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Henry Blodgett picks up Paul Volkers comments on inflation ".....The government would quietly but desperately love to inflate our way out of this mess--destroying the dollar so the real burden of our mountain of debt shrivels to a molehill.  This remedy, of course, would punish everyone who has saved up a nest egg or lives on a fixed-income, but they're likely to be considered an expendable minority...." There is also a link on this page to the Aron Task interview with Peter Schiff, "The stimulous bill will lead to unmitigated disaster." http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/2/peter-schiff-stimulus-bill-will-lead-to-unmitigated-disaster Peter compares Bush to Hoover and Obama to Roosevelt, predicting an unmitigated disaster; a depression with hyperinflation. He argues that the great depression was tempered by the fact that government spending and intervention was limited by the godl standard. Today, the Federal Reserve has no such limitation!

Mayor Bloomberg should read the Obama budget chapter, "Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced Priorities." The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of "wealth" from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget's "Top One Percent of Earners" chart. The White House says its goal is simple "fairness." That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, "it is our duty to change it."

Anyone who isn't welded to the Obama-Pelosi-Reid ball and chain has their campaign issue for November's election and 2012: spending. Republicans, Lieberman-Bayh Democrats, tea partiers, it doesn't matter. Spending, spending, spending. This is bigger than drill, drill, drill. Way bigger. Finally, after a nonstop, nearly 80-year upward climb, government spending has hit a wall. It didn't seem possible but this is a big wall. It's the American voter. This has been an unforgettable year in the history of American spending. It began with an eye-popping $800 billion stimulus bill that came from nowhere and went to nowhere. Done with that, the Washington Democrats turned to President Obama's health-care reform, which looked big at first, but turned out to be bigger. A well-publicized June estimate of the Senate bill's cost by the Congressional Budget Office put the 10-year price tag at $1.6 trillion. So $800 billion, then a trillion. Dollar signs rocketed into the sky all year: hundreds of billions on various TARP salvage projects, much drawn from some magic stash held by the Federal Reserve. The Obama cap-and-trade bill was going to use an auction to siphon $3.3 trillion from various states to Washington over 40 years. Oh, almost forgot-an FY 2011 $3.8 trillion budget. Some of this was spending, some taxes, some fees. It's all spending. A tax or fee is just a sluice gate that separates private income from the public-spending lake. And in 2009 it was beginning to look as if the politicians were going to blow the dam. California and New York, the nation's first and third most populous states, were in fiscal collapse, with the whole nation watching as once-mighty California (which looks like Greece cubed) actually issued IOUs. On April 15, the tea parties achieved critical mass, then built into a political phenomenon. The New York Times this week gave two full pages to cataloguing tea partier grievances in a way meant to convey the paranoid style in American politi

America needs an alternative. For that reason, I have reintroduced my plan to tackle our nation's most pressing domestic challenges-updated to reflect the dramatic decline in our economic and fiscal condition. The plan, called A Road Map for America's Future and first introduced in 2008, is a comprehensive proposal to ensure health and retirement security for all Americans, to lift the debt burdens that are mounting every day because of Washington's reckless spending, and to promote jobs and competitiveness in the 21st century global economy. The difference between the Road Map and the Democrats' approach could not be more clear. From the enactment of a $1 trillion "stimulus" last February to the current pass-at-all costs government takeover of health care, the Democratic leadership has followed a "progressive" strategy that will take us closer to a tipping point past which most Americans receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes-a European-style welfare state where double-digit unemployment becomes a way of life. Americans don't have to settle for this path of decline. There's still time to choose a different future. That is what the Road Map offers. It is based on a fundamentally different vision from the one now prevailing in Washington. It focuses the government on its proper role. It restrains government spending, and hence limits the size of government itself. It rejuvenates the vibrant market economy that made America the envy of the world. And it restores an American character rooted in individual initiative, entrepreneurship and opportunity. Here are the principal elements:

The Federal Reserve and central banks in general are running a grand experiment on the economic body, without the benefit of anesthesia. They are testing the theories of Irving Fisher (representing the classical economists), John Keynes (the Keynesian school) Ludwig von Mises (the Austrian school), and Milton Friedman (the monetarist school). For the most part, the central banks are Keynesian, with a dollop of monetarist thrown in here and there. Over the next few years, we will get to see who is right about debt and stimulus, the velocity of money, and other arcane topics, as we come to the End Game of the Debt Super Cycle, the decades-long cycle during which debt has grown. I have very smart friends who argue that the cycle is nowhere near an end, as governments are clearly increasing debt. My rejoinder is that it is nearing an end, and we need to think hard about what that end will look like. It will not be pretty for a period of time. The chart below shows the growth in debt, both public and private.

Thanks to Marbux :) A history of the financial collapse and how we got to the sovereign debt crisis of today.  Excellent  stuff.  A factual account that i couldn't find fault with.  Very lengthy read though. excerpt: Bailout the Bankers, Punish the People In the fall of 2008, the Bush administration sought to implement a bailout package for the economy, designed to save the US banking system. The leaders of the nation went into rabid fear mongering. Advertising the bailout as a $700 billion program, the fine print revealed a more accurate description, saying that $700 billion could be lent out "at any one time." As Chris Martenson wrote: This means that $700 billion is NOT the cost of this dangerous legislation, it is only the amount that can be outstanding at any one time.  After, say, $100 billion of bad mortgages are disposed of, another $100 billion can be bought.  In short, these four little words assure that there is NO LIMIT to the potential size of this bailout. This means that $700 billion is a rolling amount, not a ceiling. So what happens when you have vague language and an unlimited budget?  Fraud and self-dealing.  Mark my words, this is the largest looting operation ever in the history of the US, and it's all spelled out right in this delightfully brief document that is about to be rammed through a scared Congress and made into law.[27] Further, as the bailout agreement stipulated, it essentially hands the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury total control over the nation's finances in what has been termed a "financial coup d'état" as all actions and decisions by the Fed and the Treasury Secretary may be done in secret and are not able to be reviewed by Congress or any other administrative or legal agency.[28] Passed in the last months of the Bush administration, the Obama administration further implemented the bailout (and added a stimulus package on top of it). The banks got a massive bailout of untold trillions, and the

Obama and the Federal reserve are out of bullets......... The only thing that will work is Cut, Cap and Balance - the TEA Party Patriot formula that passed the House during the run up to the Natioanl Debt Limit SCAM, only to be immediately tabled and discarded by the ruling elites in the Bankster, Democrat and Repubican establishment.  With 69% of the taxpaying public in support of the Balanced Budget Amendment, one would have thought the ruling elites would have shown a bit more respect for Cut, Cap & Balance.  What we got however was anything but.   In this article Long time liberal - big government - let me into the elite ruling class advocate Henry Blodgett looks into the chasm, wondering how to pull back from the brink impending disaster. excerpt:  there are also several very important differences between this market crash and the ones a few years ago: ........... The Fed has fired most of its bullets (interest rates are already at zero) ............. Our budget deficit is already out of control, and Congress has had it with "stimulus" ............... The public has had it with bailouts That means the government's ability to do anything about this market crash is severely limited. Yes, we'll almost certainly have a "QE3." And maybe that will prop things up a bit. But it won't fix the fundamental problems clogging the economy, just as QE1 and QE2 didn't permanently fix anything. (The only thing that will fix our economy is debt-reduction, discipline, and time.)............

 the underlying issue is that the U.S. has borrowed too much, and now has a higher debt to GDP ratio than it has ever -- and because the U.S. will inevitably borrow even MORE because 1. everyone believes that lower taxes and stimulus are needed to stimulate growth and 2. if we don't, growth in the U.S. will depress -- the reality is that our lifestyle (individuals and the government spending what they don't have) is unsustainable. He says: "In addition to balancing the budget and growing the economy, I think we have to accept that the coming decades are likely to see U.S. standards of living decline relative to the rest of the world. Unless our goods offer a better cost/benefit bargain, there's no reason why American workers should continue to enjoy the same lifestyle advantage over workers in other countries. I just don't expect to hear many politicians own up to this reality on the stump." His other big points: ..... "The dollar can no longer be the reserve currency" without unflinching adherence to the associated responsibilities. ..... The debt ceiling "solution" is unlikely to represent much fundamental progress; for the most part it'll just kick the can down the road because politicians are too concerned about getting re-elected to compromise....... "We have no choice but to raise the debt ceiling and keep borrowing in the short-term."....... "Washington's spending has recently been higher as a percentage of the nation's economic output than at any time since World War II. But by the same measure, Washington's revenues are the lowest in more than 60 years." ..... When asked about conservatives' insistence on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, President Obama replied, "We don't need a constitutional amendment to do that [balance the budget]; what we need to do is to do our jobs." But clearly we do need some enforced discipline, because the years in which we haven't run a deficit have been by far the exception of late, n

excerpt:  Instead of a "stimulus" to create jobs by financing useful investments that would have paid a growth dividend in the future, we got a debt-fueled permanent expansion of entitlements and the size of government. In health care, instead of reforms to encourage competent consumers not to treat health care as a free lunch, we got a doubling down on health-care free lunchism. In banking, instead of new incentives to cause creditors to pull in the reins on risk-taking banks, we got a formalization of too big to fail. All economic crises begin differently-this one began in housing-but eventually they morph into the same old crisis of forgetting what works. Think about the last big crisis of faith in American capitalism in the early 1980s. The panic was eventually crystallized in dueling Harvard Business Review articles by George Gilder and Charles Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson, an MIT-based consultant, argued the U.S was dooming itself to vassalage unless Washington brushed aside small, poorly-funded entrepreneurs and concentrated regulatory favors and subsidies on giant firms like IBM, AT&T, Digital Equipment and Kodak. Mr. Gilder championed the then-emerging Silicon Valley paradigm. He quoted technologist Carver Mead: "We depend on the innovations of the citizens of a free economy to keep ahead of the bureaucrats and the people who make a living on control and planning. In the long term, it's the element of surprise that gives us the edge over more controlled economies." Who won hardly needs to be belabored except that it apparently does need to be belabored. Almost everything Mr. Obama understands as pro-growth consists of bets on "bureaucrats and the people who make a living on control and planning."

The two presidents have a lot in common. Both inherited an American economy in collapse. And both applied daring, expensive remedies. Mr. Reagan passed the biggest tax cut ever, combined with an agenda of deregulation, monetary restraint and spending controls. Mr. Obama, of course, has given us a $1 trillion spending stimulus. By the end of the summer of Reagan's third year in office, the economy was soaring. The GDP growth rate was 5% and racing toward 7%, even 8% growth. In 1983 and '84 output was growing so fast the biggest worry was that the economy would "overheat." In the summer of 2011 we have an economy limping along at barely 1% growth and by some indications headed toward a "double-dip" recession. By the end of Reagan's first term, it was Morning in America. Today there is gloomy talk of America in its twilight. My purpose here is not more Reagan idolatry, but to point out an incontrovertible truth: One program for recovery worked, and the other hasn't. The Reagan philosophy was to incentivize production-i.e., the "supply side" of the economy-by lowering restraints on business expansion and investment. This was done by slashing marginal income tax rates, eliminating regulatory high hurdles, and reining in inflation with a tighter monetary policy.

Giving Capitalism Its Due :: The head of the Kauffman Foundation on the importance of entrepreneurship. "Then there is the question of the public perception of entrepreneurship. In the most recent survey that the foundation sponsored, pollsters found that 63% of respondents "prefer giving individuals the incentives they need to start their own businesses as opposed to allowing the government to create new jobs directly." Conducted last month, the survey also showed that instead of the government's stimulus package, two-thirds of respondents would prefer "reducing legal barriers and red tape for new business development" as a way to jump-start the economy. Finally, 89% of respondents said that "capitalism is still the best economic system for our country." Despite this popular attitude, Mr. Schramm worries that there is a tendency on the part of some citizens to want the government to prevent market chaos. Prior to the financial meltdown this fall, "I think we were in full tide of entrepreneurial capitalism and now there's an introspection, where the vocabulary is all about regulation and the importance of the government to restart the economy," he says. While Mr. Schramm believes that the government has a role to play, he argues that "historically through the last seven recessions it's been entrepreneurs who essentially restarted the economy."

President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. But as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl has pointed out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious. The Washington Post has a great graphic which helps put President Obama's budget deficits in context of President Bush's. What's driving Obama's unprecedented massive deficits? Spending. Riedl details:

Interview with Seth Lipsky, former Wall street Asia - NY Sun editor, and journalist.  Seth explains the constitutional requirements that Congress control and protect a hard currency.  He also explains his support for Ron Paul, the Paul-Perry-Cain "flat tax" proposals, and the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel.  Hard to believe Seth worked for the Wall Street Journal, otherwise known as the globalist bankster voice.  IMHO, no one has done more to confuse the public with free market - capitalism posturing while promoting outrageous banksterism, crony capitalism and a militaristic global corporatism that threatens the sovereignty of the USA than the WSJ.  Seth however is great. excerpt: The founding fathers named the U.S. currency after a coin called a Spanish-milled dollar, which represented 371.25 grains of pure silver, and put protecting its value in the hands of Congress. "They meant the dollar to be a measure of value and in fact they gave Congress the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof in the same sentence of the Constitution in which they gave Congress the power to fix the standards of weights and measures," Lipsky told Newsmax.TV. _________________________________________________________ Editor's note: To get 'It Shines for All' at a great price - Click Here Now. _________________________________________________________  "What the reform movement that we have been covering in The Sun wants Congress to do is to step up to that Constitutional responsibility to establish a proper value to the dollar, and then we wouldn't have to worry about inflation and rising prices," he said. "We would have to conduct the government's budgetary operations in a way that didn't result in a collapse in the value of our currency," said Lipsky. Under President Obama, the White House has enacted stimulus measures to incentivize job creation while the Federal Reserve has flooded the economy with money and swollen its balance sheet in an effort to spur

Austerity cuts for the rest of the world but more spending and "quantitative easing" for the U.S. Banksters!

Very important speech. A must-read (I snipped only portions).

Since late 2007 the federal government has spent somewhere around $3.6 trillion to stimulate the economy. That is a lot of money. My suggestion would have been to take all $3.6 trillion and declare a federal tax holiday for 18 months. No income tax, no corporate profits tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax, no payroll tax (FICA) either employee or employer, no Medicare or Medicaid taxes, no federal excise taxes, no tariffs, no federal taxes at all, which would have reduced federal revenues by $2.4 trillion annually. Can you imagine where employment would be today? How does a 2.5% unemployment rate sound?