blog of bile » Department of the Treasury

94 Years of Serfdom by Paul Craig Roberts

bile — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:47:40 +0000

http://lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts265.html

This April 15 is the 94th year that Americans have had to file an income tax. For most Americans, the day is a non-event. The federal and state governments have already collected the taxes due by withholding from each paycheck over the course of the calendar year. Most Americans never saw the money and have no real idea that they earned it.

Some Americans have their incomes over-withheld as a form of forced savings. They look forward to tax time as it means they will receive a refund check from the government that they can use for a summer vacation, a big screen TV, a new appliance, or a down payment on a new car.

Few Americans realize that over the last 94 years they have been enserfed and have no more rights to their own labor than medieval serfs or 19th-century slaves.

The 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified because the income tax was only for the rich. Some states ratified the amendment because no one in the state had an income high enough to be subject to the tax.

According to the US Department of the Treasury’s history of the income tax, less than one percent of the US population was subject to the income tax. A progressive structure was applied to this less than one percent of rich Americans, with rates ranging from 1 percent to 7 percent on incomes over $500,000, a great sum of money in those days.

In the first year of the income tax, the world’s richest person, John D. Rockefeller, paid $2 million in income tax, almost 3 percent of the total income tax collected.

People were happy. They had finally gotten the rich.

And themselves as well. Exemptions were reduced and tax rates were raised in rapid succession in 1916, 1917, and 1918. Within five years the tax rates ranged from 6 percent to 77 percent, and people whose incomes were initially exempt now paid tax at more than double the initial top rate that had applied to John D. Rockefeller.

In “free” America today, despite the Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush tax rate reductions, ordinary Americans have no more claim to their own labor than a medieval serf. Most are content, however, with handing over 30 percent of their income as long as they can hope to tax the rich at 50 percent, the tax rate on 19th-century slaves.

Some 19th-century slaves, whose skills were worth more in towns than on plantations, were leased by their owners to businesses in towns. The businesses would remit half of the slave’s wages to the owner. Out of the remainder, slaves could save enough to purchase their freedom.

Today, we cannot purchase our freedom from the IRS. The only free Americans today are those who can work off the books or who can live on public welfare.

People who reject my analogy can test the analogy by refusing the government’s claim on their labor. They will find that the IRS can be just as ruthless as the worst feudal lord or slave owner.

For many Americans freedom is not as important as “fairness,” by which is meant a more equal distribution of income. However, a number of studies indicate that a progressive income tax doesn’t achieve the kind of leveling that some desire. Moreover, rich and poor are not static groups. Studies have discovered that there is a great deal of movement between the income quintiles. Some people rise, some people fall, and some rise again. The same people do not inhabit the same quintile year after year.

Government does not seem to be the answer. Indeed, some of the largest incomes result from collusion with government, such as the Clinton/Bush financial deregulation that produced the world’s first annual incomes of $1 billion.

The desire to tax the rich has caused a concentration of less accountable power in the United States as national and global corporations took over from local businesses. The estate tax, created in 1916, has forced family businesses, media, and farms into large corporate conglomerates. The corporate media, and the animal, chicken, and egg farming, with its inhumane conditions, antibiotics, and waste concentrations that pollute the environment, and large scale chemical fertilizer farming that pollutes rivers and oceans are, in part, unintended consequences of taxation aimed at the rich.

A mainstay of class war is the propaganda that “the rich don’t pay taxes.” This myth lives on despite the annual release of IRS data that proves the contrary. In 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, Americans whose tax returns placed them in the top 1 percent earned 22.1 percent of adjusted gross income and paid 39.9 percent of all federal individual income taxes.

The top 5 percent, defined as rich by President Obama, paid 60.1 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 10 percent paid 71 percent.

Those Americans whose earnings placed them in the bottom half of the income distribution paid less than 3 percent of the individual income tax collected.

The immunity of many Americans to facts is impressive. Just as many Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and hid them in Syria, Russia, or Iran, many Americans will continue to believe that “the rich don’t pay taxes.”

Peter Schiff vs Steve Liesman

bile — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:23:48 +0000

Keeping it in the family: Citigroup’s top economist tapped for Treasury post

bile — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:00:36 +0000

http://finance.yahoo.com/…

Citigroup’s chief economist is being tapped for a job at the short-staffed Treasury Department, which is at the center of the Obama administration’s efforts to battle the financial crisis.

Lewis Alexander will become a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, according to a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because a formal announcement has not been made. Alexander will work on domestic finance matters, the official said.

Alexander had worked at the Federal Reserve and also served as the Commerce Department’s chief economist in the 1990s.

Geithner so far has battled the crisis with no key deputies in place. That’s made for a rocky start for the man President Barack Obama put on the front lines of the financial crisis.

Treasury’s handling of a $700 billion financial bailout fund has drawn fierce criticism from Congress and the American public. The government has put up hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to rescue troubled financial companies, including American International Group, Bank of America and Lewis Alexander’s own Citigroup Inc.

In late February, the government said it will exchange up to $25 billion in emergency bailout money it provided Citigroup for as much as a 36 percent ownership stake in the struggling bank, a move that could put taxpayers at greater risk. The deal represented the third rescue attempt for Citigroup in the past five months. It’s contingent on private investors agreeing to a similar swap.

As a Wall Street insider from a bank that has been one of the largest recipients of government rescue funds, Alexander’s appointment could raise some eyebrows. In December 2007, he was quoted as saying that while he believed the housing market would remain weak well into 2008, it was more likely that the economy would keep growing than head into recession, adding that the housing bubble was “correcting on its own.”

The same Citigroup which is now partially nationalized? The one that made lots of bad business decisions on his watch? He’s now going to work for an institution with even more economic power?

And yet people are pissed over some AIG bonuses?

SEC chief claims regret over short-selling ban

bile — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:56:41 +0000

http://www.reuters.com/…

Under fire for regulatory missteps, top U.S. securities regulator Christopher Cox defended his agency’s record but acknowledged some regrets over how he handled the worst financial crisis in decades.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has been lambasted by lawmakers and others for not doing enough to prevent the 2008 collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, interfering with markets and failing to detect the alleged $50 billion fraud at Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff’s firm.

Cox, a Republican and former California congressman, said the SEC’s focus has been customer protection and broker dealer regulation and that the agency “performed that traditional role superbly.”

However, Cox said he had some regrets over a drastic action the agency took as markets were hurtling downward in September. For a few weeks, the SEC stopped investors from making bearish bets on financial stocks like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

The SEC’s office of economic analysis is still evaluating data from the temporary ban on short-selling. Preliminary findings point to several unintended market consequences and side effects caused by the ban, he said.

“While the actual effects of this temporary action will not be fully understood for many more months, if not years, knowing what we know now, I believe on balance the commission would not do it again,” Cox told Reuters in a telephone interview from the SEC’s Los Angeles office late on Tuesday. “The costs appear to outweigh the benefits.”

The SEC imposed the temporary ban under intense pressure from the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department which insisted it was crucial to the short-term survival of these institutions, Cox said.

A few weeks after the temporary ban was lifted, global markets were again dropping precipitously, U.S. banks were begging the SEC to reinstate its short-sale ban and there was talk of shutting the markets down.

Cox said the chief executive of one major U.S. investment bank even urged suspension of normal trading rules across the entire U.S. market, likening the situation to how Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt sent Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War Two.

The chief executive said, “that is how America made it through such crises, and we couldn’t be too focused on maintaining the rule of law,” Cox said. “That was advice we rejected.”

Wonderful. Comparing his their actions to that of outright tyrants. In one respect I agree. What was done was but a difference of degrees and not kind. But the level of degrees is so great it’s a bit of an insult to those who suffered as a result of Lincoln’s and FDR’s actions.

This was completely predicted by anyone with half an economic brain. The ban was obviously pushed for by John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs along with other major bank players. No net good can occur due to government interference. Only relative to the bad they caused prior.

Credit crunch? What credit crunch?

bile — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:14:05 +0000

http://www.reuters.com/…

The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report released on Thursday says.

As a result, governments are pumping masses of public money into the economy across the world because of the difficulties of a few big, vocal banks and industries such as car manufacturing, which would be in difficulty anyway, according to the report published by Celent, a financial services consultancy.

“It’s just stabbing in the dark with trillions of dollars,” Octavio Marenzi, report author and head of Celent, told Reuters in a telephone interview where he questioned the depth of the analysis that preceded numerous fiscal stimulus packages.

The report, much of which is based on U.S. Federal Reserve data, challenges a long list of assumptions one by one, arguing that there is indeed a financial crisis but that, on aggregate, the problems of a few are by no means those of the many when it comes to obtaining credit.

“It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson’s remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead,” said the report.

Perhaps the U.S. central bank and treasury department, and authorities in other countries by extension, know something they are not telling anyone and which is far more worrying than the public data shows, the report says.

Or, more plausibly, they were generalizing erroneously from the bad experience of a limited number of big banks and companies that are in any case in difficulty.

“I don’t think they’re fabricating stuff but what I think they are doing is taking the situation of a handful of institutions and generalizing that to the market as a whole, incorrectly,” said Marenzi.

The picture appeared to be broadly similar in much of Europe and Japan, said the report, based on publicly available data on trends in bank lending to industry, households and among banks themselves in the so-called interbank markets.

ALL A MYTH?

Regarding U.S. business access to credit, the report says:

*Overall U.S. bank lending is at its highest level ever and has grown during the current financial crisies.

*U.S. commercial bank lending is at record highs and growing particularly fast since May 2007.

*Corporate bond issuance has declined but increased commercial lending has compensated for this.

As for the interbank market, it says:

*lending hit its highest level ever in September 2008 and remained high in October and that overall interbank lending is up 22 percent since the start of the financial crisis, taken to be mid-2007.

*The cost of interbank lending, as measured by the interest rates banks charge each other for lending overnight Fed funds, dropped to its lowest level ever in early November and remains at very low levels.

Marenzi said one of the other measures used by many to gauge interbank lending — the LIBOR rate — was a flawed gauge since it was based on daily observations of eight banks, many of which were banks with particularly severe difficulties of their own.

The report argues similarly on consumer credit, which it said was at a record high in September, the latest date for publicly available data.

Local government bond issuance had continued at similar levels to those before the credit crisis, while bank lending for real estate reached a record level in October 2008, it says.

In Europe, the study says there is no evidence of a credit crisis in consumer and commercial lending data up to the end of October, with consumer lending in France and Italy still keeping to trends seen since early 2003 and Germany flatter but for many years and not any more so in recent times.

Bank lending in Britain, tracked from 1999 to October 2008, was at its highest level ever and continued uninterrupted through the credit crisis, the report says.

In Japan, banks began to increase lending activity in late 2005 after a long decline and there has been no sign of a precipitous decline through to October 2008, it said. “Indeed, no decline is visible at all since the credit crisis began.”

All of which drove the Celent report to conclude that the U.S. and other governments may be throwing good money after bad for want of a better idea of what is really happening.

“Just like a doctor contemplating an obviously sick and suffering patient, a massive surgical intervention based on a misdiagnosis can only worsen the patient’s condition.”

Congress really is just for show

bile — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:59:11 +0000

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

Writes Bob Higgs:

My source is Bloomberg.Requiring the Fed to disclose loan recipients might set off panic, said David Tobin, principal of New York-based loan-sale consultants and investment bank Mission Capital Advisors LLC.

“If you mark to market today, the banking system is bankrupt,” Tobin said. “So what do you do? You try to keep it going as best you can.”

I believe he said “the banking system is bankrupt.” That seems like an honest statement. And then he said “you try to keep it going.” Pretty cool, eh. Zombie banking system. Keep it going.

Some of the bailout assistance could come from tax breaks in the future. The Treasury Department changed the tax code on Sept. 30 to allow banks to expand the deductions on the losses banks they were buying, according to Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers tax and accounting analyst who teaches at Columbia University Business School in New York.

Wells Fargo & Co., which is buying Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp., will be able to deduct $22 billion, Willens said. Adding in other banks, the code change will cost $29 billion, he said.

“The rule is now popularly known among tax lawyers as the ‘Wells Fargo Notice,’” Willens said.

The regulation was changed to make it easier for healthy banks to buy troubled ones, said Treasury Department spokesman Andrew DeSouza.

Note: the Treasury changed the law. The pretense that Congress makes the laws, with the president’s assent, has apparently been abandoned as unnecessary in a crisis. Besides, under the present emergency regime, the Treasury is the government, with assistance from the Fed and the FDIC. All the rest is mere window dressing.

What happened at the Paulson / bank heads meeting?

bile — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:39:15 +0000

http://www.iht.com/…

The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States trooped into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department at 3 p.m. Monday. To their astonishment, they were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government, then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left.

The chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, was receptive, saying he thought the deal looked pretty good once he ran the numbers through his head. The chairman of Wells Fargo, Richard Kovacevich, protested strongly that, unlike his New York rivals, his bank was not in trouble because of investments in exotic mortgages, and did not need a bailout, according to people briefed on the meeting.

But by 6:30, all nine chief executives had signed — setting in motion the largest government intervention in the American banking system since the Depression and retreating from the rescue plan Paulson had fought so hard to get through Congress only two weeks earlier.

Sounds a lot like what Herbert Hoover did at the beginning of the Great Depression. We all know, or should after reading the above link, how well that went.

How not to raise market confidence: Fed looking into unsecured lending

bile — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:04:17 +0000

http://www.marketwatch.com/…

The U.S. Federal Reserve is reportedly looking at getting into unsecured lending, an extreme step that could allow it to directly purchase commercial paper, according to a report in the Financial Times. The report said the Fed had never done so in its history, but doing so could allow it to participate in the frozen inter-bank money market and the contracting commercial paper market. The Fed doesn’t believe it has the legal mandate to make unsecured loans, so it would need the Treasury to guarantee any losses. The Fed had said in a statement on Monday that “the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department are consulting with market participants on ways to provide additional support for term unsecured funding markets.”

This charade is sad at times. They are grasping at straws… either because they think they have to or because they don’t know any better. Unfortunately for us their mistakes are our hard times.

FDIC broke, asking for unlimited Treasury loans

bile — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:46:36 +0000

http://www.reuters.com/…

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is seeking temporary unlimited borrowing authority from the Treasury Department, according to a copy of the final Senate bailout legislation on Wednesday.

In the bill, which is expected to be voted on by the Senate later Wednesday, the FDIC is seeking the borrowing authority through the end of 2009.

The FDIC currently insures up to $100,000 per depositor and up to $250,000 per individual retirement account at insured banks.

Really just accounting tricks. The FDIC doesn’t have their own separate fund to draw from anyway so instead of the Congress borrowing they are trying to delegate the borrowing through the FDIC.

Cheap at twice the price: federal government unveils 700 billion dollar bailout

bile — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 23:58:31 +0000

http://www.nytimes.com/…

The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed to Congress what could become the largest financial bailout in United States history, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets.

The proposal, not quite three pages long, was stunning for its stark simplicity. It would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. And it would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, granting the Treasury secretary unprecedented power to buy and resell mortgage debt.

A $700 billion expenditure on distressed mortgage-related assets would be roughly what the country has spent so far in direct costs on the Iraq war and more than the Pentagon’s total yearly budget appropriation. Divided across the population, it would amount to more than $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

“This is a good foundation of a plan that can stabilize markets quickly,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “But it includes no visible protection for taxpayers or homeowners. We look forward to talking to Treasury to see what, if anything, they have in mind in these two areas.”

In Florida, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic presidential nominee, said he would press for a broader economic stimulus initiative to be part of the bailout plan for financial firms.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, issued a statement on Saturday saying he was reviewing the administration’s plan. He also urged the administration and lawmakers to consider his own plan for creating a trust within the Treasury Department to aid ailing mortgage lenders and other financial institutions.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in a statement: “This proposal is, and should be kept, simple and clear.” He added, “Simply put, now is not the time for partisan plans or pet projects.”

Some Democrats, including lawmakers like Mr. Frank and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairman of the banking committee, were adamant about including provisions to promote government action to stabilize real estate prices and help troubled borrowers refinance their mortgages.

Still another group of Democrats was pushing for a wider stimulus package that would direct help more directly and immediately to Main Street, perhaps including an increase in unemployment benefits and investments in infrastructure projects, including bridges and roads, that would help to create jobs.

A fourth, smaller group of lawmakers was highly critical and in some cases adamantly opposed to the plan. That group included including Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, and Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont.

“The free market for all intents and purposes is dead in America,” Mr. Bunning declared on Friday. “The action proposed today by the Treasury Department will take away the free market and institute socialism in America. The American taxpayer has been misled throughout this economic crisis. The government on all fronts has failed the American people miserably.”

COME ONE, COME ALL! FREE MONEY! FREE FASCISM! ALL YOU CAN CARRY!

I have to laugh because otherwise I may cry.