Out of Control! Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us? By Laurence Kotlikoff

MIND BOGGLING NEWS!...

  ~~  From Forbes magazine article posted Dec. 8, 2017

Dear friends,

Forbes magazine just yesterday became the first major media to blow the lid off of $21 trillion that have gone missing from the US treasury. The entire article is copied below. To give an idea of how much money that is, if you divide the entire US population of around 325 million into $21 trillion, the amount missing is equivalent to $65,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

CBS News in 2002 was the first to report on the much smaller amount of $2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon, as acknowledged by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a report on the Dept. of Defense website. Rumsfeld's report was later strangely removed from the website, but is still available on the Internet archive.

No other media picked up on this mind-blowing story. What should have been a top headline-grabbing story of highest concern to all Americans was simply dropped. Since then, a few major media have published isolated articles on missing trillions, as summarized on this revealing webpage, yet again, these stories were not given the top headlines they deserved. They thus attracted little notice and were dropped, so the public remained uniformed of this concerning news.

A courageous former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under George H. W. Bush by the name of Catherine Austin Fitts couldn't believe this vitally important story was being largely ignored by the media. An incredibly sharp economist who once served as managing director of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co, Fitts researched further and has been reporting regularly on the many trillions missing on her highly informative and inspiring website solari.com. The media has conspicuously avoided her detailed work on this.

Michigan State professor of economics Mark Skidmore discovered the excellent work of Fitts several years ago. He couldn't believe Fitts claim that $6.5 trillion were missing from the US government. Thinking she had mistakenly written trillions instead of billions, he and his graduate students sifted through thousands of US government reports and were astounded to find not only that Fitts was right, but that the amount was even greater that Fitts had thought.

Skidmore eventually worked together with Forbes magazine contributor Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University to compose the below article blowing the lid off this huge cover-up of $21 trillion gone missing from government coffers. Note that once certain officials saw Skidmore exposing this, the government removed many of the incriminating documents from their websites. But he wisely had downloaded all of the documents and has reposted this incriminating information on the website of Fitts on this webpage.

You can help to inform the public of this huge cover-up by spreading this news to all of your friends and colleagues. It's time for us to join in demanding full transparency on how our tax dollars are used and to expose the major corruption taking place. See the "What you can do" section below the article for more ways you can make a difference. Thanks for caring. Together, we can build a brighter future for us and our children.

With best wishes for a transformed world,
Fred Burks for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Former White House interpreter and whistleblower
December 9, 2017

Note: Watch Prof. Skidmore discussing this astounding news in this interview.

Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?
By Laurence Kotlikoff
Forbes magazine, Dec 8, 2017

I am co-authoring this column with Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at Michigan State University.

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” ~ Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, The US Constitution

On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”. The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments.

According to the GAO's Comptroller General, "Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions…. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly."

(Note, after Mark Skidmore began inquiring about OIG-reported unsubstantiated adjustments, the OIG's webpage, which documented, albeit in a highly incomplete manner, these unsupported "accounting adjustments," was mysteriously taken down. Fortunately, Mark copied the July 2016 report and all other relevant OIG-reports in advance and reposted them here. Mark has repeatedly tried to contact Lorin Venable, Assistant Inspector General at the Office of the Inspector General. He has emailed, phoned, and used LinkedIn to ask Ms. Venable about OIG's disclosure of unsubstantiated adjustments, but she has not responded.)

Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress. The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department's "failure to correct system deficiencies." The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail.

The report indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year-end unsupported adjustments. No information is given about these 170 transactions. In addition many thousands of transactions with unsubstantiated adjustments were, according to the report, removed by the Army. There is no explanation concerning why they were removed nor their magnitude.

The July 2016 report states, "In addition, DFAS (Defense Finance and Accounting Service) Indianapolis personnel did not document or support why DDRS (The Defense Department Reporting System) removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million feeder file records during the Third Quarter."

An appendix to the July 2016 report shows $2 trillion in changes to the Army General Fund balance sheet due to unsupported adjustments. On the asset side, there is $794 billion increase in the Army's Fund Balance with the U.S. Treasury. There is also an increase of $929 billion in the Army's Accounts Payable.

This information raises additional major questions. First, what is the source of the additional $794 billion in the Army's Fund Balance? This adjustment represents more than six times appropriated spending. Second, do these transfers represent a flow of funds to the Army beyond those authorized by Congress? Third, were these funds authorized and if so when and by whom? Fourth, what is the source of these funds? Finally, the $929 billion in Accounts Payable appears to represent an amount owed for items or services purchased on credit. What entities have received or will receive payment?

Note: The above article is copied from the Forbes magazine website on this webpage. Watch Prof. Skidmore discussing this astounding news in this interview.

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It isn't about the statues: The perfect slaves are those who can be persuaded to serve the state against their own best interest.

It isn't about the statues:

The perfect slaves are those who can be persuaded to serve the state against their own best interest.
Long ago the social alchemists developed the art of propaganda. They discovered that persuasion as a system of enslavement is far superior to the rack and the thumbscrew.
Public education as a dumbing down process is the ongoing basis of George Orwell's Animal Farm. A programmed population will endure bureaucratic punishment and insult with the full cooperation of the victimized people.
For 100 years or more, the public education system has taught a false history — when it has taught history at all — of America, its founding, its system and its relationship to other autocratic, authoritarian systems.
It has operated in a symbiotic relationship with the controlled media to create a very carefully and deliberately prescribed thought system which subverts the population to think and act in perfect harmony with the system.
Once the masses are manipulated into conformity and they arrive at the animal farm in full mental submission, they themselves enforce conformity. The inmates are in charge of the jail... the perfect crime.
Another way to put it is that the inmates love their captivity and they love "big brother." They and "big brother" (the government) are of ONE MIND! There is no dissent. All are ONE! This is the ultimate goal of the New World Order.
The spirit of subterfuge has become good and good has become evil.
Over time this dumbing down system has created generations of people without knowledge and the ability to follow logic and reason. Evidence of this phenomenon can be seen in the widespread dogpiling on the removal of all vestiges of Southern culture and heritage and the images of the Confederacy and the Old South which began a couple of years ago and is now reaching fever pitch.
The narrative driving these latest attacks stems from a months-long propaganda war on President Donald Trump, his supporters and white conservatives. The media have determined that Trump is a racist and that all Trump voters and white conservatives are likewise racists if they don't advocate for his immediate removal from office.
Simultaneously, anti-American organizations and globalists are fueling and funding “Arab Spring” type protests and attacks on monuments to and statues of people who we have been taught supported racist policies and slavery. Meanwhile the propaganda media and prominent politicians promote and legitimize these violent groups and their actions
Violent left-wing Marxist social justice warriors — disaffected, deluded by their lot in life, suffering from a hive mind collectivist mentality — are fomenting chaos and disorder, starting fights and destroying property over historical statues and monuments. Devoid of reason and morality, they are embracing a system — Communism — that has murdered hundreds of millions people in order to erase vestiges of a culture that fought for liberty and self-determination.
People literally do not think their own thoughts. This allows cover for the ruling class and their nefarious activities.
The violent and the non-violent assaults on monuments and statues are a prelude to something bigger... something darker. This is seen in the move from simply removing Confederate symbols to monuments to the Founders and even Christopher Columbus. This is an all-out assault on the American system and the Constitution. Sadly, Antifa's ground troops — most of them anyway — are likely oblivious. They are Stalin's "useful idiots" who carry out bidding of the elites.
Attempts to whitewash Southern culture from existence and distort the true nature of the Confederate cause, fueled by Northern progressive elites (in and out of both major political parties) white apologists and race hucksters and agitators, have been ongoing since Appomattox. In fact, assaults on Southern culture began long before Fort Sumter and was a major precipitator of the Southern secession.
This is no coincidence. It is part of the long-term war on liberty, independent thought and rural America and the attempted destruction of the predominantly white, productive American middle class.
In the United States, the dismantling of the middle class has become the appointed, full-time task of the largest government alphabet soup agencies and official U.S. policy. The middle class is the globalist’s chief nemesis. For as they are the world’s greatest producers, Americans also demand equitable reward for their labor and product, placing them in competition for resources and goods with the global elite. The greatest blows to the middle class were the income tax and free trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, because socialist economic warfare is the most reliable way to transfer the wealth of middle class Americans to the elite without awakening their complaint.
Indeed, because of the altruistic propaganda attached to socialism, Americans often believe that their wealth (and thus their own destruction) is necessary to "save the world."
The Confederacy, monuments to the men who fought for it and the Confederate battle flag are symbols of rebellion against an overreaching, socialistic, highly centralized and authoritarian government; so it's no wonder the elite power brokers want it erased from memory. While it was waved by racists during the Civil Rights movement, so was the American flag in at least equal numbers. In fact, the American flag flew over a "racist America" far longer than the Confederacy stood as a nation. These facts demonstrate the abject hypocrisy and vapid thought processes of the elites, the race hucksters and their MSM propaganda machine.
But as it was truly a symbol of standing against tyranny, the Confederate battle flag was also waved by protesters demonstrating against Soviet oppression in the 1980s and is seen as a symbol against oppressive government today.
Contrary to what is taught in school and what the propagandists continue to convey ad nauseam, the secession of the Southern states was neither an act of rebellion, nor an act of hostility against the Union. It was a separation from a voluntary contract that joined states in a common bond. But that bond was developing — in the minds of many — into an increasingly repressive institution.
The ramped-up efforts to destroy the last vestiges of the independent spirit and middle-class culture are part of the ongoing struggle of the globalists, collectivists and cultural Marxists to maintain their grip on power until One World Governance is cemented.

It can't be done until the American system, including the Constitution, are destroyed.

Yours for the truth,
Bob Livingston
Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter™

Rocky Marciano, the "Greatest Boxer of All Time" didn't die last year...he died 47 years ago.

Rocky Marciano

    When's the last time you heard the name Marciano mentioned on any sports show?  If you grew up in the 40’s and 50’s, you listened to most of his fights on radio since they weren't carried on the limited TV of the time and Pay Per View didn’t exist.  His fights with Ezzard Charles, a black, were epics.  Rocky didn't know about "Rope a Dope."  His secret trick was to just put his opponent to sleep in the middle of the ring . . .. 49 wins and no losses.

    Since he was white and boxing has been taken over by blacks, he will never be given his due in this PC socially engineered society of the last 60 years or so. Since the Liberal/Progressives control our culture, society, media and sports, Marciano and his record will be buried forever in sports history. He is the only undefeated (49 -0) Heavyweight Champion in the history of boxing. He was also drafted and served in the army.

    Just so you know…A lot of people have this title confused.  The "Greatest Boxer of All Time" didn't die last year...he died 47 years ago.  How did Muhammid Ali get to be considered "The Greatest?"   Ali had 5 losses in 61 fights, FIVE!   Rocky didn't have 5 losses, he had 0. . .. None! !  He didn't have 37 Knock Outs, he had 43 (88%).  He didn't dodge the draft.  He wasn't a race baiter and sure as hell didn't convert to Islam. He was a local kid named Rocky Marciano, aka The Brockton Blockbuster.

    Don't let the mainstream media idolize false prophets. When Rocky was once asked on TV if he could've knocked out Ali in his prime, his response was oh so classic!!  "I'd be conceited if I said I could've, but I'd be a liar if I said I couldn't".

Real Name: Rocco Francis Marchegiano

Buchanan: -The time to stop is before the War Party has us in a Mideast war ~That time is now!

 

Is Trump Enlisting in the War Party?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

 

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Tuesday - April 10, 2017

By firing off five dozen Tomahawk missiles at a military airfield, our "America First" president may have plunged us into another Middle East war that his countrymen do not want to fight.

Thus far Bashar Assad seems unintimidated. Brushing off the strikes, he has defiantly gone back to bombing the rebels from the same Shayrat air base that the U.S. missiles hit.

Trump "will not stop here," warned U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Sunday. "If he needs to do more, he will."

If Trump fails to back up Haley's threat, the hawks now cheering him on will begin deriding him as "Donald Obama."

But if he throbs to the war drums of John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and orders Syria's air force destroyed, we could be at war not only with ISIS and al-Qaida, but with Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

A Syrian war would consume Trump's presidency.

Are we ready for that? How would we win such a war without raising a large army and sending it back into the Middle East?

Another problem: Trump's missile attack was unconstitutional. Assad had not attacked or threatened us, and Congress, which alone has the power to authorize war on Syria, has never done so.

Indeed, Congress denied President Obama that specific authority in 2013.

What was Trump thinking? Here was his strategic rational:

"When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies — with a chemical gas ... that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line. ... And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me ... my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much."

Two days later, Trump was still emoting: "Beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror."

Now, that gas attack was an atrocity, a war crime, and pictures of its tiny victims are heart-rending. But 400,000 people have died in Syria's civil war, among them thousands of children and infants.

Have they been killed by Assad's forces? Surely, but also by U.S., Russian, Israeli and Turkish planes and drones — and by Kurds, Iranians, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS, U.S.-backed rebels and Shiite militia.

Assad is battling insurgents and jihadists who would slaughter his Alawite brethren and the Christians in Syria just as those Copts were massacred in Egypt on Palm Sunday. Why is Assad more responsible for all the deaths in Syria than those fighting to overthrow and kill him?
 

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Are we certain Assad personally ordered a gas attack on civilians?

For it makes no sense. Why would Assad, who is winning the war and had been told America was no longer demanding his removal, order a nerve gas attack on children, certain to ignite America's rage, for no military gain?

Like the gas attack in 2013, this has the marks of a false flag operation to stampede America into Syria's civil war.

And as in most wars, the first shots fired receive the loudest cheers. But if the president has thrown in with the neocons and War Party, and we are plunging back into the Mideast maelstrom, Trump should know that many of those who helped to nominate and elect him — to keep us out of unnecessary wars — may not be standing by him.

We have no vital national interest in Syria's civil war. It is those doing the fighting who have causes they deem worth dying for.

For ISIS, it is the dream of a caliphate. For al-Qaida, it is about driving the Crusaders out of the Dar al Islam. For the Turks, it is, as always, about the Kurds.

For Assad, this war is about his survival and that of his regime. For Putin, it is about Russia remaining a great power and not losing its last naval base in the Med. For Iran, this is about preserving a land bridge to its Shiite ally Hezbollah. For Hezbollah it is about not being cut off from the Shiite world and isolated in Lebanon.

Because all have vital interests in Syria, all have invested more blood in this conflict than have we. And they are not going to give up their gains or goals in Syria and yield to the Americans without a fight.

And if we go to war in Syria, what would we be fighting for?

A New World Order? Democracy? Separation of mosque and state? Diversity? Free speech for Muslim heretics? LGBT rights?

In 2013, a great national coalition came together to compel Congress to deny Barack Obama authority to take us to war in Syria.

We are back at that barricade. An after-Easter battle is shaping up in Congress on the same issue: Is the president authorized to take us into war against Assad and his allies inside Syria?

If, after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, we do not want America in yet another Mideast war, the time to stop it is before the War Party has us already in it. That time is now.

 

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Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Benjamin Franklin: “The way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality. That is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 24). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Mellon, true to form, had focused on allowing businesses to work on their own, which to him meant reducing taxes.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 31). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

He did not see taxation as a moral matter. Taxes were a practical thing: a tax was a price. And one could only charge “what the traffic will bear,” as he put it, drawing on a metaphor from his own railroad freight days. When a government overtaxed, it hurt itself, for it got less revenue. Taxes that were too high, Mellon noted, simply were not paid.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 31). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

In this period, the first half of the 1920s, both Mellon and Hoover published books codifying their philosophies. The austere Mellon gave his an unexpectedly populist title: Taxation: The People’s Business. In it he laid out the theories of his fellow Scot Adam Smith to justify his program of continued tax-cutting.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 33). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The government is just a business.” The lesson of the book was simple: people responded to tax rates, and lower rates might promote growth in the 1920s and pull in higher revenues for government. The whole idea of overtaxation was to Mellon un-American. “Any man of energy and initiative in this country can get what he wants out of life. But when initiative is crippled by legislation or by a tax system which denies him the right to receive a reasonable share of his earnings, then he will no longer exert himself and the country will be deprived of the energy on which its continued greatness depends.” When failure attended business, after all, noted Mellon, “the loss is borne by the adventurer.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (pp. 33-34). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

...municipal bonds were bad because they deprived the Treasury of revenue. The better philosophy was to lower rates over all. Mellon also disliked other tax loopholes,

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 34). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Hoover gave his book a title similar to Mellon’s— American Individualism. But the text, like Hoover’s work, was distinct. Hoover rejected the old brand of absolute individualism and disdained laissez-faire economics as “theoretic and emotional.” Private property, he also said, was “not a fetich” for Americans.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 34). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Hoover: America must move toward regulation: “Our mass of regulation of public utilities and our legislation against restraint of trade is the monument to our intent to preserve an equality of opportunity,”


Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 34). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The supposedly cold Coolidge heartily approved of Mellon’s tax policy, saying that “the wise and correct course to follow in taxation and all other economic legislation is not to destroy those who have already secured success but to create conditions under which every one will have a better chance to be successful.” Mellon, with Coolidge’s support, reduced the national debt from $ 24 billion to $ 16 billion. He did away with the excess-profits tax— it was wrong to say that profits were excessive anyhow, when they created the work. Negotiating past the progressive George Norris, he put through the Revenue Act of 1926,

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 37). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

more importantly, was the average real wage, solid evidence that a tax cut for the rich was also good for Henry Ford’s worker. The after-inflation earnings of employees grew 16 percent from 1923 to 1929. Revenues continued to flow in just as the treasury secretary had so pointedly predicted. Mellon was managing to balance the budget and to reduce the staff of tax officials at the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 38). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Matters were different when it came to Hoover. Coolidge understood the political success of the beneficent hand, but he did not believe in it. Man himself, he would write toward the end of the 1920s, was after all “but an instrument in the hands of God.” More and more Coolidge was thinking of God— in 1924, his son Calvin got a blister on his toe playing tennis on the South Lawn of the White House, and in those prepenicillin days, the blister brought on an infection that killed him. This tragedy made Coolidge brittle, impatient, and irritable, and one of the people who irritated him was the persistent Hoover, so different from Mellon. Where the president eschewed technology, Hoover was always playing with it. Coolidge also hated Hoover’s tendency to react to news with grand, intrusive plans. Could not Hoover see where some of his rescues had led? At one point later on, the minimalist president Calvin Coolidge concluded quite simply that “that man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 38). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

 Beyond grief lay Coolidge’s accurate perception that in the 1920s Mellon’s and his own policies were yielding the good that the men had predicted. Today we estimate that the highest level of unemployment under President Coolidge had been 5 percent in the year he was elected. From there it dropped to 3.2 percent in 1925 and then into the twos and ones. Citizens could afford all the new products. There was nothing bubbly about the potential for productivity gains.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (pp. 38-39). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

with Edison, now just on the brink of retirement. It contained the following exchange: NYT: “Do you think President Coolidge will be renominated and reelected?” Edison: “He ought to be.” Still, evaluating the specific worth of Mellon’s contribution or Coolidge’s reticence remained hard for most. Only a few favored Mellon over Hoover as Coolidge did. To the rest of the country Mellon was a distant figure. To the farmers, he was even the enemy; his gold standard kept grain prices low.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 44). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Coolidge was increasingly perplexed. As Hoover later recorded, the two had discovered that there was no getting around the essential difference in their philosophy: “One of his sayings was, ‘If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.’… The trouble with this philosophy was that when the tenth trouble reached him he was wholly unprepared, and it had by that time acquired such momentum that it spelled disaster.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (pp. 45-46). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Coolidge now had a problem. If he didn’t want Hoover to supplant him, he didn’t necessarily want to stay either. “It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly and for the most part sincerely assured of their greatness,” he would write shortly after leaving the presidency.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 46). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

 Coolidge made a thoughtful argument against long service in the job, noting that “the presidential office is of such a nature that it is difficult to conceive how one man can successfully serve the country for a term of more than eight years.” Too often, the man became the office. He did not want to be such a man.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 46). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

That same summer, the summer of 1927, Coolidge issued a short statement: “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.” There was coyness there— what if there were no choice, and candidacy were foisted upon him? But with each month it became clearer that he would indeed leave the presidency after his five and a half years. It was another of Coolidge’s acts of refraining, his last and greatest. And again, it opened a door for Hoover.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 46). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Coolidge on Hoover: At one point later on, the minimalist president Calvin Coolidge concluded quite simply that “that man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.” He had a nickname for Hoover: “Wonder Boy.”
The differences between Hoover and Coolidge: The only party as alienated as they were was Calvin Coolidge, who at first bridled at Hoover’s request that a battleship be placed at his disposal so that he might cruise the coast of Latin America in the long interregnum. Take a cruiser, Coolidge said, “it would not cost so much.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 81). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 38). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
 

In 1925 Coolidge summed up his philosophy, telling the American Society of Newspaper Editors that “the chief ideal of the American people is idealism.” But he also offered a counterpart to that: “The chief business of the American people is business." It was the latter line that was remembered, and proved too moderate for some. They shortly altered it to the now better-known phrase “the business of America is business.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 20). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Coolidge heartily approved of Mellon’s tax policy, saying that “the wise and correct course to follow in taxation and all other economic legislation is not to destroy those who have already secured success but to create conditions under which every one will have a better chance to be successful.” Mellon, with Coolidge’s support, reduced the national debt from $ 24 billion to $ 16 billion. He did away with the excess-profits tax— it was wrong to say that profits were excessive anyhow, when they created the work.

Today we estimate that the highest level of unemployment under President Coolidge had been 5 percent in the year he was elected. From there it dropped to 3.2 percent in 1925 and then into the twos and ones. Citizens could afford all the new products. There was nothing bubbly about the potential for productivity gains.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 39). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Benjamin Franklin: “The way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality. That is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 24). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

This was the era of democracy; the era of the republic was passing. “In fact,” Roosevelt said, “in these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 299). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

For, as Roosevelt put it, “evil things formerly accepted will not be so easily condoned.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 299). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

 What the interviewers observed especially was that Muncie’s citizens were unhappy at receiving two opposing lessons from governments. The first might be labeled: “Saving— the Private Man’s Only Safeguard.” The second was “Spending— the Nation’s Hope.” The citizens had trouble squaring those two ideals, and the contradiction made them anxious.

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (p. 332). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

 Was a liberal merely a left progressive? Or was a liberal someone who believed in liberalism in the classic sense, in the primacy of the individual and his freedom? Willkie railed against Roosevelt’s “philosophy of distributed scarcity.” And he argued, speaking of both the United States and Europe, that it was “from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power… “American liberalism does not consist merely in reforming things. It consists also in making things. The ability to grow, the ability to make things.” Redistribution was a loser’s game: “I am a liberal because I believe that in our industrial age there is no limit to the productive capacity of any man.” Growth, not government action, would lift the United States out of its troubles: “I say that we must substitute for the philosophy of distributed scarcity the philosophy of unlimited productivity. I stand for the restoration of full production and reemployment by private enterprise in America.”

Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man (pp. 374-375). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.