The difference between the SERFS of the Middle Ages and the Consumer/Employee/Self-Employed Business Owner/Middle Class/Working Poor of today is that in the Middle Ages, the Serf had FOOD, CLOTHING, and SHELTER almost all the time short of natural causes. Today’s modern “Serf” has no guarantee of any of that. We no longer grow our own food, make our own clothes, or provide our own shelter on our own land. We have no more “Social Contract” with our Lords and Masters. At least the Serfs had that. They had a SOCIAL CONTRACT. The basic incidentals of HUMAN RIGHTS were provided in exchange for a lifetime of work and service.

Today, we are without that. We have to work harder and harder to earn less and less. And those BASIC INCIDENTALS – Food, Shelter, Clothing – are becoming more and more expensive. Not to mention the new basic incidentals of our time: Transportation and Health Care.

The Washington Post editorial page has been one of the primary MSM outlets for aggressive deficit terrorism. There is an axis of deficit terrorism in Washington DC today. It runs from Hooverite Republicans such as Judd Gregg and Mike Spence, to Blue Dog Democrats like Evan Bayh and Kent Conrad, to media organizations like CNN, WaPo, and the Peter G. Peterson funded The Fiscal Times, to foundations like The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and Peterson-funded think tanks like AmericaSpeaks, to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), to high-level Administration people like OMB Director designate Jack Lew, and judging by his speech and actions, to Barack Obama himself. This axis has been laying down a carpet of continuous propaganda for many months now distracting attention from the immediate problem of getting people back to work, and toward doing something about an assumed long-term problem, that some argue is fictional, and that many others think may, but, will most probably not, occur

Last Saturday, the WaPo added to its place in progressive infamy with an editorial that managed, in a few short paragraphs, to repeat many of the false arguments the deficit terrorists use to scare Americans into thinking that we really have to cut Government spending as soon as we can or we will be facing unbearable suffering in future years. This post will review that editorial in detail. It begins:

The debates between the deficit doves and the deficit owls continued at New Deal 2.0 (ND20) today. Jeff Madrick, a dove, gives us a post entitled: “Stimulate Now: On Inflation and Deficits.” In this post, I’ll evaluate Jeff’s views paragraph by paragraph.

Jeff says:

Deficit terrorism has lately turned to deficit hysteria. With Germany leading the way, most Eurozone countries appear ready to implement austerity programs. The United Kingdom, under its new Conservative/Liberal overlords, appears to be taken with austerity too. And Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan have all jumped on the bandwagon. But it doesn’t look like this bandwagon will include Brazil and Argentina. They’ve had their fill of austerity, and the prescriptions of the IMF, and they’re not taking on neo-liberal ideology again any time soon. The question is what should the United States do?

Discussion of latest Jobs Report and the Fed “controlling inflaiton pressures” versus the pressures from the jobless

To paraphrase Shakespeare, things are indeed rotten in the State of Denmark (and Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and almost everywhere else in the euro zone). An entire continent appears determined to commit collective hara kiri, whilst the rest of the world is encouraged to draw precisely the wrong kinds of lessons from Europe’s self-imposed economic meltdown. So-called respectable policy makers continue to legitimize the continent’s fully-fledged embrace of austerity on the allegedly respectable grounds of “fiscal sustainability”.

The latest to pronounce on this matter is the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. This is a particularly sad, as the BOE – the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street – has actually played a uniquely constructive role amongst central banks in the area of financial services reform proposals. King, and his associate, Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, have been outspoken critics of “too big to fail” banks, and the asymmetric nature of banker compensation (“heads I win, tails the taxpayer loses”). This stands in marked contrast to America’s feckless triumvirate of Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, and Ben Bernanke, none of whom appears to have encountered a banker’s bonus that they didn’t like.

Federal government reports indicating there is no inflation in the economy just doesn’t wash here.

In the above video, Nick, otherwise known as The Modern Mystic, has raised an important question about applying Modern Money Theory (MMT) -based economics. He asks whether if all nations used MMT-based economics to achieve full employment, truly universal health care, and free public education for everyone, whether the world wouldn’t run up against resource limits, and whether these limits along with competition for resources from everyone wouldn’t cause resource price inflation?

Put another way, he is asking whether even if MMT-based, or as he calls it, “chartalist” economics, is rational at the “micro” level of the nation, it is also rational at the “sub-macro” level of a world system made up of interacting economies, national governments and interacting sovereign currencies, but no world fiscal authority? Or put still another way, is MMT-based economics, which may be fiscally sustainable in the short run in a single nation, both fiscally sustainable and socially sustainable in the longer-run in an international system of interacting, nations, currencies, and economies?

Professor Pavlina Tcherneva, one of the speakers at the recent Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter-Conference, in a striking post entitled “Do Not Confuse Solvency with Sustainability,” says this about solvency and sustainability:

The far more explicit intertwining of government and business has revealed to us exactly what the true nature of huge cost increases really are: Hidden Taxes… whether these “taxes” exist in the public or the private sector no longer seems to matter.