US Currency in Circulation

What is it Worth?

The Federal Reserve reports Money Stock Measures in an annual report.

M1 is constructed by summing currency, traveler's checks, demand deposits, and Other Checkable Deposits, each seasonally adjusted separately.

M1 seems to be about 2.006 trillion as of July 2011.¹

M2 is M1 plus deposits, transfers and potential demands (summarized for simplicity).  Seasonally adjusted M2 is constructed by summing savings deposits, small-denomination time deposits, and retail money funds, each seasonally adjusted separately, and adding this result to seasonally adjusted M1.1

M2 seems to be about 9.313 trillion as of July 2011.1

Size of the annual economy, GDP US estimated for 2010 was $14.5 trillion.2

Size of the current governments National Debt is $14.7 trillion,³ recent annual deficits are about $1.3 trillion, and total 2010 Federal tax revenue $2.162 trillion.⁴

The value of US currency is determined by the total dollars in circulations plus, deposits and other short term demands compared to the value of US goods services and the value of known physical resources, and an assessment of the unused portion of the value of the “full faith and credit of the United States”.

So, it should be a calculation of the net worth; assets including government owned lands, (not National parks or privately owned lands) minus liabilities of the USA compared to total currency available for circulation, so this might be the equation:


     US net worth in dollars

______________________ = Actual Value of Currency
   
    Face value of Currency
              (Available)

Liabilities ought to include future obligations like probable Social Security and Medicare shortfalls; clean up costs of environmental contamination caused by government activities like military ranges, radiation, and science research waste sites, and other future costs of undisclosed programs currently underway.

My estimate of other long term and unrecognized future liabilities promised by the government is $56 trillion.  My rough guess of the current value of all government lands and other assets is about 75 percent of that, or about $42 trillion.

Do we have more money out than we are worth?  Before this brief inquiry my uninformed opinion was we probable had more money printed than we are worth.

My slightly informed opinion is; we have way more money in circulation than all of the US governments resources minus all liabilities are worth.  The US net worth appears to be slightly negative, maybe minus - $.8 trillion.

Meaning I guess, our US dollar is worth around minus - 11 cents.  If that’s right, we owe $1.11 for each dollar.

If we cashed out, we would owe 11 percent more, that’s really sad.

Maybe we shouldn’t have any money in circulation.

Footnotes:

^1. Federal Reserve Board H.6 Release, Money Stock Measures, August 25, 2011

^2. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com

^3. http://www.usdebtclock.org/

^4. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org

Fix Social Security,

It’s Easy

I’m a Social Security Retirement Supplement recipient.  I paid in for 50 years.  I know from life experiences that spending more than you have, or can get, is a mistake.  Foolish promises were made originally, and silly decisions and practices have evolved since, that need correction.  Like any errant behavior, Social Security’s mistaken and exaggerated promises must now be fixed.  The good news is; it’s easy. 

Pay lower benefit amounts for retirement and lower disability benefits; begin reducing them a little each year starting tomorrow.

No Cost of Living Adjustment.  No "Means Testing".  If you paid in, you get a retirement supplemental payment; just a little lower and a little later than you expected.  No one should expect the government to keep its word, it never has before; ask the Indians or Black farmers.

If the pay out exceeds inflow, cut the benefit until it eventually doesn’t, but don’t you dare cut me because I planned for my retirement and have the means to sustain myself.  

You took my money for years.  I want what you promised me.

You forced me by conscription to pay in since I was 12 years old.  Don’t cheat me because I suspected you were lying about your ability to keep your promises.  I listened to your actuaries, apparently you did not.  I understood that the power of compound interest would be destroyed if you used the principal.  So did you, but you took the money for other government spending anyway.  You have never paid back that 22 billion or the lost interest, and I knew you never would. 

So, I planned ahead and saved enough so when you failed to keep your promises I could sustain myself, if you didn’t destroy the value of my savings by deliberate inflation.  So far I’ve guessed right, you have done it wrong at every opportunity.  Now, you are trying once again to destroy the value of my savings.  I will do everything in my power to defeat you.  And if you cut the benefits that I paid for in advance, because I thought ahead, “means testing” I will work until my last breath to defeat all of you.

Get it fixed, or get out of town.  The Gray Rebellion will come for you.

Global Climate Manipulation

A Ridiculous Idea

I’ve been a weather and temperature observer in the Mojave Desert for over fifty years.  I watched the attempts to predict both by the various weather and climate organizations.  They are unable predict rain or snow events with minimum accuracy, even in recent years.  They do little better at forecasting temperatures aside from fairly accurate highs and lows in areas where they have abundant modern instruments.  Where they have infrequent stations, like the inland west, their record is also poor, often bested by local farmers, ranchers and school children.

Their ability to forecast extreme weather events like hurricanes, tornados or heavy rains and flooding is very poor. 

Their ability to do anything about the weather is non-existent.  Understanding climate, on a regional scale is thin, if it exists.  Understanding climate on a global scale is non-existent. 

For the past twenty years one of my jobs for the Department of Defense was to analyze and report on hundreds of scientific studies of the atmospheric physics of low and mid level air contaminants, natural and manmade.  More than half of the studies were seriously flawed or just bad science.  More than half of the remaining ones were inconclusive.  Most of the remainder drew no meaningful conclusions about global temperature trends.  None attempted to understand the complexities of airborne moisture, or the mechanism for cloud formation or its complex impact of ground temperatures even regionally, let alone globally.  

These people, these meteorologists, these atmospheric physicists are who we would be counting on to attempt to manipulate temperatures worldwide.

Are these really the people you want mucking around with global climate at the direction of government employees, self appointed zealots, or elected non-scientists?  

Don’t get me wrong, the unnecessary contamination of our atmosphere is to be avoided.  But the human contributions to greenhouse gases by all human activity is very low, probably 6 to 12 percent, the rest occurs naturally.  If all humans ceased to exist, virtually no detectable changes in global temperatures would occur for centuries, other than those of cosmic solar and planetary cycles and natural planet processes.  Incidentally, it is still questionable if greenhouse gases contribute to warming, or if warming increases green house gas releases.

Do you really want anyone, let alone those mentioned above at the direction of our government or the world community, mucking around with features of our atmosphere or processes they don’t understand well enough yet to even include them in their predictive models and algorithms?  Their models don’t work well enough yet to re-predict the measured temperatures recorded by reliable instruments of the past. 

If they can’t model the past, I don’t want them changing anything without several more decades of actual scientific study.  I certainly don’t want global changes attempted based on data from one Siberian tree’s rings or atmospheric measurements that NASA has collected but are not authorized to release.

That’s not how science works.  There is very little science that is thought of as settled and even it is subject to constant verification.  If there was “settled science”, we probably would have never heard of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Tesla, or many others now famous.  They all questioned well established thought, some paid high prices to later be proven more accurate. 

Global temperature change mechanisms and causes are not “settled science”; nor are they likely to be in the lifetime of anyone alive today.

Much less Charlatanism and hyperbole, and much more scientific study, are required.