The Grizzly Bearish, No Bull Plan, for the Future of United States of America:

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The Federal Reserve’s current two-fold mandate to pursue low inflation and job creation is rescinded and replaced with the goal of providing a strong dollar as the primary basis of national financial security. A gold standard is totally unworkable in the modern world; a strong dollar standard only requires responsible, consistent monetary policy.

Our Federal government’s portion of national GDP will be reduced to 14 percent over a period of ten years. During that period the national defense portion will be reduced to 2 percent of GDP, through the dismantling of the military-industrial-Keynesian-complex. This will very likely produce another recession, but will reset a solid foundation, for future economic growth that looks optimistically forward.

The current progressive income tax will be replaced with a standard flat tax rate on individuals and corporations of 20 percent, with the only exception and exemption for the poorest Americans. This rate will continue until such time as the nation is again established on a sound financial debt-reduction basis. Then and only then can that rate be reduced.

Social Security and Medicare withholdings from individuals will be maintained at current levels, but the cap of total contributions on a yearly basis will be removed. In pursuit of a sound dollar financial monetary policy, those funds will go into a true lock box concept, with no ability of the legislative and executive branches to use those funds; except as truly marketable and repayable investment bond securities.

National catastrophic healthcare coverage will be instituted for all citizens and documented workers, being funded through a national sales tax on goods and services. This tax can be used for no other purposes. That rate will be determined by actuarial data. Within that program every individual will be responsible for the first $50,000 of the defined catastrophic illness or other healthcare event, except for what is currently defined as long-term care, where the maximum individual liability will be $100,000. Individuals will be able to buy insurance to cover those minimums through market-driven insurance options. Over time this national tax will be reduced as current Medicare and Medicaid are gradually phased out over a period of twenty-five years.

The original Grizzly USA post is now found in the Wonder Springs Chronicle Archives.

Tags: Grizzly USA, economics

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You can’t create a twenty-first century society based upon an educational system promoting the myth that you can be all you can be — by just showing up; enforced by an mediocre bureaucracy – which essentially just shows up; built on a twentieth century industrial model to create workers for factories — that no longer exist; and enforced by a geopolitical financial establishment — totally hedged against any risk.
— Jerry Bannon, The Wonder Springs Chronicle, 25 January 2012, Publisher and angry American citizen

By attempting to pick up where we left off last week and close out this brief series, this article runs significantly longer than I normally like, but I think the context helps provide a cogent framework to build toward a positive future economic path. Borrowing the outline, and placing it in a totally different context from what was presented in a Monday evening presentation I attended, the conclusion is: Make wine, not argument, and definitely not war.

When your first job after graduating from college is in military intelligence, the one universal law is to: Never believe anything you are told without verifying it from at least two other independent sources. Through experience, even in the more communications side of the spy craft, like the National Security Agency, contrasted with the real spooky dudes, you quickly learn that the real world does not operate as it is generally hyped and anything approaching the real truth is hard to come by.

This of course can quickly make you cynical, if not tempered with the most powerful force in the world — which is truth. Truth always comes with a cost and most of the time untruth grows not so much from its power, but from the naïve perception we do not possess the resources to dismantle the presuppositions of these lies.

One such untruth fostered through the media, especially at this time, is that we live in a global capitalist system of markets. This whole myth supports inductive extreme views that in order to move toward the shining city on the hill, we need either to restrain capitalism or unleash capitalism and markets will work their magic.

Neither view is able to grasp the reality that the industrial consumer age we experienced during much of the twentieth century is unsustainable, because all the productivity gains we have been able to achieve, especially in the last thirty years, have been offset with decreasing efficiencies and centralization.

Tags: capitalism, high marginal tax rates, Laffer Curve, Reagan Revolution, Glass-Steagall, debt, Alan Greenspan, GDP, globalism

Bureau of Economic Analysis National GDP Report

Tags: BEA 2011 GDP

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You can’t create a twenty-first century society based upon an educational system promoting the myth that you can be all you can be — by just showing up; enforced by an mediocre bureaucracy – which essentially just shows up; built on a twentieth century industrial model to create workers for factories — that no longer exist; and enforced by a geopolitical financial establishment — totally hedged against any risk.
— Jerry Bannon, The Wonder Springs Chronicle, 25 January 2012, Publisher and angry American citizen

On Monday we posted a homework assignment with two videos and two real articles on why America is no longer competitive in the real world. Besides the links we suggested this was going to be a unique week, when starting Saturday we had a major political upset in the South Carolina presidential primary and then last night the president’s State of the Union address. Not being all that into the current political spin, I wasn’t aware of Monday night’s eighteenth Republican candidates’ debate.

Just before the debate I made the mistake of watching the DVD of Waiting for Superman, the documentary about the failure of American education, which really is the cause and effect for the Wonder Springs’ homework post earlier Monday. NBC’s Brian Williams began the debate by again asking “baiting” questions of both Romney and Gingrich, to wit they actively entered the fray. This continued, while I did a little housekeeping. Fifteen minutes in and no change on the horizon, I decided there must be a better way to spend my time. A rapid surfing of the channels provided only commercials and nothing of equally redeeming social value, so I decided to go to bed; a very good decision.

Not so strangely Waiting for Superman proposed an education solution based upon this series title, increased productivity and a greater and more efficient utilization of both finances and other resources through decentralization. The problem with Superman however was that his goal in life was to have a college degree. Aren’t-weren’t the Occupy protests mostly based upon the futility of financially leveraged college degrees, based upon a progressive warm-fuzzy nonexistent utopia?

So departing from my previous script of looking at details related to greater efficiency and decentralization, this week we will wander into the desert of American education and beyond, things I am probably better versed anyway.

Tags: Waiting for Superman, education, SAFER Process, biofuels, research, Laffer Curve, high marginal tax rates

Tags: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Davos Economic Forum, Bill Moyers, David Stockman

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This is econ 101: when a family is richer, its older workers demand higher wages to stay in work and its younger workers demand higher wages to take a first job. The dynamic contracts available jobs unless offset by an equal or greater rise in productivity.
— Edmund Phelps, Financial Times 11 January 2012, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics

Late in last week’s article I used an archaic word, which at the time I had not noticed. But shortly thereafter, I wondered if any American still understood what I was writing about and even if they had an inkling of its meaning, if they could at all grasp the implications of what that word, if really put into practice, would actually do to the economic muddle we now find ourselves. Dear readers that word we don’t hear anywhere anymore is: decentralization.

In my lifetime the United States of America, has become really the federal government unitasker of the world and its current and potential prosperity. There was some talk within the early days of the Tea Party and the talking points of Republican candidates for the presidency, about states rights; and of course Ron Paul and his libertarian base speak of smaller government and in favor of individual rights, sometimes bordering on anarchy. The word decentralization however is to be found nowhere in anybody’s conservative lexicon.

As far as Barack Obama, the liberal-progressive-left and the Democrat Party, it seems that they think there is no problem that more government spending will not cure, particularly if it originates within the federal government unitasker, an then forces the un-sovereign states to fund what the federal government doesn’t have the political will or the constitutional power to implement.

Furthermore, like all elitists of their persuasion, they believe that new wealth can be created, as do most Republicans, through tax incentives to crony capitalists, which through mergers and acquisitions, will provide the economic basis for the continuing growth of government programs, including entitlement programs and wealth redistribution.

Late Sunday we posted a short video from CNBC last Friday with Edmund Phelps, whose quotation above, from a recent article in the Financial Times, begins our discussion this week. In that video he speaks of the role of particularly southern European governments who sponsored wealth creation for their citizens through entitlement programs, yet through unintended consequences are linked to both a decline in national productivity as well as a significant cause of the euro crisis.

Tags: economics, Edmund Phelps, productivity, wealth, efficiency, USA, liquidity, Business Ecology, Great Depression, Collectivist Elitists, Laissez Faire Scoundrels

Tags: productivity, wealth, MADP, Edmund Phelps