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20 Hours of Labor per Week: Fractional Slavery and the True Cost of National Debt
Let's break this down as simply as one can, in a manner that hopes to result in some sense of immediate relevance to the average person who has grown numb to terms like "billions" and "trillions".
Every week, since September 28, 2007, the Government has committed you, the American citizen, to an additional 20 hours of labor to pay your portion of the National Debt. Let me be clear: you owe an additional 20 hours of labor for every week that has passed since that date, with no end in sight. Here's how it works:
As of this writing, our national debt, not including long-term liabilities such as social security, is $10,582,501,387,889.35. (That's just shy of eleven trillion dollars, for those who find it tedious to count backwards through the commas.)
All debt is time owed. Period. Money is, quite literally, representative of time and the only aspects of money that are truly in question are, "What is time worth?" followed by "How can I get more Free Time?"
In the United States, if you are a minimum wage worker, your time, according to government mandate, is worth $6.55 an hour. In a balanced world, you would get a token, coin, note or some other material representation of your time spent, which you could then trade to someone else, in exchange for $6.55 worth of their time, however that may be rendered. For example, it takes me an hour to find, collect and prepare a bushel of berries; it takes you an aggregate hour to plant, cultivate, and harvest a bushel of corn. We make a fair trade. It's not too much more complicated than that, in its simplest form, at least.
If every one of the 305,094,737 citizens of the United States--man, woman, and child alike--shouldered equal weight of the National debt, each person would owe $34,685.95. That is, of course, if we could pay it all off today and instantly suspend the compounding interest. If you make minimum wage, you must work 5296 hours to pay off your portion of the debt. A person fortunate enough to get a couple weeks of vacation each year would have to work 2.6 years, just to pay off their portion of the debt.
For the average non-supervisory skilled worker making $17.01 an hour, 2030 hours are owed in future labor to this debt.
Aw, but the entire population isn't working, so let's assume, if we can without provoking laughter, that we have no intent of saddling today's children and retirees with any part of this debt. That leaves 189.89 million workers.
Now with this adjustment, our minimum wage worker owes 8508 hours of labor and the skilled worker owes 3261 hours. Imagine planning out your life and slotting into your calendar 2-4 years of income-free servitude. Now, scatter that sum about your working life and tell me if it is really more palatable.
This is fractional slavery, not accidentally similar, in ambiance at least, to fractional reserve lending: instead of declaring a few people slaves for life, we render many as slaves for only part of their life. We call them taxpayers because it sounds better.
Within a balanced budget, we, through the euphemistic process of informed consent, agree that some of our labor hours are worth transferring to the community: I do not want to fight fires, I would not be good at it, but I sure do appreciate the need for fire fighters. So, perhaps as a property owner, I invest a small bit of my income into the fire department, in conjunction with many others. Thus, a few minutes of my time are added to the few minutes of my neighbors, resulting in days of service from the fire house. This is not slavery. This is an investment. It's pretty much what keeps a community ticking.
In a fractional slavery system, the Government exceeds the consent of the People, bypassing their self-determination by co-opting their time before it occurs, without due explanation or consensus. It's simply easier to steal from the future, in as much as it hasn't occurred yet. We are rather existential beings and have a hard time grasping the reality of "future". In our Nation, where cognitive dissonance rules, the future was written off a long time ago in favor of more Instant Now. We sure do like our Instant Now in this country, don't we? I worry that we are about to lose both our Now and our Future, for these reasons and many more.
Since September 28, 2007, the Government has committed you, the minimum wage workers, to work off an additional 3.6 billion dollar average per day of National Debt. Like some kind of horrible reverse-vacation policy, you owe an additional 20 plus hours of labor to the Government for each week that has passed. The average skilled worker owes 8.25 hours to the pot, every week.
When the Government passed the bailout bill in spite of popular dissent, they added a draw of 562.8 hours against the future labor of every minimum wage worker. They added 216 hours for the average skilled worker. The average salaried supervisor, in case they are feeling cocky at this point in the diatribe, was charged 183 hours. The less you make, the more time you owe. The more you make, the more likely you can pay your debt with other people's time.
Before you move to take up arms against this clever form of slavery, consider this: Half of the world's population lives on $2.00 or less a week. Apparently, the value of their time is even less than our minimum wage worker. In China, the average worker earns 58 cents an hour in USD terms. Their time is also, apparently, worth a lot less than ours. I suppose someone should ask, "Why?" Oh, that's right, someone is: The Chinese are now asking why, along with dozens of other nations. It would have been wise for us to make that inquiry every time Wal-Mart 'rolled back' more prices.
This brings us back to the question "How can I get more Free Time?" Well, there are several age-old strategies for gaining more free time than your natural allotment in life:
1. Increase Productivity: We call this, wait for it, WORKING HARD. If you can work harder than the next guy and get more bushels of berries per hour, then you can trade for more corn. You can then reinvest the spread in tools that will help you harvest even more berries. This is the only means of fairly increasing time.
2. Consume Less: We call this thrift. If you don't need so many bushels of corn, then you don't need to pick so many bushels of berries.
3. Counterfeit the Measure of Time: We call this printing money. We just create money, gambling that the market will take time to realize that this new money isn't backed by any solid or tradable representation of time. No assets, no gross national product. It's just paper that people still believe represents some relative measure of time. When the amount of time represented by the paper exceeds the amount of time that can be truly harnessed in any foreseeable period, the value of the paper collapses.
4. Create Pretend Time: We call this usury, the derivatives market, credit default swaps, and the whole host of make-believe financial instruments wherein people make money simply by creating fake money. They don't even bother printing a counterfeit measure. They just say "Yep, we own all this time, so give us some more..." and the idiots and the ignorant believe them. Neat job if you can get it.
5. Steal All Time Now: We call this slavery. You take a body of people and declare that their time is intrinsically less valuable than your time. Ten of them work the hours of ten people, no different an output from ten of your people, but you pay them for the hours of one. That is a hell of a return on investment. Slaves aren't free; you have to feed them, it's preferable that they have shelter of some sort and sometimes it's useful to give them a little premium, so they can buy food from you. If they complain, you beat them into submission. In modern slavery, the chains of circumstance have replaced anklets, but the idea is the same. On two dollars a week, where does one hope to run to?
6. Steal Some Future Time: We call this fractional slavery, or at least I do because I like to impress myself, and maybe it will catch on, regardless of my flawed ego. It's the same thing as good old fashioned slavery, except that you aren't so much the victim of ruthless exploitation as you are just a gullible fool on the crap-end of a really bad deal. If you live in a Democracy where the instruments of redress would allow you to stifle the sale of your future time, but you fail to take true action, then you are no more a victim than you are a collaborator.
So, here we are, sliding into an unprecedented Depression in a world with exponential population growth, paying hugely, via debt, for a dishonorable war that the majority of Americans said 'no' to, repeatedly, while we pay out trillions to failed business models reeking of corruption via bailouts that the majority of Americans said 'no' to, loudly, and yet still a good ninety percent of the country continues to accrue 8 to 20 hours a week in future slavery. It's hardly an investment, as indicated by the continuing slow-motion train wreck that we politely call our economy.
I guess the only question remaining is whether we, over the last eight years, during the reign of an Administration that added more National Debt than all of prior Administrations combined, unknowingly shifted from our comfortable, negotiated, fractional slavery system to the full blown unapologetic serfdom of the people of the United States?
Or does the fact that we are still in this war, and that we still keep giving away the future's money to corrupt businesses, and that Bush and Cheney still have not been impeached for heinous crimes against the State, against Providence, and against the dignity of humanity as a whole, stand as testament to our own selfish complicity in this mess? Are we about to reap what we have sewn? The rest of the world thinks so, and, though they should tread delicately in such self-righteous garb, as glass houses are plentiful these days, their positions are not without merit.
Do We the People have an honest debt to settle with the rest of the world, whether we like it or not, one that can be negotiated peacefully, one that will require sacrifice on our part, or do We the People have a debt to settle with our own Government first, one that will require courage on our part?
Or are we just going to call it a draw here at home, everyone having sinned equally, and just blow up some more countries in a bid to balance the books, while a new administration spoon feeds us eloquent hubris, national 'service' programs and stimulus checks? I have a horrible feeling that it is this latter prognosis that will come into fruition. After all, as long as we have the biggest military in the world, who dares collect on our ill-gotten time? Do we really seek change, or do we just want to change the outcome?
Tell me, oh lesser slaves of the new America, because I can't figure it out from your actions, and frankly, I'm all stocked up on rhetoric, so action at this point is all that matters. All I know for certain is that the math would indicate that we are running out of time. It's all been spent, and then some.
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Lets see what the weekend brings John. Is BRIC going to announce itself or not? Will we seen a Bretton Woods III? The old order and old verities may be passing away. But one thing is certain: the USA cannot, must not continue to pile up its debt.
Your time scenario becomes more complex in a deflationary environment + credit lockup. A new situation in many respects...
November 15, 2008 12:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, absolutely it is a static simplification, an important point, thank you. How this evolves and even what this needs to evolve into is all up for argument, but simply generating more debt without foreseeable quantifiable returns is ludicrous and cannot be sustained. Debt as an instrument of progress is also fairly debated, but this doesn't qualify as that. Equating to current terms is an educational device, but certainly not economic science. Thanks for reading.
November 15, 2008 5:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Pretty standard libertarian twaddle.
We need to, and will, engage in considerably more deficit government spending over the next several years.
Properly managed fractional reserve banking is sound, effective, and efficient. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is not a communist plot.
I'm as fed up as anyone with the trillion dollars plus that GWB has added to the federal deficit for a war in Iraq that most of us didn't want to begin with, and even fewer believe in now. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't spend for things we do want and need, such as alternative energy development, and international climate change cooperation.
November 15, 2008 4:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have a different plan, and I almost hate to mention it here because I don't want to get caught. I plan to live my life and enjoy myself as much as possible, and at the very end, I plan to die suddenly and stick everyone else with the bill. Mwhahahahaha!!! It sounds kinda shitty, I know, but here's the thing: I was thinking if everyone did that, what would be the big deal? I mean, who's left to collect at that point, right?
The National Debt is simply not a meaningful figure on its own. You can't isolate it from other factors (such as inflation, for instance) and draw conclusions from it. And you can't give money a static time value either, because money doesn't doesn't work that way. An economist would define money as part of a system of relative pricing and an accounting store of value. It's a record of previous transactions. And it's entirely illusory. Take your savings account as an example. That's simply a record of credits: credits of energy, credits of time and credits of inherited value that you have accumulated. But the whole thing is just imaginary value. Because when you attempt to cash in those credits, the exchange value is determined by demand. Specifically, the current level of demand at the exact moment that you convert your credits into something besides credits. And demand is a function of scarcity. In other words, money is an illusion. It's a placeholder for past transactions and a medium of communication that records the pressures of scarcity and demand from everywhere in the world.
You can't borrow from the future. The only wealth that exists is that which is currently available the current combination of energy, resources, tools, labor, etc. You can't make future resources available now, so future money doesn't exist.
We need to control our national debt. But controlling debt means trading credits wisely in the here and now. Nothing else.
November 15, 2008 11:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think this an excellent analysis of our fiscal situation, and an equally excellent way of putting it to make ordinary common sense.
As a guy who got a gentleman's C- in my one brief exposure to college Econ 101, I do not claim to represent thinking in the higher realms of this material. My method has always been somewhat like Mr. Caelan's (if much cruder and less well-expressed):
Is there something inherently different about either a government or a large business, that would allow either to constructively apply rules that DIFFER from what an ordinary household would think of as everyday commonsense (ie, borrow carefully, pay back on time, etc.)?
I think there is NOT that difference. I think that the same policies that would inevitably lead to disaster for an everyday household must sooner or later lead to the same place for larger concerns (I cite GM and the USA Federal Government as my currently appropriate examples).
If we do not restore a fundamental sense of basic grade-school arithmetic and equally basic grade-school ethics to our larger fiscal affairs, we cannot long avoid disaster.
November 15, 2008 11:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Imagine you have a next door neighbor who has three rusty old cars parked on his front lawn. And one day he comes to you and says, "Hey, I'm really having trouble paying my bills. I have some money coming in soon, but I need to get some stuff paid off right away or I'm going to be out on the street. Could you lend me some cash?" So you say, "Yeah, sure. But in exchange, you've got to get those rusty old cars off your lawn." Deal made, cars gone, and he pays his bills and avoids disaster. But as a result of removing an eyesore from his property, the property values for your entire neighborhood increase, so everyone's house is worth more. And everyone's property taxes increase with the increased value. Same rules on a smaller scale...
November 15, 2008 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can you please translate that to Detroit and Goldman Sachs levels of real-world eyesores etc?
November 15, 2008 6:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm pretty sure if I could do that, I'd be under serious consideration for a cabinet position right now. :)
November 15, 2008 7:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
PS: I was being glib and I shouldn't have been. If it was up to me, I'd let Goldman Sachs sink or swim on their own merits. But the auto industry I'd save--with concessions. I don't know if you remember this, but when Bill Clinton was president, he pulled the auto industry people together and told them, "If you don't self-regulate, we're going to legislate." And they told him not to worry--that they were willing to increase fuel economy standards and reduce pollution without legislation. But they were a bunch of goddamn fucking unprincipled piece of shit liars who should burn in hell. A few years later, we were being offered obscenities like Hummers and Escalades and Yukons and Borregos and Ford Excursions. The manufacturers of these gas-hogging, planet-killing pieces of crap are sons of bitches and immoral liars from hell, and they clearly can't be trusted to tell the truth. And the people who purchase and drive these anti-American, anti-human race pieces of shit should have their citizenship to the world revoked. I have nothing but contempt for gas hoggers.
If I was in President Obama's position, I would offer the auto industry loans, but I would attach all sorts of strings. I would demand that they grow a fucking soul and start to think about what they're doing to the world. And I would REQUIRE them to increase fuel efficiency standards, year-by-year. And if they didn't comply, I would revert their accounts to the default rate of 37.8%.
FUCK the auto industry. Let them survive, but let them submit.
November 15, 2008 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like how you talk!
Because of the national employment factors, big auto should be saved...with heavy regulations and standards.
Bring back that electric car that everyone loved and GM smashed.
They could build one back then, they can't build one now?
If we got a single payer health-care system and took that out of the employer bag of bills, the whole business sector could revamp.
It is time to hold some of these execs accountable, haul them in and restrict their compensation.
Oh do we need strict oversight in this country, good grief.
I can't wait until this govt is put back into running order, FDA, FCC, SEC, DOD, ICE, ETC.
This heckuva job gang has got to go.
November 16, 2008 12:26 AM | Reply | Permalink