|
THE
INDIVIDUAL ESTATE ACCOUNT (IEA)
Home
of w w w . T I E A . u s
"Everybody loves
money.
Too bad there's not enough to go
around."
-- Bernard Schoenbaum
-- under a New Yorker
cartoon
"It's not what we know but what
we believe in
that makes all the difference."
-- Nicholas Lemann -- at
the end of a New Yorker review
This site is Home to TIEA.us. Our idea is to explain and
sell to independent voters the Individual Estate Account (IEA) -- a cornerstone for a new economic solution to
problems that remained unsolved at the end of the 20th
century.
The IEA is a federal savings account voluntarily used and owned by
any and all who chose to protect their deposits from inflation.
It has no limit on deposits or withdrawals.
The total balance of all accounts represents lower private
spending and consumption. It serves as a substitute for
taxes as experience may prove to be practical.
Accordingly, to prevent deflation
and economic contraction the federal government is empowered by the
IEA solution to spend and lend money not offset
by taxes. And to prevent spiraling inflation, and
safeguard the purchasing power of their savings, private individuals and
firms are empowered to save in a risk free deposit account.
The IEA
solution invites a general tax holiday that will last as long as a
dynamic economy balances production and consumption without need of
something as mad as the Internal Revenue Code.
The problems addressed by the
IEA and referred to in the first paragraph were
unemployment, poverty, low wages, weak labor unions, corruption in and
out of government , weak environmental law, divisive taxes, and
excessive debt in relation to money.
Excessive debt is a particular
target of the solutions suggested here. National wealth
and accumulated debt can be at odds when necessary production and
consumption are depressed. While some money is best
created by loans that accumulate more debt, other money is not.
At one time gold supplied our
needed debtless money. But to prevent inflation when
using debtless gold there had to be increased production of the things
that money can buy.
Today, there is every opportunity
to increase production of things that money can buy.
What is needed is some money that does not accumulate debt and
is better than gold at raising production.
In suggesting IEA solutions, we call the extra money needed
to protect a nation from deflation and inflation, debtless, taxless
indexed money.
The extra money is spent into
initial circulation by Congressional appropriation the same as it is
today -- the significant difference is that:
-
today Congress looks
to its revenues as a rough guide to how much it should spend. And it
looks to future taxes, (no matter that they may tend to lower not
raise economic output,) that will be used to pay interest on money it
may have borrow.
-
tomorrow the
IEA solution will have Congress look to the
effect on production, consumption, employment, affordability, price
and the potential need for excise taxes, as a guide to how much it
should spend.
-
Congress will have no
need to borrow because the extra debtless money is closer to gold than
it is to a private banknote.
To a certain extent, the problems
listed above are similar to those that were and are still disputed by
academic socialists and their opponents who believe in competitive market
processes and waiting while millions may despair until they
work.
Here we believe in combining the
goal of a just society with market success often achieved --
-
when money divides
economic power among many players, and
- fair and free enterprise is
valued.
In our view socialism failed
because it relied on extremely detailed planning by a small number of
people who tolerated too little freedom for millions of individuals to
produce and sell to each other in a relatively unplanned
market.
In our view, capitalism is failing
because top level strategic planning is shunned in the absence of
imminent disaster. And market-obsessed leaders are loathe to resort to
cost-plus pricing (that joins employer and employee interests) because
they attribute to market pricing their own good fortune and they
suffer little harm from other people's misery.
The website is intended to be a place
where many people can read and collectively write an agenda for change --
mixing and matching old and new ideas from the practical worlds of
business, banking, labor and politics, written in everyday language in not
too many pages.
The site will also contain on-going
discussion of current related events.
In keeping with internet practice,
the site is privately owned. However, it's content
enters the public domain immediately on publication. We
subscribe to open systems and copy-left principles. Writers are encouraged
to create linked sites of their own -- taking from our site whatever words
they like.
Top
Next
Contents Reply |