$33 Trillion in US National Debt??? The second coming of Keynes is at hand, and he will judge the wicked . . . (A special Christmas column)

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***Photo above*** *- President Richard Nixon, who proclaimed in 1971 “We’re all Keynesians now . . . “*

Quite a few of our nation’s lawyer-politicians would describe themselves as Keynesians. (A few might instead brag about being Marxists.) If you ask a random Senator or House Member – or President – what is meant by Keynesianism, you get the look of a stunned chicken. What If you ask them for an actual quote by Keynes? Same result. Name the title of any book written by John Maynard Keynes?

Politicians claim that Keynes invented/endorsed deficit spending. Now ask them to find a specific quote or paragraph supporting that. If they do find it, and read it, their minds will be blown. Because it’s bracketed by additional quotes, like these examples below:

“*The government should not deficit finance current expenditures. Public expenditures should be . . . repaid over the service life of the project. Tax revenue should meet these payments. There should be no deficit in the current or ordinary budget . . .”*

“*What is raised by printing notes is just as much taken from the public as an income-tax. What the Government spends the public pays for. There is no such thing as an uncovered deficit.”*

*”By continuing the process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, the wealth of their citizens . . .”*

There is a link to 216 quotes by John Maynard Keynes at the bottom of today’s column. If you want a list of his 15+ books you can google it. His best seller is *“The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money”* published in 1935.

I once meet a man (age 36) who has an Econ degree from a near Ivy League school (Bucknell). I asked him which texts by Keynes were taught in those courses. In return I got the look of a stunned chicken. He went back and reviewed his old syllabi. Zero Keynes, as in none. How about Milton Friedman? Alan Greenspan? Nope . . . not them either. I was relieved when he found that Paul Samuelson was, in fact, part of his education. But my friend was fleeced of near-Harvard levels of tuition to get a BA in Econ without exposure to some of the most famous economists not named Marx.

My friend now lives outside of NYC. A banker – he makes more in a year than the average person will in a decade. He is a renter, because between inflation and the newly jacked up mortgage rates, he cannot afford a “nice” home in a “safe” neighborhood. If I ask him if this might possibly be related to inflation and decades of government deficit spending, he might give me the look of a stunned chicken. I will NOT ask him who – if anyone – he might vote for in 2024. (Full disclosure – I wrote in for Nikki Haley in 2020).

I doubt if Putin or Xi have read Karl Marx – but their nations were founded on Marxist principles. Those principles never worked out, and Russia and China have devolved into totalitarian kleptocracies, with a foreign policy grounded in confiscation of neighboring nations’ real estate. America was NOT founded on Keynesianism, of course. John Maynard Keynes was born in 1883. The US was founded on a key Keynesian idea, however – it’s considered insane to finance a nation’s routine, daily expenses by borrowing from others. Now we’re in hock to the People’s Republic of China and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. The second coming of John Maynard Keynes might be at hand. Both the wicked and the innocent are destined for the same fate, however. Continued deficits and inflation . . . unto death.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

**(**[**TOP 25 QUOTES BY JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (of 216) | A-Z Quotes (azquotes.com)**](https://www.azquotes.com/author/7958-John_Maynard_Keynes)

by baltimore-aureole