The Fed was conceived in iniquity and raised in sin
Reuters' Analysis; Excerpt on the Federal Income Tax
Economists like Emmanuel Saez, the University of
California, Berkeley scholar who rates as the leading authority on high
incomes, points out that refusal to revisit stiff top marginal rates makes no
sense. Top tax rates today could double, Saez and his colleagues say, without
jeopardizing our economic health.
Saez has more than economic theory on his side. He
has history. On this anniversary of
the first income tax, let’s be sure to remember that history — and the
Americans who made it. In
1909, former Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh asked “Why should the colossal
incomes and the colossal accumulations of the possessors of what Mr. Carnegie
himself calls surplus wealth continue to be exempted from proper
taxation?”
“Gigantic fortunes,” MacVeagh said, serve as “serious
obstacles to the contentment, the peace and the healthy growth of the community
as to call for their abatement.” Let’s stop treating our
egalitarian-minded forebears like MacVeagh as crazy old uncles we hideaway in
the attic. Let’s invite them into our public policy parlors. They have
much to share. We have much to learn.
*********
The Analysis of the
Analysis
The main trouble with the above analysis (and there are
many troubles to be sure) is that this brief history leaves out the role of the
Federal Reserve. It was the creation of the dollar reserve structure that created the
US’s 20th century “prosperity” not the enforced confiscation of
taxes.
The Fed created the boom of the Roaring 20s by debasing
the dollar, supposedly to help the English pound regain its status as the
world’s dominant currency. In 1929,
the market finally, quite understandably, crashed and the long, dark
night of the Depression swept over both the US and most of the rest of the
world.
Panicked, Fed bankers apparently prevailed on Franklin
Delano Roosevelt to confiscate gold. This was so that US citizens would not trade
in their “dollars” for gold at commercial banks and find out that the banks had none
because the Fed had transgressed against the legal dollar/gold reserve ratio.
That was, after all, how the Fed had created a spurious boom and debased
the dollar, by printing more paper than they were allowed to, given their gold
holdings.
Yes, the Fed was conceived in iniquity and raised in sin.
Its
history is a kind of continued criminal action. As the Great Depression
rolled on, the bankers and the US and British political elite became more and
more worried
about civil insurrection.
Fortunately, and most conveniently, a world war broke
out. After the war, the US was the single, lone,
dominant standing nation-state. Its gross national product for a while
represented 50 percent of the world’s, apparently. And when the US spent itself
almost into oblivion during the Vietnam War, the result was a cessation of the gold
standard entirely and the birth of the petrodollar.
Richard Nixon dispatched “Super K” – Henry Kissinger – to
Saudi Arabia to instruct the Saud family to trade dollars only for oil. As the
biggest producer of oil in the world, Saudi Arabia was also the marginal hinge
and its currency policies were therefore the policies of OPEC.
The world would now have to hold US dollars to buy oil
and thus there would always be a demand for these dollars.
This deal gained Kissinger a TIME magazine cover picturing him as
Superman and gave rise to a thousand myths about modern US “exceptionalism.”
The original US exceptionalism had to do with its
agrarian republican heritage, in large part enunciated by Thomas Jefferson. The
US’s late 20th century exceptionalism as enunciated by a controlled mainstream
media suggested fuzzily that “American values” were responsible for the US’s
extraordinary prosperity. US workers were simply more
efficient, unions were more determined, individuals more
patriotic, science more expert, multinationals more determinedly
managerial, etc. The US was indeed a shining house on the hill … only it wasn’t.
US prosperity was built on Mao’s famous dictum: Power
springs from the barrel of a gun. We know today that there is oil all over the
Earth. But throughout the 20th century, top elites managed to
control discoveries and exploitation via “green” maneuverings and repetitive
fictions such as “peak oil.”
This is the REAL history of the 20th century. US
prosperity was built from calculated resource scarcity and determined
intimidation of the Saud family and other oil producers. Because the world had
to hold dollars, the US could print as many of them as it wanted. No other
nation could do so.
The dollar tribute poured into the US. Never had there
been such a mighty empire. The dollar reserve system allowed the power elite to
build an enormous military and a vast penal system. Gradually, US Intel spread
its agents and influence around the world.
The US’s 20th century prosperity had NOTHING
to do with graduated taxation or the idea advanced by the above Reuters analysis
that somehow a political determination to create a “moral” people with
income-leveling facilities sparked US power and prosperity in the 20th
century.
Leaving aside any potentially logical reasons to forcibly
confiscate wealth, the secret monetary history of the US shows us clearly how
US and British elites manipulated the world’s monetary system to gain riches
grander than Croesus’s.
For those with the stomach to face reality (and if you
are reading this, perhaps you are such a person) there is something else to
consider that has been mentioned before. It is the idea that the power elite
responsible for the petrodollar has decided to abandon it.
We base this conclusion on the sudden emergence of shale
oil and the increasing Western spawned violence destabilizing the Middle East.
It seems that a move is afoot by the dollar’s controllers to gradually
substitute something else for the dollar, a more globalized “bancor” – as Keynes
once predicted.
In any event, these are trends you should be careful to
watch. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media’s dominant social themes. The Anglo
sphere remains the world’s most powerful entity and it is highly doubtful that
global financial maneuverings would be taking place without its acquiescence.
Of course, you will read none of the above in the Reuters
articles or the main stream media, only that the moral imperatives of leveling
created the prosperity that US citizens cherished in the 20th
century. How this explains the economic chaos of the 21st
remains a mystery into which Reuters or the main stream media does not delve.
Probably for obvious reasons.
Economists
like Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley scholar who
rates as the leading authority on high incomes, points out that this
refusal to revisit stiff top marginal rates makes no sense. Top tax
rates today could double, Saez and his colleagues say, without
jeopardizing our economic health.
Saez has more than economic theory on his side. He has history. On this anniversary of the first income tax, let’s be sure to remember that history — and the Americans who made it. In 1909, former Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh asked “Why should the colossal incomes and the colossal accumulations of the possessors of what Mr. Carnegie himself calls surplus wealth continue to be exempted from proper taxation?”
“Gigantic fortunes,” MacVeagh said, serve as “serious obstacles to the contentment, the peace and the healthy growth of the community as to call for their abatement.” Let’s stop treating our egalitarian-minded forebears like MacVeagh as crazy old uncles we hide away in the attic. Let’s invite them into our public policy parlors. They have much to share. We have much to learn.
The main trouble with this analysis (and there are many troubles to be sure) is that this brief history leaves out the role of the Federal Reserve. It was the creation of the dollar reserve structure that created the US’s 20th century “prosperity” not the enforced confiscation of taxes.
The Fed created the boom of the Roaring 20s by debasing the dollar, supposedly to help the English pound regain its status as the world’s dominant currency. In 1929, the market finally, quite understandably, crashed and the long, dark night of the Depression swept over both the US and most of the rest of the world.
Panicked, Fed bankers apparently prevailed on Franklin Delano
Roosevelt to confiscate gold. This was so that US citizens would not
trade in their “dollars” for gold at commercial banks and find out that
the banks had none because the Fed had transgressed against the legal
dollar/gold reserve ratio. That was, after all, how the Fed had created a
spurious boom and debased the dollar, by printing more paper than they
were allowed to, given their gold holdings.
Yes, the Fed was conceived in iniquity and raised in sin. Its history is a kind of continued criminal action. As the Great Depression rolled on, the bankers and the US and British political elite became more and more worried about civil insurrection. Fortunately, and most conveniently, a world war broke out.
After the war, the US was the single, lone, dominant standing nation-state. Its gross national product for a while represented 50 percent of the world’s, apparently. And when the US spent itself almost into oblivion during the Vietnam War, the result was a cessation of the gold standard entirely and the birth of the petrodollar.
Richard Nixon dispatched “Super K” – Henry Kissinger – to Saudi Arabia to instruct the Saud family to trade dollars only for oil. As the biggest producer of oil in the world, Saudi Arabia was also the marginal hinge and its currency policies were therefore the policies of OPEC.
The world would now have to hold US dollars to buy oil and thus there would always be a demand for these dollars. This deal gained Kissinger a TIME magazine cover picturing him as Superman and gave rise to a thousand myths about modern US “exceptionalism.”
The original US exceptionalism had to do with its agrarian republican heritage, in large part enunciated by Thomas Jefferson. The US’s late 20th century exceptionalism as enunciated by a controlled mainstream media suggested fuzzily that “American values” were responsible for the US’s extraordinary prosperity. US workers were simply more efficient, unions were more determined, individuals more patriotic, science more expert, multinationals more determinedly managerial, etc.
The US was indeed a shining house on the hill … only it wasn’t.
US prosperity was built on Mao’s famous dictum: Power springs from the barrel of a gun. We know today that there is oil all over the Earth. But throughout the 20th century, top elites managed to control discoveries and exploitation via “green” maneuverings and repetitive fictions such as “peak oil.”
This is the REAL history of the 20th century. US prosperity was built from calculated resource scarcity and determined intimidation of the Saud family and other oil producers. Because the world had to hold dollars, the US could print as many of them as it wanted. No other nation could do so.
The dollar tribute poured into the US. Never had there been such a mighty empire. The dollar reserve system allowed the power elite to build an enormous military and a vast penal system. Gradually, US Intel spread its agents and influence around the world.
The US’s 20th century prosperity had NOTHING to do with graduated taxation or the idea advanced by this Reuters editorial that somehow a political determination to create a “moral” people with income-leveling facilities sparked US power and prosperity in the 20th century.
Leaving aside any potentially logical reasons to forcibly confiscate wealth, the secret monetary history of the US shows us clearly how US and British elites manipulated the world’s monetary system to gain riches grander than Croesus’s.
For those with the stomach to face reality (and if you are reading this, perhaps you are such a person) there is something else to consider that we have mentioned before. It is the idea that the power elite responsible for the petrodollar has decided to abandon it.
We base this conclusion on the sudden emergence of shale oil and the increasing Western spawned violence destabilizing the Middle East. It seems to us that a move is afoot by the dollar’s controllers to gradually substitute something else for the dollar, a more globalized “bancor” – as Keynes once predicted.
In any event, these are trends you should be careful to watch. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media’s dominant social themes. The Anglosphere remains the world’s most powerful entity and it is highly doubtful that global financial maneuverings would be taking place without its acquiescence.
Of course, you will read none of this in the Reuters article, only that the moral imperatives of leveling created the prosperity that US citizens cherished in the 20th century. How this explains the economic chaos of the 21st remains a mystery into which the article does not delve. Probably for obvious reasons.
- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/34651/This-Sh-t-Is-Bananas/#sthash.q9mdI0AJ.dpuf
Saez has more than economic theory on his side. He has history. On this anniversary of the first income tax, let’s be sure to remember that history — and the Americans who made it. In 1909, former Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh asked “Why should the colossal incomes and the colossal accumulations of the possessors of what Mr. Carnegie himself calls surplus wealth continue to be exempted from proper taxation?”
“Gigantic fortunes,” MacVeagh said, serve as “serious obstacles to the contentment, the peace and the healthy growth of the community as to call for their abatement.” Let’s stop treating our egalitarian-minded forebears like MacVeagh as crazy old uncles we hide away in the attic. Let’s invite them into our public policy parlors. They have much to share. We have much to learn.
The main trouble with this analysis (and there are many troubles to be sure) is that this brief history leaves out the role of the Federal Reserve. It was the creation of the dollar reserve structure that created the US’s 20th century “prosperity” not the enforced confiscation of taxes.
The Fed created the boom of the Roaring 20s by debasing the dollar, supposedly to help the English pound regain its status as the world’s dominant currency. In 1929, the market finally, quite understandably, crashed and the long, dark night of the Depression swept over both the US and most of the rest of the world.
Yes, the Fed was conceived in iniquity and raised in sin. Its history is a kind of continued criminal action. As the Great Depression rolled on, the bankers and the US and British political elite became more and more worried about civil insurrection. Fortunately, and most conveniently, a world war broke out.
After the war, the US was the single, lone, dominant standing nation-state. Its gross national product for a while represented 50 percent of the world’s, apparently. And when the US spent itself almost into oblivion during the Vietnam War, the result was a cessation of the gold standard entirely and the birth of the petrodollar.
Richard Nixon dispatched “Super K” – Henry Kissinger – to Saudi Arabia to instruct the Saud family to trade dollars only for oil. As the biggest producer of oil in the world, Saudi Arabia was also the marginal hinge and its currency policies were therefore the policies of OPEC.
The world would now have to hold US dollars to buy oil and thus there would always be a demand for these dollars. This deal gained Kissinger a TIME magazine cover picturing him as Superman and gave rise to a thousand myths about modern US “exceptionalism.”
The original US exceptionalism had to do with its agrarian republican heritage, in large part enunciated by Thomas Jefferson. The US’s late 20th century exceptionalism as enunciated by a controlled mainstream media suggested fuzzily that “American values” were responsible for the US’s extraordinary prosperity. US workers were simply more efficient, unions were more determined, individuals more patriotic, science more expert, multinationals more determinedly managerial, etc.
The US was indeed a shining house on the hill … only it wasn’t.
US prosperity was built on Mao’s famous dictum: Power springs from the barrel of a gun. We know today that there is oil all over the Earth. But throughout the 20th century, top elites managed to control discoveries and exploitation via “green” maneuverings and repetitive fictions such as “peak oil.”
This is the REAL history of the 20th century. US prosperity was built from calculated resource scarcity and determined intimidation of the Saud family and other oil producers. Because the world had to hold dollars, the US could print as many of them as it wanted. No other nation could do so.
The dollar tribute poured into the US. Never had there been such a mighty empire. The dollar reserve system allowed the power elite to build an enormous military and a vast penal system. Gradually, US Intel spread its agents and influence around the world.
The US’s 20th century prosperity had NOTHING to do with graduated taxation or the idea advanced by this Reuters editorial that somehow a political determination to create a “moral” people with income-leveling facilities sparked US power and prosperity in the 20th century.
Leaving aside any potentially logical reasons to forcibly confiscate wealth, the secret monetary history of the US shows us clearly how US and British elites manipulated the world’s monetary system to gain riches grander than Croesus’s.
For those with the stomach to face reality (and if you are reading this, perhaps you are such a person) there is something else to consider that we have mentioned before. It is the idea that the power elite responsible for the petrodollar has decided to abandon it.
We base this conclusion on the sudden emergence of shale oil and the increasing Western spawned violence destabilizing the Middle East. It seems to us that a move is afoot by the dollar’s controllers to gradually substitute something else for the dollar, a more globalized “bancor” – as Keynes once predicted.
In any event, these are trends you should be careful to watch. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media’s dominant social themes. The Anglosphere remains the world’s most powerful entity and it is highly doubtful that global financial maneuverings would be taking place without its acquiescence.
Of course, you will read none of this in the Reuters article, only that the moral imperatives of leveling created the prosperity that US citizens cherished in the 20th century. How this explains the economic chaos of the 21st remains a mystery into which the article does not delve. Probably for obvious reasons.
- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/34651/This-Sh-t-Is-Bananas/#sthash.q9mdI0AJ.dpuf
Economists
like Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley scholar who
rates as the leading authority on high incomes, points out that this
refusal to revisit stiff top marginal rates makes no sense. Top tax
rates today could double, Saez and his colleagues say, without
jeopardizing our economic health.
Saez has more than economic theory on his side. He has history. On this anniversary of the first income tax, let’s be sure to remember that history — and the Americans who made it. In 1909, former Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh asked “Why should the colossal incomes and the colossal accumulations of the possessors of what Mr. Carnegie himself calls surplus wealth continue to be exempted from proper taxation?”
“Gigantic fortunes,” MacVeagh said, serve as “serious obstacles to the contentment, the peace and the healthy growth of the community as to call for their abatement.” Let’s stop treating our egalitarian-minded forebears like MacVeagh as crazy old uncles we hide away in the attic. Let’s invite them into our public policy parlors. They have much to share. We have much to learn.
The main trouble with this analysis (and there are many troubles to be sure) is that this brief history leaves out the role of the Federal Reserve. It was the creation of the dollar reserve structure that created the US’s 20th century “prosperity” not the enforced confiscation of taxes.
The Fed created the boom of the Roaring 20s by debasing the dollar, supposedly to help the English pound regain its status as the world’s dominant currency. In 1929, the market finally, quite understandably, crashed and the long, dark night of the Depression swept over both the US and most of the rest of the world.
Panicked, Fed bankers apparently prevailed on Franklin Delano
Roosevelt to confiscate gold. This was so that US citizens would not
trade in their “dollars” for gold at commercial banks and find out that
the banks had none because the Fed had transgressed against the legal
dollar/gold reserve ratio. That was, after all, how the Fed had created a
spurious boom and debased the dollar, by printing more paper than they
were allowed to, given their gold holdings.
Yes, the Fed was conceived in iniquity and raised in sin. Its history is a kind of continued criminal action. As the Great Depression rolled on, the bankers and the US and British political elite became more and more worried about civil insurrection. Fortunately, and most conveniently, a world war broke out.
After the war, the US was the single, lone, dominant standing nation-state. Its gross national product for a while represented 50 percent of the world’s, apparently. And when the US spent itself almost into oblivion during the Vietnam War, the result was a cessation of the gold standard entirely and the birth of the petrodollar.
Richard Nixon dispatched “Super K” – Henry Kissinger – to Saudi Arabia to instruct the Saud family to trade dollars only for oil. As the biggest producer of oil in the world, Saudi Arabia was also the marginal hinge and its currency policies were therefore the policies of OPEC.
The world would now have to hold US dollars to buy oil and thus there would always be a demand for these dollars. This deal gained Kissinger a TIME magazine cover picturing him as Superman and gave rise to a thousand myths about modern US “exceptionalism.”
The original US exceptionalism had to do with its agrarian republican heritage, in large part enunciated by Thomas Jefferson. The US’s late 20th century exceptionalism as enunciated by a controlled mainstream media suggested fuzzily that “American values” were responsible for the US’s extraordinary prosperity. US workers were simply more efficient, unions were more determined, individuals more patriotic, science more expert, multinationals more determinedly managerial, etc.
The US was indeed a shining house on the hill … only it wasn’t.
US prosperity was built on Mao’s famous dictum: Power springs from the barrel of a gun. We know today that there is oil all over the Earth. But throughout the 20th century, top elites managed to control discoveries and exploitation via “green” maneuverings and repetitive fictions such as “peak oil.”
This is the REAL history of the 20th century. US prosperity was built from calculated resource scarcity and determined intimidation of the Saud family and other oil producers. Because the world had to hold dollars, the US could print as many of them as it wanted. No other nation could do so.
The dollar tribute poured into the US. Never had there been such a mighty empire. The dollar reserve system allowed the power elite to build an enormous military and a vast penal system. Gradually, US Intel spread its agents and influence around the world.
The US’s 20th century prosperity had NOTHING to do with graduated taxation or the idea advanced by this Reuters editorial that somehow a political determination to create a “moral” people with income-leveling facilities sparked US power and prosperity in the 20th century.
Leaving aside any potentially logical reasons to forcibly confiscate wealth, the secret monetary history of the US shows us clearly how US and British elites manipulated the world’s monetary system to gain riches grander than Croesus’s.
For those with the stomach to face reality (and if you are reading this, perhaps you are such a person) there is something else to consider that we have mentioned before. It is the idea that the power elite responsible for the petrodollar has decided to abandon it.
We base this conclusion on the sudden emergence of shale oil and the increasing Western spawned violence destabilizing the Middle East. It seems to us that a move is afoot by the dollar’s controllers to gradually substitute something else for the dollar, a more globalized “bancor” – as Keynes once predicted.
In any event, these are trends you should be careful to watch. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media’s dominant social themes. The Anglosphere remains the world’s most powerful entity and it is highly doubtful that global financial maneuverings would be taking place without its acquiescence.
Of course, you will read none of this in the Reuters article, only that the moral imperatives of leveling created the prosperity that US citizens cherished in the 20th century. How this explains the economic chaos of the 21st remains a mystery into which the article does not delve. Probably for obvious reasons.
- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/34651/This-Sh-t-Is-Bananas/#sthash.q9mdI0AJ.dpuf
Saez has more than economic theory on his side. He has history. On this anniversary of the first income tax, let’s be sure to remember that history — and the Americans who made it. In 1909, former Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh asked “Why should the colossal incomes and the colossal accumulations of the possessors of what Mr. Carnegie himself calls surplus wealth continue to be exempted from proper taxation?”
“Gigantic fortunes,” MacVeagh said, serve as “serious obstacles to the contentment, the peace and the healthy growth of the community as to call for their abatement.” Let’s stop treating our egalitarian-minded forebears like MacVeagh as crazy old uncles we hide away in the attic. Let’s invite them into our public policy parlors. They have much to share. We have much to learn.
The main trouble with this analysis (and there are many troubles to be sure) is that this brief history leaves out the role of the Federal Reserve. It was the creation of the dollar reserve structure that created the US’s 20th century “prosperity” not the enforced confiscation of taxes.
The Fed created the boom of the Roaring 20s by debasing the dollar, supposedly to help the English pound regain its status as the world’s dominant currency. In 1929, the market finally, quite understandably, crashed and the long, dark night of the Depression swept over both the US and most of the rest of the world.
Yes, the Fed was conceived in iniquity and raised in sin. Its history is a kind of continued criminal action. As the Great Depression rolled on, the bankers and the US and British political elite became more and more worried about civil insurrection. Fortunately, and most conveniently, a world war broke out.
After the war, the US was the single, lone, dominant standing nation-state. Its gross national product for a while represented 50 percent of the world’s, apparently. And when the US spent itself almost into oblivion during the Vietnam War, the result was a cessation of the gold standard entirely and the birth of the petrodollar.
Richard Nixon dispatched “Super K” – Henry Kissinger – to Saudi Arabia to instruct the Saud family to trade dollars only for oil. As the biggest producer of oil in the world, Saudi Arabia was also the marginal hinge and its currency policies were therefore the policies of OPEC.
The world would now have to hold US dollars to buy oil and thus there would always be a demand for these dollars. This deal gained Kissinger a TIME magazine cover picturing him as Superman and gave rise to a thousand myths about modern US “exceptionalism.”
The original US exceptionalism had to do with its agrarian republican heritage, in large part enunciated by Thomas Jefferson. The US’s late 20th century exceptionalism as enunciated by a controlled mainstream media suggested fuzzily that “American values” were responsible for the US’s extraordinary prosperity. US workers were simply more efficient, unions were more determined, individuals more patriotic, science more expert, multinationals more determinedly managerial, etc.
The US was indeed a shining house on the hill … only it wasn’t.
US prosperity was built on Mao’s famous dictum: Power springs from the barrel of a gun. We know today that there is oil all over the Earth. But throughout the 20th century, top elites managed to control discoveries and exploitation via “green” maneuverings and repetitive fictions such as “peak oil.”
This is the REAL history of the 20th century. US prosperity was built from calculated resource scarcity and determined intimidation of the Saud family and other oil producers. Because the world had to hold dollars, the US could print as many of them as it wanted. No other nation could do so.
The dollar tribute poured into the US. Never had there been such a mighty empire. The dollar reserve system allowed the power elite to build an enormous military and a vast penal system. Gradually, US Intel spread its agents and influence around the world.
The US’s 20th century prosperity had NOTHING to do with graduated taxation or the idea advanced by this Reuters editorial that somehow a political determination to create a “moral” people with income-leveling facilities sparked US power and prosperity in the 20th century.
Leaving aside any potentially logical reasons to forcibly confiscate wealth, the secret monetary history of the US shows us clearly how US and British elites manipulated the world’s monetary system to gain riches grander than Croesus’s.
For those with the stomach to face reality (and if you are reading this, perhaps you are such a person) there is something else to consider that we have mentioned before. It is the idea that the power elite responsible for the petrodollar has decided to abandon it.
We base this conclusion on the sudden emergence of shale oil and the increasing Western spawned violence destabilizing the Middle East. It seems to us that a move is afoot by the dollar’s controllers to gradually substitute something else for the dollar, a more globalized “bancor” – as Keynes once predicted.
In any event, these are trends you should be careful to watch. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media’s dominant social themes. The Anglosphere remains the world’s most powerful entity and it is highly doubtful that global financial maneuverings would be taking place without its acquiescence.
Of course, you will read none of this in the Reuters article, only that the moral imperatives of leveling created the prosperity that US citizens cherished in the 20th century. How this explains the economic chaos of the 21st remains a mystery into which the article does not delve. Probably for obvious reasons.
- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/34651/This-Sh-t-Is-Bananas/#sthash.q9mdI0AJ.dpuf
Economists
like Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley scholar who
rates as the leading authority on high incomes, points out that this
refusal to revisit stiff top marginal rates makes no sense. Top tax
rates today could double, Saez and his colleagues say, without
jeopardizing our economic health.
Saez has more than economic theory on his side. He has history. On this anniversary of the first income tax, let’s be sure to remember that history — and the Americans who made it. In 1909, former Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh asked “Why should the colossal incomes and the colossal accumulations of the possessors of what Mr. Carnegie himself calls surplus wealth continue to be exempted from proper taxation?”
“Gigantic fortunes,” MacVeagh said, serve as “serious obstacles to the contentment, the peace and the healthy growth of the community as to call for their abatement.” Let’s stop treating our egalitarian-minded forebears like MacVeagh as crazy old uncles we hide away in the attic. Let’s invite them into our public policy parlors. They have much to share. We have much to learn.
The main trouble with this analysis (and there are many troubles to be sure) is that this brief history leaves out the role of the Federal Reserve. It was the creation of the dollar reserve structure that created the US’s 20th century “prosperity” not the enforced confiscation of taxes.
The Fed created the boom of the Roaring 20s by debasing the dollar, supposedly to help the English pound regain its status as the world’s dominant currency. In 1929, the market finally, quite understandably, crashed and the long, dark night of the Depression swept over both the US and most of the rest of the world.
Panicked, Fed bankers apparently prevailed on Franklin Delano
Roosevelt to confiscate gold. This was so that US citizens would not
trade in their “dollars” for gold at commercial banks and find out that
the banks had none because the Fed had transgressed against the legal
dollar/gold reserve ratio. That was, after all, how the Fed had created a
spurious boom and debased the dollar, by printing more paper than they
were allowed to, given their gold holdings.
Yes, the Fed was conceived in iniquity and raised in sin. Its history is a kind of continued criminal action. As the Great Depression rolled on, the bankers and the US and British political elite became more and more worried about civil insurrection. Fortunately, and most conveniently, a world war broke out.
After the war, the US was the single, lone, dominant standing nation-state. Its gross national product for a while represented 50 percent of the world’s, apparently. And when the US spent itself almost into oblivion during the Vietnam War, the result was a cessation of the gold standard entirely and the birth of the petrodollar.
Richard Nixon dispatched “Super K” – Henry Kissinger – to Saudi Arabia to instruct the Saud family to trade dollars only for oil. As the biggest producer of oil in the world, Saudi Arabia was also the marginal hinge and its currency policies were therefore the policies of OPEC.
The world would now have to hold US dollars to buy oil and thus there would always be a demand for these dollars. This deal gained Kissinger a TIME magazine cover picturing him as Superman and gave rise to a thousand myths about modern US “exceptionalism.”
The original US exceptionalism had to do with its agrarian republican heritage, in large part enunciated by Thomas Jefferson. The US’s late 20th century exceptionalism as enunciated by a controlled mainstream media suggested fuzzily that “American values” were responsible for the US’s extraordinary prosperity. US workers were simply more efficient, unions were more determined, individuals more patriotic, science more expert, multinationals more determinedly managerial, etc.
The US was indeed a shining house on the hill … only it wasn’t.
US prosperity was built on Mao’s famous dictum: Power springs from the barrel of a gun. We know today that there is oil all over the Earth. But throughout the 20th century, top elites managed to control discoveries and exploitation via “green” maneuverings and repetitive fictions such as “peak oil.”
This is the REAL history of the 20th century. US prosperity was built from calculated resource scarcity and determined intimidation of the Saud family and other oil producers. Because the world had to hold dollars, the US could print as many of them as it wanted. No other nation could do so.
The dollar tribute poured into the US. Never had there been such a mighty empire. The dollar reserve system allowed the power elite to build an enormous military and a vast penal system. Gradually, US Intel spread its agents and influence around the world.
The US’s 20th century prosperity had NOTHING to do with graduated taxation or the idea advanced by this Reuters editorial that somehow a political determination to create a “moral” people with income-leveling facilities sparked US power and prosperity in the 20th century.
Leaving aside any potentially logical reasons to forcibly confiscate wealth, the secret monetary history of the US shows us clearly how US and British elites manipulated the world’s monetary system to gain riches grander than Croesus’s.
For those with the stomach to face reality (and if you are reading this, perhaps you are such a person) there is something else to consider that we have mentioned before. It is the idea that the power elite responsible for the petrodollar has decided to abandon it.
We base this conclusion on the sudden emergence of shale oil and the increasing Western spawned violence destabilizing the Middle East. It seems to us that a move is afoot by the dollar’s controllers to gradually substitute something else for the dollar, a more globalized “bancor” – as Keynes once predicted.
In any event, these are trends you should be careful to watch. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media’s dominant social themes. The Anglosphere remains the world’s most powerful entity and it is highly doubtful that global financial maneuverings would be taking place without its acquiescence.
Of course, you will read none of this in the Reuters article, only that the moral imperatives of leveling created the prosperity that US citizens cherished in the 20th century. How this explains the economic chaos of the 21st remains a mystery into which the article does not delve. Probably for obvious reasons.
- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/34651/This-Sh-t-Is-Bananas/#sthash.q9mdI0AJ.dpuf
Saez has more than economic theory on his side. He has history. On this anniversary of the first income tax, let’s be sure to remember that history — and the Americans who made it. In 1909, former Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh asked “Why should the colossal incomes and the colossal accumulations of the possessors of what Mr. Carnegie himself calls surplus wealth continue to be exempted from proper taxation?”
“Gigantic fortunes,” MacVeagh said, serve as “serious obstacles to the contentment, the peace and the healthy growth of the community as to call for their abatement.” Let’s stop treating our egalitarian-minded forebears like MacVeagh as crazy old uncles we hide away in the attic. Let’s invite them into our public policy parlors. They have much to share. We have much to learn.
The main trouble with this analysis (and there are many troubles to be sure) is that this brief history leaves out the role of the Federal Reserve. It was the creation of the dollar reserve structure that created the US’s 20th century “prosperity” not the enforced confiscation of taxes.
The Fed created the boom of the Roaring 20s by debasing the dollar, supposedly to help the English pound regain its status as the world’s dominant currency. In 1929, the market finally, quite understandably, crashed and the long, dark night of the Depression swept over both the US and most of the rest of the world.
Yes, the Fed was conceived in iniquity and raised in sin. Its history is a kind of continued criminal action. As the Great Depression rolled on, the bankers and the US and British political elite became more and more worried about civil insurrection. Fortunately, and most conveniently, a world war broke out.
After the war, the US was the single, lone, dominant standing nation-state. Its gross national product for a while represented 50 percent of the world’s, apparently. And when the US spent itself almost into oblivion during the Vietnam War, the result was a cessation of the gold standard entirely and the birth of the petrodollar.
Richard Nixon dispatched “Super K” – Henry Kissinger – to Saudi Arabia to instruct the Saud family to trade dollars only for oil. As the biggest producer of oil in the world, Saudi Arabia was also the marginal hinge and its currency policies were therefore the policies of OPEC.
The world would now have to hold US dollars to buy oil and thus there would always be a demand for these dollars. This deal gained Kissinger a TIME magazine cover picturing him as Superman and gave rise to a thousand myths about modern US “exceptionalism.”
The original US exceptionalism had to do with its agrarian republican heritage, in large part enunciated by Thomas Jefferson. The US’s late 20th century exceptionalism as enunciated by a controlled mainstream media suggested fuzzily that “American values” were responsible for the US’s extraordinary prosperity. US workers were simply more efficient, unions were more determined, individuals more patriotic, science more expert, multinationals more determinedly managerial, etc.
The US was indeed a shining house on the hill … only it wasn’t.
US prosperity was built on Mao’s famous dictum: Power springs from the barrel of a gun. We know today that there is oil all over the Earth. But throughout the 20th century, top elites managed to control discoveries and exploitation via “green” maneuverings and repetitive fictions such as “peak oil.”
This is the REAL history of the 20th century. US prosperity was built from calculated resource scarcity and determined intimidation of the Saud family and other oil producers. Because the world had to hold dollars, the US could print as many of them as it wanted. No other nation could do so.
The dollar tribute poured into the US. Never had there been such a mighty empire. The dollar reserve system allowed the power elite to build an enormous military and a vast penal system. Gradually, US Intel spread its agents and influence around the world.
The US’s 20th century prosperity had NOTHING to do with graduated taxation or the idea advanced by this Reuters editorial that somehow a political determination to create a “moral” people with income-leveling facilities sparked US power and prosperity in the 20th century.
Leaving aside any potentially logical reasons to forcibly confiscate wealth, the secret monetary history of the US shows us clearly how US and British elites manipulated the world’s monetary system to gain riches grander than Croesus’s.
For those with the stomach to face reality (and if you are reading this, perhaps you are such a person) there is something else to consider that we have mentioned before. It is the idea that the power elite responsible for the petrodollar has decided to abandon it.
We base this conclusion on the sudden emergence of shale oil and the increasing Western spawned violence destabilizing the Middle East. It seems to us that a move is afoot by the dollar’s controllers to gradually substitute something else for the dollar, a more globalized “bancor” – as Keynes once predicted.
In any event, these are trends you should be careful to watch. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media’s dominant social themes. The Anglosphere remains the world’s most powerful entity and it is highly doubtful that global financial maneuverings would be taking place without its acquiescence.
Of course, you will read none of this in the Reuters article, only that the moral imperatives of leveling created the prosperity that US citizens cherished in the 20th century. How this explains the economic chaos of the 21st remains a mystery into which the article does not delve. Probably for obvious reasons.
- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/34651/This-Sh-t-Is-Bananas/#sthash.q9mdI0AJ.dpuf
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