No to the Flat Tax, Gold Standard and Other Stale Ideas

National Review ^ | 02/19/2013 | James Pethokoukis

[iopscusa]

I agree, the Repubs are approaching complete worthlessness. Make note that Pethokoutis is the chosen mouthpiece on Economics for AEI + many other questionable publishers. Almost everything out of AEI and much of NRO is just more of the BS from the patsies for the Collective.

[EricT.]

A BBA should not be an A, but an annual plan based on what money THERE IS.

A Balanced Budget Amendment must have teeth. My proposal is that all members of BOTH houses that fail to pass a balanced budget are ineligible for re-election or for any other federal elective office, permanently.

[ExCTCitizen]

Bring back US jobs now.

Do you think Nike would spend the MILLIONS they give to OVERPAID NBA players to build a factory in the USA?

[iopscusa]

Read about US mfr of office equipment: “A Cautionary Tale Of Outsourcing To China: There Is No Recourse, You Could Lose Everything”

[BfloGuy]

The gold standard played a central role in the Great Depression and the severe deflation that accompanied it. Its return would hamstring the Federal Reserve in any effort it made to prevent future recessions from morphing into depressions.

That's the point. The Federal Reserve causes the recessions through its incessant money-printing. I'd not only "hamstring" the Fed; I'd abolish it.

A better option would be to anchor monetary policy not in stuff mined from the ground, but rather in futures contracts linked to market forecasts of nominal gross domestic product.

Nonsense. The point of a gold standard is that money should have a fairly constant value. Gold provides that because the amount added each year through mining is a tiny, tiny percentage of the gold already in existence.

I'm disappointed to find out that Pethokoukis is just another advocate of "flexible" money. Very disappointed.

[Sam Gamgee]

No, it only shows that conservative capitalist values were always correct and the whole reason we are in this mess is because socialist values have got us here. There is no easy way out now, but that is what liberal Republicans just can’t understand. The gold standard did not cause the great depression. A recession was caused by the tariff act, and complicated by schemes which the Federal Reserve implemented to try to stop gold from outflowing from Britain. If America wasn’t looking after the interests of another country (Britain) we wouldn’t have gotten into that mess.

[Sam Gamgee]

I was watching an old youtube video with Peter Schiff debating about 3 other university (liberal) economists (though liberal in that statement might be redundant). In short their opinion pretty much mirrored this article.
1) The economy is doing just fine right now but proposals by Schiff or Rand Paul would cause a severe downturn.
2) Inflation is benign so stop believing your lying eyes
3) We need more inflation to help employment
4) Ben Bernake is a great economic steward and we need MORE not less Federal Reserve attempts to help the economy.
Otherwords, like these Republicans, they live in their ivory tower dream world, where their servants do their grocery shopping and they have jobs that are insulated from economic reality.

[Sam Gamgee]

Yes, but let's not go all populist and Pat Buchanan in redefining modern conservatism.

We should support free (but fair) trade. It was trade unions that helped destroy our manufacturing base with their excessive demands. Businesses found savings by moving overseas. You can't really blame them.

With that said, I don't consider China a fair trader, which is why I prefer products made in Korea (Samsung) or Taiwan (HTC) over Apple, which is made in China. If there was a retail outlet that provided Chinese alternatives I would shop there.

[Sam Gamgee]

I don’t know about strictly manufacturing, but doing business in America (or Canada for that matter) should start carrying a certain advantage for resource industries. What oil company for instance wants to do business in Nigeria for instance? Or anywhere in South America, which is quickly falling to Communism these days? Why take that political risk? We have an opportunity to exploit (more than we already do) the massive resource we have oil shale, and natural gas.

[garbanzo]

University of Chicago survey of 40 economists found unanimous and vehement opposition to resurrecting the gold standard.

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Forty foxes vehemently opposed putting locks on the henhouse door...

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

University of Chicago survey of 40 economists found unanimous and vehement opposition to resurrecting the gold standard.

Forty foxes vehemently opposed putting locks on the henhouse door...

People like Bob Dole used to be mainstream conservative Republicans. Then Jack Kemp slapped us alongside the head with a blinding flash of the obvious: by opposing Democrat spending and then supporting taxes to balance the budget to avoid inflation, Republicans were acting as enablers for the Democrats’ “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” strategy. Kemp struggled in the 1970s to get Republicans to stop doing it, and finally with Reagan in the White House committed to Kemp-Roth, Kemp triumphed when the income tax rate was slashed and tax revenue essentially doubled over less than eight years.

That is relevant to the Gold Standard, in the sense that Jack Kemp published an open letter to Reagan before his inauguration, advocating that the US government should sell off Fort Knox. His purpose? He asserted that if the US did not have any significant gold reserve, that would ironically put the US on a gold standard. He argued that, without that gold, the only thing sustaining the value of the dollar would then be fiscal discipline. There would not then, in his theory, be any way to operate financially without keeping the books in good balance. The situation, IOW, would be so dangerous it would be safe.