3. Use the US governments money power -- creating and spending money into circulation -- to address pressing infrastructure needs such as repairing our crumbling roads, bridges, rails and highways. The government also would be enabled to invest in health care and education. These projects would provide a huge numbers of jobs without going into debt and having to repay interest on debt to financial institutions. Economist Kaoru Yamaguchi's advanced system dynamics computer model shows that basing the system on money instead of debt will allow the national debt to be repaid and the funding of infrastructure (thereby solving the unemployment crisis) without inflation! (see http://www.monetary.org)
The irony is that these three provisions would institutionalize what most Americans falsely believe already exists: That the Federal Reserve is public. That banks only loan money that they possess. And that the government creates our money. Wrong on all counts.
Decades of distortion and deception can be remedied by this bill.
Public control of money is not a new practice. The American colonists issued "Continentals" and the Lincoln administration "Greenbacks" to fund the Revolutionary and Civil Wars respectively -- all debt and interest free. More than 200 prominent economists during the Great Depression of the 1930s developed and endorsed "The Chicago Plan" -- which declared that only the government should create money -- to address that crisis.
Ask your US representative to cosponsor the NEED Act when it is reintroduced. Ask your two US Senators to contact Rep. Kucinich about becoming a Senate sponsor. Last year's bill can be read at
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.6550.
This bill alone cannot solve all our current economic problems. But it will end the private/corporate control of what should profoundly be a public democratic function of any society -- issuing the nation's money. Maybe more importantly, the Act will serve as a beacon of hope to a beleaguered citizenry who are seeking long term solutions to unemployment, debt, crumbling infrastructure, and need to take power over their lives and their society.
The Act is just the specifics President Obama needs to transform his hopes into a just reality.
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