When Resigning Is A Class Act

Today Joe Biden cemented his legacy as a great human being, as well as the consummate politician. He turned down his nomination for another term as President. 

He wanted to run. He wanted to win. Most of all he wanted to see the democrats continue with the momentum he has created in the last three and a half years. When it became clear to him, he was not the strongest candidate to lead the party, he withdrew, despite having won all the primaries. 

That's not bravado. That's bravery. That's not ego. That's compassion. 

The Federal Deficit....of Imagination

I want to talk with you about our government and the money we spend to keep it running.

I see your eyes glazing over, but I've got a surprise for you.

We have a federal deficit. And that is GOOD. In fact it is FANTASTIC. It means that the federal government put a bunch of money into the economy and didn't take it all back. And it never needs to take it all back.

This is a big deal!

The federal budget is not like any other budget. It's not like our household or business or state or town budgets. All those budgets have to be balanced. Whatever they spend has to be covered by an equal amount of income.

That's not true for the federal government. The federal government can and does spend more money than it receives in taxes. 

What? Does that mean the federal government does NOT pay all its bills?? 

Of course not! The federal government can ALWAYS pay its bills. How? The federal government, and ONLY the federal government, is authorized to PRINT MONEY. In a word, it creates money out of thin air. That is the government's job. That may be the government's most important job. It needs to create money to do any of the things we want it to do, from education, to health care, to military readiness. 

This is all explained in great detail in a book by Stephanie Kelton: The Deficit Myth. There is also a film about it: Finding The Money.

But let me address briefly the first questions that come to mind. 

If the government can create money out of thin air, why do we need taxes? Great question. We need taxes for three reasons. 

First, we want people to work. For our economy to hum, we need folks to participate. If we tell everyone they are going to owe the government some taxes, they'll get jobs to pay those taxes.

Second, we need to encourage businesses to be equitable. If businesses pay some people $10 per hour and other people $1,000 per hour, we need to tax the high earners more than the low earners for reasons of simple fairness. We created rules to make it possible for businesses to thrive in our economy. We also need rules to make it possible for workers to thrive in our economy.

Finally, we need to pull some of the money out of the economy to avoid inflation. How much? Great question! You're not going to like the answer. 

We don't know!! 

"Good grief," you say. "Why should I trust you," you ask. "You don't know what the heck you are doing and you want me to support you?! You must be kidding!" 

"Fair statement," I say. "But would you rather I lied to you?" I ask. 

Wrestling with inflation....and jobs....is not easy. 

Do you remember the Great Depression? Of course not, you'd have to be over 90 years old. How about the Financial Crisis of 2008? Remember all the talk of another Great Depression?

That's when banks failed, businesses closed and the government took a HUGE gamble....it flooded our economy with money! Boy did a man named Ben Bernanke get a lot of flack!

The honest to god truth is that pretty much all economists thought inflation would go through the roof back in 2008. Talk about the right person in the right place at the right time. Two years earlier President Bush had appointed a man named Ben Bernanke to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Guess what Mr. Bernanke's field of expertise was. The Great Depression!

Mr. Bernanke knew that The Great Depression would have been LESS of a Great Depression if the federal government had put MORE money in the hands of impoverished citizens. When FDR took office in 1933 unemployment had reached 25%. It took him eight years to bring it down to 15%, largely through the creation of government jobs. The CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), CWA (Civil Works Administration) and the WPA (Works Progress Administration) created more than 14,000,000 jobs. Compared to FDR's predecessors, Presidents Hoover and Coolidge, FDR had turned the economic system on its head with this creation of jobs by the government. But after eight years there was still 15% unemployment. It was only due to World War II that unemployment dropped to 2%, three years later in 1943.

Coming back to our latest crisis, the 2008 financial collapse had caused banks to stop lending, afraid that their loans would end up defaulting.  Businesses stopped hiring. Businesses failed. Mr. Bernanke, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, could not create jobs as FDR had. Only a President and Congress can do that. But Mr. Bernanke, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, could send money to banks, hoping they would use that money to lend to businesses which would hire more people, creating jobs. And Mr. Bernanke knew from his research that as much as FDR had done, without World War II it would not have been enough to get us to full employment.

Chairman Bernanke sent banks money by buying their problematic mortgages (familiarly referred to as mortgage backed securities), as well as treasury securities (US government bonds...the safest investment in today's world!). Between 2007 and 2017 Mr. Bernanke bought $3.5 trillion dollars of securities. How did the Federal Reserve "buy" those securities? It just printed the money (using key strokes on a computer!). And our national debt grew from $9 trillion to $20 trillion. 

Wow. From 2007 to 2017, over ten years, the Federal Reserve Bank added $3.5 trillion to the economy and our national debt grew by $11 trillion. What happened to inflation? It must have gone through the roof! Right? 

Wrong! The average inflation rate for that ten year period was 1.8%.

Back to your question....how high can the deficit go before inflation takes over? Again, honestly, we don't know. But we DO know today's debt is not causing inflation, and we DO know that we can bring the debt down gradually over the next few decades, which President Biden has already started to do.

Thanks to tax cuts for the wealthy over the last several decades, our society is one of the most inequitable in our history. On April 11, 2024 Mother Jones reported that 806 billionaires in America own more wealth than the bottom 65 million households in our society. Eight hundred and six people own as much as 65 million. Mind boggling.

We can increase taxes on the wealthy, and they won't even notice. An alternative is to leave things as they are, risk hyperinflation, perhaps revolution, certainly massive disruptions. Even those 806 lucky oligarchs will notice that.

Forgive me the long winded explanation. But while it is reasonable to expect the value of the dollar to decrease (through inflation) if the government keeps creating dollars and never takes any back out of the economy, it is not accurate or reasonable to assume that the government must take as much money out of the economy as it put in. In fact that would be crazy. The federal government CAN and SHOULD keep more money in the economy than it removes. The federal government SHOULD  have a deficit, forever. 

By the way, the government does not use your tax dollars to pay interest on the deficit. Your tax dollars are simply dollars removed from the economy, as the federal government puts more money in the economy when it pays for stuff.

Taxes don't pay for stuff. Taxes keep the system fair and help keep inflation in check. The government has the authority to create money, tax some of it, and monitor inflation. That's what government does.

The important point is that we need good government to manage our free economic system. To those who say, leave the free market alone and it will do just fine, I have one question. Why are some people making $1,000 per hour and others $10 per hour. If you consider that "fine", I have to disagree. 

To sum up, we have the means to pay for our government. It's built into our Constitution. The government is authorized to print money. 

The real task is not finding the money. The real task is finding people for the jobs. We should and can have zero unemployment. We should and can have an economy in which everyone has a livable wage. The real challenge is getting the free market system and the government together to figure out what jobs we want in our economy. Do we want food, houses, smart phones, social workers, therapists, guns, bombs, national forests, highways, teachers. The list goes on and on. 

We need a government paying attention to the needs of our people in our towns and cities. The free market system is great at creating jobs. It's not so good at creating equity. And it's not suited at all to designing vibrant communities. That's not the job of a business. That's the job of government. 

Good government is vital to our country. We need talented people who aspire to making government an equal partner with our free market system, not folks who want government to heed only the wealthy and provide the bare minimum of service. 

We need good government and we can afford good government. Now you know how money is created. And you know that a federal deficit of money is absolutely OK. What's not OK is a deficit of imagination. Use your imagination to conjure up the society you would like to live in. Then use your votes to make it happen. And note, one person, one President, one Congressperson, is not going to make good government happen. It's going to take a whole team of dedicated people. If you're serious about imagining a vibrant society, you'll need to get a team of folks working on it. In the words of one of our most inspiring Presidents "Don't boo, vote!"

My Fantasy...A Politician's Stump Speech

I don't get it. How are our elections so close? What would happen if a politician said this.

I'm running for office to get the government back in the job of governing. Government is NOT a dirty word any more than Business is a dirty word. Our communities need both to prosper.

Here are my bullet points:

A woman's body should be inviolable. No person and certainly no government should be telling her what to do with it. Forcing a woman to grow a child she doesn't want to grow is preposterous. Period.

We should be doing our utmost to end war, not perpetuate it. 

Israel and Gaza. We should stop sending money to Israel as they exterminate Palestinians.  I don't support Hamas attacks on Israel, but those attacks do not give Israel the right to massacre tens of thousands of non-combatant Palestinians. By supporting Israel we are now complicit in those Palestinian deaths.

Russia and Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine. We should keep sending money to Ukraine as they fight for their very existence. It is hard to understand how this is debatable.

Our economy is humming, but the details are not good. Multi-millionaires and billionaires are doing well. The middle class and the poor, not so much.

There are a few really basic changes we can make that would make a WORLD of difference for many of us. 

Health care should be FREE. You walk in the door, show your social security card, and you are good to go. Doctor's visits, hospital stays, teeth cleanings, hearing and eye care, mental health care, all should be FREE. If your doctor says you need the care, Uncle Sam pays for it. Period. But "Uncle Sam" really means our tax dollars, doesn't it? Will the costs be astronomical? Maybe. But they'll be far less astronomical than they are with insurance companies in the mix. Insurance companies add two key elements to health care: profits and overhead. Both are completely unnecessary for our health. Both are expensive. So we've got two choices. Pay for health care that includes the cost of insurance out of our household budgets or pay for far cheaper health care out of our tax dollars. 

Basic income. Every man, woman and child should get a monthly stipend from the federal government. Nothing huge. It's not to make us lazy. It's to ward off poverty. The free market system is the best way we know to keep people employed and vibrant, but it has holes. Companies move. Companies close. People lose their jobs and have to recover. There is no excuse for a nation to have companies making mega profits, people turning into billionaires, while others face starvation or have to choose whether to pay the rent or buy food for the kids. The government has made the rules that allow companies to profit. The government should also make the rules that allow people to survive. A basic income is basic.

Federal job guarantee. I admit, this is complicated. But I also think if we can create the internet and send humans in rockets to outer space, then we should have the ability to keep every able bodied United States citizen employed. I know the government is capable of organizing people because we already have the most powerful and sophisticated armed force the world has ever known. We can also create a work force of citizens who value public service over profit, and who are paid a livable wage. Simultaneously we eliminate unemployment!

Monopolies. Stop them. Monopolies are not good for the community. Companies like to float the idea that they can save money and lower prices by combining resources. While this may be true logically, it never materializes. Savings don't get passed on to the consumer. Savings go into the pockets of the shareholders, the owners. But isn't that how the free market system should work? Yes! Savings belong to the shareholders. But competition keeps the game from being rigged. If shareholders get too greedy, another company should be able to compete with lower prices and level the playing field. That doesn't happen when a monopoly exists. The monopoly can stifle dissent, buy out competition, thwart innovation. Monopolies must be stopped or regulated.

Speaking of monopolies, they are composed of corporations. Corporations are not people. They are businesses. People have a constitutional right to free speech. Corporations do not. People can contribute to political campaigns, subject to contribution limits. Corporations should not have the same right. They are not people.

Only white men could vote in our nation's early elections. Blacks, other people of color, and women fought hard for the right to vote. That right should not be taken away by state law. Last minute voting registration purges, too few voting booths, spurious challenges to signatures, these have to be illegal. Voter suppression should be a crime and people perpetrating voter suppression should be jailed.

Taxes. They should be progressive. That means we don't all get taxed at the same rate. As our income increases, the higher dollars are taxed at a higher rate than the lower dollars. Why? Why don't we just have a flat tax? Everyone pays 5%, not matter what they earn. The problem comes down to fairness. The government created rules that allow businesses to prosper in the free market system. It should also create rules that allow workers to prosper. Workers do not prosper if most make starvation wages while a few make millions. Taxes encourage the millionaires to share some of their wealth. It's simple fairness.

The federal budget. I've left this for last because it is the least well understood issue in government. Yet it drives the entire government. Part of the issue is obvious. We need a budget. The government can't do anything without a budget, without a means for paying for things. Where we get the money is less obvious. Well, it's a little less obvious. The government prints its own money. Most people know this, but don't think about it a lot. Everyone in Congress should know this or they shouldn't be in Congress. Because the federal government, and ONLY the federal government, prints its own money, its budget is very different from state, town, and household budgets. Your budget and my budget and our state and town budgets need to be balanced. That means whatever we spend money on, we have to earn. What goes out must come in. That is not true for the federal budget. The federal government can spend more money than it brings in, because it can create it. It can print it. This has been going on for years. Well, sure, you say, but won't we all have to pay more taxes eventually to pay back the debt? The simple answer? NO. We don't pay taxes to pay off the federal debt. We pay taxes to keep inflation down. That's the only reason we pay taxes. If inflation is not rising, the government can print whatever money it needs to, to continue paying for the federal debt. It doesn't need to increase taxes. It doesn't need to cut programs. So the real question is not "can we have a federal debt?" Of course we can. The real question is "Will the federal debt cause inflation?" That answer is both simple and complicated. When inflation is low, the answer is simply "NO, the federal debt is not causing inflation." When inflation is not low, the answer is not simply, "Yes, the federal debt is causing inflation," because there may be other reasons for inflation: monopolies, supply chain problems, wars, lack of resources or workers. 

The federal budget and the federal government are complicated and necessary in a vibrant society. Governing is not easy. It requires hard working, thoughtful, honest people, elected by thoughtful, hard working, honest voters. It is not easy, but it can make our lives, ALL of our lives, richer, more full, if done well. If you like my ideas, please give me a shot. But don't just vote for me. Find other people like me and support them too. Governing is a team effort. 

Living up to Sunshine

 My granddaughter's dog died today. Her name was Sunshine and she graced us for a few days shy of fifteen years. Kudos to my daughter for finding her and gifting her to her daughter. Kudos to my granddaughter for naming and cherishing her. For Tabatha Sunshine was unfailing, the constant companion, the frolicking tug of war playmate, the hug always waiting to happen, the warm body to cuddle with at night. A friend once told me it's not so much what you say or do that matters as it is how you make people feel. If I could inspire just half the love that surrounded Sunshine, I would count my life a success.

What I Don't Get: Our Love of Guns and Our Fear of Immigrants

My friends,

I've got to be frank with you. I'm confused. I'm confused why we are so closely divided about a bunch of issues. I feel like we've left common sense at the door and are just following some rabble rousers who are egging us on to follow our basest and meanest instincts.

I see folks with guns walking into malls and stores and schools, killing bunches of people, all ages, all colors, and we still think it is OK for our neighbors to own machine guns. We still think it's OK that I can buy a gun more easily than I can get a license to drive a car. 

Now I'm going to say something crazy here. The second amendment is ridiculous in this day and age. You don't need a gun to protect you from the government. You don't need a gun, because it won't work. If the government wants to detain you, do you really think a gun is going to stop them. Heck, they can just sit outside your house for a few weeks and wait for you to get hungry. You can't stay inside forever. 

The notion that the second amendment keeps us safe is garbage. It would be laughable if it weren't so serious. It would be laughable if it weren't so sad. We have allowed a bunch of self-centered, power hungry cowboys to convince us that it's more important to own our own pistol, with no license or regulation, than it is to keep our neighbors safe, than it is to keep our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters, our children safe, our two and three and four year old children safe. I'm confused. If we are seriously weighing the pros and cons of guns versus our neighbors' lives, how do we sleep at night after choosing guns? I don't get it. This should not be controversial. 

I'm not suggesting you can't own a gun. I'm suggesting you can't own a machine gun, or a bazooka, or a hand grenade, or a tank. These are weapons of war and they have no place in our homes. That's my opinion. Now I know there are some folks in this country who fervently believe they should be able to own a tank or a machine gun if they want one. And I support their right to say that and believe that. I just doubt they are anywhere close to a majority. Yet we can't get a majority of your Senators to ban machine guns. Folks, our neighbors are dying because we are making it easy for deranged people to buy a machine gun and kill us with it. This is insanity. I just don't get it. Do you?

Here's something else I don't get. There are a bunch of white guys, and one of them is a very popular commentator on one of our major news channels, who claim that those of us who are white politicians are in danger of being replaced by our neighbors who are immigrants and who are not white. This is obviously an attack on people of color. 

But before I get to our color differences, can I just point out that ALL of us in this nation are immigrants. Well, almost all of us. Our Native American brothers and sisters' great great great grandparents were not immigrants. They were here before the rest of us immigrants arrived, and they were largely removed from their lands by us, the conquering immigrants. And our Black brothers and sisters' great great great grandparents were not immigrants either. They were slaves, brought here in chains, against their will, and their descendants were not freed until 1863. They were technically free in 1863, but in all honesty, they couldn't even vote for another hundred years, and we have so much racism in this country that fifty-five years AFTER the 1964 Voting Rights Act was passed, half a million of us marched on June 6, 2020, DURING A PANDEMIC, in 550 different towns and cities, protesting the death of George Floyd and so many other Black Americans. The good news is that so many of us who marched were white. The bad news is that we needed to march in the first place. 

But let me get back to my point, almost all of us are immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. So for a commentator to proclaim with alarm that immigrants are taking over our country is non-sensical. Immigrants have been running our country since it was founded. 

Now if it's certain immigrants our friend doesn't like, well that's not surprising. Why, you say? Because one of the great ironies about us Americans is that, as diverse as we are, we have always struggled to accept each other, especially our newest arrivals, especially if we arrived in large groups. One year it was the Irish, another year the Germans, another year the Chinese. The list goes on and on. We have always struggled to accept "others", shamefully sometimes for centuries, sometimes for decades, and far more often for those of us who are not white, yet our saving grace is that our nation was built upon the principle that every human being has the unalienable right to be here, regardless of her birth, regardless of her religion, regardless of her status. Thomas Jefferson penned those thoughts in 1776, and the entire world knows it. 

Here is a fact. Our diversity is world renown! We are hands down the nation with the largest number of immigrants in the world, four times more than any other nation. Why is that? Given the virulent way we have treated blacks and other immigrants of color, from slavery to Chinese exclusion laws to Japanese internment camps, why do so many people still flock to our shores?

I think the most important reason people reach out to us is freedom.

We have this idea that freedom is important, even if we have had a hard time living up to it.

When Thomas Jefferson penned those words "all men are created equal", he didn't have the foresight or wisdom to include men of color, or women at all, but he did mean to challenge the notion that some people are more worthy than others just because of their birth. He was declaring that earls, dukes, kings, or queens, are no more deserving than the children of farmers or tradesmen.

And to our credit, though it has been painfully slow, we have agreed and inscribed into our constitution, with amendments, that "all men" does indeed mean "all people", all men and all women, men and women of every hue, of every skin color, of every idea, of every sexual orientation, of every religious persuasion, of every economic status, we have declared to the world that all of our citizens are equal, all are entitled to find a job, all are entitled to free education, all are entitled to vote. Just as important, all are entitled to debate this, to question it, to discuss it.

Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping, Victor Orban, hear me. Any person in the United States can disagree with me, loudly, openly, and that person won't be arrested, won't go to jail, won't lose their job, won't lose anything. Why can't that happen in your country? What are you afraid of? Freedom?

That principle of equality for all has been the bedrock of our nation. It is who we are. And as immigrants of all stripes have reached our shores, that principle has guided us as we wrestle with very human emotions about valuing people who don't look like us, who don't think like us, who don't pray like us, who don't eat like us.

Yes, we have lost our way, many, many times. Slavery, a hundred years of lynching's, hundreds of broken treaties with our Native American citizens, internment camps for our Japanese American citizens, the list is long and shameful and painful. And our pain in reciting it is nothing compared to the pain our neighbors experienced while enduring it.

It's ironic that the very core of our nation, the very principle that each of us is equal to and is as good as another....this principle feeds our diversity, even in the face of years of discrimination. The irony is that our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution promise freedom, promoting diversity....I mean, seriously, who is not attracted to freedom....and for many of us, particularly those of us who are white, that diversity is troubling....which is not surprising.

Humans the world over are not used to people who are different, especially if we live in more homogeneous communities. We're suspicious. We worry. We find ourselves treating these different strangers with less compassion than we treat strangers who look and think like us. 

But for those of us who happen to get to know these different strangers due to whatever happenstance, we find they aren't so different. They have worries and joys just as we do. They have jobs to get to, children to raise, parents to care for, friends to commune with. They have talents, they have difficulties, they have strengths, they have weaknesses, they have viewpoints, they have backgrounds that often turn out to be similar to ours or our parents' or grandparents', or that may be very different yet worth learning about. 

The human experience is so rich. We are both so alike yet so magnificently different. To digress, just for a minute, I have always been confused and surprised when folks, usually devoutly religious folks, proclaim that gay people are bad or wrong. Gay people need to be cured. God couldn't possibly have made people gay on purpose. Really? God doesn't have the imagination or capacity to create gay people? God can create amoebas and dinosaurs, oxygen and hydrogen, 17,500 species of butterflies, but not gay people. I think some of us are underestimating God.

We all eat, breathe, and love. We may eat different food, and love with different customs. But just as we tell our children as they find themselves with a new baby brother or sister that there is plenty of love to go round, so we will find that we too can appreciate new and different customs, foods, thoughts, clothes, smiles and faces. And that is a strength.

The diversity we have and, scream though we may, our willingness to embrace it, enriches our nation and serves as a beacon for others.

Our diversity can help us understand other nation's problems. Our diversity can give other nations confidence that we have the capacity to understand where they are coming from and help them.

Our diversity can give us the capacity to understand each other in our own country, to help each other, to support each other, as we go to work, raise our families, and participate in our communities. I encourage you to treasure our diversity, to reach out to your neighbors, to get to know each other. We are our strength, we are what makes our nation great, we are greater because of our different backgrounds and circumstances.

Stay well and God Bless.

Who Can Replace RBG

We lost a great lady. That's really a misstatement. This great lady spent the last sixty-one years massaging the law so that women and minorities could have the same rights as men. Sixty-one years of labor in today's world is a long life, and sixty-one years of fruitful labor is a celebrated life, so I don't think we should be saying we lost anything. I think we should be thankful that we gained so much from RBG.

How do we replace her? Honestly, we would be really greedy to assume we can. RBG's don't come along every day, much less be in the right place at the right time.

The democrats are going to wail that the republicans should wait until next January to select a replacement. That's ridiculous. If the democrats were in power, would they wait? If you think so, I've got some real estate on the moon I'd like to show you.

Democrats, shame on you for losing the Presidency and the Senate. Suck it up, and get back in the game. You know the rules. If you're tired of losing, convince the voters you should be in office. And when you're back in office, convince the voters you should stay in office. Try making decisions that work for minorities and those without power or money. Try acting like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and maybe you will match her run of sixty plus years of fruitful labor.

"It's the Economy, Not the Deficit, Stupid"

Health care, the environment, education, law and order, the military, jobs, social security....we have so much to do! How will we pay for it all? The deficit is killing us! 

All of that is true, except for the last statement. The deficit is NOT killing us.

Stephanie Kelton's "The Deficit Myth" is a welcome and clear explanation of how our government pays its bills. And how does the government pay its bills? The simple and straightforward answer of course is that when Congress authorizes X dollars for Y projects, the Treasury prints X dollars to pay for Y projects. 

Our Constitution authorizes our Congress to instruct the US Treasury to create dollars whenever it needs to pay a bill. Period. End of story. Most of us know that and are comfortable with that idea. And since 1971, when President Nixon took us off the gold standard, those dollars have no relation to gold or any other commodity. The US Treasury simply creates the dollars out of thin air. It can create dollars for the next thousand years, and the system will work just fine.

The hue and cry arises when the taxes that the government receives don't equal the X dollars that Congress has spent. We think that is a problem, and this is where we are misinformed. The revolutionary idea that Stephanie Kelton (and Warren Mosler before her) so clearly explains is that our government's expenses and the taxes we return to the government have no relation to each other. Our government's expenses DO have a close relationship with inflation, but they DO NOT have a relationship with taxes. 

This idea that expenses don't relate to taxes is going to take some getting used to. The idea that the government can create trillions of dollars out of thin air without causing "the system" to collapse is going to take some getting used to. Read Ms. Kelton's book and mull it over. Most of our leaders don't get it, which is extremely disappointing. They are supposed to be taking the time to think about issues like this carefully and thoroughly, and they are failing miserably. Some of our leaders, however, did get it, long before Kelton and Mosler made this idea accessible to the rest of us. Stephanie Kelton writes this about JFK when he was making plans for his moon-shot speech fifty-nine years ago:

There was a time when our political leaders had this figured out. For example, President John F. Kennedy sought the expertise of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin, who served as an advisor to Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign and then as a member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Tobin recalls JFK asking, "Is there any limit to the deficit? I know of course about the political limits....But is there any economic limit?" When Tobin confessed that "the only limit is really inflation," the president replied, "That's right, isn't it? The deficit can be any size, provided they don't cause inflation. Everything else is just talk."

The fact of the matter is that 1) the federal government simply creates money whenever it wants to pay its bills; 2) too much money in the economy is only a problem when inflation occurs; 3) taxes are not used to pay the government's bills; they are used to combat inflation and income inequality. 

Why does any of this matter?

For starters, stop thinking the government will run out of money. That is impossible. Physically impossible. The government has been printing money based on thin air for decades and it can keep doing it for the next five hundred years with no problem. It cannot run out of money.

Will the money lose value? As in inflation? Yes! That is definitely possible, and Congress and our leaders will have to pay attention to that as they manage government spending.

Is inflation a problem now? No. The last year we had inflation greater than 4% was twenty-nine years ago in 1991. 

What should we consider as we debate what things the government should spend money on? We should consider the needs of our citizens within our free economy. What do they need that the economy is not providing well? For starters, universal health care, a federal job guarantee so our homeless population disappears, public schools run by local governments but funded by the federal government on a per capita basis so that inequality in public schooling disappears, sensible environmental and climate change regulations and incentives so that our Earth does not disappear, a robust social security program.

The list goes on and can change over time. The issues will be whether the program is better suited for the private sector or the government sector, not whether the government sector can pay the bill. The government can always pay the bill. That will never be a problem. 

A real problem will arise when we have created more jobs than there are people to fill. Won't that be a wonderful problem to have!! Then, and only then, will we have to cut back on government jobs. 

Another real problem will arise when inflation starts to rise. Then we will have to raise taxes appropriately to pull some money out of the economy. Our taxes are used to fight inflation, not to pay for government spending. 

Our taxes are also used to smooth the excesses of the private economy. In the 1950's, an average S&P 500 CEO's salary was about 20 times greater than the average worker's salary. In 2017 it was 361 times greater. Progressive tax rates were never designed to pull in more money to pay for government spending. They were designed to discourage people from making outrageous amounts of money. Back in 1950 when someone reached the 90% tax bracket, he ideally thought he might as well share that last million with others in the company since the government was going to take so much of it from him!

We should get rid of regressive taxes on the federal level as much as possible. We don't need FICA or the Medicare tax. If we have a federal business tax, it should be progressive, designed to discourage monopolies.

Our economy is our strength. Our workers are our strength. The free economy works best with a strong government partner. A strong government is a smart government, that asks the right questions. The right questions for the government are, what jobs does the community need that are not being fulfilled by the private sector. The question is not, can the government afford the task. If there are available workers, the government can afford any task.