Daily Archives: 25 February 2022

I-Bonds

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For a partial solution to our nation’s high and growing inflation rate, Joshua Rauh and Kevin Warsh propose increasing the existing cap on I-Bonds that Treasury issues. Under the present cap, Americans are barred from buying more than $10,000 of I-Bonds per year plus committing up to $5,000 of a year’s tax refund to such purchases. Rauh and Warsh want to raise those caps.

However, the connection between this and inflation mitigation is at best tenuous. Selling more I-Bonds only gives the Federal government more money to spend, which is inflationary; it increases the interest payments that must be made annually, which is government spending and so inflationary; and it increases the national debt, which is future inflation.

It’s no solution at all.

Furthermore, given the Biden-Harris administration’s penchant for ever more, and acceleratingly more spending—and that of their cronies, the Progressive-Democratic Party in control of both the House and Senate—it’s not clear to me how raising, or even eliminating, the cap on I-Bond purchases by us citiens would have any material inflation-mitigating outcome.

On a larger matter regarding I-Bonds; TIPS; and other Treasury Bonds, and Bills, and Notes in general—I’m not sure why anyone would want to lend any money at all to a Biden-Harris-led US government. Maybe we should stop lending, and stop rolling existing loans. Collect on the bonds instead, and invest the proceeds in productive endeavors, like, say, the private economy where us average Americans conduct our commerce through our mom-and-pop enterprises and our businesses, small, medium, and large.

Mistaken

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Tulsi Gabbard thinks Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided had President Joe Biden (D) and European politicians only recognized Russian President Vladimir Putin’s security concerns vis-à-vis Ukraine membership in NATO.

This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border

Gabbard is badly mistaken in this, for a number of reasons.

  1. The Biden-Harris administration and NATO had already acknowledged Putin’s security concerns here, and rejected them. Ukraine’s membership in NATO is a matter for sovereign Ukraine and the sovereign NATO nations to accept or reject, not for Putin to dictate to them.
  2. Putin’s putative security concerns regarding Ukraine are not his aim, but merely a tool in his drive to reconstitute the 20th century Russian empire—which loss he considered the geopolitical tragedy of the century and which reconstitution he made explicitly his goal in his Monday night speech.
  3. NATO is a defensive alliance with no designs on Russia beyond defending the member nations against a demonstrably aggressively acquisitive Russia.
    1. Georgia, which Putin’s Russia has invaded, partitioned, and occupied those partitions
    2. Ukraine, which Putin’s Russia already has invaded once, partitioned, and occupied those earlier partitions
    3. The Baltic States and Poland, which Russia has already attacked, more than once each, with cyber war break-ins and hacks
    4. Russia’s repeated use of energy extortion against Ukraine, Europe through Ukraine, and lately Germany explicitly
    5. Russia’s shutdown of Colonial Pipeline, in response to which Biden-Harris meekly lifted the sanctions against Russia’s Nordstream 2
  4. Putin’s Russia has no security concerns from the West except in his own fetid imagination. Russia has nothing at all that the West wants that can’t be gotten far more cheaply through freely done and mutually beneficial trade.

Regarding that last point, if there’s a security risk, it comes from People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, who’s long had designs on Siberia, which generations of PRC governments, and China governments before them, consider Russia to have stolen from China. That risk already is in progress of realization via the economic deal that Putin and Xi signed just a couple of short years ago that enables Siberia’s rich resources to be jointly exploited by Russia and the PRC—with PRC citizens doing the vast bulk of the labor and moving into (functionally colonizing) Siberia in order to do that work.

No, what led Putin to invade Ukraine this time, with his intent to conquer and occupy the nation, was Western—including our own nation—mild acquiescence in those prior aggressions, invasions, and occupations. If Putin isn’t crushed in Ukraine, he won’t stop there. All of eastern Europe, including what used to be the German Democratic Republic will be at risk. And so will be the Republic of China, Japan, Republic of Korea, Australia, and the United States.