National Inflation Association

On Thursday evening, President Obama gave a speech to a joint session of Congress discussing the jobs situation here in America. The purpose of Obama’s speech was to convince the American public and their elected representatives in Washington to support Obama’s new $447 billion ‘American Jobs Act’, which has a cost that is 49% larger than the $300 billion act most people were expecting. NIA believes this bill will do nothing to reduce unemployment in America and that it is nothing but another stimulus bill in disguise that will add to our budget deficits.

Obama’s bill proposes a $4,000 per employee tax credit for businesses that hire somebody who was previously unemployed for 6 months or more, at a cost of $8 billion. At the same time, Obama wants to extend emergency unemployment compensation (EUC), which allows Americans who have exhausted standard unemployment benefits that last for 26 weeks to continue receiving them for between 20 and 53 additional weeks. EUC benefits are set to expire at the end of 2011 and continuing them through the end of 2012 will cost U.S. taxpayers $49 billion.

It is totally absurd for Obama to give employers money to attempt to hire people he is simultaneously paying to stay out of work. What makes this even more outrageous is that employers have an incentive not to hire recently laid off workers, when only those unemployed for 6 months or more will bring them a $4,000 check. If this bill is passed it will make the unemployment situation in America far worse than it already is.

NIA has heard from members who own farms and have positions on their farms available, but can’t find anybody interested in working for them and filling the available positions. Every time they hire somebody to work on their farm, the worker purposely does a poor job and tries to get fired. Their sole purpose of getting a job is to convince their local unemployment agency that they are trying to find employment so that they can keep receiving unemployment benefits, when in reality they are trying to take advantage of the system.

Obama is right that any future recovery will be driven by our businesses and our workers, but if Washington wants to make a positive difference the only step it should take to improve our people’s lives, is get out of their lives. It is impossible for any piece of legislation including Obama’s ‘American Jobs Act’, to improve the employment situation here in America. Obama needs to remove any government programs already in place that interfere with the free market. NIA believes that if the U.S. eliminated all unemployment benefits and also got rid of the minimum wage, it would cause the unemployment rate to return to healthy levels.

U.S. employees earning up to $106,800 annually currently pay a 4.2% payroll tax that is scheduled to revert back to 6.2% in 2012. Obama not only doesn’t want employee payroll taxes to raise back up to the historical level of 6.2%, which went into effect in 1990, but he wants to further reduce them to 3.1% for 2012. The annual cost of this employee payroll tax reduction is estimated to be $175 billion. In an attempt to help small businesses, Obama also wants to cut employer side payroll taxes in half from 6.2% to 3.1% on the first $5 million of payroll, while eliminating employer side payroll taxes for new hires. The annual cost of this employer side payroll tax reduction is estimated to be $65 billion.

NIA believes all payroll taxes should be eliminated. Americans who make payroll tax payments today are paying for other Americans to receive entitlement programs that they will never receive. Social Security and Medicare are already on the verge of insolvency. By the end of this decade, NIA believes Americans receiving Social Security checks will be receiving checks that don’t have any purchasing power and aren’t worth cashing. Americans would be much better off if they were able to use the money they currently spend on payroll taxes to accumulate physical silver instead. Only Americans with enough savings in physical gold and silver will be able to retire in the future.

Obama’s bill also provides $35 billion in state and local government aid, $50 billion in infrastructure repairs, $10 billion for a national infrastructure bank, $30 billion for school modernization and repairs, and $15 billion in housing expenditures. Unfortunately, the jobs Obama’s bill will create for construction workers, teachers, veterans, and the long-term unemployed, are only temporary jobs that will vanish after the bill expires, and the money printed to pay these workers will steal from the purchasing power of American workers who already have jobs today. There is no doubt about it that America’s infrastructure is decaying and we need to build new roads and bridges, but this is something that we can’t afford to do until we return to an economy that is based on production instead of consumption.

We need to return to a trade surplus and begin paying off our debt before we can afford to make investments into infrastructure. China can afford to build newer airports and faster railroads because they have a $254 billion trade surplus and $3.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves that they are better off spending on infrastructure improvements than keeping parked in U.S. dollars that will soon be worthless.

Obama says that everything in his bill will be paid for, but NIA wonders how? The government is claiming this isn’t another stimulus bill and Obama didn’t mention the word stimulus once during his speech. The truth is, NIA believes all of the measures in this bill will have to be paid for by borrowing and printing money, which will increase our budget deficit, expand the money supply, and lead to massive price inflation.

The jolt that Obama is trying to give to the economy he admits has stalled, is the same economy he tried to jolt with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which put the U.S. $787 billion deeper into debt. NIA said at the time this stimulus bill was passed that when it failed to produce the results the government said it would, instead of admitting that stimulating the economy failed and reversing course, they will say the stimulus didn’t work because it wasn’t big enough and attempt to pass further stimulus bills by making new false promises.

Obama is lying to the public just like Congress recently did in regards to its bill to raise the debt ceiling. Congress deceived Americans into believing that in return for raising the debt ceiling so that the government can continue operating as it is today, “spending cuts” would be made to lower future budget deficits. These so called “spending cuts” turned out to be minor reductions to very large spending increases, with even these minor reductions not beginning until early 2013. Government spending is set to rise every single year until the dollar doesn’t have any purchasing power left.

Obama said in his speech last night that, “while corporate profits have come roaring back, smaller companies haven’t.” The reason this is true is only the largest banks and the companies they do business with have direct access to the Federal Reserve’s cheap and easy money. If the Fed didn’t bail out all of the banks on Wall Street that made risky leveraged up bets with other people’s money for the sole purpose of paying their employees huge bonuses, smaller banks would have acquired their assets in bankruptcy court for pennies on the dollar and be prospering today. Instead, small banks that made sound decisions were punished for doing the right thing. The Fed has made it even more difficult than ever for them to compete with the large banks that should be out of business.

If the Fed and Treasury didn’t bail out Wall Street, the world wouldn’t have come to an end like former-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson conned everybody into believing. The truth is, we would be better off today because the bad assets would have been liquidated. The bad assets that caused the financial crisis of late-2008/early-2009 still exist today. The main difference between back then and now is, the size of the Fed’s balance sheet has doubled to $2.862 trillion due to the toxic assets they purchased, and the world is now flooded with excess liquidity of U.S. dollars.

It is impossible for the U.S. not to feel the consequences of the money we squandered fighting wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and maintaining military bases all around the world. It is impossible for the U.S. not to feel the devastating effects of interest rates that have been left artificially low for way too long. When you have an artificial boom, that boom will eventually go bust and the more that is done to prop a phony economy up that is built on U.S. consumers spending money they don’t have, the harder the economy will fall in terms of high unemployment, high inflation, and a total lack of purchasing power that will cause a permanent decline in the U.S. standard of living.

The fact that Obama felt the need to demand that Congress pass his bill 17 times in 1 speech, shows that nothing positive will come out of this bill for the average American citizen. The only people who will benefit from this bill are bankers on Wall Street who are in line to earn huge fees on the infrastructure deals that get funded by the new national infrastructure bank. While the official U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unemployment rate in August was 9.1%, down from its peak in October of 2009 of 10.1%, the real rate of unemployment including both short and long-term discouraged workers is now 22.8%, up from 22% in October of 2009 and a new high since the Great Depression in 1933. By further impeding the free market, Obama’s bill will further misallocate what little resources Americans still have left before hyperinflation arrives.

It is important to spread the word about NIA to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, if you want America to survive hyperinflation. Please tell everybody you know to become members of NIA for free immediately at: http://inflation.us

Hat Tip: BB