The history of money is wholly irrelevant. With or without gov't creation of money, nobody is going to buy a coke from a soda machine by trying to insert a cow.
One important thing that becomes really apparent by studying its history is how the government's spending money is the precursor to its collecting money rather than vice versa.
In austerity news, the federal judiciary finally appears to be fighting back against the idiocy that is sequestration. 87 of the 94 Chief Judges of the US District Courts sent a letter to the House and Senate leadership and key members of the House and Senate Judiciary and Appropriations Committees. It's surprisingly stern, especially given how many judges had to be on board to sign it.
http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2013/08/15/87-chief-district-judges-put-congress-on-notice/
Excerpt:
We write to you as Chief Judges of 87 federal district courts to express our grave concern over the impact the flat funding of the last few years, followed by sequestration, is having on the Judiciarys ability to carry out its constitutional and statutory responsibilities. As the boots on the ground in our nations federal trial courts, we have experienced firsthand the effect of those constraints and funding reductions. They have forced us to slash our operations to the bone, and we believe that our constitutional duties, public safety, and the quality of the justice system will be profoundly compromised by any further cuts. ...
Flat funding followed by the sequestration cuts that took effect March 1, 2013, have had a devastating impact on court operations nationwide. Final enacted appropriations for fiscal year 2013 were reduced nearly $350 million for the Judiciary. Emergency measures were implemented throughout the federal court system to address the drastically reduced funding levels, but the federal courts do not have the flexibility to absorb such a large cut on top of previous flat funding. These emergency actions represented a conscientious effort by the Judiciary to mitigate the adverse impact of sequestration on court operations in an attempt to ensure continued access to justice for the citizens of this country. However, the cuts have created an unprecedented financial crisis that is adversely affecting all facets of court operations. ...
Funding cuts to the Judiciary have also put public safety at risk. The Judiciary employs nearly 6,000 law enforcement officersprobation and pretrial services officersto supervise individuals in the community after they have been convicted of a crime and subsequently released from prison, as well as defendants awaiting trial. The number of convicted offenders under the supervision of federal probation officers hit a record 187,311 in 2012 and is on pace to reach 191,000 by 2014. At a time when the workload in our probation and pretrial offices continues to grow, budget cuts have reduced funding allocations to these offices by 10 percent. ... Particularly troublesome is the 20 percent cut that had to be made to the law enforcement allotments that fund drug, mental health, and sex offender treatment and testing services for offenders, searches, and electronic and GPS monitoring. ...
But the most significant impact of budget cuts and sequestration thus far has been the reduction in funding for Defender Services. These organizations, which have always run on modest budgets while providing high quality legal services, fulfill the mandate of the Sixth Amendment and the Criminal Justice Act for the appointment of counsel for criminal defendants who lack the financial resources to hire an attorney. Because we must provide counsel for indigent defendants, the only options for absorbing the more than $50 million cut to the Defender Services account are reducing federal defender organization (FDO) staffing levels (through layoffs or furloughs) and/or deferring or reducing payments to private panel attorneys. Reducing FDO staff (who work on salary) results in appointments being shifted to CJA panel attorneys (who charge hourly), thus increasing costs rather than reducing them and deferring more panel attorney payments into the next fiscal year. This is an untenable approach, both because it increases costs overall and because adding to appropriations requirements in the coming fiscal year compounds the shortfall of funding in the overall account....
A second year under sequestration will have a devastating, and long lasting, impact on the administration of justice in this country. We urge you to include an anomaly for the Judiciary, at the Senate bill level, if it appears we will be operating under a full-year CR.
