"It is a lynching at the highest level. No one can deny that," Dr. @CornelWest tells @andersoncooper of the death of George Floyd. "I thank God that we have people in the streets."
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) May 30, 2020
"Could you imagine this kind of lynching taking place and people were indifferent?" he asks. pic.twitter.com/r8iSUjJ3db
One good way to work with the original* is to slowly move the pointer down a vertical line – say the 40-day mark – and light up the country curves on the way down.
*a link – see a note on notes and links
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
the elusiveness of Buddhism, the inclusiveness of Unitarianism (!?)*
“… it is necessary, absolutely necessary to believe in nothing.” —Shunryu Suzuki (!gb)
Unitarians are okay with someone believing in nothing,
in what is empty of everything but the potential for anything
enlightened being is believing in nothing and doing nothing more than need be done
to be and let be, to live and let live with love, compassion joy, and equanimity (!g, !?)
to be and let be, to live and let live with love, compassion joy, and equanimity (!g, !?)
*a link – see a note on notes and links
So…about the government’s balance sheet. pic.twitter.com/aSbXWzGdxS
— pierrepoilievre (@PierrePoilievre) May 13, 2020
Bill Morneau comes across as inadequately briefed. Or maybe just not up to the job. Anyhow, he looks taken completely by surprise: a deer in the headlights.
Money issued directly by a well run, monetarily sovereign government is a zero-interest IOU cancelled in due course when accepted in payment of taxes owed. Any talk of balance sheets in this context is a red herring.
Persons, households, businesses, charities, institutions, city governments, and so forth may be required to balance assets against liabilities and equity (or reserves), but for a monetarily sovereign government, such a balance sheet is irrelevant or even meaningless; what matters is how the price and availability of goods and services people need to live on is affected by government spending.
When the price of essential goods and services rises because the resources required to produce them are hitting their limits, a responsible government can reduce inflationary pressure by cutting spending or raising taxes – or both.
A caveat is in order here. Money issued not to people who use it to buy essential goods and services but to people who use it to buy property rights to existing assets – stocks, real estate, gold bars, and so on – leads to asset price inflation. The bubble bursts, and the dispossessed among us end up even more so.
see also: David Graeber on money as an IOU
Watch how the ultra-wealthy in America gradually raised the taxes of the poor and eventually bent the curve downward until they paid the lowest tax rate of all pic.twitter.com/ukdM84gufs
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) May 13, 2020
David Graeber, 2014-03-18:
[We] … continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say “there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending “crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: “Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … “In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."
In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with “quantitative easing" they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.
What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending “crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite.
source: archived
If new money goes to people who use it to buy property rights in existing assets, the result is asset price inflation (!?)* – a so-called bubble. So, in the current system, it really matters who gets the new money. See Richard Werner on “central bank guidance” (!?)(!g).
Given how things are right now, it’s clear that new money has to go to people who need it for living expenses.*
What form can this new money take? It can be money issued by the government, accepted by all as legal tender because the government guarantees to accept it in payment of taxes. If it goes to people who do not use it to buy property rights in existing assets but use it for living expenses when there is capacity in the system to produce the goods and services they need, then this new money has no inflationary effect.
*a link – see a note on notes and links
fifty members of the Senate of Canada, almost half the chamber, are calling for a basic income plan
— George Atherton (@notrehta) May 3, 2020
“Basic income … can be implemented with speed, simplicity and efficiency by the keepers of our tax files, the Canada Revenue Agency.” #UBI #BasicIncomehttps://t.co/0bHLvU1ifk
When Trudeau was asked about Universal Basic Income – or UBI – at one of his daily press conferences, he responded by saying the government was targeting those in need and was not prepared to support a payout to everyone of all income levels, rich and poor alike. We agree. Basic income can be designed to target only those who need a top-up to provide for and maintain a very basic standard of living. And it can be implemented with speed, simplicity and efficiency by the keepers of our tax files, the Canada Revenue Agency.
source: archived
Pandemic proves it's time for basic income for all, economists say https://t.co/TnARZjwQwp
— CBC Manitoba (@CBCManitoba) May 3, 2020
and now for one on a meeting via video … ending with a plug for the sponsor: Zoom!