American poverty is a fabricated shortage of money for those at the bottom of society purposely perpetrated by politicians and their soothsaying economists to keep wealth obscenely concentrated in a very small percentage of the population at the top. It is an economic buffer zone designed by the elites to drag wages lower for those lucky enough to find a job (the ever decreasing middle class) while grotesquely increasing profit percentages for the corporate executive class.
Poverty is dismissed by the elites as a cultural problem. Lazy minorities and white trash wouldn’t know how to use more money even if you gave it to them; they can’t be trusted and should basically be ignored (you know…the welfare queens); they’re only in poverty and without a job because they choose to be that way. This cultural fable is eagerly bought by those in middle class because they are overworked and underpaid for what they do and are easily manipulated by corporate media to resent the rags that are tossed to the poor through social entitlement programs. If it weren’t for all these rags (trifles really) there would be more money for them—the middle class—to make a decent wage. Of course this is not what would happen if the social programs were actually eliminated; the money not spent on the poor would go right into the profit zone of the elites, not into the wages of the workers. But it’s a nice fantasy and it keeps the elites in control.
All of this is carried out in the ruse that America is running out of money. There just isn’t enough money to do all the things spoiled Americans want to do. At the very same time that Americans are being told that there isn’t enough money, America has more resources and capability to produce goods and services than it’s ever had in its history—and a very significant portion of those resources and capabilities are lying purposely idle because there isn’t enough money to use them. The truth is America has not run out of money. It can never run out of money because it is the creator or its own currency and that currency is free-floating—not tied to anything else, such as gold or a foreign currency. If there isn’t enough money, it’s because the government has purposely chosen not to issue it, not because it doesn’t have any to issue. Why, then, doesn’t the government issue the money? Because the government pretends it has to borrow the money from the private sector before it can spend beyond its tax reserves, and it believes it has already borrowed too much, putting the government and future generation’s prosperity into certain insolvency. After all, America’s grandchildren must pay it back. Right? This need for the government to borrow before deficit spending is pure nonsense when one considers that the issuer of a free floating currency cannot borrow its own money before it issues it—that is impossible. Every dollar ever borrowed by the government had to be deficit spent (issued) by the government first. Otherwise it wouldn’t be there to borrow!
So what does all this mean? The elites have created a political monetary system that tends to keep money out of the purchasing hands of the poor and middle class, and concentrate it into the savings of the rich, leaving vast productive resources and capability untouched and creating a huge mythological demon known as the national debt—bonds issued by the treasury which are primarily nothing more than the savings of American and foreign elites. These bonds were exchanged for reserve dollars (dollars the government had already issued) which were simply transferred into a Treasury bond account. None of the reserves were used for anything; they were just converted into an interest paying bond account and can be moved back into reserves at any time. So in reality the government never borrowed anything. It just created an interest bearing, risk free savings account for the rich as a ruse to issue more of its sovereign money and called it borrowing! Supplement the coffers of the rich and call it borrowing at the same time. How quaint! This ruse wouldn’t be a big problem if the government issued enough real purchasing dollars into the poor and middle class to offset the outrageous savings desires of the rich and still keep consumer demand high enough to promote full employment of human and physical resources. But this has not been the case because social entitlement programs and middle class wages have been politically reduced over the past thirty years (remember the poverty buffer zone?). And a significant stimulus is politically out of the question because “America has already borrowed too much.” As a result, most of the dollars issued by the government which are not sitting in bank reserves have ended up in the treasury bonds of the rich instead of being invested in further growth and consumption, growing elite savings (national debt) at the expense of the majority of Americans welfare and overall GDP.
Poverty exists in America for a reason and it is there by design. It will only be overcome when too many from the middle class are pushed into poverty and the cultural ruse of the lazy poor falls on its face as happened during the great depression. America is seeing the seeds of this impending upheaval in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. As the middle class continues to shrink and the politicians continue their wail of “we’ve run out of money,” less of the almost unlimited monetary resources in America will be used to stimulate growth through aggregate demand and the ensuing sluggish economy will generate more poverty and unemployment. At some point “the people” will have had enough. Let’s just hope that when this happens, the monetary myth of “we’ve run out of money” doesn’t carry over into the revolution. If it does, the decisions made by the new régime might actually make things worse. A revolution of the social classes generated by mythic rules of economic fraud without a corresponding monetary revolution to eliminate that fraud can bring a revolution right back into the poverty it seeks to avoid (think of South Africa). Ignorance of fraudulent monetary policy is deadly—especially when the vast majority of experts (economists) in the policy-making field actually believe the fraudulent myths they have created and are a vital part of the elite class. Without a break-through in monetary policy, the modern world economy is structured, no matter what happens, to spring back into the defense of the elite at the expense of the masses and the politically impoverished poor. It will take a revolutionary shift in monetary policy as was seen in the Roosevelt years to make any social and political change in America stick. Everyone seems to forget that when the elites of the 1930’s exclaimed, “we are out of money,” the Roosevelt administration called their bluff and issued some money, a lot of money; enough, in fact, to improve the economy for forty years. While they were at it they created regulations which made it more difficult for the elites to shift profits their way, improving the wages of the working middle class and growing the economy at rates not seen for at least thirty years. But that was just magic, right?