I wrote an e-mail to Prime Minister Harper last week!

[DennisTate]

I do realize that sending an e-mail to the Prime Minister of Canada is not a particularly intelligent thing to do. Now there is probably some poor employee of CSIS trying to figure out if I am some sort of threat or just some idiot out to become wealthy and famous!

Wealth and fame would be nice I must admit! Well, the wealth part anyway! Anyway I will greatly appreciate your comments and your prayers regarding this because if it were not for the Michael Journal people I would still know essentially nothing about economics!

PM Stephen Harper,will you save St. Mary’s Education Centre?

Dennis Tate
E-mail: tate4pictoucentre@yahoo.ca/
May 29, 2009

Dear Mr. Prime Minister:

The closure of our local elementary school in the St. Mary’s District of Guysborough
County, Nova Scota by as early as 2011 is being discussed.

I personally think that this is a terrible idea because I
am expecting that during a time of global recession and
swine flu pandemic people will begin to leave urban areas and
move to the countryside in serious numbers. At this moment there would be no
real danger in my six year old daughter having classes in the same building as
the Grade XII students but within a few years the situation could be drastically
different.

Over the past fifteen years I’ve been researching this question quite thoroughly
and I ran as an independent three times to bring attention to the alternatives.

Mr. Prime Minister, if you would publically and courageously address this
critical question I believe that you could prevent our elementary school from being closed.
I recently joined the Liberal Party of Canada because Mr. Ignatieff gave me
the impression that he would perhaps be more likely to address the root cause of this
problem than you would, but I will be eternally grateful if you will would surprise me Sir.

Following is the best article that I have ever read on this topic. If you were to
publically respond to this issue previous to June 9 this could profoundly affect
the outcome of our Nova Scotia provincial election!

Thank you for considering this theory.

Kind regards.

Dennis Tate

by Harold Chorney, John Hotson, and Mario Seccareccia

“Governments these days find it easy to defend cuts in services and programs. All they have to do is point to their annual deficits and their total accumulated debts. (As of March, 1994, Canada’s public debt was about $546 billion.) This public debt provides the politicians with a convenient excuse for cutting spending or raising taxes. Or both. «We’re broke,» they tell us plaintively. «We can’t afford to increase public services, or even keep them at their present level.»

A lesson of war

“As the deep recession dragged into 1992, Finance Minister Don Mazankowski said he couldn’t do anything about it. His hands were tied, he said. The federal government was broke. The cupboard was bare. The deficit and accumulated national debt were so enormous that his first priority had to be to reduce them — even if that meant prolonging the recession and making it even worse.

“So his budget contained almost nothing to revive the sick economy. With interest payments on the debt gobbling up one-third of tax revenue, his response was to keep taxes high and axe more public services and agencies. Like Martin Luther before him, Mazankowski in effect proclaimed: «Here stand I. I cannot do otherwise.»

“But it doesn’t take an economist to see that in fact he could. All you have to do is imagine what the government would do if it got involved in another Gulf War — or if that war were still raging. Would the Finance Minister have brought down the same kind of budget? Would he have said, «We’d like to keep on fighting, but we’re broke, so we’re calling our troops back»? Not on your life!

“Did Canada surrender half way through World War II because the national debt had grown even larger than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? Of course not! Somehow the extra money was found. If it wasn’t by raising taxes or borrowing from the private banks, why, the Bank of Canada simply created all the money the government needed — and at near-zero interest rates, too!

“When World War II ended, the national debt relative to the national income was more than twice as large as it is now. But was the country ruined? Did we have to declare national bankruptcy? Far from it! Instead, Canada’s economy boomed and the country prospered for most of the post-war period.

The Bank of Canada has failed in its duty

“Why isn’t the same thing happening today? Why was a much larger national debt shrugged off in 1945, while today’s much smaller debt (as a percentage of GDP) is being used as an excuse to let the economy stagnate?

“The answer can be found at the Bank of Canada. During the war, and for 30 years afterward, the government could borrow what it needed at low rates of interest, because the government’s own bank produced up to half of all the new money. That forced the private banks to keep their interest rates low, too.

“Since the mid-1970s, however, the Bank of Canada, with government consent, has been creating less and less of the new money, while letting the private banks create more and more. Today «our» bank creates a mere 2% of each year’s new money supply, while allowing the private banks to gouge the government — and of course you and me, as well — with outrageously high interest rates. And it is these extortionate interest charges that are the principal cause of the rapid escalation of the national debt. If the federal government were paying interest at the average levels that prevailed from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, it would now be running an operating surplus of about $13 billion!”

.” (End of the three economists’ pamphlet.)

 

[DennisTate]

If you are curious you can see the rest of the article here:
michaeljournal.org/appenB.htm

I highly highly recommend this article. If you are from the USA I recommend this one:

michaeljournal.org/plenty49.htm

First, in order to cast discredit on the Greenbacks, the bankers persuaded Congress to vote, in February of 1862, the “Exception Clause”, which said that the Greenbacks could not be used to pay the interest on the national debt, nor to pay taxes, excises, or import duties. Then, in 1863, having financed the election of enough Senators and Representatives, the bankers got the Congress to revoke the Greenback Law in 1863, and enact in its place the National Banking Act. (Money was then to be issued interest-bearing by privately-owned banks.)

This Act also provided that the Greenbacks should be retired from circulation as soon as they came back to the Treasury in payment of taxes. Lincoln heatedly protested, but his most urgent objective was to win the war and save the Union, which obliged him to put off till after the war the veto he was planning against this Act and the action he was to take against the bankers. Lincoln nevertheless declared:

“I have two great enemies, the Southern army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. And of the two, the bankers are my greatest foe.”

Lincoln was re-elected President in 1864, and he made it quite clear that he would attack the power of the bankers, once the war was over. The war ended on April 9, 1865, but Lincoln was assassinated five days later, on April 14. A tremendous restriction of credit followed, organized by the banks: the currency in circulation in the country, which was, in 1866, $1,907 million, representing $50.46 for each American citizen, had been reduced to $605 million in 1876, representing $14.60 per capita. The result: in ten years, 56,446 business failures, representing a loss of $2 billion. And as if this was not enough, the bankers reduced the per capita currency in circulation to $6.67 in 1887!