A Money Tree? by N.A.
First Iceland, and now Hungary, are now embarking on a Sovereign Money road to monetary independence. They are both telling the IMF and other international bankers from the EU that "Thanks, but no thanks for your debt money, we can make our own debt-free money." Forces from both the far Right and progressive side of the political spectrum are coming together in throwing out the unsustainable debt-money system, which not only preaches unworkable austerity, and sequestration, but whose adherents can't even understand the basic fact that you can't eliminate debt in a debt-based money system without eliminating money as well, and plunging us into a deflationary depression not seen since Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt in 1836 - resulting in an even worse and longer depression than the Great Depression. What we need to do is continue necessary spending, but eliminate the debt.
Money should exist in sufficient quantity to meet the productive capacity of the nation. Nothing more nor less. And if banks won't produce enough private money to meet that capacity, there needs to be a public option for money.
We've had seigniorage (the face value of money minus the production costs) for coins since the Republic was founded (the original coinage act of 1792), and our longest-lasting currency was the now ignored United States Note:
United States Note by Wikipedia
This was produced by Congress under president Lincoln in 1862-1863 ($450m, later $351m) through 1996, when Treasury burned its last supply of them, but after a brief period during the Civil War when they rose to 40% of the currency, these were never again produced in sufficient quantity to seriously compete with private bank money. But, the constitution's Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5, gives Congress the authority to "coin Money" anytime, for any reason, and in any amount. Rather than over-produce such sovereign money, Congress, whether bribed outright as in the 1870s, or simply misguided and ignorant, as today, has instead chosen to abrogate its sovereign, constitutional, duty to fund the nation.
Can we reverse this bank-ownership before it is too late?
Iceland and Hungary are now showing us how that can be done (and China and Japan are edging that way too, with essentially de facto public banking systems that produce stimulus money and roll over debt, though not eliminating it...yet). Will the U.S. follow, or will it continue the debt destruction brought about by the private debt-based money system?
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