All Signs Point To Fail

I'd rather do knee-bends over a lit Bunsen Burner than read the financial news. This stems from my life-long hatred for Econ 100 and the Samuelson textbook, and from my youthful and phony indifference to money.

I've almost always had as much money and things as I needed, and have spent most of my adult life disposing of things I thought I needed when I acquired them. In fact, Self-Storage units have meant a lot to me, as well as yard sales (to get stuff), and land fills (to unload stuff).

Until now I always thought that I, and my family, would make out and make do. We'd survive no matter what. Even getting old, and some would say, sick, hasn't abolished this conviction.


However, it's under pressure now in Connecticut, where we replaced a Republican governor with a Democrat, through voter shenanigans. We sent a regulation Democrat Prog to Dodd's old seat, and we re-elected the entire Democrat delegation to The House in Washington. Our State House is huge majority Democrat. We're broke with the highest per-capita debt in the country, our bond rating has been downgraded by Moody's, and the ideologically inbred tribe that caused it still rules.

Listen to them, and your hair hurts. Nowhere in their northeast political orthodoxy is the awareness that consumers require producers, or that the "little guy" is little because he chose to be. Or that odious "Big Business" also creates "well-paying jobs" for "working families", that EVERY claim on society is a "special interest", and that the northeast is post, post, post-industrial. Heavy industries are in ragweed covered graves or moving to red states.


You hear these hacks, but you really don't. They're like painted shamans in the frothing stage of Talking in Tongues, reciting doggerel from temple carvings in a vanished language. They confuse you, but they also piss you off because the SEIU apes understand and treasure every word of it. It must be explained in Samuelson's chapter on The Endless Free Lunch. No one could be that stupid without being educated to it.

But someone is that stupid, and it's Ben Bernanke. Ben is going to print $600 billion and buy Treasuries with it - in the crazed belief that this will make Treasuries more attractive by raising their interest rate from nearly zero (to what?) cause a borrowing, and therefore a spending, boom while devaluing the dollar and monetizing the debt through inflation. If there's more let me know.

Ben is an economist retained by Obama, along with Tim Geithner. In a world where Paul Krugman can win a Nobel Prize in Economics, this isn't as freakish as it seems. If you want more on the economic disaster to come, search Instapundit for "Quantitative Easing", and see what it means to you. And remember these awful facts:

In 2009 the Federal government spent $3.5 trillion and received $2.1 trillion in revenue. They borrowed $1.4 trillion, or 40% of the budget and 10% of GDP. Our publically-held debt is $7.5 trillion, without Bernanke's lunacy. If the "recession" ended today, our annual deficit and borrowing requirement is $1 trillion for ten years. And at the current spending rate, by 2020 we'll be $20 trillion in debt with annual interest payments of almost a trillion dollars.

Take cover.