Thanks to everyone who responded to my father's original post (link below). He wanted to wrtie a follow-up post. To those who didn't see the first one, he is a retired businessman (he owned a construction firm) in his late 70s.
Reading the various responses to Bluewater9's post of my essay here http://www.dailykos.com/... it became apparent I failed to say what I was trying to say about the economic problems facing the nation. So let me try again.
Within the existing economic system, we, the people of the United States, do not need to impose taxes on ourselves to have money to pay for the operation of our Federal government. We, the people, do need to impose taxes on ourselves to regulate the monetary system, the amount of money in circulation.
Local and State governments need to collect taxes to operate, the Federal government does not need to collect taxes to operate.
The national monetary unit is the dollar. The Federal government needs dollars to operate. We, the people, have the unabridged right, through our Federal government, to create or manufacture dollars without limit, therefore, we, the people, do not need to tax ourselves to have dollars.
Since we, the people, have access to an unlimited supply of dollars, we, the people, do not need to borrow dollars. Allow me to repeat that. We, the people, do not need to borrow dollars.
The practice of borrowing dollars to operate our government commenced during a time when we, the people, had imposed artificial restrictions on our ability to manufacture dollars, most notably with the gold standard. When the artificial restriction was removed by President Nixon, the individuals who managed our government kept right on borrowing dollars, instead of simply creating the dollars our government needed to operate.
Now some people will say I have it all wrong, that Congress cannot simply create dollars and place those dollars into a Federal account.
As a matter of fact, that is exactly what Congress has been doing for the past four decades.
Congress wanted more dollars to spend than we, the people, wanted them to have. So Congress used the deceitful practice of borrowing dollars by selling debt instruments, T-bills and such, and Congress created a huge amount of interest bearing debt.
To summarize, we, the people do not need to borrow dollars to finance the operation of the Federal government. We, the people, should not be owing dollars to various entities.
To work our way out of the problems Congress has created, we, the people, should order Congress to order the managers of the Federal Reserve System to manufacture the dollars needed to service the national debt until the debt is totally and completely retired. In addition, we, the people, should order Congress to create a taxing system that can adequately control the amount of money in circulation so as to avoid debilitating inflation. And we, the people, should order Congress to develop a plan for phasing out of existence the antiquated income tax, and to implement the plan.