Trump v Obama Trillion Dollar Deficits


QUESTION: You ignore that Trump will create a deficit of a trillion in one year with his tax cuts for the rich. What do you have to say about that one!

HT

ANSWER: So what? Obviously, you probably are a CNN watcher. They never said anything about Obama who created the first trillion deficit and maintained that throughout his presidency between 2009 to 2012. What does it matter? Nobody ever intends to pay it back. Just in case you just noticed, that is the least of our problems. Try talking about the Pension Fund Crisis that will hit all the people directly. The Trump deficit will put money back into the economy directly whereas the Obama deficits were never something that actually stimulated the people directly. It was like Quantitative Easing – welfare for the bankers, not the people.

Beware of Household Income Interpretation


 

I have warned that one of the clever ways taxes are raised is by changing the definition of the rich. We can see that when FDR came into office, the definition of the rich became $5 million because he was planning to introduce the payroll tax and everyone had to pay. That was a lot of money when a Cadaliac cost $600. After the war, the definition dropped dramatically. Then we see in the ’90s, the definition was raised to $250,000.

However, this is called “household” income. They have already begun to apply this to people with disability. If a parent is disabled and is living with a child, the government wants to reduce the social security benefit because the “household” income is too high, So in a clever way, the government is denying you social security benefits if your combined income with you children exceeds their threshold.

The talk behind the curtain is that since children over 30 are living with their parents, the “household” income should now include all children living with their parents. Of course, they fail to see that they are creating a crisis by forcing children out the door who cannot afford an apartment by sending their parent tax rate higher. They never consider the social impact of taxation.

For the Health Insurance Marketplace, a household usually includes the tax filer, their spouse if they have one, and their tax dependents who are children they claim. Under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), they have adopted this new definition of household income called Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI). The government is defining households and income for the purposes of determining eligibility for benefits based on everyone in the house.

If you got divorced on December 31st, the tax code will be applied to a single person at a higher rate for the entire year. If you claim Head of Household as an unmarried person for tax purposes, the qualifying person is limited to your son or daughter or eligible foster child – not even your parents.

Beware of applying the definition of “household” income to the income tax. That is clearly another thing on the Democrat’s wish list.

The First Representative Form of Money


Egyptian Monetary System

 

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; I was discussing the history of money with a professor at our university where they have a display of coins. I asked why were there no Egyptian coins. He referred me to your site and said that you are the expert in the world monetary system. I read your piece on the Egyptian deben monetary system. The Egyptians began with a representative money rather than coins. Is this the oldest civilization with pyramids and paper money?

JY

Tutankamun-Coffin

mycaene-Gold-cup-55ANSWER: From a monetary perspective, the Egyptian monetary system is by far the first representative form of money. In other words, they used a derivative of paper money proving that money also need not be tangible as has been the case in modern times. The central element of any monetary system hinges upon whatever the people “believe” has value. In Egypt, gold was seen as the tears of god and was reserved EXCLUSIVELY for royalty. Gold did not serve as any sort of medium of exchange until about 700 BC. Why? For anything to serve as the medium of exchange it must exist in sufficient quantity. As long as gold was rare, it was exclusively the property of kings and represented a luxury with no PRACTICAL value whatsoever.

Egypt’s monetary system began with barter. It was primarily based on agriculture – grain. This evolved into official Graineries and a farmer would then take his crop to the Grainery and receive a receipt. With time, the monetary system evolved where people would then accept these receipts (paper money) in payment.

The huge difference between Egypt and Mesopotamia can be seen through the monetary system. The earliest use of metal appears to be in Mesopotamia cast in the form of silver rings. In ancient Egypt, silver was probably more expensive than gold which was rather common after the exploitation of the Numbian mines. Evidence supporting this idea comes from a New Kingdom Period wall painting depicting a man weighing big gold rings which were discovered in Thebes. This is the Deben Monetary System.

Eventually, gold rings became customary to carry out trade with the outside world. So we tend to find the beginning of a two-tier monetary system using grain receipts for local small transactions and gold rings for international payments of a higher monetary value. We see this type of two-tier monetary system throughout the ancient world right into modern times. Ancient Athenian Decadrachms are traditionally discovered around the Mediterranean seaport rather than in Greece reflecting they were high denominations used in international trade. Bretton Woods used gold dor international payments and paper money for domestic US transactions when gold was illegal for citizens to possess. The two-tier monetary system lasted in modern times up until August 1971.

To make trade between Phoenicia and Mesopotamia easier they created a system that could have been based on the traditional Egyptian measurement known as deben that was equal to about 86 grams, which would exchange for 12 shekels used by Babylon and Phoenicia of about 7.2 grams per unit. Pictured here is a dishekel of the Phoenician city of Tyre, which is believed to be the earliest known coin circa 450-425BC. The date of the first Phoenician coins is uncertain. The earliest date generally accepted by scholars is about 450 BC and initially, the coins were all silver with weights based on variations of the Babylonian shekel of 7.2 grams. The most interesting aspect is that Phoenicia possessed no precious metal mines. The source of their silver came from trade with distant mines in Spain and possibly Sardinia. The motif is that of a dolphin riding the waves and the reverse with the wisdom of the owl.

Now, just to address your comment that Egypt has the oldest pyramids, that is an incorrect statement. Caral has the distinction of being the oldest known city in the Americas and one of the oldest in the world. In fact, the Caral Pyramids were built approximately 5,000 years ago and they are actually OLDER than the Egyptian pyramids by around 100 years. They predate the Inca Pyramids by some 4000 years. Like other pyramids in history, the Caral pyramids are believed to have religious significance. There are six total pyramids.

The Norte Chico civilization flourished between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC. It appears to have been simply a barter civilization, yet there are many mysteries yet to be solved. For instance, there remain some very curious questions unanswered such as why are there no surviving evidence of ceramics? They appear to have used gourds instead of ceramics. Gourds may be good for storage and drinking or eating, but would not function as pots for cooking. There appears to also be missing any evidence of agriculture so it is possible they never eat bread. We do know that they used blue whale vertebrae as stools suggesting that they lived off the sea. It is entirely possible that they eat fish raw like the Japanese.

On some of the gourds, figures have been discovered which may represent a deity. Very few have survived but they may represent some form of a god reflecting a religious belief system that appears to be common to all civilizations. There is also no sign of significant surviving art perhaps because they were made from organic material, which did not survive.

Bernie Proposed Everyone Gets a Job & Free Healthcare


 

You really have to wonder just when will these people stop with the promises of robbing the rich to hand out free everything to everyone else. Bernie Sanders wants to introduce a plan to guarantee everyone a job at $15 an hour. He is clueless that if you raise wages, people spend more and prices rise and will NOT remain the same. You end up back where you started. To begin with, not everyone wants a job. There are plenty of people who have no problem living off of welfare. But he also wants to guarantee healthcare to everyone. That may be a wonderful idea, but you MUST first nationalize all hospitals and then doctors must become government employees. You have to lower the wages of doctors and you have to eliminate the lawsuits or specify how much you will be paid for what injury.

Without a comprehensive structural reform, all these proposals are absolutely worthless and would bankrupt the entire system as is. We simply have to let it burn down to the ground and start from scratch. Healthcare and education will ONLY become affordable when people cannot get insurance and to stay in business, prices will have to drop.

CURIOSITY that is the key to Everything


COMMENT:

Sorry, the question being, how could it or could it be possible for, people first-time buyers, and foreign buyers to all happily own houses while supporting growth and the economy. I hope one day and highly think plausible in thousands of years time u will be looked back on as our generations Socrates , only this time hopefully all your information will be saved a spread for education, and s new renaissance, what with information storage, internet, and common sense must prevail common sense from understanding this education.

All the very best will get to one of those conferences, one day enjoy.

Ps best education comes from grieving I reckon sorry for your loss, she’ll be even prouder, all the very best and to your health sir and dedicated staff.

 

 

REPLY: We are all on a journey through this life to gain knowledge. If you do not assume you know everything, then you keep your mind open and you actually learn at all ages. There was a professor at Princeton University who knew Einstein. He would tell me that I reminded him of Albert. I was totally surprised for I certainly did not put myself in his category. I asked how was that possible? He explained to me that it was not the subject matter, but I was always curious and wanted to understand how things worked and why.

It was that CURIOSITY that drove me to put together the world monetary system from coins. It was the ONLY way to definitively understand HOW empires, nations, and city-states rose and fell. The daunting question was always: HOW did Rome fall? Was it like a gradual decline as a 747 plane coming in a for a landing or was it abrupt appearing like a crash out of nowhere?

When I gathered the coins and mapped out both the money supply by studying the dies and the metal content, then and only then was it possible to answer that question. That was the CURIOSITY that reminded the professor of Einstein. It is the pursuit of knowledge that is our purpose in life. It is all we leave behind to prove we even existed. The greatest obstacles to advancing human society are bias, prejudice, and self-interest.

The key to everything is CURIOSITY. If we do not try to figure out how everything works without ASSUMING we know everything so why bother, we just may learn something. Therein lies the seeds to the advancement of human society. Here is a passage from the Last Lion by William Manchester. It really explains what a true genius is. We wrongly assume that such a person just knows everything like an encyclopedia. The true genius is someone who challenges the prevailing school of thought and asks WHY?

This is what Manchester wrote on the subject about genius and Winston Churchill. It is something that is important and we should keep this in mind with our children.

“Samuel Butler defined genius as “a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds,” and it is ironic that geniuses are likeliest to be misunderstood in classrooms. Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota have found that teachers smile on children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. Intelligent but uncreative students accept conformity, never rebel, and complete their assignments with dispatch and to perfection. The creative child, on the other hand, is manipulative, imaginative, and intuitive. He is likely to harass the teacher. He is regarded as wild, naughty, silly, undependable, lacking in seriousness or even promise. His behavior is distracting; he doesn’t seem to be trying; he gives unique answers to banal questions, touching off laughter among the other children. E. Paul Tor-rance of Minnesota found that 70 percent of pupils rated high in creativ¬ity were rejected by teachers picking a special class for the intellectually gifted. The Goertzels concluded that a Stanford study of genius, under which teachers selected bright children, would have excluded Churchill, Edison, Picasso, and Mark Twain.”

id/pages 158-159

This is also why A students work for C students, and B students work for the government. Critical thinking is the key to everything and it is CURIOSITY that drives the advancement of society. Sadly, the number of people who question their immediate surroundings takes place in less than 10% of the population. People who often write asking what if everyone followed Socrates, the answer is rather simple – that would never happen. It is like saying what if 100% of the people voted for Democrat/Labor or Republican/Conservative?

It is CURIOSITY that is the key to everything

Russia’s Wheat Crop Fails?


The weather turned very cold this year as our computer has been forecasting. The importance of our model’s forecasts lies in determining what will be the next cycle focus. Each cycle tends to shift from one to the next sector. While we still risk a strong dollar rally into 2020 creating the economic recession through deflation as assets decline, the next 8.6-year cycle appears to be setting up to be a commodity cycle. As the climate changes to bitter cold, we have warned this is when FAMINE and DISEASE rise. The flu season is always when it turns cold – not warm.

It is important to keep an eye on the climate cycle and prepare for the next real bull market. This year, the wheat crop in Russia has failed because of the bitter cold with even April coming in as the coldest in more than 140 years. The people who want to believe in global warming are so enamored with this idea mixing up pollution with climate change that they fail to see the trend coming. As crops fail with colder winters, food supplies will decline and prices will rise. So look for the next 8.6-year Economic Confidence Model Wave to bring higher prices in food

The Crisis in Analysis – Is it Just Hopeless?


A new study has come out taking issue with the entire climate change forecasts putting forth that it is at best 45% as intense as the prognostications put forth. The greatest flaw is just how poor these people do their research. They are TOTALLY ignorant of any cyclical trend and project that if the temperature rises 1 degree this year, then they project that will continue without change for decades. Honestly, they do the same in just about every field with the same results. Economists assume they cannot predict the business cycle so why bother. Projections for growth into the next year are always based upon the trend this year.

 As that famous interview of Larry Summers by Bloomberg reveals, Summers was asked why you “smart” people can never predict a recession? It is the methodology that makes all of these forecasts worthless. The one thing we can count on is that whatever trend is in motion this year, by no means guarantees we will see the same next year.

Just how do we ever get all of these fields to stop and consider cycles is beyond comprehension. When you forecast the future trend correctly, they accuse you of causing the trend because of influence. It often seems hopeless to ever get a change in how analysis is conducted. It will just take a crash and burn before anything changes.

Summer states the very theory why the NY banks accused me of manipulating the world. The assumption is you cannot, and if you do manage to do it, then it is attributed to influence. You just cannot win.

Greece & the Debt Crisis


The entire EU Crisis began precisely on schedule on the Political Pi Turning point from the major high in 2007. Precisely on the day of the ECM turning point, April 16, 2010 (2010.29) Greece notified the IMF it was on the verge of bankruptcy. By April 22nd, the Euro fell to near year-low levels amid concerns about Greece’s debt crisis. The IMF activated the loan facility and Greece received its first €45 billion on April 23rd, 2010. Then on May 9th, the IMF approved a bailout package for Greece with the largest loan and exceptional, fast-track access. Of course, that turning point of April 16th, 2010 was also the first time the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with outright FRAUD is selling its Mortgage Backed Securities.

Mother-MerkelIn dealing with Greece, the German head of state Chancellor Angela Merkel, had promised the German taxpayers that any loan to Greece they will be held to the fire and forced to repay. The polls were turning hard against Merkel as she was being bashed in the world press for Greece had forgiven Germany’s debt after World War II, but Merkel refused to provide any relief for Greece because of her campaign promise. The divert the press from here hardline policy on Greece, Merkel then summarily announced that she would take the refugees from Syria with open arms. That then began the European Refugee Crisis and Merkel then force the rest of Europe to share the burden she created unilaterally. The entire European Refugee Crisis was created by Merkel, and this has been at the center of the crisis which is tearing Europe apart at the seams. That came as the next ECM wave turned from its peak 2015.75.

Now as we approach the next political Pi Turning Point due on November 21st, 2018, which will be 8.6 years from when the Greek debt crisis began, the EU Commission has demanded from the Eurozone states that debt relief should be provided to Greece. “We need to find a mechanism that will ease the debt burden that is on the Greek people today,” EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said Friday at a meeting of Eurozone finance ministers in Sofia. The creditors would have to show “solidarity with Greece” in order to secure the recovery of the long-term crisis country.

The Greek government creditors addressed by Moscovici are the taxpayers from those Eurozone states that had granted loans to the country in recent years – especially German taxpayers. With these loans, the Greek government paid the debts that it had with major international banks. All the loans in Christendom to Greece will not solve the debt crisis. The design of the Euro was seriously flawed. They implemented only a single currency and left all member states with their national debts instead of consolidating them. Then the Euro rose from 80 cents to $1.60 and suddenly Southern Europe saw their national debts double in real value. It was no different from borrowing to buy a home in Swiss franc to save interest and watching the Swiss double in value and now you owed twice as much on your home. Debt relief of 50% is needed on the entire national debt – not just the loans since 2010.

Britain Cancels its Currency but Keeps £1 million notes


COMMENT:

Message: I am a great fan of your blog and read all with interest. I was surprised to read £10 notes have been canceled, as I still regularly get £10 and £20 notes and send them even though electronic money transfer is increasingly the norm

MR

REPLY: Britain introduced the new “tenners” last September. There was a period when both could circulate. That term expired here in the Spring of 2018. You can exchange them at a bank, but you must have an account. If you do not have an account like myself, the currency exchange operations charge 20%. The eliminated the paper one pound notes back in 1984. They will be doing the same with £20 notes. They have not yet announced any release date for that one. The speculation is that the £50 notes will be discontinued.

The Bank of England actually prints itself internally £1 million and £100 million pound notes. They are used only internally to back the paper currency issued by other banks such as the Bank of Scotland. They are used to back those notes which are exchangeable to Bank of England notes.


Juncker Celebrates 200th Birthday of Karl Marx


The head of the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker celebrates the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx in Germany. What is really stunning, is that Karl Marx is not merely the champion of Communism which he adopted from the French Commune experiment during the French Revolution, but he has ignored the little fact that no other person in history is responsible for killing tens of millions of people, more than all the wars combined, who gave their lives for his ideology.

To celebrate Karl Marx which advocates suppressing the people and taking all wealth from them and handing it to the state politicians is in itself a demonstration of exactly how the EU looks at its role today. We live in a very dangerous era for this is the collapse of Marxism and they will fight back with every ruthless means possible to save their theory of living off of other people’s money.