The cult is the basis of culture, and our cult worships money

 

Congress went on a spending orgy since 2019 adding $8.77 trillion to the national debt and dimwits blame the Fed for being unable to control inflation

 Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Blame yourselves. You elected them.

 

The chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.

-- Plato, Republic, I, 346f.

Money printing getting way ahead of output is the cause of the current inflation

 US GDP last clocked in at $24.883 trillion in 2Q. The total public debt at the end of 2Q is $30.569 trillion.

That's now a mismatch of 123%, up from 105% in 2013, ten years ago, when the total public debt was $16.8 trillion and the GDP $16 trillion.

In other words, the debt has grown by 82% over the period while the GDP has grown by only 56%.

The debt represents spending money we do not have, and the increase in the debt represents the spending of more money we do not have. We simply create it out of thin air to facilitate the process. It doesn't matter what form it takes, whether in the form of Treasury securities or physical money.

Spending go whirr, Fed money machine go whirr, debt go whirr, and eventually inflation go whirr. Inflation is the payback for going into the debt for which we refused to pay at the time.

Debt draws forward prosperity . . .

But it should come as no surprise that the future we robbed has no prosperity in it, now that we have arrived there. 

And people wonder where the inflation came from.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

 

Inflation trader squeals like a stuck pig, fears QT will soon lead to the sort of stock event you tell the grandchildren about

 Well, we've heard that before, but this story about one of them perfectly describes how Fed money creation has ballooned, by design, to facilitate gains for those first in line for the money, the banksters, while the rest of us just get the inflation:

The Fed creates reserves as a special form of dollars that can only be held by banks and some similar firms, that they use to settle debts to each other. (The rest of us mostly use bank-created electronic money, plus physical dollars.) Since QE began, reserves have ballooned as the Fed created reserves to buy bonds from banks. 

Unlike in 2017, large quantities of reserves have been returned to the central bank via money-market funds. These funds, which savers use as a liquid alternative to savings accounts, are allowed to deposit money at the Fed overnight using reverse repurchase agreements (RRPs), and have already sucked $2.2 trillion of reserves out of the system, up from zero at the start of last year.

For now, the loss of reserves isn’t a problem. Banks had too many deposits and reserves anyway, and they still have $3.3 trillion of reserves, more than they had ever held until last year.

More.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

 

All Items Consumer Price Index under Jerome Powell isn't capturing inflation like it did under Arthur F. Burns even though they both increased money supply at about the same rate

Currency in Circulation (CURRCIR) under Arthur F. Burns rose at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.64% from Feb 1970 to March 1978. The Consumer Price Index (CPIAUCSL) rose at a compound annual growth rate of 6.49%.

After four years of Jerome Powell, Feb 2018 to Feb 2022, Currency in Circulation rose at a similar 8.41% CAGR but the CPI only at 3.31% CAGR, almost 50% less than under Burns.

Milton Friedman famously said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

Something is rotten in CPI Denmark.

Mark Levin barked at a caller tonight that doctors aren't in the top 1%, saying that's Marxist crap

Mark is celebrating Milton Friedman's birthday today, so he's in no mood for anyone who has the temerity to question capitalism's idealism.

Meanwhile US News and World Report here says that

"In 2016, a general internist made a median salary of $196,380, according to the BLS. The highest-paid in the profession earned upward of $208,000, while the lowest-paid made $60,080. ...  In fact, a physician's average salary was $201,840 in 2016."

People who made $200,000 or more in 2016 were in the 98.70706th percentile, in other words in the top 1.29294%. There were just 2.1 million such individuals in 2016.

You weren't firmly in the top 1% until you made $250,000 in 2016.

Robert Tracinski skewers some libertarians for the socialism in their heads, but still misses why it's there

Here, chalking it all up to "unexamined collectivist assumptions" and mistakenly allowing "a little dominion of socialism over their thinking" and the left "trying to preserve that territory they own in your head" through various schemes like the estate tax.

In other words, they're insufficiently indoctrinated. You know, like all those intractable Russians who were sent to the Gulag for nothing more than mistakenly expressing incorrect thoughts.

It never dawns on Tracinski that ideology is a coin with socialism on the one side and libertarianism on the other.

The article is amusing because the "conservatives" he skewers for being insufficiently libertarian are or were aligned with the left and leftism: Charles Murray (former labor unionist, six years in the Peace Corps, "rebel"), Ronald Reagan ("I didn't leave the Democratic Party . . ."), Stuart Butler of health mandate infamy (Brookings), Milton Friedman (FDR functionary) and Megan McArdle (self-described former "ultraliberal").

With the example of McArdle on the estate tax before him, one might have hoped that Tracinski had stumbled into the origin of the socialism in our heads, but no, "there is no such collective entity as 'society.'"

The man wishing to leave his estate to that little society called his family might have begged to differ.

Equality Of Taxation Would Completely Wipe Out The First 41 Million Wage Earners

If we had anything like equality of taxation in this country, it would completely wipe out roughly the first 41 million of 151 million total wage earners. That's how bad federal spending has become.

In 2011 the first 37.4 million individual wage earners had net compensation of up to $10,000. Add in those making up to $15,000 and you get up to 49.6 million wage earners. So the 41 million mark is reached roughly somewhere between the $11,000 and $12,000 per year level of earnings.

For fiscal 2011, federal spending came to $3.6 trillion, and US population came to 313.85 million people.

If we taxed everyone equally as the US Constitution called for originally (you know, "direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers", which is one reason why we must have a census every ten years to begin with), all that federal spending in 2011 divided by all those millions of population comes to . . . wait for it . . . $11,480 per person.

So federal spending in this country is so bad that we'd have to reduce the lowest paid 41 million Americans to what amounts to slavery, to be fair, because they'd owe everything they make to the government. Everything.

"How much government is spending is the true tax", Milton Friedman once said (quoted here). And also the true tyranny.

Thomas Sowell Says Mitt Romney's Minimum Wage Views Prove He's No Conservative

Here:

When you set minimum wage levels higher than many inexperienced young people are worth, they don't get hired. It is not rocket science.

Milton Friedman explained all this, half a century ago, in his popular little book for non-economists, "Capitalism and Freedom." So have many other people. If a presidential candidate who calls himself "conservative" has still not heard of these facts, that simply shows that you can call yourself anything you want to. 

NY Times Paints Loughner and Hard Money Libertarianism as Right Wing Extreme

The leftist ridicule offensive continues, designed to preoccupy the opposition and get the right fighting amongst themselves over who belongs and who doesn't, while the left presses on for new gun control measures and suppression of free speech.

Notice the elision going on in the first passage here:

He became an echo chamber for stray ideas, amplifying, for example, certain grandiose tenets of a number of extremist right-wing groups — including the need for a new money system and the government’s mind-manipulation of the masses through language.

Libertarians generally hold to hard money ideas, but that hardly makes them right wing, witness the long war of traditionalists like Russell Kirk against what he called "the chirping sectaries." The hard money idea is subtly paired with mind-manipulation conspiracy theory by the Times, whatever that means, without support and simply by assertion. Having been a fairly well-informed conservative since the late 70s, one is hard-pressed to know what the Times is even talking about. There you go again, one of our own might say now. We've had our Truthers and our Birthers. Now we've got our Minders, I guess.

One suspects the Times knows full well its only plausible case is in the Libertarian hard money ideology, as here:

A few days later, during a meeting with a school administrator, Mr. Loughner said that he had paid for his courses illegally because, “I did not pay with gold and silver” — a standard position among right-wing extremist groups. With Mr. Loughner’s consent, that same administrator then arranged to meet with the student and his mother to discuss the creation of a “behavioral contract” for him, after which the official noted: “Throughout the meeting, Jared held himself very rigidly and smiled overtly at inappropriate times.”

Notice the effort to paint gold and silver backed money as "a standard position" on the right. It isn't, and it hasn't been as long as conservatism has been resurgent since the 60s and Milton Friedman style monetarism and devotion to a strong dollar captured people's imaginations.

Clear-headed thinkers on the right, like George Will, have well noted the Federal Reserve's failure to maintain a sound currency partly because its mandate was divided in 1978 to include maintaining full employment. Instead, hard money ideology has been an enthusiasm prevalent on the fringe, among Libertarians, in the post-war era in view of the fact that the monetarist consensus has been breaking down due to its failures, and because the gold standard used to be, well, the law of the land, all the way up until . . . FDR.

The dishonesty of the presentation coheres with the view of the Times that, for most of its history, America has been a veritable right-wing nuthouse. They ought to know.

That Was My Line, says Barry Ritholtz

"Two items are noteworthy (besides his lifting my 'If you want less of something, tax it.' line)."

-- Barry Ritholtz, January 20th, 2010, referring to former Reagan Administration Office of Management and Budget Director, David Stockman, in The New York Times

The famous maxim, "If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less of something, tax it," has been circulating since before the time when Barry Ritholtz was perplexed in college, trying to figure out whether he was preparing to graduate or matriculate. The meanings of things elude him still, for which he supplies the appropriate expletives in proportion to the want of knowledge. At any rate, he's no more the author of it than he is of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

This is an annoying sort of narcissism which usually emanates from New York intellectuals at The Times, but that's obviously not the case here. David Stockman is from Michigan, of course, just as Rush Limbaugh is from Missouri, whom Michael Savage routinely accuses of stealing lines. Must be something in the water, there in New York, that creates visions of grandeur from an early age.

The maxim, for what it's worth, is variously attributed to either Milton Friedman, Jack Kemp, or Ronald Reagan, but without chapter and verse. A little tough to nail down. I suspect it may predate them all. Ronald Reagan expresses the ideas explicitly in his farewell speech of 1989, but not in the identical language. Stockman, of course, knows the lines from that era, not from The Big Picture blog.

It just goes to show that the free for all of the internet is no substitute for publications vetted by the knowledgeable.