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San Diego — Last week was a GREAT week for the Prez, King Barrack I, all merciful and bountiful, hallowed be his name. Moody’s is threatening to reduce our national credit rating, and the already under reported unemployment numbers went back up over 9%. Even party loyalists are quietly uttering the forbidden thought of a “double dip” recession that was long forecast by those doom and gloom folks on the other side. Ignoring all past rhetoric to the contrary, he told the employees at a Chrysler plant that we had to expect it to get worse before it got better because of “bumps” in the road that would stop even the famous Jeep Wrangler which that plant was building.
Some tried to paper over the remark by claiming it was simply a lame joke. I don’t think it was a joke at all but a slip of the truth, a “Freudian” error. It was fascinating he should choose that venue, itself sort of a shell game economically. The company and the administration made much of the fact that they had paid back their bail out money… they did not mention that they did it with low interest government loans meaning that in terms of their liability to the government it was a wash and they owe the same as they did before the swap in books.
But that is a side show to the economic main attraction. What I believe are the true bellwether sheep in the mix, gas and food and housing, all continued a negative slide. Gas went slightly down then back, housing continued down, and food costs continued up while unemployment was up. All while His Majesty told us how much better things were getting, all while catastrophe was being declared if we were not allowed to borrow even more money instead of facing reality and cutting back on our entitlement spending.
I just have a single question for those advocating this debt ceiling increase. Would you advise a family member or close friend, someone who was in trouble due to over extending their credit cards, that a workable solution could only be found if they got another credit card and borrowed some more? How well would you expect that to work out? Well, that is precisely what the administration is telling us needs to happen. And they won’t even consider trying to offset that with some spending cuts.
i even just read the comments of one partisan that claimed we were looking at it all wrong and as any banker knows liabilities are actually assets. He was serious… and he ignored that it was the banks which had been doing precisely that with a boatload of toxic loans that should never have been granted that was one of the critical nails in the economy’s coffin.
One of the MSNBC pundits, Rachel Maddow, asserted categorically that if we stopped the funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan then we could solve the budget crisis without having to cut other programs. Whatever she is smoking, i have some old hippie friends that would love to get their hands on some of it. Let’s do the math.
According to the Governments own figures, total defense spending requested for FY 2012 was $881 Billion. That number included spending on the military, Homeland Security, the Veterans Association, The Nuclear Adminsitration and several State Department Programs. But to the point, funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan action is requested at $118 Billion, down from $159 Billion last Year. But the national debt is now over $14 Trillion. The money for the Iraq and Afghanistan operations won’t even pay the debt service which is $275 Billion for May through October of 2011. In 2010 interest on our debt was $413.9 Billion and the total for 2011 will be higher.
The other common suggestion from the left is that we should raise taxes on the very wealthy and that would solve it. OK, let’s do the math again.
According to The Monthly Treasury Report just put out by the Treasury Department, the total worth of American Billionaires is $1.3 Trillion. Forget just taxing them, if we took their entire worth and chucked them on the street homeless and penniless we could not even cover this year’s deficit of $1.6 Trillion, never mind the debt. And then who do we hit up for the rest? And what do we do next year? Throwing in all of the Millionaires entire wealth still does not come even close.
In fact, for those “We can tax our way out of this” crowd, if we added up the entire Federal Tax revenues from all sources (taxes, fees, Social Security, etc.) in 2011 it adds up to $4.46 Trillion. Does the administration think we are so stupid that we cannot go on to the government’s own web site and get these numbers to poke holes in what they are trying to tell us? For every dollar in funding commitments we take in less than 50 cents. Could you run your personal finances like that, unless of course you were on the public dole yourself? Of course not.
But, you respond, the government can do something you can’t; it can simply print more money. Yes it can and that is precisely what it is doing. But how many years of economic study does it take to understand that more money applied to the same number of pulls on it must necessarily result in that money being worth less per unit. But if you are paid a fixed rate that is not adjusted for inflation, then it takes more of the money from your pocket to buy the same things. So how is that working out for you at the gas pump and the grocery store?
That is all common knowledge so the answer to the question on the table apparently is, “Yes.” We ARE that stupid.
There was a time when you might not have heard it since the main media never talked about it and the only ones trying to sound some alarm were those wackos on the opposite side. But now, even NPR TV finally had one of its reporters admit that some major economists were not backing the administration’s story of economic recovery. On a Radio Talk show this week even James Carvell, virulent liberal and hardly a pawn in the conservative camp, expressed the concern that Obama, his guy, did not seem to really understand the situation and he feared that we could start seeing some serious civil unrest over it.
So why would this be good news for the Prez? Well to ask that you would have to be very new to this blog where I have pointed out event after event where, to me, the only logical explanations that connected all of the dots and provided a complete fit to the facts were that either he was rock stupid or was purposely trying to destroy our economy so that he could then ride to the rescue and rebuild it in his own favored European socialist model. His comment that it has to get worse before it can get better is a revelation of the real plan. For him to succeed then it MUST get a lot worse… to the point of collapse.
Both the “rock stupid” and the “Socialist Revolutionary” theses form viable working hypotheses. But the missing part of the “stupid” thesis is compassion for the human costs and concern for the country. Even if he were too stupid, too ignorant, or simply too incompetent to know how to fix it but actually wanted to, a positive desire for the country and real compassion for the economic suffering of so many citizens would have seen an outreach for help and a game change to try to find something that did work even if it was the final humiliation of an admission that the government cannot fix an economy, especially by ramping up the spending policies that created the problems in the first place. But there is no sign that is about to happen and that means the “stupid” hypothesis starts to fall apart. That only leaves the one working hypothesis to examine.
Government can certainly can ruin the economy, but only production and private industry can fix it and maintain it. Increased tax revenues flow from increased productivity. Duh! But that concept is not something possible to even contemplate, much less address in his world view. It is, for him, a complete and willful blind spot. I think rather that while he is an unqualified and incompetent president, he is not a stupid person. And he is certainly not without a goal and a plan to reach it. Instead I think, and with increasing conviction, that he is an ideologue with a plan for social revolution that he is implementing brilliantly.
The obvious next question then is to what possible ends could he be aiming? Weren’t you listening? He already told us but no one wanted to hear it and he knew full well that the sycophants hanging on his anointed robes would hear only what they wanted to hear and then try to ignore or spin the rest. His previous close associates and mentors have already told us. He himself was clear he wanted to transform America and he was also clear in his vision for what that might look like. Couched in warm fuzzy rhetoric about caring for the poor, the needy, or, best and most heart-string tugging of all, the children, he wishes to oversee a government run and enforced redistribution of wealth from those who earn it to those who do not. He knows that those who do not, who seek to continue feeding at the government trough, are a sufficient voting block to keep him in office essentially for life.
Oh I know there is that pesky amendment limiting Presidential terms but he has already shown a major disdain for that musty old document and would have no trouble overriding it as he has other Constitutional roadblocks to his plans.
I can see the eyes rolling now; I hear the whispers that ol’ David has finally lost what little grip on reality he might ever have had. But I simply would ask you to revisit the history of countries who have gone from some more or less popularly elected for of government (prior to rigged elections that created “Presidents for Life”) and see what the mechanisms were that set the change to a de facto dictatorship in motion. it has, nearly always and with very, very few exceptions, been the same sequence of effects and it has started with an economic crisis followed by, as Keynes himself described it, a debauching of the currency, that is the printing of more money to stave off an out of control inflation which is then enflamed by the increased amount of money in an economic death spiral.
As in the most famous example, the Weimar Republic in Germany, the value of money declines rapidly meaning the cost of good escalates rapidly until even basics are unaffordable, people panic and in the following chaos take to the streets in protest which, given the nature of mob psychology turns sooner or later to riots and the benevolent dictator in training now has to use strong-arm means for the good of the people to bring things under control.
None of that would be possible here except slowly and surely the drug of benefits has been doled out as if for free and now has become cripplingly addictive. We were promised “change” and we certainly got it. From January 2009 to May 2011 Gas prices have increased 84%, Corn has increased 78%, Sugar has increased 164%, Food Stamps have increased 35%, long term unemployed has increased 146%, the national debt has increased 32%. All of that in a little over half of a Presidential term. The rate of increase in the National Debt is stunning. In the last two years we have accumulated national debt at a rate more than 27 times as fast as during the rest of our entire nation’s history. To put that in some perspective if you are driving in the right lane doing 65 MPH and a car rockets past you in the left lane going 27 times faster, it would be doing well over 7,000 MPH! Is your income growing at that same rate?
No one could possibly believe that is sustainable and so the only possible explanation for the continuation, much less the acceleration of the policies that created that situation is that it is on purpose and it has as its goal the very end to which it has historically always led: an over throw of government and the institution of a de facto dictatorship “for the good of the people.”
I truly do not want to be correct in this. I keep waiting and searching for the evidence that will provide another working hypothesis to analyze but thus far i’ve not seen it. That is why i endure the snarky administration apologists on MSNBC and read the claptrap from Huffington Post and other such sites hoping to hear the missing fact or piece of evidence to allow me to change that thinking. I don’t have any kids so I do not worry about them and I also do not worry about the kids of those who have consistently voted to let this political monstrosity loose on the land. If that truly reflects the values of the 21st Century American then they deserve what is coming.
What I don’t like is the closing speed which may bring about this collapse and change in my own lifetime.
N. DAVID KING's BLOG 