Save Our Prosperity. Tax Ourselves
June 27th, 2010
The essential premise: Prosperity is desirable.
Austerity is undesirable. Everyone wants prosperity. Austerity brings violence and unrest.
What is prosperity?
Prosperity is the ability to buy what you need – or what you may not need.
It is everyones desire – this ability to buy what you need.
When there is much buying and selling we have prosperity. Those are times when people are employed. They sell their time and buy goods and services with their earnings. Thus causing other people to be employed and, themselves, to buy things. Prosperity is connected to economic activity; the vigorous exchange of goods and services.
To be able to buy things is the ultimate measure of prosperity. So to ask for prosperity is to ask for economic activity.
Of course, the benefits of economic activity may not fall equally on all, but those who prosper do so from economic activity. Governments try to create prosperity. Adversity drives Governments from office.
Fundamental equation:
spending minus revenue = deficit = must be borrowed
Any government – municipal, national – is an economic unit. During the year it spends an amount called ‘spending’. The taxes and the fees it collects are its ‘revenue’. The difference between these two is called the ‘deficit’. A negative deficit is called a surplus.
The deficit is the amount of money that must be borrowed in order for the government to pay its spending bills for that year.
Government borrowing takes the form of bonds. These are promissory notes sold on the open market. In the U.S. all such borrowing is done only with the consent of the electorate. It is we who permit government to borrow; either directly, by vote on a bond issue, or indirectly as when Congress raises the Debt Limit.
Consider the number of human beings on the surface of the earth; the population of the world. Reasonably researched data exists for this number over the course of several thousand years. And accurate data exists for most of the last 110 years – often year by year.