|
|
Jeff Bell on Budget & Economy |
Bell: Strongly Agree.
Question topic: Briefly list political or legislative issues of most concern to you.
Bell: Giving back control of our money from the Federal Reserve to the people by restoring the gold standard.
A: Strongly oppose.
"I offered an answer to that problem," he added. At the center of the economy's lackluster recovery, he said, is the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy, which he blames for the lack of job creation and for denying people the ability to save. The U.S. needs to undergo a "fundamental monetary reform," he said.
That belief is what prompted Bell to run again in the first place, he said. Since 1982, he has continued working on tax and monetary reform at a series of Washington DC-based think tanks and consultancies. "It just struck me that the whole cycle was going to go forward with no further debate on Fed policy unless I decided to come back to New Jersey and run," he said.
The most important hindrance to middle-class prosperity is the condition of the US dollar. Since 1994 it has lost over 1/3 of its value, and lost 10% in the last five years alone since the Federal Reserve began its "Quantitative Easing" program of creating new dollars. The effect of rising prices is felt everywhere: at the grocery store, the gas pump, in medical costs, and school tuition.
While Washington has gotten free financing from the Fed, everyone else has fallen behind.
This is the direct result of the Fed's policy of near zero interest rates, now in its 6th year. The suppression of interest rates below the market level has also broken down the traditional banking system, in which small businesses borrow from their local banks. The total value of all small bank business loans is approximately half of what it was when "zero interest rates" was adopted.
"I'm a one-issue candidate," he says. "I don't really want to get into state issues. With no money, my only real opportunity is to be known for just one thing." So Bell, an eloquent and ardent pro-lifer, defense hawk, and foreign-policy interventionist, ties nearly every issue he's asked about back to the destructive power of paper money.
"Why is it so important to return to gold-dollar convertibility now?" his letter asked the unsuspecting Republican voters of New Jersey. "Things have gone too far for limited half measures to work." A return to the gold standard, he concedes, would of course result in higher interest rates, as the dollar sought its own level of value without direction from the Fed.
The charisma of the Marxist left began to fade during the West's post-WWII economic recovery juxtaposed against the stagnation of Stalinism; but by the 1960s, Marxism's mild-mannered nephew, Keynesianism, had taken nearly complete control of elite economics, especially in the English-speaking world. Keynesianism tolerated private enterprise but argued that deficit spending and the creation of excess money were far more reliable drivers of large-scale ("macro") economic growth. These 2 stimulants had one thing in common: They are achievable only through the actions of governmental elites.
Policy elites in the 1960s "knew" that the solution to recession was a temporary dose of inflationary stimulus, and that the solution to inflation was to put a temporary brake on growth.