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Whether the author's plan would work or not, what bothers me about it is that it seems that the 2 major actors within the US government that would have to carry

Whether the author's plan would work or not, what bothers me about it is that it seems that the 2 major actors within the US government that would have to carry out this plan, namely Congress and the Executive branch, appear in recent times to the lack the ability and/or willpower to carry out any long-running fiscal-scale mission in a consistent way. I'm in my thirties and from what I've observed so far in life it is extremely hard/rare for them to carry out any single plan regarding Federal spending consistently for more than 2 years or so, before making significant changes, adding loopholes, gutting it, making exceptions, making a total 180 degree turn in direction, etc. To give just one example, if you follow US Congressional news you'll periodically hear about something called a "debt ceiling" that supposedly Congress has to follow, which puts a limit on how much debt/deficit is allowed to exist at the Federal budget level. The problem is that they also periodically raise this "ceiling", whenever it is convenient. Whenever there is some supposedly exceptional or temporary state. And these exceptional cases and temporary conditions keep happening. Therefore the Federal debt just keeps going up and up (mostly: except during part of the Clinton presidency.) Memo to Congress, I don't think the word "ceiling" means what you think it means! The crack baby treatment of NASA is another example. "Give us a big plan to return to the Moon and Mars and we'll fund it. Okay, thanks, great plan, we'll start funding it." Few years go by. "Oops, sorry, we changed our mind, uh, could you repurpose that into a cute little station escape pod for us? k thx bye."

lzw 16y ago
If you look at history, this has been the case ever since the founding of the Federal Reserve. This is not a failure of will, this is the way the system is designed. The system is designed to fail, because this maximizes profits for the bankers in the long run and for politicians in the short term. When the system fails, most of the politicians who propagated the bad policies will be out of power. The federal reserve put us on a boom-bust business cycle, and those who understand the cycle profit from it. The fed drives up the boom, as they did with housing, and everybody who is smart makes money, then they raise rates and trigger a bust, and when that happens to the point where serious damage is going on, everybody buys up assets really cheap. The politicians profit from this as well- during the boom they say "look at this boom I created!" and get reelected. During the bust they say "look at this bust the other guy created, give me more power!" and they get more power. The ultimate boom, of course, is in the value of the dollar which is actually nothing more than a debt instrument itself. When it crashes there will be huge political opportunity to remake the country, including constitutional amendments or even a new constitutional convention. People will suffer, but there's nothing like a good crisis for the politicians.

lzw 16y ago

If you look at history, this has been the case ever since the founding of the Federal Reserve. This is not a failure of will, this is the way the system is designed. The system is designed to fail, because this maximizes profits for the bankers in the long run and for politicians in the short term. When the system fails, most of the politicians who propagated the bad policies will be out of power. The federal reserve put us on a boom-bust business cycle, and those who understand the cycle profit from it. The fed drives up the boom, as they did with housing, and everybody who is smart makes money, then they raise rates and trigger a bust, and when that happens to the point where serious damage is going on, everybody buys up assets really cheap. The politicians profit from this as well- during the boom they say "look at this boom I created!" and get reelected. During the bust they say "look at this bust the other guy created, give me more power!" and they get more power. The ultimate boom, of course, is in the value of the dollar which is actually nothing more than a debt instrument itself. When it crashes there will be huge political opportunity to remake the country, including constitutional amendments or even a new constitutional convention. People will suffer, but there's nothing like a good crisis for the politicians.