"Bill" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

Sorry Ed. I think we both know what we're talking about.
I think we understand the technicalities better than most.
I think you can start fires faster quicker than I can put them out.

That's not intentional. I wanted to avoid the entire issue, remember? g

You seem to prefer to get hung up on my use of a word rather than try to
understand what I am trying to say, so I don't find it easy to communicate
with you.

I'm not sure what word you're talking about. "Assets"?

As I said, I agree with your key points, that fiscal restraint is a good
thing, and that excess inflation is not. When you introduced the idea that
transferring dollar bills to someone who spends them implies asset value,
the problem is that those who don't understand these accounts would take
that to mean that the government can just sit on the SS excess, putting it
in some kind of account, and then hand it out, without other consequences.
There are plenty of consequences. The first is that the money can't be used
for anything and therefore it's worth nothing, unless it's let out of that
purgatory -- which it may never be.

That leads a lot of people to assume the whole "trust fund" setup is a ruse
to allow Congress to spend that money. It's not, and it's exactly the kind
of misunderstanding that leads to the general economic malcontentedness we
hear on this NG and elsewhere. Most people assume there's a government
conspiracy to screw them, when the truth of this situation is that there's
hardly a way to do anything different. There's no screwing. And nothing
about it is hidden. It's all in the open.

I'm not trying to pick nits with you, Bill. This is a difficult but very
important point that most people do not understand. Once the government sits
on a really large lump of revenue like the excess SS payments, pulling that
money out of circulation for years at a time, bad things happen. That's why
they don't do it. And if they wanted to, we have no mechanism to do it. If
we tried to create one, hardly anyone would like the choices. It would just
start another political firestorm. And it wouldn't cure the problem that
what you're really screwing with is the money supply, not some kind of
savings account that's equivalent to what we do as individuals. There just
is nobody higher than the Treasury who can hold the money.

Some people know everything and some know nothing--is that how it is?

Most know something and make assumptions about the rest. When the rest is
federal accounts and our money, they're mostly wrong assumptions. It's not
easy.

I don't doubt that you understand it, despite getting the deflation issue
backwards. g But this point is not one in which I'm going to accept a
misrepresentation with my name on a post that accedes to it.

--
Ed Huntress


Bill