alajac

Cramer's Mad Money - We Lost a Good Man (5/8/09)

Jonathan: we just need to change the system, details are on the "alajac" page at u4prez.com, but essentially we need to replace the Federal Reserve system with "ourselves", replace Fed dollars with debt-free US Govt dollars, compensate EVERY legal resident $1000 per month for the government's abrogation of their right to free access to land (see Tom Paine's "Agrarian Justice" plan for argumentation), get rid of ALL personal and corporate welfare and subsidy schemes, get rid of ALL Federal income-based taxation, and drain off excess dollars with a less-than-one-percent, automatically-collected "infrastructure maintenance fee" on any-and-all ELECTRONIC transactions (cash and barter get a pass), and admit other countries as U.S. states if they apply (as we did Texas). Those steps will handle just about EVERYTHING: unemployment, poverty, credit crisis, most crime, homeless vets, end of the FDA and the anti-drug laws (as both are corporate welfare schemes), war, wealth mal-distribution (given enough time, as the "infrastructure maintenance fee" is a de facto tax on accumulated wealth), over-population (by removing the incentive that capital-poor people have to breed their own free labor force), etc. etc. etc.

Is the U.S. Banking System Safe?

Bank stocks bounced because there are many clueless people with lots of money, as evidenced by many of the above comments, I've been warning people about this crash since 2006 (due to an article I read about the lagging correspondence of the S&P500 with the Housing Index); anybody who didn't see this coming shouldn't be trusted with a checkbook, much less funds and banks and the Federal Reserve System.

If the bank owners were personally responsible for loan losses do you think they would have made all those bad loans? They can socialize the losses and take all the profits, so they do. As noted in this great piece, fractional reserve loaning is totally corrupt, a government-approved Ponzi scheme.

Loans from fractional reserve banks are inherently “liar’s loans”, the lie being, the bank is loaning money that it really doesn’t have. The Fed and the thousands of banks creating these liar loans create inflationary conditions that actively discourage thrift: people throw their money at something that hopefully will go up in a lot in price in order to hold onto the buying power of their money, trading the certainty of being screwed in the long run for the chance to possibly avoid being screwed at that future time. Debt-money leaks out value like a bucket with a hole in the bottom leaks out water. This is just going to keep happening until the basic cause gets fixed.

First of all, WE NEED OUR OWN DEBT-FREE CURRENCY, backed by all of the real estate owned by the United States (which is, in fact, all of the real estate within the national boundaries, and really more than that including other nations whose continued claim to existence depends on U.S. defense of that claim; case-in-point, Kuwait, 1991), we should distribute that new currency in monthly equi-dollar amounts to all legal residents (amounts due minors to be held in trust accounts). Also, we need bankers to be held financially responsible for any loss of depositors’ money (if they want to gamble with fractional reserves, it’s the bank owners who should pay, not taxpayers, and if you lose your own money by depositing it in a fractional reserve bank, again, it’s YOU who should pay, not taxpayers. How can we ever expect things to get right with a system based on socializing losses?

Next, we should REPLACE ALL FEDERAL NON-CONSUMPTION TAXES with a one-half percent(+/-) Tobin-type tax on ALL outgoing electronic transactions (avoidable by using cash for all transactions, and, since avoidable, the tax will be arguably being paid voluntarily) in order to:

1. Pay off the national debt,

2. Repair the damage that the U.S. government has done to persons and the free market by favoritism (reparations for having “Constitutionalized” slavery might be considered) and excessive regulation (e.g., we need about 4 times as many doctors and healthcare professionals as we currently have in order to have enough competition extant to get medical costs back to the realm of affordability, and we would have had them had there been a free market in medical education), and

3. Extract and destroy excess currency as required to avoid inflation.

No other form of Federal non-consumption tax would be allowed (this tax could go to zero when it has done its job if there is no inflation in the system).

The monthly equi-dollar distribution amounts should be of sufficient quantity (assuming $1000, that’s $24,000 Federal tax-free per couple, plus whatever wages and other income they bring in) to be considered sufficient replacement for all forms of corporate, farm and personal welfare, including subsidies, welfare, tax incentives, Social Security (to be phased out), Medicare, the Federal Minimum Wage law, and ALL OTHER forms of Federal financial redistribution schemes; there won’t be any need for separate Federal retirement accounts since there won’t be any income or investment taxes.
For those who like their political solutions morally justified, the monthly equi-dollar distribution amounts can be considered “justified compensation” for the denial of free access to all the property that the government has privatized.

With everybody getting the same monthly amount, and everybody paying the same percentage increase of fiat money, there is no redistribution nor inherent injustice in the plan.