Our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling. It’s estimated that more than $2 trillion is needed to repair the decaying roads, bridges, sewers and other basic physical assets across the nation.
Money will soon run out of the highway trust fund to repair roads. Congress needs to decide what to do. Ideas are many, but fall into 3 categories: go further into debt, increase taxes or shift existing funds (i.e. rob Peter to pay Paul).
There is a 4th option — to create debt-free and inflation-free US money, as proposed by the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act — HR 2990 in the last Congress.
The US could simply create US notes equal to what’s needed to pay for engineering, materials, labor, etc. This is not the same as the misnamed Federal Reserve (more of a private than public entity) creating money out-of-thin-air through their Quantitative Easing nonsense that has mostly helped Wall Street and fueled ever more speculative bubbles.
US money, similar to what action President Lincoln took in creating federal “Greenbacks,” has no attached interest payments. Several prominent economists, including IMF’s Michael Kumhof, have said this type of public money creation does not increase inflation when such funds are used for needed functions.
Of course, bankers hate the idea. One of the major sources of profits by banking corporations is interest from loans. Banking corporations don’t want anything to impede the license they’re been given to create money. When the US borrows, it in essence borrows money that it could have created. The difference is the US has to pay back the loan plus interest.
No wonder HR 2990 didn’t get very far in the last Congress. Banking corporations got their monies worth via lobbying and political campaign investment thanks to their never-intended First Amendment constitutional free speech “rights” to prevent public creation of public money. Even the idea of democratic public money creation must be suppressed.
Economist William Hixson said:
“The very idea of a government that can create money for itself, allowing banks to create money that the government then borrows, and pays interest on, is so preposterous that it staggers the imagination. Either everyone in government in charge of the procedure is lacking in intelligence or they have been bought and paid for by those who profit from their skullduggery and their infidelity to the public interest.”
Seven million jobs would be created under the NEED Act. Over $2 trillion would be injected into the economy.
We should all ask US Senator Sherrod Brown (who’s on the Senate Banking Committee) to introduce the NEED Act. This would, at least, create a vehicle for mass education — necessary to build awareness and, hopefully, a movement for eventual passage.
More info on the NEED Act is at http://www.monetary.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/HR-2990.pdf
create real democracy 