Re: Colin Bartlett’s letter ‘Debt and Money’ (Feb. 13, The NEWS).
It is clear Bartlett read Neil Dawe’s plain exposition (in another recent letter to the editor) of how money is created and his advocacy of the Bank of Canada as the nation’s main source of debt funding. But Bartlett infers that if such a process were adopted now, it must promote all the evils of inflation,and “move the debt directly on to the shoulders of the taxpayer...”
Who on earth does he think has carried the burden of debt and inflation these last 40 years as money was created against no asset to cover deficits, the Man in the Moon?
He quibbles about the 4.7 times inflated value of money since the debt was wholly privatized in 1975, but says nothing about the 35 times growth of federal debt alone in the 39 years since then. According to the then-Auditor General’s Report, within 15 years of the change an astounding 92 percent of federal debt was due to borrowed deficits caused by un-payable interest.
Can this be un-connected to the private donation system for political parties? Money created by our own bank at administrative cost only, against budgets unadulterated with pointless interest, could not have created the usurious debts now crippling every government in Canada.
Perhaps Bartlett should e-mail the Auditor General’s Office for that 1993 report, and consider that six years after the last bank-induced crash, five old European nations are still massively in default to private banks. They could have issued their needs themselves at a small fraction of the cost, like China and Norway and Germany — hugely successful economies. Even little North Dakota on our doorstep has been funding itself debt-free for decades. Why aren’t we?
Russ Vinden
Errington