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SW Saskatchewan | You have certainly got a thoughtful discussion going here and I applaud your well chosen questions in your post. Well done.
One thing I would like everyone to consider is the old "Wages Fund" concept that was generally accepted until the 1880's and 90's. Today we have the variant in the concept that there is going to be a retirement crisis because there is not enough money in peoples savings accounts and retirement plans.
Yes, there will be a crisis and we early boomers are starting to see it, but the way the question is phrased is wrong. What it implies is that we can save goods and services from one time period to a later one. Yes, like the survivalists out in the wilds of Montana, you can pile up beans and salt pork but YOU CANNOT STOCKPILE SERVICES!
That nursing care attendant cannot be put on ice and saved cryogenically for 20 years till you need those services. Those services have to be provided and purchased at that time. It will do you no good to build and mothball your nursing home if you can't provide the care down the road.
So if there is a shortage of attendants down the road, all the saving for the rainy day will only inflate the cost of those services then. just like the War Chests of Medieval Kingdoms, that gold and jewelry had to be exchanged for actual materiel at the time of war-and the effect was to remove goods from the civilian market as assuredly as if those goods had been bought by taxation or borrowing. The goods couldn't come from history and certainly they didn't have a handy time machine to steal them from your grandchildren. The borrowing removed cash from the then living and working people and put it into the hands of the government.
Borrowing and taxation - the same effects and affect the same age cohort. But they may not have the same income distribution effects
So you aren't borrowing from your grandchildren except in the case that they may have to apply taxation on wealth that it has been to easy to evade in our time.
But what you are doing is akin to the farmer going to the bank and borrowing money to buy fuel for his combine. If he doesn't buy the fuel, his harvest is being lost every day the combine does not run.
And every unemployed North American is a "harvest" that is being left to weather and be lost.
Printing of money has provided the fuel to harvest a crop that would have otherwise been lost- but too much of the printed money went to the providers of the fuel and not enough to the combines.
And taxation is the way that is achieved, anyone who believes that income distribution can be through the "market" also believes that Mr Ponzi had a magnificent financial plan, too bad everyone couldn't have been first since it was only the investors that didn't correctly time their investment that lost.
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Redman..from below.
