Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram
We are a couple of months in front of an off-presidential year election. Before we go to the polls, we should brush away the political cobwebs that prevent us from seeing clearly what is right under our noses, and so …
What is debt inflation?
Inflation is a contributory cause in high prices, but inflation is not the same as high prices. Inflation is a government caused market distortion, a reduction in the purchasing power of money. Combined with currency devaluation, it can significantly erode the real value of a currency both domestically and internationally.
There are, we know, numerous ways to discharge debt. Ordinary people discharge debt by increasing their income and paying off the debt. There are different ways to increase your assets to pay off a debt. You might increase your working hours, get a raise from your boss, or turn to a life of crime and rob a bank. In any society in which criminal activity is punished, this last option is not, in the long run, profitable.
One need hardly say that a government is an assembly of ordinary people. Just as a church is the body of the faithful, so a government is, in any republic worthy of the name, the body of people governed. The Declaration of Independence, Americans cannot help but notice on the eve of the 250th year of its signing, begins with the words “We the people…” Our ego-inflated politicians wish us to know they are above the common cut. They can flout economic laws without fear of arrest.
The federal government may discharge debt – deficits – by increasing taxes or borrowing money to pay off the debt, or by printing money, a solution to the debt problem at the federal level; states don’t print currency.
If you are a government, federal or state, you may choose to neglect debt or acquire more debt by passing along the debt payment to the children of taxpayers. There is in the United States no debtor’s prison for politicians who resort to this option. Perhaps there should be. Connecticut just now is hoisting a half century of accumulative debt.
Connecticut’s comparable state-government debt is $26 billion. The state’s audited total liabilities (ACFR), a measure that includes all state‑government obligations plus long‑term unfunded benefits such as pensions and other post‑employment benefits, is about $94.43 billion, according to a 2023 report.
So then, why don’t politicians – like every householder in the state of Connecticut – pay off their debts by raising taxes, thus increasing the state’s net worth?
Good question.
Post and pre-revolutionary Americans have been through much of their history tax-averse for two reasons: 1) they regard much of government as an economic imposition. The whole of the French Revolution and a good part of the American Revolution pivoted on the perception that the government, when it overreaches, and the governed are inversely related to each other. The stronger the government, the weaker the people; the richer the government, the poorer the people. And 2) private and governmental income is an indispensable means of acquiring power and agency. Americans have never been willing to surrender their independence and agency to an immodest secular, political church of anointed politicians.
Ordinary Americans are reservoirs of natural rights because they live in a country -- secured by blood, sweat and tears -- in which important rights are not dispensed by godlike secular deities. So says…
John Adams (1765): “Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”
James Wilson (1790): “Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.”
James Madison (1792): “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example… of charters of power granted by liberty.”
Thomas Jefferson (1791): “I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that ‘all powers not delegated to the United States… are reserved to the states or to the people.’”
Connecticut’s political deities fear raising taxes for the same reason King George III feared – and was said to have praised -- a resolute George Washington. When the news was brought to the king that Washington would give up office and return to private life after having served as the President of the United States for only two terms, he was reported to have said, “If Washington does that, he will be the greatest man alive.”
Modern scholars now tell us that the quote does not appear in any credible archival records, royal correspondence, or contemporary accounts of George III’s reign. No matter, here was a case of a larger truth overcoming the absence of facts. Washington did what kings fear most, and he was the greatest man of his time.
Stay updated with the latest in the Constitution State with The CT Centinal
