Arizonans for a New Economy

09/10/2026

Marx on use value, exchange value and, although he does not call it per se, "intrinsic value." The last is what he identifies as rhe human labor required to create the object.
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CAPNwKHRh/

08/25/2026

It appears that Treasury is poised to use its general account, the one from which it funds government operations to buy back US Treasury Bonds. This policy enables it to expand its buyback capacity from the new announced capacity of $4B/week to almost $1T.
Treasury Secretary Bessent seems to be grasping at straws to stanch rising bond yields. The yields resumed their climb after a brief retreat last week when Bessent announced the doubling of capacity.
Remember, yields are the combination of the bond coupon, (it's interest rate upon issue) and the market price of the bond later. It is the falling after market price that is causing the yield spiking. Bond investors seem to be demanding higher yields due to the risk of default on interest payments.
Interest payments on the $40B national debt now consumes 33% of the Federal budget. Congress cannot contain the deficit (the difference between tax and other revenues and expenditures) running about $2T/year, so Treasury has to continually push more and more bonds into the market. Congress is literally borrowing money to pay the interest on its debt.
The scheme to use Treasury's general account to buy back Treasury bonds and thereby eliminate them from the saturated bond market will exhaust this surplus and eventually cause funding delays on budget appropriations. Departments will go broke and be unable to fund operations.
This is a structural problem that until Congress musters the guts to tax America's richest households and the corporstions they own sufficiently to fund the Federal budget, will only get worse.

Bessent $1 trillion Treasury General Account bond buybacks

Using the TGA would provide the Treasury with considerable firepower to influence long-term bond yields.

08/23/2026

08/23/2026

Arizona is on the brink of losing 40% of its CAP allocation. The rippling economic effects of this are not speculated upon in this article beyond the impact to tribal agriculture and the Phoenix suburb of Cave Creek.
Tucson has been wise enough to embark upon a decades-long water conservation effort that has been so effective, percapita use has steadily declined over decades.
Tucson presently is the last repository of CAP water. Because of our conservation efforts we have been able to both vastly reduce our deep aquifer consumption ("groundwater pumping") and our CAP allocation. We have been storing our excess CAP water in our aquifer by pooling then pumping it into deep wells. This is now a reserve that will keep Tucson with a plentiful supply, by some estimates the next 100 years.
Tuconans became rightly alarmed this year when the Pima Board of Supervisors revealed that they had been in secret negotiations with a company to sell county property for development of a data center. This alarm stemmed from reports that data centers consume large amounts of water. The current status of this conflict is fuzzy to me but what is clear is that Tucsonans are acutely aware of the vital importance to our way of life that is our water supply.
That brings me to speak of the frustration for me with the fact that I know there is a viable solution to this crisis. The Coalition for a National Infratructure Bank, of which I am part of the national education team, has fruitlessly tried to inform state water officials and electeds of this solution but they are heedless of it as shown in this NYT article. For more information, please scroll to the post directly below this one; an LTE from our lead team on our aqueduct project.

Decades ago, the state won funding for a massive Colorado River project by agreeing to be first in line for cuts at a time of deep drought. The Trump administration says that time has come.

08/22/2026

Dear Editor, New York Times
August 2026

We would like to submit the following as Guest Essay in the New York Times. The situation on the Colorado River is going to severely harm not only the Southwest, but also the entire country in the next few years unless we get more water to the system.

Thank you for your consideration.,

Sincerely,

Don Siefkes Alphecca Muttardy
Advisory Board Member Advisory Board Member
Coalition for the National Infrastructure Bank Coalition for the National Infrastructure Bank

The Department of Interior has just released its plan to help solve the water shortage on the Colorado River (NYT, 8/21). This plan requires draconian cuts to the water supply to the lower Colorado Basin States, AZ, NV, and CA and encourages conservation for the other 4 Basin States, CO, WY, UT, and NM. Arizona has hired a prestigious law firm to defend the Central Arizona Project’s (CAP) junior water rights to Colorado River water. To get federal financing for CAP originally, Arizona had to agree to being 1st in line for water cutbacks should a future shortage occur. This plan simply divides up a decreasing water supply, but does not bring new water to the Colorado River System.

Do we really want to wait and see what happens and run the risk of the Southwest collapsing as many human societies (Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the Mayans, the ancient Assyrian Empire, modern Syria, etc.) that lacked water have done? Of course not.

We believe the best solution is to bring new water to the Colorado River using Mother Nature’s desalination system – ocean water evaporation-to clouds-to rain-to land-to-rivers- back to the ocean – to obtain this new water.

Lakes Mead and Powell have a combined capacity of 16.1 trillion (T) gals. They currently, 8/21/26, contain just 4.0 T gals (24.9% of capacity). To get close to 50% capacity, which would greatly relieve pressure on the entire system, we need to bring 4.0 T gals of new water to the Glen Canyon Dam and then let it flow downriver using the current infrastructure.

Mother Nature has provided one river in the U.S. that could provide the necessary water permanently without harming anyone’s water rights or creating any environmental problems - the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana. This river drains 30% of the entire Mississippi watershed into the Gulf of Mexico without generating any electricity or providing any significant commercial shipping.

As of 8/21/26, this river is discharging 850,000 gals/sec into the Gulf. This is a massive amount of water. To put it in perspective, 850,000 gals/sec is the same as 85 10,000 gallon gasoline trucks every second (!) going into the Gulf without doing anything.

If a 1,200 mile water conveyance system with 50,000 gals/sec capacity, just 5 of those 85 gasoline tank trucks, were built from Vidalia, LA to the Glen Canyon dam we could get that 4.0 T gals in approximately 2.3 years. This would lower the level less than the natural change in river depth as average yearly water volume has varied from 700,000 to over 2,000,000 gals/sec since the 1930s with an average of 1,400,000 gals/sec. (rivergages.com)

The engineering to build and maintain such water systems is well-known and has been used repeatedly in our nation’s history – the California Aqueduct, the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the Central Arizona Project are examples.
image image.png

This would be a long system, but we have built 49,000 miles of Interstate Highways and over 191,00 miles of petroleum pipelines in the U.S. including two massive oil pipelines from Texas to New Jersey in less than a year in the 1940s. Furthermore, the Chinese government is finishing a massive similar water system of 2,700 miles from southern China to the north. If they can do it, we certainly can.

Why not build desalination plants? Well, you would need 25 of the Sorek 1, Israel type plants to achieve a capacity of 50,000 gals/sec. These would take decades to build, are very expensive to operate and you’d need to build a conveyance system anyway to get the water up to the Glen Canyon Dam.

We estimate the cost to do build this aqueduct to be on the order of building 1,200 miles of new Interstate Highway, approximately $15 billion or $25 billion if extrapolating the cost of the Colorado River Aqueduct.

Financing would come from a new National Infrastructure Bank (NIB). A similar institution financed the Hoover, Parker and Imperial Dams, Lake Havasu and the two large oil pipelines mentioned above. There is a bill in Congress, HR5356, that would create a $5 trillion NIB to do just this. It would require no new federal spending or new federal taxes. As President Trump says, the way to rid ourselves of a $40 trillion debt is to grow out of it, and HR5356 can easily do this.

We urge Congress to get going and pass this Bill

08/21/2026

Pres. Obama speaks about defending democracy.

08/19/2026

If you are wondering what the US Treasury uses to by back its own bonds, the answer is proceeds from the sale of new bonds, notes and tax revenues. A bank larceny crime is called "check kiting," that is, perhaps now not possible due to instantaneous electronic debiting. What it once was when someone presented a check for cash at a bank teller window then went to the bank it was drawn upon and deposited a check from another institution that was then presented with a check for deposit from the first institution.
It's sort of like juggling balls of money, they're all always in the air and always in the hand.
This kind of ponzi scheme is unusual for such a large institution as the Treasury but this flim flam is necessary when the market for US debt is exhausted.
We also read that Japan was poised to redeem some of its $1.2T in US Treasuries to shore up its sliding yen. This is what foreign reserve currency is for. But Treasury stepped in and redeemed billions in Euro bonds and bought some $36.5B worth of yen. (See comment below for link). It is not clear how many dollars Japan's central bank used and how much Treasury did.
Once again we see a flim flam operation by the US Treasury to prevent a possible run on its bonds. The reckoning on US debt is coming, it's just a matter of time. This time, there will be no cavalry.

Government bond yields fell and stocks jumped on a move by the Treasury Department to double the amount of debt that it can buy back from investors.

08/18/2026

Robert Reich schools Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the K shaped economy. On the wealth divide it is interesting to read that the top 1% of Americans own 29.2% of American wealth while the bottom 50% own 5.3%.

But you're the one with power, so your error is dangerous

08/18/2026

The US debt reached $40T, ahead of schedule. Investors are risk averse to long Treasuries as the latest Treasury auction had to offer a 5.13% yield to attract buyers. This is a reflection of the reckless Federal deficit spending that saw a $2T deficit in FY 2026. Every dollar of the deficit has to be financed with US Treasury bonds. To complicate matters for investors and the general economy, we have a glut of cash. This means selling off Treasuries for cash increases the money supply, pushing the dollar's value down i.e. "inflation". This also means the Federal Reserve cannot rescue the Treasury Bonds by buying them (quantitative easing) because it must buy them with new dollars.
The yield spike also has implications for banks because they are holding US Treasuries as reserves on their loans. The yield spike devalues the bonds they own. Presently, there is virtually no margin requirements on large US banks. They are grossly overextended, as much as 30X. If depositors get skittish and run on their accounts, the banks will be hard pressed to pay them, triggering insolvency. The Fed cannot rescue them with new money as mentioned earlier.
US 30-year yields hit highest level since 2007 as war, oil worries fester -

U.S. 30-year Treasury yields rose to their highest level since 2007 on Tuesday as stalled talks to end the U.S.-Iran ‌war and worries of an imminent escalation sent oil prices above $90 a barrel, fanning fears of inflation and jolting markets.

05/17/2026

What is "neo-liberalism" and what does it have to do with the war against Iraq and the 2008 financial crash? Read all about it in Thom Hartman's essay here:

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness"