There were several letters to the editor published in The Boston Globe today.

Problems lie with MBTA’s labor costs and Time for the ultimate overhaul both show that readers don’t have a complete understanding of why the MBTA faces some of the financial problems that it does.

Even the letter favorable to the MBTA, Mass. leaders should embrace transit excellence, not austerity, could probably benefit from knowing the part of the story that is missing.

This part of the story was covered in my previous post The Boston Globe Covers Up for Wall Street, Ignores Swaps Losses in Coverage of MBTA Turmoil.

The Boston Globe may be unaware of the issues that are getting swept under the rug.  They certainly haven’t owned up to the part they have played in furthering the misperceptions about the MBTA.

My response to these letters is a perfect example of one of the reasons why I write this blog.  In this case, I was able to easily find the article that shows what The Boston Globe is hiding, because I could look it up on my own blog.  Somehow, I knew that I would want to reference that article some day.

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Peterson Foundation Sings the Same Old Song.

I post about this article here to try to help disabuse you of the idea that the Peterson Foundation has even a shred of credibility which even some Democrats think it has.

I also post a much larger selection of excerpts than I normally would, because it is really important for you to read this material.  I know many people don’t follow the link to the underlying article in my blog posts.  If I am lucky they do read what I put directly into the post.

Also, keep in mind that the Chief Economist for the minority on the Senate Budget Committee, Stephanie Kelton, used to be the editor of New Economic Perspectives until she became the Chief Economist.  I have high hopes that she and Senator Bernie Sanders, who appointed her, can start to educate the public and other politicians to the reality of how sovereign currency works, and the policy opportunities it unlocks.

Now for the excerpts from the article The Peterson Foundation Sings the Same Old Song.

He thinks the debt is a long-term problem that we have to start to solve now. I think there is, literally, no public finance-related debt problem for a fiat sovereign like the U.S., and that the problem that exists is not a debt problem, but a political problem created by Peterson and his allies across the political spectrum who have propagandized the view that there is a debt crisis since the mid-1970s, with increasing success since the 1990s.
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But apart from CBO’s efforts at science fiction, this sentence clearly implies that higher deficits are a bad thing, that the lower deficits we’ve been having currently are an improvement over what we had before, and that our fiscal situation will be getting worse again soon in the precise sense that we will be running higher deficits. So, this one sentence shows that The Peterson Foundation has no idea what the government deficit really is.
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So, the lower deficit Peterson approves of is close to or past putting the private sector into an aggregate annual loss position. And, in advocating for further deficit reduction, what Peterson is doing is advocating for placing the private sector into a much deeper and unsustainable loss position over a period of years. Doesn’t Peterson know that government deficits add to private sector aggregate net financial assets? Doesn’t he know that budgetary austerity will cause the private sector to lose financial wealth? Doesn’t he know that the deficit doesn’t harm the government’s capability to spend, but that cutting it does harm the private sector’s capability to spend by destroying private sector wealth over time?
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They would take money from us, our children and our grandchildren today, preventing us from investing in that future, because they say that the Government is like a household and has to run small deficits or surpluses to safeguard its future capacity to spend. But the federal government is the monopoly issuer of the currency, and when it uses that power to deficit spend it generally contributes net financial assets to the private sector and makes it stronger, while when it runs surpluses it doesn’t increase its capacity spend, but only decreases the private sector’s ability to generate economic activity and new investments.
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These very views are today largely responsible for the disasters we see in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and increasingly in Italy. It is long past time to end their fiscal reign of terror, by giving them no further credence.

We can do that in the United States, by making everyone understand that there is nothing to the gospel of deficit reductions, surplus budgets, and fiscal austerity except human misery, and making them understand also that the time is long passed to embrace a doctrine of real fiscal responsibility that tells us to evaluate fiscal policy proposals in fiat sovereign nations by their likely real world results without regard to their implications for the public interest-bearing debt.

In comments on a previous post, 47 Traitors! Biden, Others Rip GOP Senators Over Iran Letter, Marden Seavy introduced the following video clip of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

As Stewart really lays into the Republicans at the beginning of the video, I thought that Mardy had really found the clip to put the nail in the coffin of the Republicans. Unfortunately, I watched the clip to the end. In a seemingly even-handed way, Stewart points out the history of Democrats speaking to foreign leaders at which Republicans and Republican Presidents were annoyed. Jon Stewart has the nasty habit of pointing out the foibles of both sides.

I decided to research one such incident. This was the visit by Nancy Pelosi to Bashar al-Assad of Syria. President Bush was trying to isolate al-Assad at the time.

Of course the devil is in the details of the comparison. The New York Times had an article at the time, Pelosi Meets With Syrian Leader. The article points out the negatives and some possible positives of the trip from various points of view. You’ll really have to read it yourself, and make your own judgment.

I have been reading about the Logan Act of 1799, last amended in 1994. It is not clear if the words WikiPedia gives us are the original act or the act as amended.

The paper Conducting Foreign Relations Without Authority: The Logan Act by the Congressional Research Service settles the matter.

As amended, the Act states:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects

Was Nancy Pelosi trying to defeat some measures of the United States in the same way that the Republicans were? Or is there an actual difference. Now it is up to you to decide if there really is a moral equivalence with what Nancy Pelosi did and what the 47 Republican Senators did.

By the way, the WikiPedia article says:

Despite the apparent success of Logan’s mission, his activities aroused the opposition of the Federalist Party in Congress, who were resentful of the praise showered on Logan by oppositional Democratic-Republican newspapers. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, also of Pennsylvania, responded by suggesting that Congress “act to curb the temerity and impudence of individuals affecting to interfere in public affairs between France and the United States.”

So I come to the conclusion that if you want to do seemingly outrageous things, you can certainly take the risk of doing them (as in starting a war with Iraq under false premises). If you turn out to be right in what you did, you will be deemed a hero. By the same token, if you turn out to be wrong, you will be the goat, and deservedly so. If you end up being the goat, you have no one to blame but yourself.