wz1000

From the article

> The 30% who are working under federal jobs programs will have working lives completely decoupled from the workings of the market. The movements of markets – particularly financial markets – will be irrelevant to everyone except for a group of weird, chart-watching, twitchy nerds who fulfill the boring job of capital allocation to an increasingly irrelevant section of the economy.

And earlier

> That money is mostly chasing the same goods that were available before the crisis (rent, groceries, and debt service) so it’s not crowding out other buyers and causing inflation (inflation occurs when more money chases the same goods, so buyers get into bidding wars that drive up prices – when the same quantity of money is chasing the same quantity of goods, there’s no inflation).

You are missing all the second order impacts, such as conflict and mass migration.

From the Wikipedia article you linked:

> As stated, economic estimates of climate change impacts are incomplete.[31] Analysts have used integrated assessment models to estimate the economic impacts of climate change. These models do include estimates of some impacts, for instance, the effects of climate change on agriculture.[31] In other areas, models exclude some impacts. An example is the possibility that climate change could lead to migration or conflict.[31]

Again, you are missing the point. Yes, it is inflationary, but the inflation caused will not be the end of the world. As you admit, most of it will simply counteract the deflationary effects of unemployment and full automation.

You're missing the point. There is no inflation taking the no automation stage as a baseline.

I.e. the scenario is workers spending $X of their employer granted salaries on goods they produce vs spending $X of basic job salaries that machines produce

Debt does not (necessarily) mean high taxes in the future.

Deficit is Government spending - Tax collected. High deficits might lead to inflation. One way to control inflation would be to increase taxes(draining money out of the economy)

> In general, when the government consumes a lot, the private sector can consume less of the national product.

This is not exactly true. When there is still "slack" in the economy(it is not at full employment, the private sector isn't investing for other reasons etc.), government spending tends to have low inflationary pressure. It is only when the economy is operating at peak productive capacity that government consumption crowds out private sector consumption.

It is bad when it causes excessive inflation. The "debt" in itself can never be unsustainable, since it is denominated in USD, which is a floating fiat currency that the US government controls. The US government is the source of all dollars, so it can never 'run out of dollars'. However, printing too many dollars can lead to inflation. So the deficit could be called unsustainable if it causes unwanted inflation.

Yes, it is true, but the difference is that the US is also a fiscal union, which is not the case with the EU, making it fundamentally unworkable in its current state.

https://blogs.imf.org/2018/02/21/the-euro-area-needs-a-fisca...

That is not how this works. The value of the Euro is depressed compared to what it would be if the deficit running regions were not part of the common currency.

If that does not change, the Eurozone is a doomed project.

In a monetary union, the regions running a surplus enjoy a massive boost due the exchange rates being depressed by the regions running a deficit, while the industries of the deficit regions struggle to catch up, hampered by the lack of natural corrective forces of a floating exchange rate. If a monetary union has to work, the deficit regions have to be fiscally supported by the surpluses generated elsewhere, or they just spiral further and further into debt, unemployment and industrial collapse.

> not just borrowed but entirely given by the EU (=Germany).

You can't have a workable monetary union without a fiscal union. Germany wouldn't have such a big surplus if its exports weren't massively boosted by the southern states depressing the exchange rate of the Euro. Unions require unity, and if Germany feels like its pulling more than its own weight, it can exit. But you see exactly the opposite, Germany (at least nominally) states that its goal is to preserve the union, and this betrays the fact that the union brings massive advantages for the German economy. It is not out of a sense of benevolence and european solidarity, but of pure self-interest.

Well, if Germany and the North want the union to survive, they will have to treat it like a real partnership and respect and recognize the contribution of their other partners.

The current "solution" of bailing out Italy and Spain with even more debt on the condition of further future austerity will only lead to further instability, unemployment, discontent and financial ruin when the debts come due.

It is not a question of "solidarity" with the South. It is a question of whether the North recognizes the contribution of its partners to the union, and whether they can act in mutual self-interest to save it.

See https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=8011181001001220...

Taxes take money out of the economy. Government expenditure puts money into the economy. Its a basic accounting truism. The rate of inflation/deflation is proportional to the difference between the two.

Think of it this way. If one day the government decides to tax 99% of the money in the economy, you have barely any money left circulating for anyone else and you get deflation(less money chasing the same goods). On the other hand, if the government decides to add a billion dollars to everyones bank account, you have too much money in the economy and inflation(more money chasing the same goods. The government can decide to put either of the policies(or anything in between) into effect at any time, it isn't constrained by its own "savings under the mattress" at any point. If there are restrictions on government action in this direction, they are legislative, not fiscal(because, again, the government is the source of all money, it can never be fiscally constrained, no more than the referee in a tennis match can run out of points to award).

RE mattresses: If you owned a money printing machine, you would not be stuffing money under your mattress, because it would just take up space. You would just destroy money you do not need at the moment, and print more as and when you need it.

RE cities going bankrupt: Of course, the city of Stockton doesn't control the money supply, we are only talking of entities who can issue their own currency, i.e. the federal government. This is also why Greece went bankrupt, because it doesn't control the supply of money its debt was denominated in.

The government can spend as much as it wants without needing your tax money. It doesn't matter how much money the government collects in taxes, it can spend as much as it wants regardless, because it can print as much money as it wants.

> The government DOES spend the money it garners through taxation

The government can spend the money regardless of how much it raises in taxes. Your taxes do not fund government spending.

Money is fungible. If government taxes $x and then spends $y, it is the same result as if it burns $x and then spends $y of newly printed money. In both cases the money supply changes by $y-$x

The difference between you stuffing money under a mattress and the government doing so is that the government controls the money printers and you do not. There is no point to the government stuffing money under a mattress because it can conjure up as much money as it desires when it so desires. On the other hand, you have no much magical ability, so the situation is quite different.

And yes we are talking about fiat currencies because most currencies in use today are fiat currencies.

Government debt is not like household debt, and government saving is not like household saving.

Why the complexity of a "private, permissioned blockchain" compared to the traditional databases subject to periodic audits that the world already runs on, are proven to work and are conceptually much simpler? It seems like a solution in search of a problem.

The effect of taxation is precisely the same as that of destroying money - it means that the money is no longer available for non-government entities to use. On the other side of the transaction, for the government, as you recognize, taxation presents no increase in buying power.

To directly compare the two scenarios - taxation and burning money - private entities can no longer use the money and government can still spend as much as it wants subject to self imposed limitations. There is no functional difference.

The government already has an infinite supply of money for itself, by virtue of being the issuer of the currency. Money supply means the money in circulation in the non-government sector. Then by definition, taxation takes money out the economy and government spending adds money to the economy.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances

Discounting foreign trade, private sector surplus is exactly equal to government deficit.

> Sectoral balances analysis states that as a matter of accounting, it follows that government budget deficits add net financial assets to the private sector. This is because a budget deficit means that a government has deposited more money into private bank accounts than it has removed in taxes. A budget surplus means the opposite: in total, the government has removed more money from private bank accounts via taxes than it has put back in via spending.

> Therefore, budget deficits, by definition, are equivalent to adding net financial assets to the private sector; whereas budget surpluses remove financial assets from the private sector. This is represented by the identity: (G – T) = (S – I) – NX

> which is

> (Government sector balance) = (Private sector balance) – External sector balance

> where G is government spending, T is taxes, S is savings, I is investment and NX is net exports.

> The conclusion drawn from this is that private net saving is only possible when running a trade deficit if the government runs budget deficits; alternately, the private sector is forced to dis-save when the government runs a budget surplus and the trade deficit exists

In the above equation, increasing T has exactly the same effect as decreasing G by the same amount.

The government doesn't need to tax you to get dollars to spend. They are the source of your dollars, they can will as many dollars into existence as they wish, subject to self-imposed limitations. Where do you think dollars come from? Why would an entity with an infinite supply of dollars need your dollars?

The purpose of taxation isn't to fund government operations, its to maintain demand for dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances

That is precisely what taxation is. Taxation takes money out of the economy, government spending puts money into the economy. For all intents and purposes, government spending creates money, and taxation destroys it.

The government doesn't need your tax dollars in order to spend. As the issuer of currency, it can will as much money into existence as it wants. So collecting taxes is simply a way to regulate the money supply, control inflation and provide a base level of demand for the currency.

Money enters the economy via government spending. Money leaves the economy through taxation.

Governments don't need to tax in order to spend, they are the issuers of the currency.

The point is that the statement in the article is just plain wrong. You are advancing quite a different argument. Some junkies do in fact clean up their act, so saying that becoming a junkie is an irreversible process is also wrong.

> Helicopter money is irreversible since it increases the monetary base of the end-users.

This is inaccurate. If the government pumps $x into the economy today, tomorrow it can take $x out by levying a tax.

> He also suggested that blockchain technology and digital currency opportunities allow central banks to transfer money directly to citizens’ accounts. In this case, the regulator will be technically able to limit the time during which the money can be spent.

Can anyone explain what "blockchain" brings to the table here compared to traditional banking? If you want to distribute money to everyone, you want to verify real-world identities, which seems like the exact opposite of the typical use case blockchain is paraded around for.

Just pointing out how that description applies equally well to the canonical "good guys" too.

> Feel free to walk me through the 'good guy' point of view of the people who invaded my home country, shot down a passenger plane, and got away with complete impunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

I would say is held up until 2016. After the election of Trump and the ensuing Russophobia, mainstream liberals became allied with the security state (CIA, NSA, FBI), and quickly turned on former liberal heroes like Snowden, Assange, Manning etc.

I thought the notion that Australia was a democracy was laid to rest in 1975 with the CIA's coup of Whitlam's government.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...

"An internet reinvents 19th century anarchism"

You might want to read "Fields, Factories, and Workshops" or "The Conquest of Bread" by Pyotr Kropotkin

There is a 36.7%(or ~1/e) chance that you don't get any of them.