California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Student Loan Debt Can't Be Discharged in Bankruptcy: Not Good.

by John Lawrence, September 7, 2018

It wasn't always so. When I went to college, there was no such thing as student loan debt. Financial institutions did not seek to profit off the notion that everyone - especially the poor - should have a college education. There was financial help for those promising students who weren't able to afford college or you could even work your way through.. Today it's too easy to borrow money to go to college even for those with low IQs. They are the ones who are especially vulnerable because they don't understand what they are getting themselves into.

It's a much better deal today for high school graduates not to go to college but to go into the military. As an Uber driver, I pick up a lot of young military folks, and it has made me realize what a good deal they have. First they are getting paid rather than going into debt. Second they are seeing the world as they are assigned to a variety of military bases which are located all over the world. Third they get trained and qualify for free online college education. Fourth they have free health care. Fifth, they can get out in 5 years with certain benefits, and, if they stay in for 20, they even get a pension and are young enough to start a whole second career or a business. What's not to like? It's a no brainer.

However, I don't like the military option because I don't like the idea of being a part of the US military domination of the world. The US mentality is that every problem has a military solution. I would much rather see the option of going into the Peace Corps while obtaining the same kind of benefits. But alack and alas, that is not possible. The benefits for going into the Peace Corps or Americorps are stingy by comparison. So smart young people are going for the military option which includes a lot of generous benefits and no student loan debt which is even a more important feature. And they can feel like they're serving their country although in my view they are participating in the US military machine which is dominating the world and has a trillion dollar annual budget which could be much better spent building infrastructure or benefiting the American people in ways that don't involve destruction of the planet and its peoples.

America Spends $1 Trillion on its Military Every Year - and Has No Way to Pay for It

"Indeed, so long as Imperial Washington is stretched about the planet in its sundry self-appointed missions of stabilization, "peacekeeping", punishment, attack and occupation, there is zero chance that America’s collapsing fiscal accounts can be salvaged."

by David Stockman Thu, May 17, 2018 | from Russia Insider

Like the case of Rome before it, the Empire is bankrupting America. The true fiscal cost is upwards of $1.0 trillion per year (counting $200 billion for veterans and debt service for wars), but there is no way to pay for it.

 

David Stockman was President Ronald Reagan's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Republican Congressman from Michigan and author of the following books:

 

The Reagan Economic Plan, 1981
The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, Harper & Row, 1986
The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, PublicAffairs, 2013
Trumped!: A Nation on the Brink of Ruin, and How to Bring it Back, 2016

 

The original headline of this article was:  'Why the Empire Never Sleeps: The Indispensable Nation Folly, Part 1'.  Stay tuned for Part 2.

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David Stockman, America's financial conscience and scold

 

That’s because the 78-million strong Baby Boom is in the driver’s seat of American politics. It plainly will not permit the $3 trillion per year retirement and health care entitlements-driven Welfare State to be curtailed.

The Trumpite/GOP has already sealed that deal by refusing to reform Social Security and Medicare and by proving to be utterly incapable of laying a glove politically on Obamacare/Medicaid. At the same time, boomers keep voting for the GOP’s anti-tax allergy, thereby refusing to tax themselves to close Washington’s yawning deficits.

More importantly, the generation which marched on the Pentagon in 1968 against the insanity and barbarism of LBJ’s Vietnam War has long since abandoned the cause of peace. So doing, boomers have acquiesced in the final ascendancy of the Warfare State, which grew like topsy once the US became the world’s sole superpower after the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991.

Yet there is a reason why the end of the 77-year world war which incepted with the "guns of August" in 1914 did not enable the world to resume the status quo ante of relative peace and prosperous global capitalism.

To wit, the hoary ideology of American exceptionalism and the Indispensable Nation was also, ironically, liberated from the shackles of cold war realism when the iron curtain came tumbling down.

Consequently, it burst into a quest for unadulterated global hegemony. In short order (under Bush the Elder and the Clintons) Washington morphed into the Imperial City, and became a beehive not only of militarism, but of an endless complex of think-tanks, NGOs, advisories and consultancies, "law firms", lobbies and racketeers.

The unspeakable prosperity of Washington flows from that Imperial beehive. And it is the Indispensable Nation meme that provides the political adhesive that binds the Imperial City to the work of Empire and to provisioning the massive fiscal appetites of the Warfare State.

Needless to say, Empire is a terrible thing because it is the health of the state and the profound enemy of capitalist prosperity and constitutional liberty.

It thrives and metastasizes by abandoning the republican verities of nonintervention abroad and peaceful commerce with all the nations of the world in favor of the self-appointed role of global policeman. Rather than homeland defense, the policy of Empire is that of international busybody, military hegemon and brutal enforcer of Washington’s writs, sanctions, red lines and outlawed regimes.

There is nothing more emblematic of that betrayal of republican non-interventionism than the sundry hot spots which dog the Empire today. These include the Ukraine/Crimea confrontation with Russia, the regime change fiasco in Syria, the US sponsored genocide in Yemen, the failed, bloody 17-year occupation of Afghanistan, the meddling of the US Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea, and, most especially, the swiftly intensifying contretemps in Iran.

 

Why Democrats and Republicans Are Both Wrong About the Economy

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

The unemployment rate is 7.8%. Both parties agree that this is too high, but they propose totally different solutions to create more jobs. The Republican solution is to give more tax breaks and other advantages to the rich and to corporations because they are the job creators. Really? Then why haven't they created more jobs in the last 30 years. This historical experiment of "trickle down" economics has been tried since the time of Ronald Reagan and it has proven to be an abject failure. Yet Republicans are still pushing it as the solution to all our problems. 

Esteemed Nobel laureate and Princeton professor Paul Krugman wants to take the traditional Keynesian approach and do deficit spending to improve the economy. He says there's no reason to worry about the deficit since the US can borrow money at extremely low rates. Not to worry. He sides with Dick Cheney who famously said, "Deficits don't matter." He and Bush then went on to add trillions to the national debt by fighting two unpaid for wars, tax breaks for the rich and an unpaid for prescription drug benefit for seniors that was in reality a giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies. But now that a Democratic President is in office, Republicans are all worried about deficits. They should have been worried when George W Bush was doing the profligate spending.

However, I disagree with both Cheney and Krugman. Deficits do matter and here's why. Sure the government can borrow a lot of money, as much as it wants to, at extremely low rates. But the government has to pay interest on the national debt and that is a growing part of the budget. Interest on the debt is the fourth largest government expenditure after Defense, Medicare and Medicaid. In 2011 Federal, state and local  governments spent $454,393,280,417.03 on interest. It actually came down dramatically in 2012 to $359,796,008,919.49. That's still a lot of money. The Federal government alone spent around $220 billion in net interest on its debt in 2012, and is predicted to spend over a trillion dollars in interest by 2020. That's $1 trillion we can't spend to educate our kids or to replace our badly worn-out infrastructure.

And there's no guarantee that interest rates will continue to remain at historical lows. They are being held there right now by the Federal Reserve's policy of quantitative easing. The Fed is printing money at the rate of $85 billion a month. This money is being essentially given to the large Wall Street banks. Theoretically it's being loaned, but if someone loans you money at a zero interest rate, why would you ever pay it back? It's foolish to think that interest rates will always remain this low and that foreign nations and individuals will continue to loan us money ad infinitum.

The Fed's policy of printing money and then giving it to the big banks relies on the theory that low interest rates will get the economy moving again. The theory goes that people will be attracted to the low interest rates, borrow money and consume. It assumes that banks will actually loan out the money. Since consumption is 70% of the US economy, GDP will increase and that will create more jobs. In other words the Fed is exercising the same trickle down theory of economic growth made famous by Ronald Reagan and that has been tried for the last 30 years and failed. The Fed is essentially devaluing American currency in the hopes that this will create jobs. And it has been a big failure insofar as job creation is concerned but it has kept the US government's borrowing rates low.

So if both deficit reduction and job creation are important, how do you do both. Put simply the US government has to walk and chew gum at the same time. The Republican emphasis on cutting spending, especially spending on social programs, would lead to austerity and that would contract the economy even more. So that isn't the solution. To be fair President Obama has not been on the side of deficit spending as a way to get the economy out of the doldrums. He has been for a balanced approach of stimulating the economy and paying down the deficit. But Paul Krugman and many Democratic theorists like Robert Reich have.

The trick is to note that government spending does not have to be deficit spending. Government spending can increase without incurring greater deficits by increasing government revenues. And there are different varieties of government spending. Republicans favor just giving government money to private corporations and having them do the job. Their policy is to let the government just be a money conduit from taxpayers to corporations. Alternatively, government can spend money directly on jobs programs like rebuilding infrastructure. Instead of using the indirect approach which amounts to pushing on a string which is what the Fed is doing and which Republicans advocate, the government can actually create jobs directly in the public sector. If you want to create jobs, why not just create jobs directly instead of trying to get the private sector to create jobs. President Obama should just get up and say, "We've tried various policies to get the private sector to create jobs; they haven't worked so now the government, the public sector, is going to create jobs directly."

But here's where Democrats and President Obama have a problem. Instead of calling for more revenue by taxing the rich and corporations and government direct spending instead of spending to fund private corporations to rebuild infrastructure, Obama is reticent because he is afraid of being labeled a socialist. No worries, he's already been labeled a socialist despite his administration's being the most pro-business administration in years. And beware of the public/private partnership which is just another variation of the privatization of functions which the government can do more efficiently. We don't want to replace the military-industrial complex with an infrastructure-industrial complex replete with lobbyists, cost plus contracts and highly paid CEOs. There's no need for Wall Street to get involved.

Well, where is the money going to come from? Senator Bernie Sanders has an answer: End Offshore Tax Havens. One out of four profitable corporations pays nothing in taxes. Tax rates on profits are the lowest since 1972. Last year Facebook paid nothing despite having a billion dollars in profits. Government revenue as a percentage of GDP is lower than at any time in history. Corporate contributions to tax revenue are the lowest of any major country on earth. It is absurd for major corporations to stash huge amounts of money in countries like the Cayman Islands which have a zero tax rate. 

Bernie Sanders and Jan Schakowsky have introduced the Corporate Tax Fairness Act. The bill will raise $590 billion over the next decade. The bill will also stop giving tax breaks to corporations for shipping jobs overseas. Their bill would prevent oil companies from disguising royalty payments to foreign countries as taxes in order to reduce their taxes in the US among other things. And it has a snowball's chance in hell of passing. A financial transaction tax would bring in as much as $100 billion annually. We used to have one; Europe just recently enacted one. Let's end the "carried interest" loophole for hedge and private equity funds. Wall Street needs to start paying its fair share.

Corporations have been getting away with murder in not paying their fair share of taxes. This is from an article by Bernie Sanders:

"In 2010, Bank of America set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands (which has a corporate tax rate of 0.0 percent) to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It worked. Not only did Bank of America pay nothing in federal income taxes, but it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year. They are not alone. In 2010, JP Morgan Chase operated 83 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $4.9 billion in U.S. taxes. That same year Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to avoid an estimated $3.3 billion in U.S. taxes. Citigroup has paid no federal income taxes for the last four years after receiving a total of $2.5 trillion in financial assistance from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis."

The sad fact is that the private sector is not in the process of creating jobs but of destroying jobs through automation and robotics. Almost anything a human being might have done in a job is now being done by robots. Some say that this creates jobs for "knowledge workers." Sure if you're among the upper 1% in knowledge talent. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook are not looking for the average college graduate. They're looking for the upper 1% of college graduates. Together they employ less than 200,000 people in the US. The top talent in every field are making good money. Everyone else is going downhill if they're employed at all. 50% of college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed in terms of their qualifications. In the 2009-2010 recovery, 93% of the gains in income went to the top 1%. 

Why should the private sector create jobs if they can get a robot to do the work 24 hours a day at a cost of less than $5.00 an hour? If the private sector will not create jobs, that leaves the government to create jobs directly.  Instead of pushing on a string with policies that are supposed to create jobs indirectly by encouraging the private sector to do so, government should get more involved. More government revenues plus direct job creation rebuilding infrastructure could result in growing the economy, providing good middle class jobs and paying down the debt.

Chrystia Freeman in her book Plutocracy explains this phenomenon which results in the divergence of jobs and income, creating a well to do upper 1% class and everybody else:

"This is what ecomomists call the "superstar" effect - the tendency of both technological change and globalization to create winner-take-all economic tournaments in many sectors and companies, where being the most successful in your field delivers huge rewards, but coming in second place, and certainly in fifth or tenth, has much less economic value."

We are seeing the effects of a meritocracy where the top 1% of talent merges with the top 1% in terms of income and wealth. This is great for the top 1% of graduates from elite colleges but not so much for the average graduates of average colleges with $100,000. in student loan debt and a job at Starbucks instead of a career type job in their field. In every field the chasm between the superstars and everyone else is getting bigger and bigger. Inequality increases with the acceleration of meritocracy. Meritocracy and plutocracy converge creating a democratic dystopia.

That's why the government has to step in to regulate this runaway dystopia. Taxes on corporations and the rich need to be increased in order to tamp down inequality. This revenue needs to be redistributed to the former middle class in terms of job programs. It could be redistributed in terms of welfare and unemployment insurance, but this creates a class of dependents. It would be much better to create a middle class of workers rebuilding infrastructure. And this is not a trivial job. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that there is $2 trillion worth of work that needs to be done just to bring roads, bridges and other basic infrastructure up to par. But there is more to infrastructure than just that. When you consider all that needs to be done to prevent and combat the changes due to global warming, there is enough potential work out there to fully employ US workers for generations. Utilities need to be hardened and undergrounded. Fossil fuel powered electric plants need to be converted to solar and wind. Buildings need to be made less energy consuming. High speed rail needs to be implemented. Housing needs to be moved back from the shorelines.

There is no lack of work that needs to be done, and this is work the private sector not only won't do but in many cases it is work that the private sector is lobbying against doing. They profit from using the atmosphere as a dump. It's crucial that the government prevent runaway wealth maldistribution, create jobs that the private sector has no incentive to create and save the planet from ecological disaster.

First World Governments Drowning in Debt

by John Lawrence

 

In her excellent book, "Web of Debt," Ellen Brown questions the whole notion that governments, whether they be the US or the Eurozone, should have to go into debt to private bankers such as Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to get the money they need to finance their operations. Consider the Federal Reserve which is the primary creator of the money supply in the US. It is neither Federal nor is it a reserve. It is a private bank which creates money as an accounting entry on a computer screen. Recently, it loaned over $7 trillion to private banks at a ridiculously low .01% interest rate. That wasn't money it held in reserve; it was money that was "printed" or rather created out of whole cloth. And who do you think sits on the Board of the privately owned Federal Reserve? Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase! Do you think that the Federal Reserve acts in the interest of anyone other than the large, too big to fail, banks? The banking system prints or creates money all the time, and not only central banks do it. It has been a longstanding practice of banks everywhere to loan out more money than they hold in deposits. This is called "fractional reserve" banking. For example, when a bank takes in $100 in deposits, it will loan out $1000 figuring that that will be sufficient for depositors who wish to redeem their deposits. Unless there's a run on the bank, that usually is sufficient. So money is created by the private banking system all the time and on a daily basis. Many multiples of the banks' deposits are then loaned out at interest.

Individuals, businesses, corporations and governments then borrow money from private banks to meet their needs for expansion and simply to pay their bills. The US government, for example, borrows the money it needs to function essentially from Goldman Sachs and other large banks and then pays interest to those banks. This happens because the US sells Treasury bonds to those large institutions in return for money to fund its wars and pay social security and medicare recipients among other things. The taxpayers are then on the hook for paying the interest on these bonds. Goldman Sachs got the money in the first place from the Federal Reserve so that by means of a little bit of subterfuge (the Federal Reserve cannot by law loan money directly to the US government), money is transferred from the privately owned Federal Reserve bank, which it created out of thin air, to the US government with interest to be paid by the taxpayers to private banking interests.  This begs the question that Ms. Brown makes a central point of her book: if a private central bank can increase the money supply by creating money out of thin air as an accounting entry on a computer screen, why can't the government itself create the money to fund its needs? In particular, if the government created the money instead of the private banking system, taxpayers wouldn't be on the hook for the interest payments which are rapidly eating up an ever increasing share of the Federal budget. Interest on the national debt is projected to be $241.6 billion in FY 2012; it will only increase every year as the national debt goes up. The question is why should US taxpayers pay interest to private bankers on the money loaned to the US government which was created by private bankers when the US government itself could just as well have created the money interest free?

The same line of reasoning holds for the Eurozone which is caught up in a debt crisis in which the private banking system is raising interest rates for countries that it considers weak. The rising interest rates make countries such as Spain and Italy even weaker and all this is being fueled by speculators who are shorting the bonds of these countries. Derivative trading such as shorting drives up interest rates since it makes it seem that investors are selling rather than buying the bonds of those countries.

The process of shorting can be simply explained as follows. Suppose my neighbor buys a lawnmower for $500. I then ask to borrow my neighbor's lawnmower to mow my yard. As I'm mowing, another neighbor drives by and offers to buy the mower for $450. As it happens, I know about a sale at the local Sears where I can buy the same exact lawnmower for $400. So I sell the lawnmower for $450., rush down to Sears and buy another one for $400., return the mower to the neighbor I originally borrowed it from and then pocket the $50. profit. Now in the dark world of derivatives markets it's not even necessary to borrow anything from a preexisting owner in order to short sell. These trades are called "naked shorts." The whole effect will drive up interest rates in Greece and Italy making their borrowing costs to turn over their loans even more expensive and hasten the day when these countries will default. Speculators stand to make big money if and when a Eurozone country does default because they have placed large bets on this outcome. It is to be noted that the European Central Bank (ECB) has the same deal that the US Federal Reserve has in that it can't give money directly to one of its member countries. Monies have to be funneled through banks. This means that they are subject to the machinations of the bond market and speculators. If the ECB created the money directly and then loaned it to member countries, the interest rate could be maintained constant as speculators would be eliminated and it would be lower as the private bankers would not be getting their cut.

If the whole notion of a central government creating the money supply as opposed to a private central bank creating it seems radical to you, please bear in mind that this is exactly what Abraham Lincoln did to fund the Civil War and the economic expansion following it including the transcontinental railroad, the land grant colleges and the Homestead Act which gave away free land to settlers in the west. Greenbacks were government created currency which was spent into the market. Today Federal Reserve notes are created by the privately owned Federal Reserve and are the official US currency. Ellen Brown maintains that any government can create a fiat currency. This simply means that the government created currency is declared to be the legal currency of that government. It doesn't have to be backed by gold or anything else. It is the official currency just because the government says it is. Ellen Brown characterizes the Greenback era as follows:

How was all this accomplished with a Treasury that was completely broke and a Congress that hadn't been paid themselves? ... Lincoln tapped into the same cornerstone that had gotten the impoverished colonists through the American Revolution and a long period of internal development before that: he authorized the government to issue its own paper fiat money. National control was reestablished over banking, and the economy was jump-started with a 600 percent increase in government spending and cheap credit directed at production. A century later, Franklin Roosevelt would use the same techniques to pull the country through the Great Depression; but Roosevelt's New Deal would be financed with borrowed money. Lincoln's government used a system of payment that was closer to the medieval tally. Officially called United States notes, these nineteenth century tallies were popularly called "Greenbacks" because they were printed on the back with green ink (a feature the dollar retains today). They were basically just receipts acknowledging work done or goods delivered, which could be traded in the community for an equivalent value of goods or services. The Greenbacks represented man-hours rather than borrowed gold. Lincoln is quoted as saying, "The wages of men should be recognized as more important than the wages of money." Over 400 million Greenback dollars were printed and used to pay soldiers and government employees, and to buy supplies for the war. The Greenback system was not actually Lincoln's idea. but when pressure grew in Congress for the plan, he was quick to endorse it. The South had seceded from the Union soon after his election in 1860. To fund the War between the States, these Eastern banks had offered a loan package that was little short of extortion - $150 million advanced at interest rates of 24 to 36 percent. Lincoln knew the loan would be impossible to pay off. He took the revolutionary approach because he had no other real choice. The government could either print its own money or succumb to debt slavery to the bankers.

So the war and the economic development following it were financed with goverment created fiat money, the Greenback. This would be perfect today for funding the $2 trillion in infrastructure repair and rebuilding that the IEEE claims is needed - in other words an infrastructure bank. This would solve a lot of the US' unemployment problems as well as bringing the US infrastructure up to par with China and other countries which are modernizing their infrastructure at rates far exceeding the US. The Eurozone ECB could also print or create euros without borrowing or funneling them through private bankers and subjecting the economies of certain countries to the whims of speculators. For the US it would be simple to move the Federal Reserve into the Treasury Department, transfer ownership to the public sector and keep the fact that the chairman would be appointed by the President. To keep its autonomy, Congress should not have the ability to interfere with the newly created Federal Reserve just as the situation exists now. So what would change? Only that the money created would be the equivlent of Greenbacks which would be non-interest bearing notes. Government created money would not be money that the government would have to pay interest on to private sector banks. These Greenbacks could coexist with Federal Reserve notes so that there would be two forms of currency in circulation both of which would be legal tender. Therefore, Federal Reserve notes would not have to be recalled. The new system could be created overnight with a minimum of disruption to commerce.

The Eurozone probably operates the same way. I'm not an expert but I surmise that the large European banks such as Deutsche bank, Societe Generale and ING loan money to Eurozone countries at interest. Even Goldman Sachs, since it is an international bank, probably has its finger in the pie of Eurozone money creation.  Even money created by the ECB needs to be funneled through these banks before it gets into the coffers of the respective Eurozone countries. This means that not only are countries such as Greece and Italy paying interest to the large European and international banks but the interest rates they are paying are subject to market speculation which drives them up even more. If the ECB issued euros directly instead of letting the large banks do it, the interest rate could be carefully controlled, the rates wouldn't be subject to speculation and the interest paid would go into the coffers of the ECB instead of into the coffers of large private banks.

Individuals and families in the US and throughbout the world are increasingly indebted to private banks for mortgage debt, student loan debt and credit card debt. Easy credit and low initial interest rates as well as declining wages have induced much of the population to go into debt in the same way that countries have gone into debt. Ultimately, these levels of debt are unsustainable especially if today's historical low interest rates start to rise. Of course the banks' major goal is to have everyone in debt paying interest money to them as a major part of their expenditures. If everyone is a debt slave, the banks are in the position of owning most of society's assets. Ellen Brown's ideas about taking money creation out of private bankers' hands and putting it into the hands of central governments strikes at the core of capitalist economics which assumes that money creation remains entirely privatized. However, other countries such as China have shown that government owned large banks can be a boon to economic development and growth.

Also in the US state owned banks such as the Bank of North Dakota maintain that state in a healthy economic condition compared to the US as a whole. Interest collected on loans goes back into state coffers defraying taxpayer expenses. So lower taxes are the result of a state owned rather than a privately owned bank. The same could be true for countries as well. Also loans can be more carefully controlled so that they go for socially useful purposes rather than fueling speculative investment. Finally, many countries including China and Norway have sovereign wealth funds which act to make those countries more creditworthy than countries which have no assets and only debts. As any banker knows, an individual's creditworthiness represents the difference between his assets and his debts. The same holds true also for countries. If governments created their own money, it could be loaned directly to families that are being foreclosed on instead of relying on private bankers to work out deals with them which they have been reluctant to do thus exacerbating the foreclosure crisis. Greater leniency could also be granted to student loan debtors than is the case now.

Lincoln saved the US an incredible amount of interest repayments by issuing Greenbacks instead of borrowing the money:

In 1972, the United States Treasury Department was asked to compute the amount of interest that would have been paid if the $400 million in Greenbacks had been borrowed from the banks instead. According to the Treasury Department's calculations, in his short tenure Lincoln saved the government a total of $4 billion in interest, just by avoiding this $400 million loan.

Finally, a quote from Thomas Edison from an interview in the 1921 New York Times:

If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill, The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution, pays noboldy but those who contribute in some useful way. It  is absurd to say that our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.

Therefore, the "full faith and credit" of the US government and the ECB could apply to currency as well as bonds, and private bankers and speculators could be eliminated from the loop.

Bernie Sanders Calls Out Republicans on "Shared Sacrifice"