Ping
Farmfriend please ping your list, thanks!
Why can't government use its own 50% of the land as collateral?
Huh? The $17 trillion figure is often quoted. However most of that is for future Social Security and Medicare payments. One little secret - the government doesn't have to pay them. According to the Supreme Court decision in Flemming v. Nestor there is no contractual obligation for the government to provide Social Security payments. Congress could meet today, pass a law eliminating SS and if the President signed it that "debt" would be gone.
The government has even defaulted on its debt before. Before the depression many bonds were to be paid in dollars or gold as requested by the holder. Congress and FDR outlawed private ownership of gold and thus defaulted on the bonds.
Ultimately the National Debt will be paid in the traditional way, the way we have paid of great blocks of it in the past when it got too high. We will partially default. Without a gold standard that can be done and few people realize it has happened. The creditors know these things and will begin to jack up interest rates when they see it coming. Some will save much of their principle, many will lose most of it. Default will be by inflation, by pumping out dollars, liquidity, faster than the market demands it and dollars decline in value so that the smaller dollars pay of the dollar denominated debt at a fraction of the value of the loans. Actually it is already occurring. BC startedd it with a nudge and W has ratcheted it up. For the sake of this war I hope that the consumer price effects do not get obvious before November. The price of oil is a big part of that phenomenon.
Seems the only mechanism they need is the New Deal Commerce Clause. A little creative application of that and they can do pretty much anything they want. The damned thing is a bulldozer.
Good article. Thanks for posting.
Terra means earth, duh....whoda ever thought it? I thought she meant Terro, as in terrorist. That's the montetary unit, those of such ilk are rooting for.
Thanks for posting this! I like horror movies from time to time, but that is the scariest thing I've seen in a long while.