biden's wanting to pay for infrastructure by taxing the rich is not necessary to pay for infrastructure per se, but it is necessary to get unbounded economic inequality under control.

Kelton continues:

"So back to the debate over the trillion-dollar infrastructure ill. The conversation began with staffers being asked whether we thought a so-called pay-for should be attached to the bill. It was my first week on the job, so I was relieved when another staffer spoke up first. "No," this person began, "I think we should just do it as a clean bill." A clean bill meant writing a spending bill that didn't include any language abut how to pay for it. Another staffer agreed, and soon I echoed their sentiments. Our country desperately needed to make these investments. There was clearly enough fiscal space to do it, and infrastructure is one of the things that has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support. Since the GOP was in control of the Senate, we reasoned, the bill would need at least some support from Republicans to pass. [Ha. Ha] Proposing a tax increase would guarantee defeat. Not everyone agreed. Another staffer objected that the press wouldn't take the legislation seriously unless it specified exactly how it would be paid for. In the end, the bill included a proposal to raise revenue by closing a variety of tax loopholes that overwhelmingly benefit the rich. Needless to say, the legislation did not pass. Meanwhile, the latest ASCE [American Society of Civil Engineers] report card shows how deferred maintenance is catching up with us, as the cost of our needed improvements has climbed to a whopping $4.59 trillion."

Is it deja vu all over again? Is it gridlock or spinning our wheels as infinitum? Is it Republicans thinking it is more important to defeat Obama's and now Biden's agendas than it is to prevent bridge collapses?

Kelton's point is that the US doesn't really need to "pay for" anything by taxing first or finding the money first. "In 2017, a 1215-page bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, sailed through the Senate with a vote of 89-9. The White House had requested $700 billion, but the Senate had authorized $737 billion, kicking in another $37 billion without hint of concern about where to "find" the money. They simply voted in an overwhelmingly bipartisan way to increase the Pentagon's discretionary budget."

Yet the Pentagon budget has not protected us from international ransomware attacks nor domestic terrorists. May I submit that the money is misspent and misdirected? Instead of going where the money is really needed it goes to the vested interests in the military-industrial complex who continue to justify war in order to line their own pockets.

Kelton continues: "That might seem like a double standard. As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, "We write unlimited blank checks for war. We just wrote a $2 trillion check for the GOP tax cut, and nobody asked those folks, 'How are they going to pay for it?' She's right. Somehow, there's always money for war and tax cuts. For just about everything else, however, lawmakers are expected to show that they can "pay for" their spending."

As MMT has shown, the US government does not need to tax or borrow in order to spend. Taxation is necessary to control inflation, to extract money from the economy if there is too much of it out there chasing too few goods or services. Right now there is too much money out there in the hands of billionaires that should be extracted in order to prevent runaway financial inequality. But it is not necessary to tax before money can be spent on infrastructure or anything else. There are limits, and the limits are the material and human resources that are available to soak up that money by providing constructive economic activity like building infrastructure. Hyperinflation like what happened in the Weimar Republic or even Greece cannot happen in the US because the US never has to go to the capital markets to borrow money at prevailng interest rates. The US central bank, the Fed, issues whatever money is necessary to pay US bills and that includes any money appropriated by Congress whether for war, tax cuts or building infrastructure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9pAPIUYXxQ

 

Biden Can Go Bigger and Not ‘Pay for It’ the Old Way

By focusing on how much revenue they hope to raise from tax increases on the well-off, Democrats risk limiting the scope of their ambitions.

by Stephanie Kelton, April 7, 2021

Last week, President Biden introduced a $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan in a speech, calling it “a once-in-a-generation investment in America.” And on Wednesday, he and the Treasury Department outlined many of the package’s details, including how to “pay for” it. A close look at those so-called pay-fors, however, shows Democrats are thinking about fiscal responsibility the wrong way. They could be on the verge of sparking some unpleasant short-term overheating of the economy, in which price increases accelerate and the purchasing power of our dollars falls somewhat. If the final legislation were to grow much larger — toward the $10 trillion level many progressives in Congress are pushing — it could send such inflation soaring.

In an interview on MSNBC last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York explained her mixed feelings about the president’s proposal, saying she has “serious concerns that it’s not enough to realize the very inspiring vision that Mr. Biden has advanced.” Rather than spending roughly $2 trillion over eight years, Ms. Ocasio Cortez and many of her Progressive Caucus colleagues would prefer “to go way higher” and on a shorter timeline.

She’s right that it is possible for Congress and the Biden administration to go bigger, faster — but only by shifting to a completely different budgeting framework: Instead of passing legislation that leans on taxing corporations and the rich to keep spending from increasing the deficit, they would have to develop a robust plan with a focus on containing inflationary pressures as that heightened government spending hits the real economy.

The president called his plan “fiscally responsible” during his speech simply because it will raise more revenue than what he’s proposing to spend. On paper, and according to conventional wisdom, this is a balanced policy. It may satisfy the scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office or even earn high marks from deficit hawks. But because these proposed hikes fall exclusively on corporations and more affluent Americans — who have a relatively high marginal propensity to save rather than spend — the taxes may not diminish enough private sector spending to prevent the government’s own increased outlays from igniting some inflationary overheating, especially if Congress does “go way higher.”

Off the Top of My Head

Joe Biden's Trillion Dollar Budget Plan

by John Lawrence

Don't worry about how to pay for it. Any nation with a sovereign currency (let alone the world's reserve currency) and a floating exchange rate can never go bankrupt. The Federal Reserve can issue the money. In fact in the real world this is exactly how it works for any budgetary legislation passed by Congress and signed by the President. Let's say, for example, Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan is signed by him into law. The US Treasury has an account at the Federal Reserve bank. Let's say there is only a trillion dollars in that account. What happens next is that the Fed just augments the Treasury's account by a trillion dollars by means of a few keystrokes on a computer. Bingo the government now has all the money it needs to spend on infrastructure. It didn't have to receive tax money in advance of the money it needed to spend. At the same time the Treasury Department creates a trillion dollars worth of Treasury bonds and sells them to the primary dealers who are required by law to buy them. These are mainly big Wall Street banks. These banks sell the bonds in the secondary market. If they can't find enough buyers, the Fed "adds liquidity to the market" by taking the Treasuries onto its balance sheet in return for marking up the Wall Street banks accounts at the Fed with the appropriate amounts of cash. Now everybody is happy. The US government has the money it needs in its Treasury's account at the Fed. The Wall Street banks have plenty of liquidity in their reserve accounts at the Fed, and the amazing thing is that it didn't require any money from additional taxes.

Another amazing thing is that most politicians are totally ignorant about how government financing actually works. The Republican Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine gets on TV and opines about the fact that the US is going into too much debt and how will our grandchildren ever pay it off. "Here in Ohio," I'm paraphrasing," we have to pay our bills and pay down our debts. Every household has to be fiscally responsible and pay their debts." Well households and states are in a different category from the Federal government. They actually do have to pay their debts. So what he is claiming is a half truth. States and households cannot issue a sovereign currency whereas the Federal government can. States and households use the Federal government's currency. The big lie, however, is that the US government has to pay off its debts. It never does, and no entity can force it to do so. The other constraint that Larry Summers and others worry about is inflation or currency devaluation. Inflation could be a problem, and that problem, should it arise, can be dealt with by sucking money out of the economy by means of taxes. Biden's plan to tax the rich will suck some of their superfluous wealth out of the economy thus forestalling inflation while tending to reduce the runaway economic inequality that is now threatening democracy in the US.

The Federal government is not like a household or a state. Households and states actually do have to pay back the money they borrow plus interest. That's why it's so important that the various COVID rescue plans provide the states and municipalities with money. Otherwise, they could become financially insolvent and go bankrupt like Orange County in California did a few years ago. Birmingham, AL also got itself in hot water and went bankrupt. Countries in the Euro zone have the same problem as states in the US. They gave up their sovereign currencies when they joined the EU. So now countries like Greece and Italy have to beg the European Central Bank for relief, relief they could have provided for themselves if they had retained their sovereign currencies like Britain did. Britain will not have any problem with financial shortages because, like the US, its government can issue whatever currency is deemed necessary to weather any storm.

So in addition to the Big Lie that Trump won the election, politicians of both parties are perpetrating another Big Lie that the US actually has to borrow the money to pay for Biden's trillion dollar infrastructure and safety net programs. Some politicians, like Bernie Sanders and AOC, actually know the truth, and, evidently, they have convinced Joe Biden thereof as well although they won't actually come out and say it to the media: the US government can just issue money into the private economy. It doesn't need to borrow it or even tax for it in advance in order to spend. So the real policy of the Biden administration is not tax and spend. It's spend and maybe tax later, but target those taxes on the wealthiest among us. As opposed to the Republican philosophy of giving tax breaks to the wealthy and taking the social safety net away from the poor.

Off the Top of My Head

The Stock Market is Too Big to Fail

by John Lawrence, April 2, 2021

Just as the big Wall Street banks are too big to fail, so now is the stock market. The stock market will never take another radical dive downward because the Federal Reserve won't let it. The way the economy is shaping up Treasury bonds, which hardly pay any interest, are just a safe place to store your money and also for foreign nations which need the world's reserve currency (the US dollar) to have a savings account because they need dollars to conduct business. There is no worry that the US will have to pay off the trillion dollars in Treasuries that China owns because they need those dollars to do business with the US and other nations. If they did want to dump all their Treasuries for some reason the Fed could just create the money to pay them and effectively take the Treasuries on its own balance sheet.

So the stock market is the only game in town for those who want to actually "invest" their money. There is so much 401(k) money in the stock market that that is reason enough to never let it fail. Instead it will continue on its merry way upward while the Fed keeps interest rates at approximately zero so that not much in the way of interest will have to be paid on US debt. There is no reason to fear that Joe Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan will bankrupt the US. Since the US dollar is a sovereign currency, the Fed can print as much money as it wants. If international investors don't want to buy this debt, it ends up on the Fed's balance sheet which is an effective black hole from which it never has to emerge.

Then why is there all this kibuki theater about "how to pay for it," the $2 trillion infrastructure plan I mean. It's just that most Americans including most Congressmen are under the illusion that a country with a sovereign currency like the US faces any constraints in paying for anything. Well, there is one constraint - inflation. This is probably of little concern as long as the money is targeted at the lower middle class an the poor which haven't seen wages rise in 40 years. The real inflation in the economy is the asset inflation that the rich are mostly responsible for. That includes the stock market and real estate. Inflation in the stock market will be carefully controlled by the Fed. We've seen that the stock market moved up even during the pandemic. The real problem is inflation in the real estate market which has made housing unaffordable for many. It continues to get worse as the extra dollars the wealthy have to invest are driving up prices. That's why it makes sense to tax the rich ostensibly to pay for the infrastructure bill. The real reason, however, is that inequality is getting out of hand in the American and the world economy. Taxing the rich is the only effective means to reduce inequality to a reasonable level. It will also help to bring inflation in the real estate market under control.

The real problem that Biden's infrastructure bill will have to deal with is changing the nature of the US economy. When the economy was in full employment under Trump, there were still 4% unemployed. 5% unemployment is considered "full employment," but that still leaves about 15 million people out of work. Biden's infrastructure plan will put those 5% back to work. It had been considered by conservative neoliberal economists that 5% unemployment was necessary to ward off inflation, but that theory has been debunked by Modern Monetary Theory. While inflation will still be a concern with all of Biden's stimulus spending, the main concern is restructuring the US economy from an entertainment economy to a constructive labor economy. Trump's economy was arguably a full employment economy (except for the 4% unemployed), but it was an economy the jobs of which were mainly in the entertainment and military industries. In other words, in my opinion, it was an economy based on false unbeneficial values. An economy based on labor participation rebuilding American infrastructure will be an economy based on necessary and fundamentally beneficial values. This might mean that some of those presently employed in frivolous industries might be incentivized to change jobs. Reducing the entertainment and military sectors while increasing those employed rebuilding infrastructure would be, in my opinion, be a good thing.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Biden's Infrastructure Initiative: Don't Worry About How To Pay For It

by John Lawrence, March 30, 2021

Even Republicans agree that there is a need to upgrade the infrastructure of the US. But they don't want to raise taxes to pay for it. Good news! You don't need to pay for it with tax money. The US dollar is a sovereign currency. That means that the central bank, in this case the Fed, can just create the money. In fact this is how it's always been done. The deficit is just an accounting regime. Money created by the Fed need never be paid back. It just goes on the Fed's balance sheet. This is a fact known and agreed to by most economists but many politicians and the American public are totally ignorant of this basic fact about how the economy works. Modern Monetary Theory has attempted to explain it in books like "The Deficit Myth" by Stephanie Kelton. So why does Biden also propose tax increases on the rich to pay for it? These are really two separate issues. Taxes need to be raised on the rich to try to bring into balance the skyrocketing financial inequality that has been occurring, not to pay for the infrastructure bill. Why do politicians including President Biden continue to perpetuate the myth that appropriations bills need to be "paid for." Why don't they just come out and say the truth - that a nation with a sovereign currency can never run out of money?

When just a few people own most of the wealth, we're back in a neo-feudal society where the rich control the political process, and the rest of the people are merely peons who don't really have a stake in the society at all. The Republican attempts to change the voting laws to suppress the minority vote is a way to cement that fact in American society. That's why it's so important to liberalize the voting laws so that every American citizen is encouraged to vote, not discouraged from it. So the infrastructure initiative is really two or even three pronged: rebuild infrastructure such as roads, bridges, ports, rail lines, airports and broadband thus putting millions back to work in good paying jobs. Secondly, to build back better in the sense that, insofar as possible, address the problem of global warming, and, thirdly, to make a first step in addressing economic inequality. All these things are important.

The only thing to watch out for while spending all this money is inflation, and some economists like Larry Summers are already sounding alarm bells over that. By taxing the rich and corporations money will be sucked out of the economy thus tending to reduce inflation. If sucking money out of the economy reduces inflation, then the sucking must be addressed to those areas where excess money really exists: namely, the rich and corporations who have been getting away with murder for years under both Republic and Democratic administrations. Forbes reported that "The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country." Forbes ought to know. Perhaps with Biden's plan to tax the rich, it'll take 10 of the richest to equal the bottom 50%'s share. As for inflation, so much money in so few hands has already produced asset inflation in the form of rising housing and rent prices making it problematic for the young and the poor to support themselves especially at a minimum wage that hasn't increased in 50 years. What Summers doesn't understand is that the inflation that has occurred has been in the money that has been made by the rich which is actually wealth inflation, not in the form of wage inflation of the poor and middle class. Therefore, in turning this process around Biden's infrastructure bill is actually pointing the American economy in the correct direction.

Off the Top of My Head

Inflation Probably Not a Problem If Biden Programs Are Carefully Targeted

by John Lawrence, March 14, 2021

Critics have said, "Oh, My your children and grandchildren are going to have to pay back all these trillions of dollars that have been spent by both the Trump and Biden administrations on COVID relief and to get the economy going again." Not True! Modern Monetary Theory has shown that the Federal Reserve can just create the money and the Treasury Department can just spend it without ever worrying about paying it back. Finance is not the problem. The problem is potentially inflation which economist Larry Summers has sounded the alarm about. Most of Biden's relief bill is targeted at the poor which means that that money will be sucked up to pay past due rent and mortgage bills as well as providing a decent lifestyle which should not be inflationary except if you believe the nonsense of the neoliberal Phillips curve which supposedly proves that a certain segment of the population has to live in poverty and penury in order to fight inflation. That has also been debunked by Modern Monetary Theory although most politicians are still on the wavelength of neoliberal economics which has been shown to be fallacious in this and many other regards.

State and local governments likewise will just suck up the money in the relief bill to bail themselves out of debt and provide an adequate level of social services. This also is not inflationary because the money will not be just sloshing around in the economy with nowhere to go. What is inflationary is tax breaks for the rich, but this money can be sucked out of the economy by taxing the rich. What Larry Summers fails to take into account is that the US and much of the rest of the world has a two tier economy. The rich and upper middle class are doing very well, thank you, while the lower middle class and the poor are suffering. The COVID pandemic illustrated this in even starker terms with the so-called K-shaped recovery. The upper classes made money; the lower classes are on the verge of losing whatever financial gains they had made during the Trump economy. Inflation is caused by too much money sloshing around in the economic system. Most of that inflationary money is held by the rich in assets like stocks and real estate. Money injected into the economic system targeted at the poor is immediately sucked out of the system to pay debts and to provide basic necessities. There is enough physical and material capacity in the system to provide basic necessities so this money is not inflationary.

Inflation is caused when there is too much money chasing too few goods. As long as there is the material and human capacity, money directed at those sectors of the economy will not cause inflation. The real problem in future Biden administration bills involving infrastructure and the Green New Deal is that the materials to build out infrastructure, namely, steel, cement and plastics, require fossil fuels to manufacture and the manufacturing processes themselves are inherently carbon dioxide emitting. This comes about from basic chemistry which involves the carbon and oxygen atoms every step of the way. Most basic materials are composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, and the chemistry involved in manufacturing releases large amounts of carbon dioxide. The manufacture of solar panels requires mining high quality quartz and combining it with coal. It's hard to get away from fossil fuels as the Michael Moore movie, Planet of the Humans, pointed out. For this reason spending large amounts of money on infrastructure involving cement, steel, plastics and other materials could actually produce more global warming rather than preventing it. The finances are available; the proper materials are not. The manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels require the release of large amounts of greenhouse gasses.

Because of these fundamental limitations regarding materials, it doesn't make sense to throw trillions of dollars at either infrastructure or global warming mitigation. That would be either inflationary or misguided in the sense that large projects in these areas could produce even more global warming. As Bill Gates has pointed out, money should be invested in promising startups and research that can solve these basic problems and into digital nuclear which is the only renewable energy source that won't result in a lot of greenhouse gasses being created in the first place. Advanced nuclear is the most promising source of clean energy. Gates has invested in a company TerraPower which does research on advanced nuclear reactors. Their mission statement reads:

"TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries that decided the private sector needed to take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and lift billions out of poverty. Advanced reactors and other isotopic applications are now possible with technology and enhanced computing capabilities that were unimaginable a few decades ago. At TerraPower, we are innovating in nuclear to improve the lives of people everywhere and to build the clean energy of tomorrow – today."

So when the Biden administration gets around to their initiatives on infrastructure and global warming, they need to heed Bill Gates' warning about traditional manufacturing methods involving cement, steel and plastic. Energy from solar and wind are inadequate to solve the problem for many reasons. Large scale demonstration and build out of nuclear energy reactors should be the order of the day, They are the only clean energy source that has the potential for diminishing the world's reliance on fossil fuels.

Off the Top of My Head

If Two Democratic Senators Were Not Elected in Georgia Run-offs, There Would Be No COVID Relief Package Under Biden

by John Lawrence, March13, 2021

It was crucial that the two Georgia Democratic Senators were elected. Not one Republican voted for Biden's $1.9 trillion bill. If there were one less Democrat in the Senate, nothing like it would ever have been passed. Republicans are the Party of No. Not one Republican Senator will ever vote Yes on any legislation put forward by a Democrat so that Georgia election was crucial. That's why Republican legislatures not only in Georgia but around the country are scrambling to put restrictive Jim Crow voting regulations in place on the belief that Republican operative Paul Weyrich was right. He said, "So many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

So now economist Larry Summers is worried about inflation due to the fact that trillions have been added to the deficit. So far, lawmakers have enacted six major bills, costing about $5.3 trillion, to help manage the pandemic and mitigate the economic burden on families and businesses. Even those economists know that the Federal government doesn't need taxes  in order to spend money. The Federal Reserve can create it with a few keystrokes on a computer just the way they did to bail out Wall Street banks during the Great Financial Recession (GFR) of 2008. Of course the public wasn't suppose to know about this "secret" bailout by the Fed. Authorities wanted you to believe that the $700 billion bill passed by Congress provided the bailout. In reality it was much more. Rolling Stone reported: "Washington Post “Fact-checker” columnist Glenn Kessler disputes the numerous studies showing the real bailout outlay was through the Fed, which the Sanders campaign had said was anywhere from $7.7 trillion (the number Bloomberg used in its coverage of secret Fed lending) to $29 trillion (the number the Levy Institute at Bard College calculated, including guarantees and other forms of aid).

So how is it that  Larry Summers was not so worried about inflation due to the Fed's trillions of dollars created and given to Wall Street? The answer is that that money was given to rich people which has caused no inflation because rich people are not going to spend money in ways that drive up the Consumer Price Index (CPI). They are mainly going to invest their money in ways that aren't included in the CPI. They are going to purchase assets like stocks and real estate. Consequence: no inflation at least as measured by the CPI. Instead the Wall Street bailout during the GFR as well as the $2 trillion tax breaks of the Trump administration produced asset inflation. It's the reason that home prices and rents are becoming increasingly unaffordable. But Summers is worried about inflation as measured by the CPI which is what happens when poor and middle class people get a trillion dollar bailout. They will spend that money at least partly on consumer goods that are included in the CPI and potentially drive up prices. However, much of the bailout money will go to pay off debts like past due rent and mortgage payments. This is not inflationary. So the real moral of the story is that, according to economists like Summers, bailing out rich people is good, bailing out poor people is bad.

So two lessons are to be learned here. 1) The Fed doesn't need taxes to create money and spend it into the economy whether that money is to bail out banks or to bail out the poor and middles class. 2) Democrats need to enact at the Federal level voting laws which encourage as many people to vote as possible and roll back Republican enacted restrictions on voting at the state level. In order to do the latter, Democrats will have to eliminate the filibuster at least for particular types of legislation. The only reason Biden's $1.9 trillion relief bill passed is that it was done by a process known as "budget reconciliation" which only requires a majority vote in the Senate. A national voting rights bill cannot be passed by that process and is subject to the filibuster which requires 60 votes. The Party of No wouldn't hesitate to use the filibuster to doom any voting rights legislation at the Federal level which means essentially that Jim Crow voting rights would again be put in place to discourage black people from voting. And don't worry about your children and grandchildren having to pay off the national debt. The Federal Reserve doesn't need their money.

Off the Top of My Head

Green New Deal: We Have a Problem and Its Not Money

by John Lawrence, March 5, 2021

Modern Monetary Theory has shown that a nation with a sovereign currency such as the US dollar need never fear running out of money, and that Federal spending does not depend on tax receipts. However, it does depend on whether the human and material resources are available. Just pouring money on the problem will cause inflation unless it is soaked up by available resources. The problem is that the material resources are not available. As Bill Gates has pointed out in his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the problem cannot be solved by the renewable energy resources that are now available, namely wind and solar. Building wind turbines requires immense amounts of concrete for the bases and steel for the turbines, and the manufacture of those resources emits tons of greenhouse gasses. Manufacturing solar panels requires mining of quartz sand and coating with ethylene-vinyl acetate. This manufacturing requires energy—most often derived from the burning of fossil fuels, as the Michael Moore film, Planet of the Humans, has pointed out.

Solving the problem of global warming can't be undertaken by using the available resources of concrete, steel and plastic the manufacture of which emits huge amounts of greenhouse gasses. So even though the financial resources are available, the material resources are not. The human resources, however, are arguably available. Wray and Tcherneva  write in a paper How to Pay for the Green New Deal:

"In the neoliberal era, we chronically operate below full employment. That is obvious in Euroland, which is probably operating 25 percent or more below full capacity. Even the US today has substantial excess capacity, in spite of claims that we have achieved full employment. Over the past quarter century, we have had to readjust our estimate for the natural rate of unemployment—the rate below which inflation is supposed to pick up—in every recovery, because inflation never arrives as unemployment falls. Most recently, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, economists claimed that the natural rate of unemployment had increased to over 5 percent. Yet, the unemployment rate kept coming down, while inflation never materialized. We will not know precisely where the inflation barrier is until we ramp up aggregate demand."

So given that human resources are available, it is clear that the material resources are not. Bill Gates recommends spending the money on research to develop new non-greenhouse emitting substitutes for steel, concrete and plastic. That would require high level scientists who might be less available than low level workers. Assuming a full court press requiring large numbers of university and scientific human power, this project is probably feasible although it would not require trillions of dollars of financial resources at least in the initial phases. Later development would require more and finally building out renewable energy resources using these newly developed materials would require more money. So the problem is not that finance is not available. The problem is dispensing it in appropriate amounts over time. There is one promising energy source that would not require such a huge investment in research and development because that has largely been done and that is what we might call digital nuclear. Bill Gates has invested in a company called TerraPower which claims:

"With the growing demand for electricity, TerraPower entered the nuclear energy arena to lift billions out of poverty. Advanced reactors and other isotopic applications are possible with technology and enhanced computing capabilities that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. At TerraPower, we are ready to build the clean energy of tomorrow – today. TerraPower leads in advanced nuclear energy because it has spent the last decade investing in innovative technologies to solve some of the biggest challenges facing humanity."

Two things are clear. Much work has already been done on an advanced nuclear reactor that solves the problems of dangerous explosions such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima and also the problem of spent fuel radioactive storage. Using high level computing power and advanced digital technology which wasn't available to previous generations of nuclear reactors, Gates maintains that a safe design for nuclear power generation is close to being available. Considering the problems with solar, wind and biofuels which have a longer time horizon before being solved, it seems that nuclear is further along in its development phase and also has greater potential for being a carbon free source of energy. “Nuclear has actually been safer than any other source of [power] generation,” Gates told [CNBC's Andrew] Sorkin. “You know, coal plants, coal particulate, natural gas pipelines blowing up. The deaths per unit of power on these other approaches are — are far higher,” Gates said, a fact he also references in his new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”

In their section, “COSTING” THE GREEN NEW DEAL," Wray and Tcherneva write:

"Milton Ezrati, writing for Forbes, offers his own estimates for the various components of the GND, citing different sources (Ezrati 2019). Here we only use his estimates for “greening” projects. Based on estimates by physicist Christopher Clark, the cost of expanding renewable energy to 100 percent would be $2 trillion over 10 years. The smart power grid would cost an additional $400 billion over 10 years (estimate from the Electric Power Institute).13 Upgrading and retrofitting buildings would cost between $2.5 trillion and $3.9 trillion ($3.2 trillion midpoint estimate) over 10 years. The total cost of greening projects comes to $5.6 trillion over 10 years ($560 billion per year, or 2.87 percent of 2017 GDP)."

This is only one of the costing estimates that Wray and Tcherneva provide, but these costing estimates need to be further examined in terms of how much fossil fuels are necessary to build them out and manufacture them. Materials that require large amounts of carbon dioxide emission for their manufacture must be rejected. In the final analysis the Job Guarantee (JG) that Wray and Tcherneva advocate is partially limited to "what Tcherneva calls “care for community” and “care for people” projects: service projects related to senior and youth care, teacher’s helpers, neighborhood and park cleanup, artistic projects, and so on. Thus, the JG program can provide resources needed for green projects in an amount equal to 1 percent of GDP (and resources equal to another 1 percent of GDP for other care services). These would largely be in upgrading buildings and homes to improve energy efficiency, although some could be used in nontechnical maintenance of energy projects (landscape maintenance, for example)." So the mix of high level workers like scientists could be combined with a significant number of low level workers to provide a comprehensive approach."

The bottom line is that we had better get cracking, financing a Green New Deal is no problem because as Modern Monetary Theory has shown, the money is available, but resources must be carefully allocated to avoid the pitfalls of inflation and making the problem worse by using large amounts of traditional materials like concrete, steel and plastics. Nuclear is probably the best bet for power generation and it must be deployed quickly especially in India and China where coal fired power generating plants are still being deployed at a rapid rate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwbDETx3zo0

 

Off the Top of My Head

Bill Gates Needs to Get Up To Speed on Modern Monetary Theory

by John Lawrence, February, 28, 2021

Bill Gates is a smart guy. He has singlehandedly been the most influential person on pandemics and now on climate change with his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. In this book the most important thing he points out in my opinion is that it is not enough to put electric cars on the road and to use renewables to power electricity generating plants. There is also much carbon dioxide emission coming from manufacturing and agriculture. In particular the manufacture of cement, steel and plastic produce as much or more carbon dioxide ton for ton as those products themselves. In addition beef and dairy cows produce a lot of methane due to the fact that they are ruminants with a certain kind of digestive system. Gates believes that much innovation, research and development is needed to come up with substitute products in all these areas as well as electrifying everything and running it all with renewables including a new digitized nuclear system.

The one thing that this polymath doesn't seem up to speed on is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) which is important because all this innovation, research and development requires vast amounts of money. He personally can't provide it all although he has used his fortune in very constructive ways in terms of health care around the world and also seeding promising startups. The Gates Foundation is concerned with all these problems on a world wide basis and not only in the US. He is a globalist and not an America First type of guy which is altogether appropriate because pandemics and particularly global warming are universal problems affecting every country and all people on earth, and their solutions require a world wide approach.

Bill Gates like some economists is somewhat concerned about inflation after all these trillions of dollars are spent by the US government first on COVID relief and then on infrastructure and a Green New Deal. If they study MMT they would know that MMT shares that concern, but addresses it in terms of the amount of idle resources there are in the economy. For instance, if there is 5% unemployment (what is considered full employment by conventional economists), there are still over 15 million people available for work. If there are material resources available such as cement, steel and glass, the price of these items is not likely to be bid up causing inflation. However, while some material resources are readily available, their substitutes which don't cause carbon dioxide emissions in the manufacturing process are not. A large infrastructure project which requires huge amounts of concrete with rebar such as is necessary in constructing a bridge, for example, will also cause large amounts of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere. As Gates points out, making things which require cement, steel and plastic adds about 31% of the total of greenhouse gasses which are emitted annually. For every ton of steel produced we emit 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide. For every ton of plastic, the figure is 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide, and for every ton of cement, we emit a ton of carbon dioxide.

With figures like that how is the US going to do a $4 trillion (which is the amount our infrastructure is in deficit) infrastructure project without producing even more billions of tons of greenhouse gasses (GHGs)? We need huge R&D projects funded by the government first before we can scale up the production of carbon free products which replace these traditional construction materials. Financing the R&D is not a problem as these human resources are widely considered to be available. This would cause no inflation. Getting the material resources when little or none of them is available would cause inflation. Nevertheless, the US ramped up production of ships and airplanes for World War II without causing much inflation. To deal with global warming or climate change is a thornier problem. If money is just poured into the economy on a non-targeted basis, it will cause inflation so it makes sense at least initially to pour the money into R&D as Bill Gates suggests. Doing a large infrastructure project without using the proper materials could make global warming even worse.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Should Blue Collar Workers Have to Pay Taxes to Bail Out White Collar Student Loan Debt?

by John Lawrence

Short answer: There is no need for the Federal government to tax in order to spend. That has been demonstrated by Modern Monetary Theory. However, taxation, if imposed in order to fight inflation, needs to be imposed primarily on the rich and upper middle class, not on the poor or lower middle class. The smart thing for the Biden administration to do would be to decrease taxes on the lower middle class ^i.e. blue collar workers before 2022 thus drawing them away from the Trump camp. In general the American people need to be educated that deficits don't matter except just as accounting entries on the Fed's balance sheet. Biden's COVID relief initiative of $1.9 billion will not raise taxes nor will his follow-on trillion dollar initiative for the build-out of green infrastructure.

The question, "Can We Afford to Pay for the Green New Deal?" is equivalent to the question "Can We Afford to Pay the Costs of Avoiding Annihilation?". In the past we have been able to afford a massive build-up to pay for the Second World War. The climate challenge is the moral equivalent of war. If we lose this war we lose not just our freedom. We lose the habitability of the entire planet. Various attempts have been made to cost out the components of a Green New Deal. Green power generation and transportation are not sufficient in themselves to get to net zero carbon emission, but they are a start. As Bill Gates has pointed out in his recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, major industrial processes also generate much greenhouse gas emission. For instance, every ton of cement that is produced contributes one ton of carbon dioxide which goes into the atmosphere. Every ton of steel produced results in 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, and every ton of plastics produced emits 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide. So it's not enough just to deal with green transportation (electric vehicles) and green power generation (solar and wind).

The cost of "greening" these industrial processes is pretty steep. Capturing carbon dioxide at the site of the manufacturing process is possible, but there is no cheap way to do it. Bill Gates is investing in promising start-ups and is counting on innovation to come up with new processes and materials which will not result in so much carbon dioxide being released into the air. Gates points out that we need to electrify every possible manufacturing process and make sure that all that electricity is generated cleanly. He advocates a new generation of nuclear power sources as wind and solar can not possible fill every energy need mainly because they are intermittent. Nuclear can fill the gap for consistent power generation when solar and/or wind are offline. Smart nuclear power which Bill Gates has been instrumental in developing would solve the problems encountered so far of explosion and what to do with nuclear waste. As a last resort Direct Air Capture of carbon dioxide from the air is possible but also costly.

What it all boils down to is this: we will need on the order of a trillion dollars a year for 10 years commitment to address climate change if we have a prayer for avoiding the worst consequences. What's more a lot of this commitment must be made in cooperation with China which is one of the worst polluters. Rivalry and even a Cold War must be set aside if the world is to avoid the worst outcome from global warming. India and China are building coal fired power generation plants at a rapid pace because coal fired power plants are so cheap comparatively and those countries are developing so quickly. It's not enough just to "green" the US. It has to be cooperation on a world wide basis. Competition has to be set aside and replaced by cooperation. The ownership of intellectual property is irrelevant when it comes to saving the planet.

A national budget for a Green New Deal shouldn't contribute to inflation since there are currently so many unemployed people available for work, and particularly because so many of the small businesses that were lost during the pandemic are not coming back. Also further robotizing of manufacturing processes will eliminate whatever blue collar workers are left working in those fields. In World War II there was some postponement of consumption in order to fight inflation. That may be necessary for the moral equivalent of war which the Green New Deal represents. If so, workers in certain nonessential industries may have to be repurposed and retrained for industries involved in combating climate change.

Off the Top of My Head

Former Energy Secretary Proposes Going to Capital Markets for Money to Upgrade Energy Grid Infrastructure: Is This Wise?

by John Lawrence, February 21, 2021

Clinton's Energy Secretary, Bill Richardson, proposes going to the capital markets since the government has been spending so much money on COVID relief. He suggests a public-private partnership. Evidently, Mr. Richardson, like most politicians and dignitaries, is totally ignorant of Modern Monetary Theory. The Federal Reserve can create interest free money with a few computer keystrokes while the capital markets will charge interest, and not only that. Once you enter the Wall Street casino you're subject to all the vagaries of the financial markets like securitzation, credit default obligations, interest rate swaps, betting against the success of various programs and much more. These are the kind of financial activities that caused the 2008 Great Recession and the bankruptcy of Orange County, Birmingham, Milan Italy and the misery in Greece. What's more going to the capital markets causes the same inflation risks as having the Fed create the money because inflation is caused by the amount of money sloshing around in the economy not who supplies it.

Larry Summers is worried about Biden's big spending bills causing inflation. What he doesn't get is that these bills are targeted. It's not just money pumped into the economy. The money going to states and municipalities, for example, is going to pay off debts. That holds for all the money going to families who are behind on their rents and mortgages. Paying off debts is deflationary not inflationary. Money going to unemployment insurance is just money that allows people to consume as if they had a job. That is not inflationary. Money going to businesses to prevent them from failing and putting employees back to work is not inflationary because having these businesses fail and employees without jobs is deflationary. All those flights and cruises not taken, all the money not spent going to movie theaters, all the money not spent on consumption when consumption is 70% of the economy - is deflationary. In fact there is so much deflation during a recession that that is the main worry - not inflation.

But reorienting priorities should also play a part in controlling inflation. Decreasing the trillion dollar budget of the military and military-industrial complex would help to offset inflation and pay for infrastructure repair. It would also free up the human resources needed for a build out of green infrastructure because wage inflation is caused by not enough human resources being available thus bidding up wages. The integrity of the US dollar could also be increased by eliminating sanctions on other countries. The US is using the fact of sanctioning other countries because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency causing the diminution of the use of the US currency as sanctioned countries find workarounds using other currencies. In America's Other Forever War, Peter Beinart explains that these sanctions do not accomplish anything except to hurt the people that happen to be living in the countries that are sanctioned. The chickens will come home to roost as the US dollar looses value in the international currency markets as the euro, yen and reminbi are used more for international trade. As Beinart writes, "“It is past time,” Joe Biden pledged last year, “to end the forever wars.” He’s right. But his definition of war is too narrow."

A careful analysis of Biden's spending plans  as well as reorienting current spending priorities needs to be carried out so that runaway inflation does not occur. Certainly putting people back to work is not inflationary. Federal money targeted toward paying off debts by states, municipalities and families is not inflationary. Federal money spent on infrastructure is not inflationary providing that the human and material resources are available. Since the Federal Reserve can create US dollars without the need for taxes, Modern Monetary Theory has shown and economists widely agree that the only limit on Federal so-called "deficit" spending is inflation. Stephanie Kelton has explained that Deficits Don't Matter in her book, The Deficit Myth. People like Bill Richardson and most liberal and conservative politicians need to study up on economics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are some of the few people that already have.

Off the Top of My Head

How to Pay for a Green New Deal

by John Lawrence

In 1940 British economist J. M. Keynes’s book, How to Pay for the War: A Radical Plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer gave the economic guidance for financing the Second World War. Following Keynes, massive financial resources were devoted to the war resulting in full employment without inflation. There is a model here that can be used for the Green New Deal (GND) which is the Moral Equivalent Of War (MEOW). Bill Gates and J.D. Alt have put an upper bound of $5 trillion a year, but closer and more exacting estimates have put it at $1 trillion a year for 10 years. Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray write: "Instead of simply adding up estimates of the government spending that would be required, we assess resource availability that can be devoted to implementing GND projects. This includes mobilizing unutilized and underutilized resources, as well as shifting resources from current destructive and inefficient uses to GND projects. We argue that financial affordability cannot be an issue for the sovereign US government. Rather, the problem will be inflation if sufficient resources cannot be diverted to the GND. And if inflation is likely, we need to put in place anti-inflationary measures, such as well-targeted taxes, wage and price controls, rationing, and voluntary saving. Following Keynes, we recommend deferred consumption as our first choice should inflation pressures arise. We conclude that it is likely that the GND can be phased in without inflation, but if price pressures  do appear, deferring a small amount of consumption will be sufficient to attenuate them."

Their analysis is the most astute to date. We know that the money is available because the Federal Reserve can create it with a few keystrokes on a computer. This has been demonstrated time and time again from the bank bailouts of the Great Recession to the COVID relief bills. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has provided the theoretical framework that explains how the Fed creates money and the fact that the US can never run out of money. The US government which has a sovereign currency does not have to pay back loans whereas a private household or even a US state does have to pay back loans or else suffer the consequences. The only potential consequence when the Fed creates money for public purposes is inflation which can be controlled by a variety of measures. In How to Pay for the Green New Deal, the authors write: "Viewed from the MMT perspective, the government uses the monetary system to mobilize real resources and to move some of them to pursuit of the public purpose. Affordability is never an important question for a sovereign government—the relevant question concerns resource availability and suitability. There is thus a natural alliance between MMT and the GND. If we can identify technologically feasible projects that would achieve the GND’s goals, and if we can identify the resources to devote to these projects, then we can arrange for the financing of the programs." Bill Gates has identified a number of promising new technologies that he has invested in to address the GND issue.

As Keynes pointed out, it's a question of available resources to tackle any public problem. If the resources are available, the money is no problem although resources may need to be switched from the private to the public sector. Republicans who favor that all economic activity be confined to the private sector may have a problem with this. Nevertheless, this is exactly what happened during the Second World War. Resources, both human and material, were activated within the public sector to fight the war while at the same time were withdrawn from the private sector. Consumption was held to a minimum and deferred till the war's end. Then private resources, both human, financial and material, were unleashed so that the post war era was one of the most prosperous that the world has ever seen. The deflation brought about by wage and price controls and rationing during the war offset the inflation caused by the public money that was spent financing the war. The same tactic is necessary for a Green New Deal.

Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray write: "The approach is simple but also profound: total the resources available to prosecute the war while meeting the consumption needs of the population. If the available resources fall short of what is needed, the solution cannot be found in the finances. Government can always spend more to shift resources to the war effort; if consumption spending is not reduced, the result is inflation that generates a combination of “voluntary” saving and excess profits as real consumption falls. To prevent this undesirable outcome, government must reduce consumption demand by some combination of voluntary saving, taxes, deferred compensation, rationing, and wage and price controls. To be clear, the purpose of these actions is not to provide government with the financial means to “pay for” the war effort but rather to relieve pressure on scarce resources."

There will be much opposition from the America First crowd which is really a euphemism for Me First. The people who put their own freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want will probably not take too kindly to making any sacrifices so that future generations will have a habitable planet to live on. There will be demagogues ala Trump who will appeal to their baser instincts of solipsistic selfishness. They will be all about their First Amendment freedoms to resist any effort that is for the public good especially if it involves doing anything of a salutary nature for people in other parts of the world. I can visualize bars and restaurants complaining that they can't get enough hired help because everyone is employed by the Green New Deal. Let's hope that the better angels of mankind will prevail.

Off the Top of My Head

Despite All the Talk, Practically Nothing Has Been Done About Global Warming

by John Lawrence

Every year 51 billion tons of Greenhouse Gasses (GHGs) go into the atmosphere. There has been no decrease in that number despite the Paris Accords, despite more hybrid cars, despite the build up of solar and wind renewables. 197 countries adopted the Paris Agreement at the COP21 in Paris on 12 December 2015, over 5 years ago and yet there has been no improvement in the number of tons of GHGs dumped into the atmosphere per year. Well, a couple of tons less this year due to the pandemic. In general it is slightly increasing according to Bill Gates in his new book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." At the rate we are going, there is no way that the earth can escape the dire consequences of global warming. Should we just give up and enjoy the few remaining years of a habitable earth? I don't think so. What will it take to forestall catastrophe? Basically, it will take a Green New Deal or should we call it the Green Equivalent of World War II?

During World War II there was a huge amount of government deficit spending. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that this is no problem because a government such as the US which issues its own sovereign currency can never run out of money whether or not there are tax receipts to cover the spending. The problem is inflation which occurred in WW I despite more modest outlays. In the WW II years there were wage and price controls which effectively controlled inflation. There was also rationing. These measures made sure that all resources both human and material were devoted to the war effort. Everyone was on the same page. Is that possible for a Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW) today? Would people be willing to give up anything so that resources could be devoted to a MEOW as far as Global Warming is concerned? Many Americans are not even willing to wear a mask during a pandemic, and many also believe that global warming is a hoax. Would they sacrifice for a MEOW?

Bill Gates has invested his money in a variety of start-ups which have some promise of addressing the global warming issue. One of them is Direct Air Capture (DAC) in which carbon dioxide is removed directly out of the air. This is a feasible alternative which is already in use on a small scale. The problem is that it's the most expensive alternative out there. A combination of other methods to ameliorate GHGs in the atmosphere would not only be more feasible but cheaper. He estimates that removing 51 billion tons of GHGs per year would cost $5.1 trillion per year. This would be an upper bound on the cost of getting to zero GHG emissions. Actually this does not seem too unreasonable given the fact that between 2008 and 2015, the Fed’s balance sheet, its total assets, ballooned from $900 billion to $4.5 trillion. That means that the Fed "printed" $3.4 trillion with its Quantitative Easing (QE) program. The Fed has "printed" $3.5 trillion just in the year 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic to keep the economy from falling apart. This is the amount of money authorized by Congress in several spending bills. Add to that Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill and you get a total of $5.4 trillion. And yet there has been no inflation.

So there is a little hocus pocus going on in the relationship between the Fed and the Treasury. The Fed by law is not allowed to buy US debt directly from the Treasury department. How it works is Congress authorizes a spending bill. The Treasury issues a Treasury bond if there aren't enough taxes to cover it. That bond is sold to the "primary dealers" which are mainly big Wall Street banks, and then the Fed buys the bond on the "open market" which means it buys them from the primary dealers. So by a roundabout method, the Fed buys up US debt by means of "printing" money although it's actually by means of a few keystrokes on a computer crediting the Treasury's account at the Fed and the Fed takes the bonds onto its balance sheet from which theoretically it could sell them some day. One little distinction: this is not QE. QE was a term coined when the Fed "printed" money to bail out the big banks aka providing liquidity. The Fed took all the toxic junk of mortgage backed securities and other assets onto its balance sheet and gave the banks all the money they needed to cover bets on credit default obligations and interest rate swaps and other casino garbage. So while it amounts to the same thing - the Fed "printing" money and adding it into the economy - the money injected now is going into the real economy whereas the QE went into the Wall Street economy.

But I digress. So Bill Gates says it would require at most $5.1 trillion to get our GHGs down to zero on an annual basis. In other words keep the goddam fossil fuels, cow farts and Keystone pipeline and just get those DAC machines humming. Seems reasonable to me. The Fed can just print up that $5.1 trillion and we're home clear. J.D. Alt estimates that solving the global warming crisis will cost $60 trillion over 10 years which is about the same amount per year that Bill Gates estimates although supposedly we will reach some point at which renewables and other technologies will result in zero emissions so we will not have to go on spending that amount in perpetuity. So why don't we just go ahead and do it? The Fed could just print the money. No inflation is in sight. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that any country with a sovereign currency (such as the US dollar) can never run out of money and as long as the resources are available (both human and material) the financial resources will always be available. The only problem is the stupidity of most of the US Congress (mainly Republicans) whose only response to any Democratic initiative is just to Just Say No as well as their economic ignorance. So it is of paramount importance that next year after the pandemic is over and before Republicans take over (hope not) one of the branches of Congress in 2022, that Congress passes a $5 trillion per year Green New Deal or a $50 trillion GND spread over 10 years.

Off the Top of My Head

A Job Guarantee Would Win Over Trump Voters and Also Address Black Lives Matter

by John Lawrence, February 14, 2021

Joe Biden can win over disgruntled Trump voters with a job guarantee. There has been a lot of research indicating that, if government were the Employer of Last Resort (ELR) at say a wage of $15.00 an hour, this would save money on unemployment as well as setting a minimum wage. It's also the minimum wage called for in Biden's COVID relief bill. Robert Reich, Clinton's labor secretary says:

"[G]ive Republicans and independents every incentive to abandon the Trump cult.

"White working-class voters without college degrees who now comprise a large portion of it need good jobs and better futures. Many are understandably angry after being left behind in vast enclaves of unemployment and despair. They should not have to depend on Trump’s fact-free fanaticism in order to feel visible and respected.

"A jobs program on the scale necessary to bring many of them around will be expensive but worth the cost, especially when democracy hangs in the balance."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his last letter requesting support for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”:

“It was obdurate government callousness to misery that first stoked the flames of rage and frustration. With unemployment a scourge in Negro ghettoes, the government still tinkers with half-hearted measures, refuses still to become employer of last resort. It asks the business community to solve the problems as though its past failures qualified it for success.”

It's clear that an ELT program would solve many problems not the least of which is wooing Trump voters to the Democratic party. Trump's appeal to them was partly that they had been left behind because jobs had been moved to China and Mexico and he was going to bring good paying manufacturing jobs back to America, something he never did or had a clue how to do. The ELR program will act as an automatic stabilizer adding jobs during a recession and eliminating them during an expansion when jobs will shift back to the private sector. All private employers would have to do is pay a wage slightly higher than the program wage of the ELR program which would effectively set the minimum wage. It has been thought that a certain level of unemployment was necessary to fight inflation, but that's not necessarily the case as jobs in the ELR program would not compete with jobs in the private sector. The program wage would be a floor below which wages could not drop.

The so-called "Phillips Curve" maintained that there was a trade-off between employment and inflation, that to achieve lower inflation you had to increase unemployment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines full employment as an economy in which the unemployment rate equals the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), no cyclical unemployment exists, and GDP is at its [full] potential. The Federal Reserve considers a base unemployment rate (the U-3 rate) of 5.0 to 5.2 percent as “full employment” in the economy. So government economists have been willing to trade off the misery of approximately 16 million unemployed people in order to achieve stable money. Those 16 million are mainly composed of African Americans. However, Modern Monetary Theory claims that this is not necessary. There are other policy tools to fight inflation. Taxes, for example, mainly targeted on the rich. Other countries such as Argentine and India have implemented ELR programs. The money spent would eliminate the need for food stamps, unemployment insurance and other government programs necessary to deal with poverty and homelessness. Anyone wanting a job could have one, and these jobs would be in areas like child and elder care where there is a need for additional workers.

Off the Top of My Head

Even With Unlimited Spending Some Problems Can't Be Solved

by John Lawrence

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown that unlimited Federal spending is no problem. The money is there, but it's a question if the productive capacity is there. For instance, since most products are manufactured in China, unlimited spending on products needed to counter the pandemic might only produce inflation. That's a problem of letting crucial industries be relocated to a foreign country and not manufactured here. If you can't ramp up production in a meaningful time frame, even though the finance is not a problem, the ability to produce needed products may be. In this situation MMT predicts inflation. Existing facilities to produce vaccines can only produce so many vials.You could go to 24 hour a day production, but beyond that you would have to build more factories and that takes time. Would the money spent to build more factories be well spent if the production facilities came online only after the crisis was over? No. MMT stands for spending money wisely to solve social problems like the pandemic and global warming, but the time frame within which the problems need to be solved is important. There's no sense in spending money to ramp up production if that production only is available after the problem has already been solved.

Yeva Nersisyan and L Randall Wray write:

"But what happens when ventilators and masks are not available for sale even as companies are operating 24/7? More money may not solve the problem, but the government still has a role to play. During the second world war, the US quickly became “the arsenal of democracy” by repurposing its productive capacity to meet the needs of the war. Through diligent planning “[l]ipstick cases became bomb cases, beer cans went to hand grenades, adding machines to automatic pistols, and vacuum cleaners to gas mask parts”. We were able to cut “production time for Liberty Ships down from 365 days to 92, 62, and, finally, to one day”. We can mobilize our resources once again to build temporary hospitals, and to ensure a sufficient supply of medical equipment and whatever else is necessary to overcome the crisis."

So it may be necessary to shift production from pre-COVID endeavors to provide the necessary human and material resources to deal with the problem. For instance, the restaurant industry which filled the gap from lack of time for home preparation of meals due to both spouses working has suffered the most during the pandemic because more people have the time for meal preparation at home. Those workers are now available for deployment in other more crucial industries such as the renewable energy industry. Other hospitality and entertainment sector workers can also be shifted to more crucial endeavors just as they were during World War II. The economy as it existed pre-COVID was composed mainly of profitable private sector activities, many of which were not designed to deal with the most crucial social problems.

The solution of the pandemic at least in the US has an expected solution within the next year. Global warming has a somewhat longer time frame, but requires much more money to be spent because, from a finance point of view, it's a much larger problem. Changing the infrastructure of the whole world will require much more money but over a longer time span. The time span for solving global warming is approximately 10 years so we have ten times as long to solve global warming as we do to solve the pandemic. The pandemic may never be completely resolved because wiping out the virus everywhere in the world completely may not be possible just as it has not been possible to wipe out a number of other viruses. Over time, however, the problem can become treatable and manageable. The same can be said of the global warming problem. It may be impossible to eliminate every source of greenhouse gas emission in 10 years, but if most of them are eliminated, the remaining problems may be manageable in the sense that the earth may ultimately be salvageable.

What we have learned from the pandemic is that much more money needs to be spent on research and development in virology so that we are better prepared to deal with pandemics and epidemics. Two infectious diseases have successfully been eradicated: smallpox and rinderpest. The rest still exist somewhere in the world. There are also four ongoing programs, targeting poliomyelitis, yaws, dracunculiasis, and malaria. Five more infectious diseases have been identified as of April 2008 as potentially eradicable with current technology by the Carter Center International Task Force for Disease Eradication—measles, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis and cysticercosis. What we have also learned is that there is more of a threat to Americans and human beings in general from viruses than there is from foreign nations, both state actors and terrorists. Therefore, the money spent on the defense department should be drastically reduced while the money spent on human health should be vastly increased. Let's deal with the real threats not the imagined ones.