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Diary    H3'ed 12/15/17

Greenbacks from Margin to Middle


Robert Cogan
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My sense of the current rhetorical mood of American campaigning is that the Republican "National Debt Terrorism" has run out of steam and that there is room to start proposing that America's severe needs be met, at least in part, with an authorization by Congress of a (supra Federal Reserve) increase in the common money supply, greenbacks, printed without taking them from earnings and spent off-budget, for various needs.

It could start small with an appropriation for, electronically created money for disaster relief for California and Puerto Rico. Then it could go to sew up CHIPS and other Republican budget slashes. Eventually later authorizations could go for infrastructure strengthening and a large direct federal employment program at living wages in this infrastructure work.

Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman and Stephanie Kelton are on the Board of the Sanders Institute. Sachs is rightly credited with stabilization of Bolivia's currency in part by cutting its government's oil subsidy. While raising the price of gas has good environmental consequences, my sense is that the energy interest is way too powerful to accomplish much at this now. But a proposal to start small with greenbacks would only mildly threaten the finance interest. It's a line of less resistance!

Greenbacks were created by REPUBLICANS. As the Republicans lose offices through austerity they, even, could grasp at this as a straw. "Printing money," expressed correctly as authorizing electronic creation of United States Notes and posting them to accounts of SS, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, etc. represents an easy way for Sanders campaigners to answer the question "How will you pay for all that?" If Dems don't get out in front of this, Republicans may eventually preempt it!

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I could be Bernie Sanders older brother by similarity. I was born in Manhattan, 1940, he, about a year later, in Brooklyn. I too am a white male American. A retired college professor of philosophy. We both were born of Jewish parents. I was (more...)
 

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