The dividend can be approximated and adjusted as needed. That handles the diminutions aspect of the gap. The compensated retail discount handles THE ENTIRETY OF EXCESS COSTS for the period in other words all costs more than the the cost of initial and immediate production/service which including all financial costs (interest), waste, redundancy, asset inflation and depreciation could easily make the discount upward of 45-50%. This is consistent with Douglas’s insight that the cost of production is the cost at its initial creation. As the totality of the discount is rebated back to participating retail merchants where all costs for any item is terminally summed the various types of enterprise including banks (whose retail product is Debt/Loans and various other (legitimate non-destabilizing) products and services….profit making systems can still survive and thrive….while the cost of consumption falls until….ultimately….money evolves into an utterly gracious ticketing system for the distribution of the abundant production made available by human ingenuity and creativity, and its technological expression.

The integration of:

both private banking and public banking (balance, equilibrium in the flow through time and completeness)

both a satisfactorily independent and abundant lifestyle without employment and even greater abundance with employment

both dynamism and the balance of workability

both the process of the physical universe and the static eternality of spirituality

both Duality and Trinity

both disbelief and the graciousness to grant belief

both belief and the graciousness to grant disbelief

both open minded science and open minded spirituality

both the immediacy of the moment and the flow of moments

both Self awareness and Space and Time

both the separateness of Self Awareness and mystical unity with whatever you experience….at the same time

Yes excellent statement Wally.  Not having been formally educated in economics I always enjoy the economic content of your posts and its relevant comparisons and contrasts to  Social Credit theory.  The one thing I would add is that we need to keep in mind that the primary aspects of Grace, which as we all know is the concept Social Credit is based on, are not only balance, equilibrium and flow, but also abundance and that abundance can be both a state of mind even in austerity and also an upwardly flexible state of monetary lifestyle if you have the dual mechanisms of the Dividend and Discount to maintain the equilibrium.

As a friend of Steve Keen’s you must have been aware of his IDEA site’s recommendation for a “complementary currency” for Greece. Even though it is a tame and tepid version of Social Credit it would have been an excellent and workable way for Greece to exit either with the Euro or as a complementary currency to a new Drachma. I can’t figure out whether the reasons why it was not considered were because it was not capitalist enough or not socialist enough which only goes to show how captured economists’ minds are by orthodoxy and consequently unable to conceive of a third alternative to those two that is an integration of their best aspects and which places the rights and welfare of the individual above the tyranny that both Finance Capitalism and Socialism have shown themselves to historically and inevitably devolve into.

Frugality is a personal virtue, but imposing austerity on an economic system whose most basic problem is scarcity of individual incomes….is irrational. Ethics are a Necessary human blessing, and Grace as in abundance of giving/gifting is the highest of blessings to the other and even more so for the Self.