Haydn's minuet in canon from the D minor "Fifths" string quartet. Great!

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

They would still have to go to the doctor and get a prescription.

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

I should add that in American almost all health insurance is provided by employers to employees. So under the new rules, even a person working at a Catholic hospital would have access to free birth control

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

The new American health care legislation (The Affordable Care Act) taking effect soon will require that health insurance coverage (we buy health insurance from private insurance companies) include free birth control for women.

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

Churches and their sponsored non-profits don't pay any taxes anyway.

My position is that if there is an individual mandate to carry health insurance, then there must be some regulation as to what constitutes adequate coverage, and therefore this must include contraception.

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

Ha ha, perhaps i wasn't clear enough. I support the administration's position and the argument that I put forth in the post in support of it.

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

When reading philosophy, you often see the use of more extreme examples in order to make a point more apparent. It is seeking to shed light on the nature of the conflict of principle.

All the best!

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

Yes, the MMT position is that the US cannot become insolvent unless it chooses to do so. And your point that a government can choose to "de-peg" its currency is certainly true. The overall point is that insolvency is not the worry, though if the US voluntarily decided to stop making interest payments, there would be economic ramifications because of this assault on the public confidence.

So it's inflation which is the real issue. But once again, so much of our production capacity is sitting idle (hence, high unemployment). We need more spending.

If greater debt leads to more spending at some point, then wonderful, the economy is running at full steam as we are spending more than we are able to produce. Let's raise taxes and interest rates to cool off this highly charged economy.

But to worry about inflation and spend less when the economy is depressed makes little sense. Large-scale, sustained unemployment is the much bigger enemy right now.

Inflation is often described as "too many dollars chasing too few goods and services." But the key word is "chasing", which means spending. The US's debt is a bit inert horde of savings. It is not being spent.

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

I am not saying that refusing to cover birth control is the equivalent of refusing to cover heart disease treatment. I am using the latter to point out that there is a limit to religious liberty in this context, namely when it affects another's health, and a more extreme example helped to point this out.

This was an analogy, and the two are analogous, even if one is more extreme than the other.

So I did not make use of a slippery slope argument for that reason. I am not arguing for covering birth control because if they don't then pretty soon they won't cover heart disease. That would be a slippery slope argument, but that's not my point.

The reason why they should cover birth control is because the workers are not necessarily Catholic, or even if they are they aren't necessarily anti birth control (98% of Catholic women who have had sex have used birth control), and because birth control is a strong, strong factor in women's health and well-being, and the institutions are doing more than providing religious services, it should be covered.

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

Easy access to birth control is widely considered by a multitude of science-based health organizations to be essential to a woman's health and well-being. There are a multitude of considerations, not the least which is that it enables a woman to participate fully in society - education, career, etc.

You can debate this, but the argument put forth is certainly not absurd.

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

geerussell,

You are are top of things. Thank you! Geezerman's comment is a fancy way of saying inflation will happen. But inflation is driven by excessive spending compared to production. Obviously there is much slack in the economy right now, much more room for additional spending and production. If inflation creeps up, then there are tools to deal with it.

The idea that investors will not buy bonds is floated a lot. But banks, institutions, etc, sitting on reserves, have no alternative if they want a return. They can hold cash and get nothing, or buy bonds and get something. Plus, if they didn't buy bonds, the system would be flooded with reserves putting downward pressure on interest rates.

If we do have a debt problem, it is a distributional problem, as the rich sit on stacks of inert money, while workers do not have enough to spend to finance their own jobs in the aggregate economy.

Cue the neo-classicists to say that the rich's saved money is what finances bank lending........also an outdated idea from the era of the gold standard.

best to all!

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

But wasn't the ruble pegged to the dollar? Therefore, even though the currency was called "the ruble", Russia could not control it any more than Greece can control the Euro. Russia did not have sovereignty over its currency. The US dollar is not pegged to any other currency, of course, and we do not owe any debts in any other currency.

ThePowerofMeow · 3 months

Having read through many of the criticisms, I find that many of them fall into a few major categories:

Yes, I am a musician, not a trained economist. You should certainly do your own research. Please check out the sites I put in the article.
There are the usual hyperinflation fears. "If China's bonds were converted to dollars hyperinflation would ensue..." Dollars and bonds are interchangeable. If China wanted to spend all their money, then yes, it could POSSIBLY end up bringing on inflation, and in the current economic climate, it would be a boon! Unemployment would drop dramatically from that huge rise in demand. Tax receipts would jump. Sounds terrible, huh.... ;) But seriously, if China wanted to spend dollars they would do it. Holding their savings in bonds simply means they don't want to spend right now. If they converted to dollars and still didn't want to spend, little would change.
Conflation of "money" with "real resources". People say, "yes but the government can't create real resources out of nothing".....first of all, yes it can, in the same way you and I can. But if we are talking about money, let's talk about money. If we are talking about real resources, let's talk about that. They are different. The former is a tool to aid in the creation and distribution of the latter.
People say " the government can print money, sure, but it doesn't create the dollar" or something kind of contradictory. The origins of the term "dollar" are of less consequence than how the system operates today.
People suggest that the government borrows from the private sector, not really creating assets. So imagine the government spending $10 into the economy, then pulling $10 out through a bond sale. All is even, right? No. Because the bond remains. An asset. And it can be sold for cash or borrowed against. The Fed has enormous amounts of bonds on its books, and the corresponding cash or bank reserves are in the non-government sector. So the government spends and then the non-government sector holds that money in the form of bonds, cash or bank reserves.
Many of the criticisms would be true under the paradigm of the gold standard. But the position I find most logically compelling suggests that our mainstream thinking is still behind the transition to a fiat money system. Our thinking and terminology are stuck in an outdated paradigm.

Best to all!

trot-trot · 10 months

The downgrading of the US is based ONLY on the fear that politicians will willingly and completely voluntarily stop paying interest on bonds. There is absolutely no reason why we should do this. US debt is simply dollars owned by the non-government sector that they have converted into interest-bearing bonds (as opposed to holding the dough in bank reserves which pay far less). The US is the issuer of its own currency and does not actually need to borrow from anyone. It's a huge misunderstanding.

Bonds serve the function of keeping the amount of reserves in bank accounts relatively stable - it helps the Fed maintain their interest rate target because they can buy and sell them as they need to control the amount of reserves in banks at any one time.

The only fear of large amounts of deficit spending is inflation, but since we have a large amount of potential production sitting idle (as evidenced by our high unemployment rate) we need more spending - so demand-driven inflation is no problem right now. If it becomes a problem in the future the Fed can raise rates or the government can raise taxes to cool off the economy.

Our real problem is a weak economy/high unemployment.

Plus, if you are afraid of what a downgrade might do to interest rates look at what happened to Japan when they were downgraded in 2002 - interest rates are SUPER low there. The public understands that there is no risk of involuntary default from a country who issues its own sovereign currency.

BBQCopter · 10 months

But how did the government originally attain gold to back its money? Surely not just from mining.....I am sure that a lot of mining in the past was done by private interests? Don't you think?

Mining new gold would be inflationary of course and something I would think you might be against? ;)

BBQCopter · 10 months

If you mean the difference between currency and real products and services (nominal value vs. real value) then you are off topic as we are discussing the former here.

BBQCopter · 10 months

Tell me how money is introduced into the economy in a way besides debt/deficit spending.

How does one base money on gold without gold? And how does one get gold? By buying it from people with notes printed out of nothing. If a person wants notes and turns in their gold for them, it's operationally a government expenditure out of thin air. The government buys gold with printed currency. So it's still debt-based. The gold standard is also a terrible, outdated idea with too little flexibility for a modern economy, but that's another subject.

Government deficit spending introduces a new financial asset, a bond, into the economy. Yes, it's a debt, but all money is debt. Dollar bills are "IOU's" which are only slightly more liquid than bonds. Dollars are, ontologically, debt.

Deficit spending will not be inflationary now because there is not enough aggregate spending in the system to surpass our ability to produce - this is obvious because of our high unemployment. Our economy is suffering from too little spending (all income comes from spending).

Demand-driven inflation (not supply-side inflation from higher gas prices, etc.) can be dealt with if it arises, but of course it's more concern to the capital side of the equation than the labor side. Willingly keeping high unemployment out of fears of inflation (which are unfounded now) is the actual tax on the future. We are not growing our economy and investing in ourselves like we should be.

BBQCopter · 10 months

ThePowerofMeow

TROPHY CASE

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