LizzieMaine
Bartender
- Messages
- 33,825
- Location
- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
A Confederate fifty-cent piece sold for over $600,000 a few years back. That'll buy a lot of sorghum.
...Whatever you want to call them, bond sales to finance a war are an approach I support -- people feel differently about war when they feel like it's coming directly out of their own pockets. We need 10 percent of your gross income, buddy, skimmed right off the top. Yeah, you, get yer hand out of your pocket and shell out. "Bonds and Taxes, Bonds and Taxes, That's The Way To Beat The Axis!"
Well, you should be gratified to learn that around here where I live, most of the new road construction is of toll roads. I suppose the link is greater that way than the old way of taxing gasoline. The problem with Social Security that is objectionable to some people and always has been, is that half of the tax is paid for by employers. A few years ago for some obscure reason, the employer's tax portion was lowered for a year and I don't know how that was supposed to help anything. Apparently no one realizes that many people do not get paid enough to finance their own retirement and for that matter, even to be good consumers, even though Wal-Mart seems to be doing okay nevertheless.
All of this logic can be applied to schools, too, you know. No one has a right to a free education, although it just might be good public policy, not that that has ever counted for anything.
I'm guessing that a genuine Confederate one-dollar bill would fetch considerably more than a buck today.
I'm reminded of that John Huston line in "Chinatown." You know, the one about certain things becoming respectable if they last long enough.
War bonds weren't needed to finance the war. They were to soak up excess buying power and control inflation.
Okay, so somebody explain why war bonds weren't needed to finance the war and if not, how did we finance the war?
If government could finance itself by simply printing money, there would be no need for taxes at all, would there? Think about it: how many people here get paid in cash? I realize it was more common then, but when the government bought a new battleship, they didn't drive across town with a truck full of cash. They wrote checks for things like that. These days, it would be by a wire transfer.
Cash is still always welcomed, of course, but the government doesn't work that way. In fact, it's very suspicious of those who deal with large amounts of cash.
Ultimately, it was paid for with taxes. Borrowing by government is only a form of deferred taxation. It's just a matter of who pays the taxes and when. It was also paid for by the deaths of over 400,000 American soldiers.
Well, governments raise revenue by other means, including corporate taxes. But no one should think that everyone pays the same taxes. Sometimes, it is rumored, some wealthy people pay no taxes, as hard as that is to believe. But it seems that many people believe that the government can just print all the money it wants. Generating large amounts of cash isn't that easy either, you realize. But it is true that governments exist with the consent of the governed and in a sense, all countries are democracies, the only differences being in who gets to vote. Beyond that, of course, there are other differences in governments. In a sense, a homeowner's association is a form of government. Even though it exists with the "consent of the governed," it does not follow that everybody's happy.
All my comments here are serious. Believe as much of it as you care to and ignore the rest.