Dr. Michael Hudson - Is this the end financially of the American empire? (2/2)

[411American]

WERE SCREWED

[pretorious700]

Dr. Hudson is right about some things, dead wrong about others. Privatization of "public services" will ultimately be an improvement, because with profit motive comes incentive to be better and more efficient. If the US government owned the airports, no one would ever get anywhere on time, or at all.

[hplaserjet2001]

Part 2: ...and we are trying to execute that to the best of our abilities." -Donald Kohn, Vice Chair, US Federal Reserve Bank

"And you are saying that that entitles you to keep secret the expenditure of 1.3 trillion dollars or $4,000 for every man, woman and child in this country?" US Congressman Alan Grayson

[hplaserjet2001]

Part 1: US Congressman Alan Grayson asking US Federal Reserve Bank Vice Chair Donald Kohn about the Fed lending $1.2 trillion to unknown sources. "What gave you the authority to say that, isn't that something that we (Congress) should be deciding and not you?"

Response: "I think you gave us the responsibility in the Federal Reserve Act to oversee the stability of the financial system through our lending facilities to be the lender of last resort...

[hplaserjet2001]

Part 2: Income tax revenues amount to around 20-25% of the revenue collected by the government. Other funds come from corporate income taxes, imports, cigarettes, gas and a slew of excise and other taxes. Further corruption of your tax dollar occurs when the Federal Reserve "loans" money to the government.

[hplaserjet2001]

Part 1: The Grace Report: When Ronald Reagan took office, he commissioned a blue ribbon panel of businessmen to assess various functions of the government, headed by Peter Grace. That report stated that, "100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by the interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government."

[furyofbongos]

Why not just let the free market handle the currency which is where it originated?

[LastReplaySC]

they are globaly selling of the federal police as a revenue collecting system. the feds are nothing more then a corperartion, and the people still believe that they are working for the citizens and that all this tax and revenue goes into roads and what not....... it's an illusion money is debt and all work done by us was and is pre-paid

[vallpojken]

"The only two alternatives that do seem to me feasible over the longer run are either to make the Federal Reserve a bureau in the Treasury under the secretary of the Treasury, or to put the Federal Reserve under direct congressional control. Either involves terminating the so-called independence of the system. But either would establish a strong incentive for the Fed to produce a stabler monetary environment than we have had.

Milton Friedman

[ourearthhome]

States always had the power to fund themselves adequately by taxing community created land values. They chose to give a free lunch to land owners, i.e. all real estate owners who get to keep/cash in on values they do not create. They taxed labor and real capital invested in the real economy instead. Now that labor and the real economy is tapped out and no new taxes can be raised without a huge push back states are selling off public assets. All they/we ever had to do was tax what was not earned.

[ThorlikeSmash]

@ourearthhome

What is community created land values?

[ourearthhome]

@ThorlikeSmash The economic value of land, what you have to pay to rent it or to buy it exists only because there is the community of people around the particular piece of land in question all of whom need land. No community, no land value. This means that individual "owners" of land do not create the value of their particular pieces of land. Individuals build and create the value of improvements on land but there has to be a community of many individuals for land to have a value.

[ThorlikeSmash]

@ourearthhome

Thank you. It is appreciated. Are there any BOOK readings you would suggest to help me learn about our economic, social, political, and environmental situation? Maybe not just America, but the whole world. I know it may be a loaded question, but at this stage of my life, men like Dr. Michael Hudson have piqued my interest in US as a society. I don't have a very firm grasp of law or economics, or any of the topics above really. I just feel there are MANY things I should learn

[jstreet2]

over and its time for us naked apes to unite into a balanced world empire.

English, along with Western values, will probably always form the backbone for the new world order but its power base will be distributed among the various geopolitical centers, including Japan-China, Europe, Russia and the Americas.

It's possible, ironically, that nuclear weapons will make this possible because large power centers will be forced to live with each other or else face world annihilation.

[jstreet2]

I can't help adding that a poorer America would not necessarily be a bad thing. Americans eat too much fast food, buy too many big, energy sucking cars, trucks and SUVs, live in over sized McMansions, buy yachts they don't use and go on absurd, hedonistic cruises and generally waste the planet's ressources. And most important, Americans spend far too much money supporting a war machine whose sole purpose is to steal the world's raw materials.

It's possible that the argument for a Pax Romana is

[jstreet2]

This would place the House of Representatives in control and would be a good start towards a more democratic form of government for the United States.

In other words, politics and economics are not separate, as the present crisis demonstrates.

It would only be a first step, but the other solution is bloody and chaotic and only the lowest orders of society want to see the whole country fall into civil war and revolution. The rest of us would rather see reason prevail, I hope.

[jstreet2]

America is still a democracy, at least nominally, and we could take the country back with incremental, bloodless revolutions the way England did after the first bloody revolution led by Cromwell.

They neutralized the King, first, and then neutralized the House of Lords. We could do the same with our President, making him into a figurehead and then neutralize the absurdly undemocratic Senate (Nevada, Vermont, the Dakotas, etc.... each have two Senators and California, New York, Texas . have two!

[ourearthhome]

Toll booth economy: state governments are going to sell public services like roads, airports, parking meters etc. off to private companies who will then run these services that used to be low cost subsidized by public revenue for profit. Governments will do this because they refuse to tax community created land values preferring to subsidize real estate (land owners) at the expense of labor and real capital/industry. Land prices will reinflate while the real economy will be taxed and go down.

[Dondonovan]

Damn good interview.

[TruthandJustice101]

We are at a turning point in The Empire.

We will see a diminished America in the future and a more permanently impoverished populace...but with an even richer elite structure.

[golfprobro4eagles]

Thanks for the dash Thom some of us are trying to catch up. I went to a public school.

[MDThomas01]

Ron Paul (and Austrian Economists in general) want an end to Central Banking in all forms--either as private corporation or as government department.

Either form of Central Bank still has the power to create money for their friends, who then outbid those who earned their money honestly. This drives up prices, destroys private wealth, and distorts the economy. It is how governments pay for war.

Visit mises (dot) org or thomasewoods (dot) com for a better explanation...

[HurricaneHeidi]

Absolutely correct, MDThomas01, and very well stated.

I am spearheading a Civil Disobedience movement to reclaim our wealth through the CIVIL matter of refusing to repay all unsecured debt "owed" to these legalized counterfeiters. I have escaped the Debt Trap.

I have defeated all unsecured debt collection by representing myself. I did not need to hire an attorney. I explain exactly how I did this:

watch?v=GJMQCcFFzak