Ninety-nine Years Of Fiscal (cliff) Policy

The Senate spent an intense and grueling 3 whole minutes pouring over the American Tax Payer Relief Act of 2012 before voting and passing the bill, 89-8. Our Senators are truly amazing as they must have read one page per second and still spent 26 seconds discussing it. Congratulations are certainly in order as both parties came together in a collegial spirit of compromise and goodwill to do the work of the people. Now we can all expect tremendous financial recovery since our politicians have saved us all from the ‘fiscal cliff’…a dreadful combination of porkless spending cuts and tax increases. The proverbial can has been kicked merrily into the distant future. We can all breathe easy and forget about it until March. No doubt, by that time, our servant-leaders in Washington D.C. will then spell out specific cuts and increases, agree on a new debt ceiling and good times will be here again. Historians will be writing about the miraculous recovery implemented by the most brilliant and responsible economic geniuses to grace humanity in 6,000 years.

Specific numbers are coming out and the spin doctors are now explaining to us who the winners and losers are from the bill. But we only need look at two numbers and compare them to know we have all lost again. The annual tax increase is projected to be $62 billion. Last year’s budget deficit was $1.1 trillion (or $1,100 billion). This leaves our politicians with only two choices. Government can take a massive pay-cut, essentially bankrupting itself. Or it can arbitrarily raise the debt ceiling one more time.

The truth is, America has been on this losing streak for a century. Ninety-nine years ago, the powers that be created the fiscal cliff. In December of 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill that gave away control of America’s money supply to the largest privately owned banks in the world. We call it the Federal Reserve System but there is nothing federal or reservist about it. Created to eliminate recessions and depressions, the exact opposite has occurred over and over again. Instead, the Federal Reserve marked the beginning of fiscal cliff policy—the monetization of debt.

This is how fiscal cliff monetary policy works. When the government needs more money (and when does it not?) it must raise taxes. But raising taxes is usually not politically expedient. So instead, the government goes to the Federal Reserve, hat in hand. In the hat are treasury debt certificates, or T-bills. The Federal Reserve purchases these notes of indebtedness. They create money out of nothing, pass it on to the government, and then proceeds to charge the government interest on this money that does not exist. The government uses the counterfeit dollars to buy votes. This counterfeit money makes its way into the money supply and the government’s back-door tax increases begin to take effect. We call it inflation. The American people get higher prices, higher interest rates, higher unemployment, economic slow-down—a recession. This creates a boom-bust cycle that intensifies in pain on a regular cycle or is delayed by more debt purchasing. This cannot go on forever. The real cliff will eventually be reached and Biblical laws of cause and effect that exist in the realm of finance MUST push us over.

Our fiscal cliff monetary policy violates biblical principles concerning debt, just weights and measures, stealing, coveting, partiality, rules on collateral, multiple indebtedness and the insanity of fractional reserve banking to name a few. All of these will be dealt with in more detail in future articles. Needless to say, it will take massive national repentance from the top down to avoid our coming fiscal cliff. I’m talking the kind we read about in the book of Jonah. But I don’t see our president sitting in sack-cloth and ashes and that goes for your neighbors too.

I can’t help but be reminded from a scene in the movie, Dumb and Dumber every time I think or write about debt monetization. Lloyd and Harry recover a million dollars that was supposed to be used as ransom money to recover a kidnapped man. While working their way to the rightful owner of the money, they decide it would be okay to spend some of the money along the way. When the kidnapper finally catches up with Lloyd and Harry, pistol in hand, he demands they open the case. What falls out of the case are dozens of slips of paper. The kidnapper is furious but Lloyd confidently assures him that, ‘the slips of paper are better than cash…they are IOU’s.’ Needless to say, the guy with the gun wasn’t buying it.