MAJOR LEGAL UPDATE!

Cato Institute backs Kevin Trudeau in Supreme Court case! Click here to read all about it: http://www.cato.org/pubs/legalbriefs/Trudeau.pdf

 

Obama’s CFR Economic Council Director Calls for Global Tax

February 14, 2012

Info Wars

By Kurt Nimmo

Gene “the Machine” Sperling has called for a “global minimum tax” on corporations. Obama’s director of the National Economic Council linked the call to the so-called Buffett Rule, a scheme based on statements made by investor Warren Buffett who said government should confiscate more money from the rich in order to reduce the tax burden on the poor.

Following Sperling’s comments yesterday and heated response in the blogosphere, officialdom responded by saying “there’s no United Nations-imposed duty in the works,” as Politico phrased it.

Sperling said the government “is looking for shared sacrifice” in its quest for more revenue. “He was referring to our proposal in the Blueprint for an American Built to Last that removes tax incentives for companies that ship jobs overseas,” a White House official said.

The Cato Institute did some fact checking after Obama’s SOTU teleprompter reading. Cato points out that the government encourages sending American jobs to slave labor hellholes like China and Vietnam and imposes a 40 percent tax rate on corporations that invest in the United States.

Obama’s “Blueprint for an American Built to Last” is cynical class warfare rhetoric for the ill-informed who will vote him back into office in November. The so-called 1% never pay taxes. They put their money into tax-exempt securities and move it offshore.

“In other words, the genuinely rich are likely to be the least harmed by high tax rates in the top brackets,” writes Thomas Sowell. “People who are looking for jobs are likely to be the most harmed, because they cannot equally easily transfer themselves overseas to take the jobs that are being created there by American investments that are fleeing from high tax rates at home.”

Click here for the full report.

Currency Not Tied To Gold Or Other Standard Becomes Worthless

November 25, 2011

The Washington Times

By Richard W. Rahn

The major world governments are in the process of destroying the value of the money their citizens hold. On Nov. 16, the Cato Institute held its annual monetary conference. Speakers included high-ranking officials from the Federal Reserve and monetary experts from the academy, think thanks and financial institutions. There was unanimous agreement that the world monetary system is in deep trouble, which is obvious to anyone who keeps up with the news. It is easier to observe the problem than to come up with a solution.

Economists define money as having the following characteristics:

A unit of account, meaning that we can define the value of goods and services in it.
A medium of exchange, meaning that others will accept your “money” (e.g., the U.S. dollar) for goods and services.
A store of value, meaning that it keeps its intrinsic worth.

Since the beginning of the Federal Reserve System in 1914, the U.S. dollar has been a lousy store of value. It is now worth just one-twenty-second of what it was worth in 1913 and only less than one-quarter what it was worth as recently as in 1971, when the United States officially cut the last tie of the dollar to gold. Even so, many people around the world prefer to keep U.S. dollars because dollars have been less subject to inflation than most other major currencies. At the moment, the U.S. dollar is losing value at a rate of about 4 percent per year.

Inflation occurs when the central bank – the Fed in the United States or the European Central Bank in Europe – creates money at a faster rate than the supply of goods and services increases. Changes in the rate with which people spend money (referred to by economists as changes in the velocity of money) also affect inflation in the short run. If people hold on to money rather than spend it, inflation will fall and vice versa. Central banks can control the supply of money but not changes in velocity. In the United States, velocity has fallen because regulators have been increasing lending standards, so, in many cases, banks cannot even make what they think will be good loans. Also, regulators have been increasing the amount of reserves banks must hold. The result is that even though the Fed has been rapidly increasing the money supply, much of it is sitting in banks rather than being used for additional investment or consumption. Even so, the growth in the money supply has been greater than the growth in new goods and services; hence the current inflation.

Democracies have an inherent flaw in that many seek to use the political process to transfer wealth from some to others. This leads to counterproductive levels of government spending. People also dislike paying taxes. Therefore, the politicians tend to spend more than the tax revenue provides, and this excess spending is funded by the sale of government bonds. Under a classic gold standard, the sale of bonds by government was limited to the amount of gold the government held, plus the amount of gold that the bond buyers could reasonably expect the government would be able to buy from projected tax revenues if it became necessary.

Click here for the full report.