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free trade & free markets

Negative Logic

“The idea that negative interest rates will produce loans and generate growth,” concludes Richard Rahn in a Washington Times op-​ed, “is not supported by the evidence to date.”

Citing current markets for Danish and Swiss bonds, Rahn states that “approximately 30 percent of the global government bond issues are now trading in negative territory.”

Bonds used to seem the best investment. Government is the biggest, most reliable consumer, as J.B. Say and Destutt de Tracy (the latter being Thomas Jefferson’s favorite economist) argued, making the bond market the surest form of consumer credit. Governments last, weathering storms. So people loan them money not merely to earn interest, but to not risk their principal investment. 

Government bonds during America’s Great Depression were about the only form of investing going on: everything else was shaky. 

Which seems to be happening again. 

“In theory, as the interest rate falls, businesses and individuals should borrow and invest more,” Rahn explains. “In fact, as can be easily seen in Japan, as the interest rate falls, many save more — increasing the supply of savings and putting downward pressure on interest rates — in order to ensure they will have adequate funds for retirement. So, a low or negative interest rate policy becomes self-defeating.”

Could the logic of modern economic policy be … illogical?

Keynesian fiscal policy has always struck me as based on … evasions, the most obvious being that actual, real-​world Keynesian politicians somehow never insist that deficits be turned into surpluses in good times, as John Maynard Keynes’ original program stated. 

Modern monetary policy also seems … well, if not evasive, at least … desperate.

Which I would be, too, were I riding on a growing debt as big as the federal government’s. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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national politics & policies responsibility too much government

The Problem with Public Accounts

President Trump’s promise not to cut one dime from Social Security and Medicare doesn’t square with the fiscal cliff these programs are headed for. To save the system, benefits must be cut, taxes must be raised, or both.

Or else replace the system.

No wonder, then, that John Stossel insists we “Fix Social Security Before It Goes Broke,” and rescues a decades-​old proposal: “private accounts,” which he says “would certainly pay retirees more than Social Security will ever pay.”

In Chile, where they have tried this, private accounts have worked out pretty well, contributing to the once-​impoverished country’s rise to “the richest country in Latin America.” 

Had the United States adopted such a system, at Social Security’s inception, the amount of capital flowing into projects big and small would have not merely prevented the stagflation of the Seventies and brought us almost unimaginable wealth, it might have turned political eyes towards accountability, prudence and stability.

But, because Social Security was set up as a Pay As We Go system, we paid … and the money went.

It got so messed up that by the 1980s Ronald Reagan charged Alan Greenspan with “fixing” it. That “fix” mainly meant increasing taxation. The decades of revenue surge over outflow was spent by Congress for war and handouts. And now we’re reaching a repeat of the late 1970s’ Social Security insolvency.

Meanwhile, Chilean leftists “hold street protests against private accounts,” Stosssel reminds us. “They’re angry because capitalists get a slice of the pie.”

Back in the USA, Democrats demand that more benefits be wrung from Social Security. Are they dead set on proving why socialism doesn’t work?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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