The AP says President Obama’s new budget would impose a host of tax increases, amounting in total to $1.4 trillion over the next decade. Taxvox calls it a “mind numbing budget” in which not only taxes but total debt will go up in absolute terms.
Next year, according to Obama’s fiscal plan, spending would increase to more than $3.8 trillion. Revenues would rise by two full percentage points of GDP to almost $2.6 trillion. Thus the deficit as a share of GDP would shrink to 8.3 percent. After that, matters would improve somewhat more (thanks in part to a growing economy) but the deficit would never fall below 3.6 percent of GDP. And still, the total debt held by the public would grow from an already-troubling 63 percent this year to 77 percent by 2020.
Where’s the money going to come from? More taxes on wealthy individuals and business, the proposal says. The WSJ writes that tax deductions will decrease and tax rates will increase for those who are deemed able to do more.
The bulk of that increase comes as tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush expire at the end of 2010. The top two income-tax rates, which affect people earning more than $200,000 a year, or $250,000 for married couples, will return to 36% and 39.6%, from 33% and 35% now. Under the budget plan, capital gains and dividends would be taxed at 20%, up from 15% now, for people at those income levels.
But as in last year’s budget, Mr. Obama proposed Monday to go further by limiting the value of those benefits, which include deductions for mortgage interest and some charitable contributions. The highest-income earners under current law can lower their taxes by up to 39.6% of those deductions; under Monday’s proposal, that would be reduced to 28%.
The Washington Post says the President declared “it’s time to save what we can, spend what we must and live within our means once again.” This basically means the government will tax more and spend more in order to stimulate the economy to eventually reduce the deficit. The WaPost is skeptical that it will work, but took pains to note that “it is Congress, and not the president, that sets spending and taxing levels. All the president can do is send up a budget blueprint and make it sound like his proposals are the final word.”
David Sanger at the NYT stops just short of saying that President’s Obama’s policies are an admission that America’s pre-eminence on the world stage is over. It is broke and has no prospect of ever getting level again. The question is whether the budget simply recognizes this possibility or actually constitutes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sanger notes that the President’s budget contains two numbers. The first is a deficit percentage unseen since the Civil War, World War 1 and World War 2. It is a World War budget without a world war. But it is the second number that scares Sanger.
But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.
He ends by saying that President Obama should get high marks for candor, unlike the Bush administration, which tried “sugarcoat” situation. Yet it is, as Sanger says, Obama’s deficit that we are talking about now.
Crimson tide
YouTube Direkt
Will this government-led recovery work? Or will this budget simply exacerbate the situation. Open thread.
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Even the old Soviet model put borrowed money to work building infrastructure for, they thought, a productive future. Their attempts failed for a number of reasons, but the plan, their domestic big picture, was sellable.
These Dems have no such plans for development of anything. Just entitlements forever. The only possible explanation for this must be, in my mind, and I keep coming back to their favorite excuse ‘too big to fail’. Leftys really think, just like teenage adolescents, that money just falls from the sky. The only folks that think this is good governance are those that want sump’m fer nutt’n.
Will it work?
After the money’s gone and the credit dries up; It’s economic Armageddon.
gee, ya know, a trillion here, a trillion there, it all starts to add up pretty soon!
I’m almost certain reasoned deliberation underpinned the entire process.
http://movies.apunkachoice.com/titles/evi/evil-roy-slade/mid_14974/videos/moytid/D1NsNSkt1xU/evil-roy-slade—randolph-the-accountant.html
This is stunning. After 4 years of Obama, unless the Republicans totally win back both the House and Senate, our nation will be destroyed. It will take our nation 40 years to undo the damage that he is doing to our debt and nation. It is mind-blowing.
President Obama has thrown open the doors to the Treasury to benefit unions, bankers and other assorted Democrat constituencies, saddling the country and its taxpayers with trillions of dollars of debt far into the future. And he is not done yet. If he is successful in his dream of destroying the finest health care system the world has ever seen the cost will be catastrophic. If he is successful in his dream of destroying the economy of the United States with a punitive carbon tax, the cost in jobs and standard of living will be irreversible. And next year, if Obama has his way, spending will increase to over 3.8 trillion dollars. The looting of the Treasury continues apace, and soon the cupboard will be bare.
The cupboard doors
Were always lures
But heretofore stood firm
Against the guys
Whose many tries
To open in their term
Who tried their worst
The doors to burst
The treasury to loot
And give the gold
To friends of old
And new found friends to boot
The cupboard doors
Withstood the whores
Who tried with might and main
To strip the land
To grease the hand
Of those with much to gain
Withstood them all
Until that Fall
When into town there strode
A man in black
Who did not lack
The cupboard’s very code
He opened wide
Just for his side
The cupboard and its sums
And gave away
What we all pay
In taxes to his chums
The unions got
From him a lot
Of power, votes and cash
And bankers cried
And tried to hide
Their bonus money bash
With trillions yet
To come in debt
Obama was not done
He pledged much more
From our small store
To fight the warming sun
Yet finding work
To him’s a quirk
No jobs? He doesn’t care
He’s not to blame
That’s not his game
Besides, the cupboard’s bare
The tax revenues will be nowhere near what is proposed.
I suspect that bond holders will look at this and gasp. There is some justification for the borrowing last year, a tough year, although I won’t grant that myself. But next year, and the year after?
The republicans just won 2010 and 2012 handily. The Democrats will be out of power for the better part of a generation.
Derek
In 2000, Clinton left a $236 billion dollar surplus. Two years later, Bush’s tax cuts give us a $158 billion dollar deficit, and it went downhill from there.
I realize that 9-11 intervened, but that should have been a wake-up call like Pearl Harbor. Congress should have officially declared a war on the al-Qaeda NGO and any sovereign state that offered them sanctuary, beginning with Afghanistan. Nukes at Tora Bora. There should have been a war tax, and war bonds, and a draft. Then the whole thing would have been wrapped up in a year and we’d be done with it.
But no, we were told to go shopping, lest the terrorists win, and we got a tax cut rather than a war surcharge.
I’m a true fiscal conservative. I believe in minimal government. But if the American people through our representative democracy insists that government take care of all of us like a nanny, then I insist on the second best thing, which is to pay as we go.
We aren’t doing ourselves any favors by going into debt. Lots of people fall into that trap with credit cards, it gives them the illusion that they are rich for a while, and they are getting something for nothing. It was even true for some people before they reformed the bankruptcy law.
Credit should be a tool, like a lever, that allows you to pull some of your future earning power into the present and apply it all at once to purchase now what you would otherwise have to scrimp and save for years to get. Just as machines have to overcome friction to work, going into debt has its own form of entropy in interest charges. That’s money we’re flushing right down the rat hole.
And now we are at the mercy of China’s goodwill, bowing and scraping to them, and begging them every year to keep buying our Treasury bonds. This has emboldened them to raise holy hell when we supplied Taiwan with a modest array of defensive weapons. People are willing to make sacrifices such as CAFE standards and the like to get out from under reliance on foreign oil, they should have the same willingness to get out from under foreign debt, even if we must do without our precious tax cuts now. That is the conservative stance to take.
I saw some research today that compared the wages and benefits of the average Federal employee (approx. $120K/yr) vs. that of the average private sector worker (approx. $60K/yr).
When enough people realize that their tax dollars are going to work to support this as well as to insure the full retirement of GM employees after 30 years (some as young as 48), we’ll get more pushback.
Although I prefer Austrian economic concepts, Art Laffer did have a point.
The higher the tax rate the less money collected by the government:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
I do not think that the income (tax receipts) that Obama projects in his budget is likely to appear.
A “government-led” recovery won’t work. It can’t work. By taking money from the private sector and redistributing it, the government guarantees that the money will not be spent efficiently or used to create lasting wealth.
If this spending does not result in a vast increase in economic growth, America will ultimately enter a debt spiral. As the economy deteriorates, the cost of borrowing will go up. That will cause the debt and deficit to further increase, requiring us to borrow still more money.
If something is unsustainable, it will stop. When the party finally ends in a decade or two, Americans will experience a catastrophic decline in their standard of living. They will have only themselves to blame.
The CBO’s accounting probably forgot to include another factor which we must not forget to include: the demographic situation. The younger generations are simply too small and sparse to support entitlement spending on this scale. Actual tax receipts will likely fall far below the CBO’s optimistic numbers, and then there will be nothing to do except declare insolvancy and go home.
Obama’s budget is really just an exercise in speculative fiction. The spending cannot happen, the money doesn’t exist, and the physical economy cannot withstand the disruption any longer. It’s like the last line of coke left in the phial, the one you take to stave off the dawning realization that you spent all your money, wrecked your personal life, and you haven’t been home in three days.
cloward-piven if you will. i’m tending my victory garden.
fill the spare bedroom with canned goods
#7: Ms T
As much as I’d like to agree, we can’t save our way out of the fiscal ccesspool that 40+ years of ‘Great Society’ has wrought. We need to cut spending radically.
The nineties were literally a perfect storm of prosperity where demographics, technology, expanded markets fostered by the end of the cold war and cheap oil all crossed paths. But in just a few short years, we’ve spent the margins.
I’m 57 and I’m willing to sacrifice the thousands of dollars that have been stolen from my earnings by these socialist bastards – since I was 13 years old – if they will only : 1) Stop Entitlements – for everybody. 2) Outlaw Unionized labor in government and in government funded education. 3) Shrink Government staff, both at federal & State levels, at the same percentages as the fall in GDP. 4) Discontinue all affirmative action directives in government/public sectors. 5) Institute a Fair Tax on purchases.
That’s my deal.
THAT would be a jobs program!
Obama gets one right?!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_sci_nasa_future;_ylt=AoTfkHUWUWAHAa5ztrMy0ApH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTM3aGJoaHQzBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwMjAxL3VzX3NjaV9uYXNhX2Z1dHVyZQRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzIEcG9zAzIEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawNuYXNhZ29vZG5pZ2g-
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is redirecting America’s space program, killing NASA’s $100 billion plans to return astronauts to the moon and using much of that money for new rocket technology research.
–
Back on topic, I’ve wondered at the tax projections given the down economy, how much does that figure into the deficit? Or else, given these numbers, WHERE is the money supposed to be going???? Last year’s deficit included a $770b porkulus package, but surely that was a one-time thing. Is it really repeated in the 2011 budget?
Obama told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to redistribute wealth. Now it turns out he is destroying wealth instead. One could almost accept the former goal (except that it has been shown time and again to disincentivize production), but the latter is just pointless destruction. The only good news to come out of this is that increasing numbers of voters are getting involved in real grassroots organization. The question this November will be can Chicago politics trump grassroots organization? F
If Scott Brown had not been elected in Massachusetts, this number would look worse. Much worse.
If the emails from East Anglia and Penn State had not been unveiled, this number would look worse. Much worse.
We have a bloated government, filled with bloated egos, that produced a bloated budget, that is worsening a bloated deficit.
So what’s the answer?
More government. More people on the bloated dole. We are in a financial death spiral…and our entrenched media was a co-pilot.
I’m taking a hard look at the time value of our dollars…and finding the first element…that we are living on borrowed time.
The question this November will be can Chicago politics trump grassroots organization?
Consider that millions of low-income people who need a job — even a fake government job — to buy food that they need now will be incentivized to elect Obama, even if it is against their long term interst to do so. From a certain point of view, a government led jobs recovery can become a massive vote-buying scheme. It’s a sad sight.
I remember describing elsewhere how voters in a Third World country will sell their vote for a ten bucks and bottle of gin, even when they know it simply puts the bad guys back in office. They need the ten bucks now and the bottle of gin to drown out the sorrows now. And tomorrow can take care of itself.
While the middle class remained strong this kind of vote-buying was hard to pull off. But if a sufficient number of people are pauperized, then an opportunity for permanent power presents itself to those who are willing to take advantage of the crisis. If enough of the electorate is desperate enough, then yes, you can buy votes. The thing is, when you see how hard up people have become, you can’t hardly blame them. It’s a very cynical exercise, but then we are dealing with politicians.
This dynamic suggests that economic hardship to some extent favors the Obama strategy. The worse off people are, the more they have to rely on these “incentives”. They have nothing else to fall back on but Hope. And Hope is what he’s going to hold out, like a carrot dangled in front of a starving donkey.
Clinton’s surplus, about which we had to hear endlessly from Democrats during the Bush years, was itself another bubble. It was the combination of massive cap gains receipts from the Dotcom bubble — remember the frenzy around “day trading” and such? when everyone and their brother was loading up on internet companies that soon crashed? — and higher than normal income tax receipts due to low unemployement and so many more people making fat, dot-com salaries. Add to that how Clinton starved the military, and how the Republicans reined in a lot of spending, including welfare reform, and you have a surplus situation. But it was never going to last.
Not only did the money dry up following the market collapse and 9-11, but the Republicans to their everlasting shame tossed away their reputations as fiscally prudent stewards of the national wealth and went on their own spending frenzy. Really, they had the chance to fix pretty much everything, but they blew it. And it set the stage for Obama.
Well, at least by comparison the free spending Republicans now look like misers. And yes, it will require enormous spending cuts and strong economic growth to get out of this mess. Neither of which is particularly hard to achieve, you know, assuming you had politicians with a lick of sense, at least a dollop of honor and integrity, and a spine. Sadly, they have none of that.
I wonder more and more if O’s real plan is to devalue the dollar, or even replace the currency entirely. We all wake up one day and find our money is gone, and we have just as much as Obama says we have. That surely would be a crisis too good to waste.
What Obama is trying has been tried many times and has never worked.
Until he can explain to me precisely how it is different this time from all the other times, and lay out the mechanics of how that difference will result in success, I am logically forced to conclude his proposed solution will fail this time once more as it always has.
How hard is that to comprehend?
The commenters (1, 6, 8, 10) above on this thread have it right. It is impossible to tax a nation into prosperity and stability. The private sector has its bumps and warts but in a truly free and productive society it should be preeminent. No good nation exalts public sector employees over private. When’s the last time you heard a teacher’s union thank the taxpayers? Or social workers in SEIU expressing an ounce of gratitude? Listen up, you entitled government union types – your income stream and standard of living aren’t OWED to you. We can and will remove them abruptly if you push us too far.
The Obama budget isn’t a solution to anything. It amounts to a massive transfer of wealth and income stream and power from the private to the public sector and it produces nothing in return other than loyalty of SEIU types, teachers unions, and other government employees to the great wealth transferer in chief. Certainly nothing of real value. This while the non-military public sector is already overpaid – generally speaking – by any historical comparison.
We don’t need higher pay and more bulletproof income security and unassailable pensions for government workers, we need to cut back on ALL of those things to put the fear of God into that crowd. There is an inverse relationship between job security and work ethic, and we need to work that relationship hard, expecially in these times. It might also be time to reconsider the concept of pensions for government workers beyond social security. Let them save like I have to.
Simultaneously, we should be tossing millions of them out of government work entirely. Perhaps being in the private sector will sharpen their work ethic and appreciation for what REALLY makes things work.
#14 enscout
I mentioned it on another thread – public sector unions are a form of treason. The unions are in an alliance against the interestes of the taxpayers and for themselves. They should be banned outright immediately, and attempts to be in one or to organize should be considered crimes against the citizens of this country.
#16 F
He is destroying wealth as well as the nation in a way which defies logic.
His solution seems to be that when you come upon a man lying bleeding the best thing to do is stab him a few more times. Good luck with that.
So, Richard: Are you suggesting that we’ve reached, or passed, the tipping point?
If so, how can we ‘dis-incentivize’ those types from casting their ‘sump’m fr nut’n’ ballot?
Maybe the founders had it right. I mean, the part about not allowng just anybody that could make it to the polls the right to vote. Unless you have skin in the game…
It’s been posited here before. Unless you pay federal taxes…If you are on the dole…no ticky – no laundry.
I have always felt that the comments here were from some of the brightest people and when someone references Evil Roy Slade (#3) it just proves my point.
If so, how can we ‘dis-incentivize’ those types from casting their ’sump’m fr nut’n’ ballot?
Increasing the desperation of the electorate has always worked in favor of the demagogues. A nation with a large, fairly prosperous middle class has an electorate that isn’t so easily bought off. Desperation has a quality of its own. When people are badly enough off, they’ll steal, even kill, for a slice of bread.
So what this implies is that the time to organize is now. Not later when you’re down to the last can of beans. 2010, not 2012 is the critical year. President Obama has doubled down again, and if the political system is to work as normal then people have to exercise their rights while they still have the energy and strength to do so in the old, considered way. To leave it to a time when the political system may be behaving abnormally due to extreme economic conditions is risky for democracy and for the institutions which underpin it.
In a way the Scott Brown election created an existential crisis for the administration. So he’s staking it all on a throw of the dice. That ups the ante for everyone. The crisis of one party becomes the the crisis of both sides.
America is not a third world nation.
Blacks and Hispanics voted to put one of their own in, along with White women enamored of the “handsome big shot” and that plus enough people willing to take a gamble on Obama who seemed “safe and vetted” was enough for a narrow margin of about a little less than six points.
Who will turn out in 2010? The White Middle class that is getting screwed. Sure, Chicago and LA and other places will flood the polls with dead, phony, and non-enrolled voters voting. But will it be enough? No.
You don’t take a bunch of middle class people, suddenly make them poor, and their children and grandchildren, forever, and then not expect something to happen. Of course something will happen.
Nor will Obama be able to pull a recovery. Verizon cut 13,000 jobs. Glaxo Smith Kline another 20K or so. Sams Club about 12K. And on and on. Right now almost EVERY city and County and State is bankrupt. Meaning that Obama will be spending the BULK of his budget in transfers to states JUST TO KEEP STATE EMPLOYMENT UP. So there are not mass layoffs of state/muni/county workers to the tune of say, another 10-15 million.
In fact, just keeping the government employment level UP makes things harder for Obama. It creates a naked spoils struggle between the White Majority (particularly men) who are disadvantaged and Gays, Blacks, Hispanics, and White Women, who are favored. FDR governed it might be recalled by kicking every Mexican he could find out of America and excluding Blacks from the New Deal. Only in 1944 when Eleanor Roosevelt threatened various things did the Democrats allow Blacks to vote in Dem primaries.
This is, respectfully, what our host does not get. America is a White Majority nation, deeply divided by race, with the post-Reagan consensus broken.
The post Reagan consensus, kept by GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush, was that Blacks, Hispanics, gays, and White Women, would be preferred and come to dominate government employment through Affirmative Action. However, government employment would be limited, tax burdens light, and growth in private sector employment with more limited AA burdens discriminating against the WHITE MAJORITY would mean social peace, with every one getting enough pie given that the pie always got bigger, and thus slices got bigger, for everyone.
Note the conditions: limited government growth, primacy of the private sector, economic growth in the latter. Including both jobs and wages.
This is a nation between 66%-75% White (depending on how you count guys like Mark Sanchez), and the majority can and will make the rules. Particularly when the ranks of SWPL are thinned by unemployment and underemployment. What little GDP growth that has happened has been from inventories drawn down as much as possible, being refurbished. Export-led growth is impossible, given that manufacturing is about only 20% of US jobs.
Job growth depends on economic growth internally which in turn requires:
1. Fewer regulations on business activity and job creation.
2. Fewer taxes on business activity and job creation.
3. CHEAP OIL and energy. PERIOD.
4. Keynsian pump priming by MASSIVE DEFENSE SPENDING. It took only 5,000 (estimated) men to build the Golden Gate Bridge in the Great Depression. It can take as many 60K direct and indirect to construct a Nimitz class carrier.
The ability, will, intellect, and politics of Obama doing this are zero. So he will get himself a Republican House, and possibly Senate, by 2010.
By 2012, he will have the mother of all patronage/resource battles between the White Middle Class and everyone else. This will be a fight drawn largely along racial lines. It will be ugly. Defeat for the White Middle Class will ensure second-class citizenship and eventual ethnic cleansing ala South Africa, with nowhere else to go. The fight will be extremely ugly even by contemporary standards, with charges of racism no longer potent (by abuse too much).
What is the White middle class supposed to do? Just all kill themselves? Die so America can be a nation of a few trendy hipsters and non-Whites living an “AVATAR” dream? The fury of the Tea Parties elected Scott Brown into “Ted Kennedy’s Seat.” This is economic (and cultural — no lawyers for terrorists) at its core.
The easiest thing in the World was for Bill Clinton to dole out goodies for the White Middle Class, with a promise implicit not to dole out too much to Blacks and Hispanics (End of Welfare as we know it). Obama cannot do that. He’s the first Black President. It’s his nature.
I understand the Obama budget released today:
1. As usual, assumes those subject to higher taxes will do nothing different as a result.
2. Includes as predicted income some $650 Billion from Cap and Trade. And Cap and Trade is about as likely to get passed as I am to take my rifles to DC on a mission known in the Air Force as Armed Reconnaissance. In fact, it is exactly as likely as me doing that.
Peterike #19:
Right! Those of us with money in the market got screwed big time. We paid taxes on capital gains for years during the Dot Comm runup and then had it all disappear. And a bunch of 20 somethings ended up with a few hundred $K in their pockets for having produced nothing useful. No wonder the Cyber types liked Clinton and Gore so much and vice versa.
Josh #15:
Obama came to Florida and assured the people at the Cape and KSC that he would support the new Moon program and more Shuttle flights past the planned end. I thought he was lying but some people bought it. I was up at KSC today and there were long faces all around. It is true that NASA has had 24 years since the Shuttle was proved to be a huge mistake to come up with a replacement, but Pres. Bush finally pulled them out of that delusion.
whiskey #25
Obama will be spending the BULK of his budget in transfers to states JUST TO KEEP STATE EMPLOYMENT UP. So there are not mass layoffs of state/muni/county workers to the tune of say, another 10-15 million.
Exactly my point. This budget is a DIRECT transfer of wealth from the private sector to the public (comprised primarily of the ethnic/gender groups you mention) in order to purchase voting loyalty. Public sector employees have violated the social contract they made with the private sector in subtle ways in the past but this is overt breach of that contract, done in a way which cannot be hidden. The Tea Parties are just the beginning. The private sector will want it’s income stream and economic liberty back – and it will most definitely want other forms of retribution. Candidates must be found with enough fire in their bellies to enact said retribution.
progressivist takeovers end up with block bosses who control the people thru weekly food ration cards –on the intimate level, where everybody knows everybody, it works like a charm. ‘denunciations’ are not done for fun, but for food.
Wretchard,
In one sense (but only one), the comments on this site are overdone.
When Bush cut the top marginal rate for top earners, he did so for the normal income tax (40% ->35%). But when he did that, he did not change the tax rate for the alternative minimum tax. This means that individuals in that top bracket didn’t really get a tax break (though much poorer people did).
So when Obama repeals the tax cuts that Bush put in, he doesn’t get a revenue increase. Because people just jump from the AMT schedule back to the normal schedule with very little change in their tax bill.
For this reason, Obama had to add something else – to actually get any revenue. That was the change in deductability for mortgage interest in charitable deductions.
He’s pulling in as much money as he can from the current crop of wealthy individuals, but as many people pointed out, he’s at the limit of what can be extracted before he kills economic activity.
Jim
ht instapundit, “It’s the SPENDING, stupid!”
http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/02/01/debt-and-taxes/
(snip)
To see that debt is not the culprit, suppose for a moment that we decide to eliminate the debt tomorrow by raising taxes, so the average American forks over $40,000. What does that do for the average child who’s born tomorrow? It removes a $40,000 debt burden and simultaneously cuts his inheritance by $40,000. How is that child’s life affected? To a good first approximation, not at all. (I am glossing over some complications here, but they are of relatively minor importance.) And of course that calculation makes perfect sense because the only way you can make the next generation richer is by conserving actual resources—which you can’t accomplish with accounting tricks.
Ah! you might say, but we’ve done more than that—we’ve saved that child not just from $40,000 in debt but also from a lifetime of accumulated interest on that debt. Yes, and we’ve also robbed that child of not just $40,000 in inheritance but also of a lifetime of accumulated interest on that inheritance. It all washes out.
This is why it’s so frustrating to hear talk of blue ribbon commissions assigned to the task of “debt reduction”. “Debt reduction” can mean less spending, or more taxes, or some combination thereof. But to raise taxes solely for the purpose of debt reduction is to mask the problem, not to solve it. Debt is not the problem; spending is. Hysteria about the debt is misdirection.
(end snip; do read more)
…the comments on this site are overdone
***
…he’s at the limit of what can be extracted before he kills economic activity
***
I get it, James –#29 is one of those comments!
***
anyhoo, re the quote in #30, goes without saying that a great way to ride the moral high horse while transferring the nations less numerous capital accounts to its more numerous expense accounts, is to do it via having a crisis and running up debt in response, then hyping the debt emergency until public opinion ‘forces’ you to confiscatory taxation in order to pay that debt. of course, the dead economy and high unemployment if handled right become political features, not bugs. look for cumpulsory labor laws soon enough, tho.
The Myth of the Clinton Surplus
These facts are available at multiple links (Google: Clinton’s Surplus). This shows how deceptive are the Democrats and big media. The Clinton surplus myth is repeated endlessly as a biased and untrue talking point.
Read the whole article. Here is an edited excerpt:
—-
You will often read the claim that President Clinton balanced the budget and even ran a surplus. This is then used to underline the irresponsibility of the Bush administration. (And prove the true effectiveness of Democratic administrations -amg)
Clinton claimed surpluses of $69, $123, and $230 billion for FY1998-2000. Clinton claimed that the national debt had been reduced by $360 billion (interestingly, not the sum of the yearly claims, which is $422B).
There was never a surplus. In fact, the total national debt increased by $281 billion during those years. How can this be? The Public Debt and yearly deficits were paid down by borrowing money from the Social Security fund, rather than borrowing directly from the public. Clinton did not achieve a surplus and he didn’t leave President Bush with a surplus. Actually, growing deficits began with a $133 billion deficit in the last Clinton budget, not in the first budget of the Bush administration.
—-
Analogy: Dad has a college fund for the kids (accumulated money from Social Security taxes) and a credit card (Public Debt). Dad spends more than he earns, and borrows from the college fund to cover the excess. Then he goes further, and borrows $281 more from the college fund to pay off some of the credit card. Dad talks to Mom: “We’re doing great dear. Look, I have paid down some of the credit card.” Dad doesn’t tell her that the kids aren’t going to college.
The question before us is, simply: Is this man insane?
If the answer is yes, then in the absence of vicious intentions, we pull together, elect conservatives in 2010, and bid Obama farewell in 2012 (or sooner, if mental illness permits removal from office).
If the answer is no, then what must we surmise? My money, what’s left of it, is on the intention being to impoverish the middle class to the point where resistance [to whatever malevolent design is planned] comes either at an appalling cost, or worst case, is no longer possible.
Wretchard’s right on this point: Now is the time to mobilize, while we still can.
Whiskey: I’m not for de-regulation, per se. While I agree that we’ve strangled most manufacturing here, I think the bigger problem is our inability/unwillingness to enforce many of the laws currently on the books. If we’re to be a Republic, damnit, lets be a Republic. If we would only enforce law equitably we could repeal much of the redundant burden of overregulation that drives businesses overseas.
That’s the other side of your ‘existential threat’ equation, Richard. The Dems in general and this current government in particular, has dismantled the Republic, the ‘nation of laws’ and turned it into a mob-ocracy.
A huge exception to less regulation, IMHO, is the finacial industry. There, regulators are often the fox in the henhouse variety (from my perspective) and regs should certainly prevent the investment houses and banks from becoming casinos.
The constant quest by politicians for celebrity company, their attendance at glitzy affairs, their fairy-tale life conducted in front of a drab, gray mass of humanity, with the occasional bon-bon thrown to the left or right, as they progress through the crowd in their crystal carriages, evokes Juvenal. And no, not the hall.
iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.
I get so tired of hearing about the Clinton surplus. I am glad to see that I am not the only one.
The question before us is, simply: Is this man insane?
If President Obama is “insane” then a lot of people are insane like him. He’s not the cause of the problem. He’s the product of a line of thought taken to its ultimate conclusion. A significant percentage of the electorate, and ironically enough, many of those who believe themselves to be the best educated, believe in exactly what he’s doing.
And they’re not going to be dissuaded by anything except the school of hard knocks. Only direct experience of the kind that happens when you stick your finger in an electric socket will convince them of the existence of what they deny. And maybe not even then. Consider you are dealng with people who were perrfectly willing to hand their money over for Global Warming, to that fakir Pachauri and that crew at the Climate Research Unit. Who are convinced Iran is no danger one day and surround it with missiles the next — missiles that are supposed to be useless. Who think nothing of putting a less than salubrious man in charge of safe schools and congratulate themselves for having protected “the children”.
Chesterton was right. When you start believing in these atheist, worker’s paradise ideologies, it doesn’t mean that you believe in nothing. It means you’ll believe in anything. One wonders what it will take to wake people up? The answer is whatever they inflict on themselves. The true believers are performing the equivalent of running their faces up against a granite wall. How long till they admit it hurts?
Some will hold out till the end. There are none so blind as they will not see. That’s man for you; our bretheren. We have no choice but to love them, even when and especially when they are a pain in the butt.
remember the big deal Obama made ofthe ”bipartisan blue ribbon commission to cut the deficit (debt)” –in the SOTU, and at the pubby retreat –he keeps mentioning that the senate rejected the proposal but he, the president, went ahead by executive order and ordered the empanelling?
This panel will be charged with cutting the debt, not cutting the spending.
Meanwhile, Obama’s secret plan doesn’t need LESS debt –it needs MORE. We have a president –and every follower you will be hearing say “we must SPEND our way out of this recession” –who will make a grimace at the debt, while chortling on the inside, because only the private-economy successful quarter of the population will be paying off that debt –they and their children and grandchildren –and they will HAVE to, because they own property valued in dollars. Not for long do they own property, but for now they do. This is a sequence –we’re at a line on their page right right now.
And, the bipartisan panel will provide Obama the cover to ratchet taxes ever higher (aim #1 is passing this new set), and transfer wealth from the disfavored producers to the favored consumers, all in the guise of ”responsibly” protecting the Dollar and ”lowering the burden on the younger generations”.
of course the whole scheme has been tried and tried and always fails and ruins the nation. unless by miracle human nature has finally changed, so it shall again here.
One wonders what it will take to wake people up?
Well, we’re all predicting and expecting financial disasters.
When they hit, some will believe, just a little too late. Hyperinflation. Doubling of tax rates. Denial of service in hospitals. Gasoline at $8/gallon.
Others will still not believe, and look for scapegoats.
Others will celebrate the pain.
People, huh.
18/Wretchard:
While the middle class remained strong this kind of vote-buying was hard to pull off. But if a sufficient number of people are pauperized, then an opportunity for permanent power presents itself to those who are willing to take advantage of the crisis. If enough of the electorate is desperate enough, then yes, you can buy votes. The thing is, when you see how hard up people have become, you can’t hardly blame them. It’s a very cynical exercise, but then we are dealing with politicians.
This dynamic suggests that economic hardship to some extent favors the Obama strategy. The worse off people are, the more they have to rely on these “incentives”. They have nothing else to fall back on but Hope. And Hope is what he’s going to hold out, like a carrot dangled in front of a starving donkey.
This is where American exceptionalism comes in, for America is very different in this respect from any other place in the world. Our national memory includes – indeed is founded upon – resisting pauperization and exploitation. This fact gives anyone possessing an American psyche a sort of “back door” that leads out and away from despair. It is something akin to a prophecy and a promise, all the more believable because it actually happened once; and this is generally all that is meant when we say that America is a nation favored by God. America instantiates in time a truth that belongs to eternity; this fact, once made actual, can never again be removed from human experience. From now on, all those who desire freedom will have the successful example of America before them as a living source of hope.
How then could we, who have lived this experience and imbibed it with our mother’s milk, ever forget it? Certainly we have strayed from the path of righteousness and perhaps we are due for a Babylonian exile, but there will be a return for us. The city set upon a hill does not falter. Our faith will give us the strength to survive Obama, and then we will resume laboring in the vinyard where the Lord has planted us.
Wretch, personally I believe he knows exactly what he’s doing. Ditto for a minority of those supporting him, particularly the elite in govt, media, academia, etc…
What worries me is whether or not he’ll get us all wedged in between a rock and a hard place before we slam on brakes.
No doubt, one way or another, there are players yet unknown who will rise to fame (or infamy) as the story unfolds. It could even be one of the posters here.
For my part, I’ve wondered what I might do if I am “given a package” by my employer… judging from what others have received in recent thinnings, I’d likely have close to six months severance pay given my length of service.
In sillier moments, I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a ticket to D.C., buying a tuxedo, a comfortable chair, a pitchfork (with prongs suitable filed down) and a tastefully designed sign that says, simply, “Ok, that’s it. Who’s with me? Bring your chair.” I’d set up out front of the capital building. No yelling, screaming, gesturing. Just… SIT. SILENT. And STARE.
I figure it’s likely that I’d be hauled away within 10 minutes… but if not, I wonder how long it’d be before The Pitchfork Brigade would stretch hundreds and hundreds of feet to the left and to the right? After a couple of months, maybe someone in the MSM would deign to send a snarky flunky to interview/chastize me for being a tool of some sort…
There it is, folks. Fifteen minutes of fame for someone who wants it. Maybe even start a Movement.
(Sorry – just a bit grouchy at the moment.)
Whiskey: America is a White Majority nation, deeply divided by race, with the post-Reagan consensus broken.
…Defeat for the White Middle Class will ensure second-class citizenship and eventual ethnic cleansing ala South Africa, with nowhere else to go…
…He’s the first Black President. It’s his nature…
Whiskey, nothing personal, but I had to remove your blog from my bloglist and I won’t be visiting there again because you yourself, as you make clear in the remarks above, insist on dividing Americans by race. I won’t use the epithet “racist” because that gets tossed around too much, but the essence of racism is that you pigeonhole people by the color of their skin.
When it comes to the black-white thing, which is really just an echo of the Civil War and it’s aftermath, I have no “skin in the game” because of my parents’ ethnicity (Philippines).
I once heard that the most segregated hour in America was 11AM on Sunday morning, and that may be true in the Protestant world, but my background is in the Roman Catholic community, and let me assure you that race has absolutely no relevance in Holy Mother Church.
I am a veteran of the United States Navy. I served at the very end of the Cold War, just before Gulf One. There was no such thing as black and white in Reagan’s Navy, and it has only gotten better since then. All those young men and women who served, and are serving, and will serve, then go out into the country and cultivate that vision within America at large. And it is beginning to pay off, especially with the generations just now coming up.
The media has painted Baraq al-Bama as “post-racial” and we saw with the Gates arrest that was a lot of hype. But American themselves, to a great extent, have truly moved beyond race. I did not vote for Obama, because I’m a Libertarian, but the fact that Americans did elect a President who was half-black and half-white proves that most Americans are not deeply divided by race as you insist.
And since this is probably my last opportunity to reply to you, Whiskey, not all American Muslims are plotting to blow up airliners.
Not all American women are ready to share a Tiger Woods with twenty other women rather than sleep with Joe Sixpack. If Tiger’s wife didn’t even know, then his Hos didn’t know.
And after 50 years on the liberal plantation, with the majority of college students now female and with a black President, it is as if all the cages in the zoo were unlocked. But the victims (animals) remain in their cages, because they are afraid of change and don’t know what they’re supposed to do. The victim class has become the ultimate conservatives.
Byron wondered where the great days had gone when he supported Greek independence from the Turks. The landscape was the same, the people were genetically unchanged, but they had forgotten something and he could not make them remember it.
The English themselves would nearly forget what they were, only to recall themselves one last time when the world needed them most. But they needed a Churchill to bring back the recollection and even he could do it one time. William Mancester almost outdid Byron in capturing the moment, but he did it in prose.
Strange isn’t it? The only real treasure of a people — of a civilization — is its culture the very thing which moderns are convinced is useless.
It’s the raiders vs the farmers, all over again. The raiders have mastered their weapons and steeds while preening and feasting and orating around the campfires (see wretchard’s Juvenal ref), waiting a few seasons while the dull stolid farmers across the river and over the hill have slowly and thru sacrifice, hard work, and hope for the future over time have built up stores of grain and herds of livstock. then the raiders at their choice of time and place, launch the raid. Now for the tillermen it is either victory, death, or serfdom.
Okay, do I have this right?
Taxes go up.
Revenue also is expected to increase which implies that the GDP is growing.
Bush held always increasing deficits? If I read the chart right it is:
2000 Surplus (Attributed to Clinton – I will give you that)
2001 Surplus Smaller, but still (Clinton + Bush) – BFA (Big frakkin’ attack)
2002 Deficit Small (relatively) (Bush & 2 wars)
2003 Deficit Growing from previous (Bush & 2 wars)
2004 Deficit Growing from previous (Bush & 2 wars)
2005 Deficit Shrinking from previous (Bush & 2 wars)
2006 Deficit Shrinking from previous (Bush & 2 wars)
2007 Deficit Shrinking from previous (Bush & 2 wars)
2008 Deficit Growing from previous and the biggest yet (Bush & 2 wars)
2009 Deficit = OH HOLY SH-T! (Bush + 0bama as The Zero asked for ARRA & TARP) I don’t care what The Zero says, he gets to own this one all on his lonesome with an assist from GWB.
So, in closing, Bush grew it but them worked hard to shrink it. The Zero? OHS! Deficits as far as the eye can see with assumptions that beggar belief = Revenues grow as taxes increase. Yeah, that’s happening. Maybe in ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’.
hykgoml @ 3 – Baraq “Evil Roy Slade” 0bama – I like it! That clip is just BANG ON!
Walt @ 5: Great verse! As usual.
newrouter @ 12: “i’m tending my victory garden.”
buddy larsen @ 13: “fill the spare bedroom with canned goods”
AND buy more ammo! Buy non-hybrid seeds.
Enscout @ 14: The only way that is going to happen is not “pretty”. Sad to say.
wretchard @ 24:
As you said before he has doubled down, nay asked to change the house rules to double down more than once. This is disaster of the worst type. I think that his enormous ego has been wounded by many circumstances – Scott Brown, Virginia, healthscare bogged down, same for Cap’N'Tax, the world has laughed at him twice in Copenhagen, the Nobel Prize was only a temporary sop to his wounds and now this massively corrupt, narcissistic psycho/basket-case has popped a gasket. The SOTU/STFU speech was the indicator. He directly challenged the SCOTUS to a fight that he will lose. He told America that we were too stupid so he would give us another chance to come around before he brings out the punishment. The Republic is in deep trouble. And many of it’s citizens only see Unicorns flying out of The Zero’s butt and cotton candy clouds.
RWE @ 26: “I understand the Obama budget released today:”
Yup, but he needs Directive 10-289 to make it work. And perhaps the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” also.
Teresita, the percentage of federal tax revenue to GDP if memory serves, went from roughly 23% in 1999-2000, ( the highest of the postwar years) to roughly 16% in 2001, ( the lowest of the postwar years), without the tax rates changing. The Dotcom bust caused the change. That is why the early Bush II years had such huge deficits, and even with the huge spending of the Bush years, the deficit due to tax cut spurred economic growth ( not counting the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan ) fell to just $154 billion in 2007.
That is not to say that the Bush spending spree was a good thing. Bush in many ways, with his freespending ways, lax oversight, Rino and Democrat appointments, capitulation to political correctness, support for the bailouts, and his lack of concern for regulatory excesses, paved the way for the Obama nightmare we now face.
wretchard #18 @ Feb 1, 2010 – 8:00 pm:
Then the question is, dear Cicero, is the republic past the point of no return?
Look to condition of our culture. Markus… well? /roamin’ humor
Pascal (the derivative)
One unspoken aspect of this hefty new budget is the situation with the Government Sponsored Entities (GSE). As of the quiet announcement of Christmas Eve, these entities (chiefly Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) have entered the federal books for all practical purposes. With no vote on the matter, either, which is a quite a shock but another story, the Treasury took unilateral action to assume unequivocal and total backing of these behemoths. GSE debt is, right now, for all intents and purposes, an instrument similiar to a T-Bill.
Factor in GSE debt and our national debt grows beyond its recently adjusted ceiling by 3-4 trillion dollars. With the national debt already at 12T, we now push upwards into 15-16T. Our GDP is 14T.
Now, look at all the hand-wringing over Greece where debt has climbed to 110% of GDP and note that as of December 24, 2009 we’ve now surpassed that mark. We’re into the 130% area, and nothing but more and more red-ink awaits us according to the ten year projections.
We simply have to cut spending, hard and deep, to dig ourselves out of this hole we’ve irresponsibly dug ourselves into. Additionally, we have to flush out and write down bad debts. This is hard medicine. It will make America poorer in the short run (as opposed to doing the same in the long run). It will cause a lot of intense pain (as opposed to lingering, generational burn).
These corrections are coming, we cannot avoid them. Obama will do everything in his power to keep the music playing as long as he can, because that’s the easiest and the most optimistic course.
But the reality is that the public books are a mess, they are destructive to America’s future, and they cannot continue on this course for many more years barring something truly amazing, unforeseen, and very lucky. It is not smart to play roulette.
42. Teresita:
not all American Muslims are plotting to blow up airliners.
In WWII germany, not all germans planned on killing my family -BUT they approved silently and not so silently – It’s been stated repeatedly that the Muslims – wherever they lived were celebrating 9/11 – none not a single one has expressed sorrow for our loss.
ragnar, directive 10-289 is fictive but Agenda 21 sure ain’t.
Teresita — So what if you removed links to my blog? Fact is, America is and always has been, since slavery, deeply divided by race and pretending real hard for fairies won’t make it any other way.
In fact, it is even more complex because now Hispanics, formerly a minor key in American politics, are coming to the fore as the new majority (projected 2040). Do you really think ANY nation that was formerly White Majority (80% as recently as 1980) can flip to White minority “peacefully” without a whole lotta struggle? It beggars the mind to consider such delusions. THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED in all of human history. EVER.
OF COURSE Americans are divided by race. How many White folks during the height of the housing bubble scarfed up (comparatively) cheap South-Central land? White Americans pay lots of money to live as FAR AWAY from Blacks and Hispanics as they possibly can. Desegregation was as much a function of the suburbs and Henry Ford as Martin Luther King. In practical terms, Whites and Blacks live apart, eat different food, have vastly different attitudes towards almost everything, and speak different dialects. In fact Los Angeles of today, with PC and Multiculturalism and no segregation and Jim Crow, has fewer Whites ever coming into contact with Blacks than in say, 1939.
In fact, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone shows concretely that the Multi-racial society with Democracy is a fantasy. The less mono-racial/ethnic a society is, the greater the mistrust, less investment in public goods/spaces, and more cynicism. This extends even to intra- as well as inter-racial groups. The only “fix” America has ever found is the Reagan Bargain (growth, limited AA ceding a finite government to non-Whites and Women). The only model for a multi-racial, multi-cultural society without the Reagan Bargain is in fact, Islam, characterized by a Caliph or Sultan, ruling over a slave society with favors dispensed and revoked, and an angry majority eager to punish favored minorities. Heck, not even Serbs and Hungarians could get along in the Austro-Hungarian empire and they were all White and Christian.
The fate of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and other favored minorities once the Sultans fell I leave you to contemplate.
I can assure you that RACE plays a HUGE role in the Roman Catholic Church in America. In my neck of the woods, there are the Hispanic Catholic Churches and the White ones, and the Vietnamese ones. They are as segregated as ever. It is even stronger in places like South Boston, or Queens.
You lack IMHO basic reading comprehension of what I wrote. Americans “have not moved beyond race” because government spending is ALL ABOUT RACE. ObamaCare is rightly characterized as taking money and health care away from the White Middle Class to give it to most Mexicans (most of them illegal) and Blacks. That is a political loser. So is Obama’s budget.
Government is the only game in town under Obama because it breaks the Reagan Bargain. It is rigged against White Men. Period. Particularly since the most White Male friendly employment, defense, is being gutted. What do you think they will all do? Become “past race” while unemployed?
No. They will vote themselves goodies and NONE for Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, and so on. That is what spoils politics is ALL ABOUT in the first place. It ALWAYS devolves to race/ethnicity. It’s why FDR deported every Mexican, he could find, and prevented Blacks from unionizing. Which is why after four and then eight years of economic failure FDR got re-elected.
[Yes not all American Muslims want to blow up Airliners or fly planes into buildings. But they tolerate those who do, and fail to prevent/speak out against it, and we are seeing the end of likely the ability for the White Majority to tolerate that along with a Depression. I predict Switzerland will not be alone.]
A mature understanding of human nature recognizes that people are hard-wired to trust those who resemble distant kin, and distrust those who do not. Reagan’s genius was knowing this human nature, instinctively, and creating a system that encompasses the investment of all groups. Ironically his Immigration Reform Act of 1986 by creating a permanent pipeline of population replacement from Mexico undermined this.
You can’t ask people to care about a multicultural dreamland, much less fight and die for it. And if anything, Ataturk’s Turkish Nationalism is what will come after the PC regime falls, it will.
Obama’s budget is as much a fantasy as the Sultan dreaming he could hold the Balkans in 1900.
I woke up this morning at 6:30 AM, got my $5.00 yard sale espresso maker out, ready to go to prayer and then off to trim a house, my first meaningful post Christmas work. About three minutes after waking up, the power died here in my neighborhood. Like I said , I was still groggy, coffeeless and all. My mind started wondering, Is this an electro-pulse attack? How am I going to cook those cans of beans Buddy spoke of that are in my garage? Man there ain’t even no wood to burn here in the Sonoran desert.
I fear one day the lights will go out here in the USA, literally, figuratively, metaphorically, whatever. Every myth we’ve loved and cherished has been trampled by the diseased minds of the left half of my sorry generation. Would to God they all od’ed at Woodstock or we’re gunned down at Kent State. I don’t really mean that, but what a wretched miserable crew along with the depraved and deprived children they’ve produced.
So, we sit here, older now, weeping for a land we loved, a City on a Hill turned into squalor. Obama’s not the devil. He’s just the vacuous empty amoral
glib talker that men long for when they believe in nothing, stand for nothing, love no one ,least of all their own miserable selves. God help us all.
We simply have to cut spending, hard and deep, to dig ourselves out of this hole we’ve irresponsibly dug ourselves into. Additionally, we have to flush out and write down bad debts. This is hard medicine. It will make America poorer in the short run (as opposed to doing the same in the long run). It will cause a lot of intense pain (as opposed to lingering, generational burn).
It’s going to be hard, but there are huge opportunities. First of all there’s the prospect that all the people who are engaged in make work can somehow be employed doing real work. Work with real value. Consider a UAW worker building a car sold at a loss isn’t really productively employed. But if he can be employed for real that will create real value. That by itself will cause a spike in real GDP.
Secondly, that would largely cut away the legacy stuff because you can’t save it anyway and this creates an opportunity to reform institutions that would otherwise resist it.
So there would be a lot pain, but since that’s unavoidable anyway, it might as well be turned into an opportunity for gain.
cowboy/48, add to that that the new budget includes what-700 billion? –in tax rcpts from cap & trade –which begs a question, is it worse to count what isn’t, or to hope for passage of that odious crime of a tax? Also, the budget predicates debt service at current costs –almost laughably wrong as soon as the fed quits buying almost all the new mortgages –in about 5 or 6 weeks. note how much 30-year paper treasury is auctioning trying to lock in today’s cost. Pitiful, pitiful, makes me want to cry what a pitiful mess we mooned around and fell off into. maybe we could hire some consultants –reckon the Zimbabwe financial planners are available?
What is needed is gutsy advertising.
1. An Obama lookalike dancing and piling a wheelbarrow of money on a bonfire.
2. Billboards and flyers with candid photos of government workers and their incomes.
3. Signs and billboards with photos of Franks, Obama, Gore, Gorelick, Dodd, Holder etc and simple slogans like “Thief” or “Friend of Terror” or “The World’s Envy Trampled” or “The World’s Best Health Care Ruined.”
4. Photos of the New Black Panthers with the slogan “Holder Released.”
5. Pelosi’s photo 20′ high, slogan “Bar Tab $101,429 You Paid.”
If we go full Alinsky on them and dare them to sue we win.
Buddy – I know that but so is The Zero’s budget abomination. Fiction of the worst type – some people actually believe these fever dreams, that is the discouraging part.
Wretchard,
That bar graph you posted is terrifying. It’s obvious that from 2012 on, we’re going into thermal runaway, i.e. getting into deeper debt to pay the interest on earlier debt. There can only be one escape and that’s to default on the public and private debt. The conclusion is inescapable:
The US dollar will be demonetized.
This previously happen under the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, i.e. the so called “Shinplasters”. However the US currency has never been demonetized since the signing of the US Constitution.
What a disgrace!
The United States Dollar survived over two centuries, a ruinous Civil War and two World Wars but it was on my generation’s watch while I was a voting citizen that our economic system was ruined.
And why was it ruined?
Because we could not live within our means. The US public opted to vote themselves a free lunch rather than actually earn one (We were lazy, stupid and greedy).
I think I’ll crawl under the desk, assume the fetal position and start whimpering.
This looks like “The Road to Serfdom”. Here, Obama’s government explained in 5 minutes by Hayek:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRS-Ft3uEz8
jeez, hard times sho is at least bringing out some expressive writing. trang you could put that last one in the local paper and get a following in no time.
if obama isn’t stopped, the result won’t be impoverishment of the middle class, it will be a second civil war. possibly the nation will split into several regions, possibly it will remain intact with the losing side expelled or eliminated.
my guess is that obama will be forced out of office right after this year’s elections — assuming the dems take a bloodbath at the polls. this guy is screwing the pooch for everyone, not just the middle class.
with any luck, the left will be so discredited that they are driven out of all the institutions they have taken over.
Whiskey, don’t lump all hispanics together. To me, there are at least three types of hispanics:
• the ones that have made the transition to what most people call ‘white”. Hell, many that have lived here a while, have intermarried with white people, what do you call them?
• the ones, often illegal, that have learned English, have skills, and are trying to make the transition to what people consider ‘white ” culture.
• and finally, the ones, almost always illegal, that don’t want to learn English, have limited skills, at most a sixth grade edumacation, are sullen and are frankly somewhat of a menace to society. Unfortunately, in the last few years this segment has grown tremendously. When I go out to a construction site now, most of the construction workers don’t habla Englais, can’t read plans, and don’t take direction very well. They end up all to often doing things over two or three times at least, need a tremendous amount of supervision and rarely in the end do anything well. Anything complicated becomes a real chore.
So yes , I’m frustrated with the illegals too, but it’s possible for hispanics to assimilate in the right setting, just not in the way we are handling things now.
if this can consolate you, you aren’t alone in the pithole,
SPIEGEL_English ‘It Will Be Terrible’: Economists in Davos Look with Concern to 2010 http://tinyurl.com/yep3uhn Germany aging & public debt
wretchard said:
“It’s going to be hard, but there are huge opportunities. First of all there’s the prospect that all the people who are engaged in make work can somehow be employed doing real work. Work with real value. Consider a UAW worker building a car sold at a loss isn’t really productively employed. But if he can be employed for real that will create real value. That by itself will cause a spike in real GDP.”
How is that real work going to be capitalized? The stock market should have crashed in the middle of last year. It didn’t because the Federal Reserve was propping it up with freshly printed green backs. That -1.85 trillion dollar negative spike in 2009 represents the money spent propping up a zombie economy. That bad debt should have been defaulted on and the bankrupt companies wound up through an orderly Chapter 11 process. Unfortunately, the US federal government is bleeding itself to death in providing life support for a zombie financial industry. After the US dollar goes into hyperinflation there will be no financial mechanism for resuscitating the economy. Bernancke and Obama have already jettisoned the life boats.
I’m hyperventilating… …must resume fetal position…
Unsk #46: Good explanation of Dotcom bubble
and tax revenues. Bush tax cuts had nothing whatsoever to do with the decline, they were not even in effect. When they did kick in,
they helped people to get out of the Dotcom hole and that in turn raised revenues to what *should* have darned near balanced the budget
except for the war and Dubyas carelessness.
Teresita: You have to forgive Near Beer. He keeps seeking what George Will aptly termed
“the coveted status of victim”.
There are however some kernels of value in his rantings. The different conflicts that we see both here and abroad are, as usual, cultural conflicts. Culture is geographic in orgin as as is ethnicity. Therefore, culture often manifests itself along ethnic lines. Religion is part of culture and culture also shapes religion.
so it is not surprising that hose with certain physical appearances tend to behave a bit differently than those with other appearances. The ongoing mistake is to ass u me that those differences in appearance are the cause of the differences in behavior.
The other mistake is to ass u me that the behavioral differences are universal.
I wonder what Whiskey would have made of the 1999 Juneteenth Rodeo held in Golden Gate Park
in San Francisco. I was right at home there.
A Mejicano is a wee bit different from a Tejano. And a Norteno vaquero has little in common with a Yucatan campesino. And the Moro who fashioned Alsa Masa has no truck with a wahabi.
Be sure you don’t breathe a word about a certain Gulf Coast evening which consisted of a black jarhead, a white dogface, a Chicano squid and a Viet Cong (who had voted for Ronald Reagan) sitting around, buying rounds, telling war stories all the while feeling up stylishly dressed Korean bar girls. The juke box was putting out some rap right down the road from a Confederate war memorial and within spitting distance from the birthplaces of The Big Bopper, Janice Joplin and Tex Ritter. A perfectly normal evening except for one thing: how the heck did we manage to miss having a coonass in the crowd? I’ll never know.
Any questions?
Headlines We’d Like to See:
JFK 1962: “We shall go to the moon.” Obama 2010: “We shall not go to the moon.”
So the whites will be priced like the blondes are in our countries but in Harem or Madrassas
Madrassa rules in Afghanistan “To be honest, they fought about a boyfriend” 6 men beheaded by Talibani http://bit.ly/cibLMK
MC/62; Thanks –i’d give you a big hug if i could, just for the kind sentiment.
***
I see what you’re saying, whiskey –but that vision can’t be the aspiration. wherever race relations are not good, we need to see that –we need to try to see that –as a deviation from the ideal if not the norm. If we don’t, if we harden a la the balkans, well that’ll be the sure end of the American Dream. there’s hope for better. hispanics and anglos have mingled a couple hundred years in the Austin/San Antonio corridor and we no longer even note each other’s classification –it’s just nature, like trees grow, if there’s no energy or force driving division. And that can be a tall order –Texas is just blessed –so much skanky-ass badlands that nobody wants to fight over, we’ve had space and time to quit dividing ourselves.
***
dave, the coonass was on his way there –riding a motorcycle –he must have got chilly so he turned his jacket around backards. Then he hit a skid and took a tumble. The ambulance guy said he seemed ok, just a little groggy, ’til they tried to turn his head around.
Eggplant: Fer a different opinion, I refer you to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the *Telegraph*.
He recently predicted that the Yen would go Weimar, followed by the Yuan and with the
Euro falling off its perch. By 2030, the
dollar will be almost hegemonic and old B Hussein What’s-his-face a fading memory.
Well, you wanna get up a pool on all this?
Will check in on the morrow. Eyeballs now propped open with toothpicks.
I always look at a weakness (structural, political, networks) as an opportunity for someone or something… And, try to foresee who/what that someone/thing is, then predict the outcome. Just a mental game I play trying to keep ahead of the game. I’m often wrong, but I usually hit around 50% of the time. Honestly identifying the variables, sorting through their weight if occurring at different times leads to some surprising conclusions if you are honest with your data in front of you.
I’m not sure that the scenarios have all been explored by our ruling class. If they have, they are a sinister bunch that must be removed. If they haven’t, they are a stupid bunch that must be removed. The compiled data lead to one conclusion.
The genius of a Democratic Republic is that we have the opportunity to resolve a bad decision. This generation of decisions was on par with none that I can conjur. What a rube I’ve been, what rubes we are.
If I can play the scenarios in my head, what have our enemies done? Been lax as we have? I don’t think so… When would you strike if you were an enemy of the United States?
Thingumbobesquire said:
JFK 1962: “We shall go to the moon.” Obama 2010: “We shall not go to the moon.”
I was doing some thermal protection work for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). Fortunately I never got emotionally attached to it because I knew the design was fouled up and the money wasn’t there. (Un)fortunately, a bunch of highly competent guys did put their hearts and souls into Orion and no doubt they’re in mourning (this sucks big time). The folks who will really eat it are the ones working at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and Johnson Space Center (JSC). Their milk cow was the Space Shuttle but the Space Shuttle goes away in September of this year. Orion and Ares-I was supposed to soften the blow of the Shuttle going away but now it’ll be like a guillotine.
A whole bunch of really dedicated and talented guys are going to be standing in the unemployment line or flipping burgers at MacDonald’s. If I don’t play my cards right, that’s where you’ll find me, behind the counter offering you a Big-Mac and fries or dressed up as Ronald MacDonald.
Buddy:
I am sick and tired of Texas
And all its sorry soil.
I drill and drill for water,
And all I get is oil.
For Marie Claude:
Heaven is where the cops are English, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and things are organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the cops are German, the lovers Swiss and it is organized by Italians.
Dave,
Falling in love with an Italian can be a very painful experience and English food isn’t that bad. I would dare say the best Indian food on Earth is in London.
dave, ok, one for you, then i gotta gotta hit the rack too, first remembering to take off my boots and jacket.
Chinese feller is on his first vist to USA, and he’s in a Frisco bank changing money. Teller hands back dollars for yuan, and Chinese feller thinks the xchange is short. he asks the teller what’s the deal with count. teller answers “Currency fluctuations.” Chinese guy says, “Oh yeah? Well maybe someday currency flucs you Amelicans, too!”
Whiskey,
In my opinion Teresita is right. Thomas Sowell is not out to take goodies from you. Marco Rubio does not want to increase the power of the state at your expense. Michelle Malkin is not trying to present a politically correct version of history.
This is a nation of laws and of values. It is our (broadly speaking) vision versus their vision. Statist versus liberal. Rent producing versus rent seeking. There is a significant correlation between these values and culture and race. Rent seekers (like our rent seeker in chief) want to obscure their theft and avarice with some rhetorical slight of hand about race.
Whiskey, the non productive want to take from the productive because they are somehow lacking. All corrupt men are. They cover it up with talk about entitlement and you take them at their word. I assume that when a member of a minority starts talking about how you owe them you get angry. You see them as the enemy. I see a conversation waiting to happen.
I’m from metro Detroit. The problems this city has have nothing to do with race and everything to do with government paying for single mothers, a political monopoly, and a tragic lack of ambition. Any population or ethnic group can be corrupted over time. If you look at the chav or lad culture in the UK you’ll see something very similar to what we have here.
C.S. Lewis wrote that evil is like a series of knots that had to be undone. We will slowly undo them one by one until Detroit is revealed to be what every city is: A bunch of people who can work. For good or for ill culture is learned. We were the industrial capital of the world. We can be something positive again, locally and nationally. Race has nothing to do with it.
Talk culture, talk values, give like minded people something they can rally behind. Give differently minded people something to consider.
Or not.
i choose the part before the ‘or not’, ben.
trangbang68
Cheer up – we’re still kicking. I know at times it seems everything has gone down the drain but that American exceptionalism we keep hearing about is real. We will survive this.
Dave-
No room for the Irish anywhere? We need to talk about this – If you’re ever in Seattle, give me a holler – benevente4 at gmail.com
Nonsense, the budget deficit in 2011 will be in the $600 Billion range, maybe even a touch less. This year’s is harder to figure, but a $T will catch it. We’ll know more when we see the next two month’s tax receipts.
So, the idea is…make all of us poorer…so that we grovel for the crumbs?
300 years of American exceptionalism turned to dust as we become wards of the state?
We no longer reach for the moon, because it’s impossible from your knees?
What…precisely…has been made better since the stewardship of this administration was begun? Race relations? Don’t make me laugh. Jeremiah Wright may have gotten his wrist slapped and the muzzle…for PUBLIC consumption. We are far more divided and in a more sinister way.
Has science been advanced? When methodology takes a back seat to the marauding narrative, we all lose. Global warming is the canary in the coal mine. Are we not to assume that medicine is within the reach of the “pre-fabricated conclusion”…conclusions that fit the narrative, the facts be damned?
Are we safer? We have emboldened the enemy…and refuse to call him by his given name. He’s a euphemism, watered down in action and lawyered up in capture.
Are we providing more and better goods and services? Where? And, to whom? Are the banks lending more? Is consumer confidence up?
Is our information stream defending us? Are they digging for the truth? Is the entrenched media…the Fourth Estate…keeping their mandate to us…we, who self-govern this land of ours …and the need for accurate information, like oxygen for the body politic to make wise choices?
Have we maintained a place in the world of dignity, honor and respect?
Do our enemies know we are not to be trifled with and our allies know we are to be trusted?
Are our banks better able to lend and grow the economy?
Is the job market filled with promise for tomorrow?
Is Washington less partisan? Is there governance in the sunshine? Have special interests less sway? Is there more transparency?
Precisely by what measure are we to say we are in steady hands, rather than grabbing and pawing ones?
Does our government like us? I mean, as a people. How are we described by them, in their terms? What do they say about us, when they think they are off the record and the mikes are turned off?
We are a nation divided and the wedge is our own government. It emanates from a place of abject disrespect for its own people. Our information stream is a court jester, willing to play the fool …prat falling before the royal box, to be head patted and dare not risk the back of the hand for any truth in jest.
And we, the independent streak beaten out of us…wait to be stripped naked in the sun…to beg for crumbs, when they are done insulting us.
And when the crumbs come, we will grovel for them and call the day “better”, grateful that it wasn’t as cruel as yesterday.
Obama thinks that if you eat the seed corn, you increase the supply of corn.
The wealthy spend by far the highest percentage on seed corn.
That the wealthy don’t need the money is precisely why it’s seed corn, not why you should take it.
No. They will vote themselves goodies and NONE for Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, and so on. That is what spoils politics is ALL ABOUT in the first place. It ALWAYS devolves to race/ethnicity.
I assume this is the whole point of Democrat politics. Create a spoils system they assume they can permanently control, make themselves the Big Man, and destroy what’s left of the Melting Pot. The problem with Big Man politics is that it’s unstable and tends to devolve into tribalism, where power is only transferred by force, the only purpose of government is to enrich the tribe in power, and politics is assumed to be zero-sum. Wealth can’t be created under the Big Man, because he steals it for his tribe. Under such conditions nobody will invest to create wealth making grinding poverty a permanent condition of the common man. We need merely look to Africa and the Muslim Middle East to see living examples of where we are headed.
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/02/01/tacks-n-spend/#comment-74
Amen to what Ben said. I also don’t worry about Marc Rubio or J.C. Watts wanting to take spoils from me. Associating education with ‘whiteness’ or ‘acting white’ vs. doing stupid things (impregnating teenage girls, dealing drugs, wearing pants at the ankles) has been a Bill Cosby hobbyhorse to his own people for years. Thankfully, even among hip hop stars and football players there’s a message that says get your own, become an entrepreneur, own a business. And the Tyler Perry movies, for good or bad.
One of the reasons I can’t stand kneejerk Russophobia is that it assumes inside every Russian beats a heart that wants at the very least a benevolent Czar if not a Stalin to order them around. This ignores centuries of a communal but somewhat democratic order, the village veche, or the Great Novgorod assembly, and other somewhat more small r republican features in Russian society. Ultimately any lasting liberal order in Russia must be based on that history, even if it’s exagerrated, rather than being seen as a Western import – especially at a time when as Solzhenitysn pointed out the West itself was losing its democratic vibrancy in a sea of self-loathing and elitism.
And saying Russia is the victimizer and everyone else in the USSR was a Captive Nation ignores the fierce Russian peasant resistance to collectivization – the hundreds of thousands who burned their crops and shot their cattle in the 1920s and 30s knowing it would likely mean certain starvation rather than submit to the commissars. The Russian Orthodox Church today remembers many of the priests who sided with their flocks who resisted ‘the godless yoke’ as heiromartyrs. They and the ones who fought the Nazis even after they were encircled knew it was better to die on their feet than live as slaves. Russia in fact was the first Captive Nation, and its people the first victims of Communism (and one need not get bogged down in details of how Stalin and Berea were Georgians, Krushchev was Ukrainian and a commissar during the Holmodor, some of the most fanatic Red Guards were Latvian, or how many like Trotsky and Bukharin were of secular Jewish origin).
Reagan respected the Russian people, a lot of the folks who use his banner to advocate anti-Russian policies and imposing their will in Russia’s near abroad even when democratically rejected (i.e. Yuschenko) do not. In fact, some of them just hate Russia and Russians with a passion and hiding it under the guise of being anti-Kremlin or anti-statist doesn’t change it. Unfortunately such people still get prominently featured in The Economist, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. And that’s why I go by Mr. X aka George Kennan who spent his latter years trying to rescue his younger thesis from those who were not just anti-Soviet but anti-Russian people.
Solzhenitsyn is now on the curriculum in Russian schools. So much for ‘rehabilitating Stalin’ and all the other BS propaganda that comes from the Soros backed people.
Man this is depressing,
time for a little song and dance.
Thanks to Irving Berlin, for a truly moving rendition of our fiscal plight…gotta dance
If you’re blue and you don’t know
where to go to why don’t you go
where fashion wits
are taxin spendin gits
Different types who wear a day
coat pants with stripes and cutaway
coat perfect fits
like taxin spending gits
Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper
Tryin’ hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper)
Come let’s mix where Rockefellers
walk with sticks or um-ber-ellas
in their mitts
them taxin spending gits
Have you seen the well-to-doUp and down Park AvenueOn that famous thoroughfareWith their noses in the airHigh hats, and arrow collarsWhite spats, and lots of dollarsSpending every dimeFor a wonderful time
If you’re blue and you don’t know
where to go to why don’t you go
where fashion’s glitz
like taxin spending gits
Different types who wear a day
coat pants with stripes and cutaway
coat perfect fits
Dem taxin spending gits
Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper
Tryin’ hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper)
Come let’s mix where Rockefellers
walk with sticks or um-ber-ellas
in their mitts
lax taxin spending gits
Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper
Tryin’hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper)
If you’re blue and you don’t know
where to go to why don’t you go
where fashion hits
past taxin spending gits
fast taxin spending gits
max taxin spending gits
ack taxin spending gits
Hope…
Change…
Cap and trade
Global Charade…
If you’re blue and you don’t know
where to go to why don’t you go
where fashion spits
on taxin spending gits…
slap taxin spending gits…
stop taxin spending gits…
Wretchard #24: Obama has doubled down again, and if the political system is to work as normal then people have to exercise their rights while they still have the energy and strength to do so in the old, considered way.
Agreed. The strongest action must come now, this year, while we still have what we still have. Before things get worse. For more of us.
I just experienced a power outage of two long days and two even longer, very cold and very dark nights and couldn’t help but think about how this could become more of a regular thing, without even the necessity of an ice storm. (Congress may not pass Cap and Trade but there’s always the stealth way via the bureaucracy or executive orders or the courts – e.g., carbon dioxide ruled a pollutant.) During the power outage, about all I could concentrate on was how cold it was and how difficult it was to do even the simplest things. And I discovered my limit for enduring adversity before becoming disgracefully ill-tempered was a mere 24 hours.
If we as a productive and still largely free people lose any more ground to our statist overlords, we may be sunk. Most people are probably not like many here at BC – abundant fighting spirit, many ex-military, etc. – and when hardship comes their world will shrink as they withdraw more into themselves and their own day-to-day concerns.
“The lights are going out. The lights of the world!” he thought, and he felt like a child going alone into the dark.
– from George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides
I discovered my limit for enduring adversity before becoming disgracefully ill-tempered was a mere 24 hours.
Heh. I’ve heard career airborne men say the ultimate battle strategy is LIPOPOP. Little Isolated Pockets of Pissed Off Paratroopers.
Once more, with feeling, America Rising.
With dreams of a second term (and The Revolution) dying on the vine, POTUS might be feeling that he should cause as much damage as he possibly can…
…before the fates kick in.
Slash and burn. Scorched earth.
(A case of: “The American people are not worthy of me”???….)
Re Whiskey’s expectation of ethnic conflict, mathematical ecology, even the earliest work by Lotka 80 years ago, demonstrates that in competition between two populations, one population will drive the other to extinction if the addition of any new individual to the (winning) population reduces the growth rate of the other (losing) population more than it reduces the growth rate of the population receiving the new individual. Eventual reduction of the growth rate to zero is assumed by the logistic model.
In the context of taxation and wealth transfer, if the growth rate of the productive Caucasian population is reduced more by addition of a newborn non-Caucasian than the non-Caucasian population’s growth rate is reduced by addition of a newborn Caucasian, then high taxes on the productive Caucasians constitutes a weapon impelling them toward minority status at the least. Minority status is an unstable state as Kosovo shows.
Trangbang68 #52:
A quote from a recent interview with the President of Poland, Lech Walesa:
“The world has no leadership. The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations. There was the hope that whenever something was going wrong one could count on the United States. Today we lost that hope.”
marymcl, I’m all right, the coffee kicked in this morning. I’m jazzed about college football signing day tomorrow. Nice weather here in Tucson, good friends, wife and kids who love me. Buddy’s joke about the fluctuations also got a smile on my face.
Actually the best therapy I found, I’m reading “The Complete Works of Calvin and Hobbes” I was reading it at midnight last night ,stifling a laugh not to wake my wife up. It’s all good.
Obama’s budget also doesn’t factor in the costs of future wars and disasters. If L.A. is destroyed by an earthquake or New York goes up in a mushroom cloud a few years from now, where will we find the money to respond?
America, first Obama will bankrupt you, then he will disarm you.
I’m not entirely sure how he will administer the coup-de-grace.
Maybe Obama believes the U.S.A. will devour itself in a civil war; or perhaps he thinks your enemies will just naturally destroy you when he has weakened you enough; or, just maybe, now that he has access to your launch codes, maybe he will use your own nukes to finish you off.
Personally, I believe Obama will arrange for something terrible to happen to the U.S.A. if his plans to transform your country into a socialist hell-hole are stymied.
I don’t have time for a long post right now, but I’d like to throw in with Teresita and give a brief criticism of Whiskey’s argument regarding Hispanics.
Once again, there is a demographic matter to consider. Mexico, and indeed all of Latin America, have experienced there own birth dearth in recent decades. Their TFR has fallen to the replacement level or slightly below it, and they simply do not have any more young workers to export. The idea of an endlessly rising Hispanic population in the USA, fueled by immigrants, is delusional. Also, reproduction rates of Hispanics already in the USA have dropped to the replacement level, or slightly below. There is no prospect of them out-breeding whites. We all need to start having more children, not less, if we want to see anything like economic growth again. That goes for whites, blacks, hispanics, and everybody else.
I never thought I’d live long enough to watch the American republic go down in flames. But here I am seeing it all happen right before my eyes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGNiEExZkk8&feature=related
Y’know, it’s the math.
Obama hisself doesn’t do math. And the Geithner/Bernanke/Goldman axis doesn’t publicize their numbers. Neither do Pelosi or Reid have the foggiest idea what they are doing.
It’s the math.
I’ve been wondering about the US trade deficit for twenty years.
I was right.
HOW CAN THIS TRADE DEFICIT NOT BE KILLING US? I kept asking. I never got an answer. It wasn’t in the text books.
But there was a thirst for US dollars all around the world. Trillions in treasury dept. Trillions more in CDOs. The US played ponzi scheme with the world – and with itself.
So the double whammy. The flow is now stopping, AND we have to find a way to pay back several trillions in debt, both treasury and CDO.
No easy task, no matter who is president.
We have already SPENT these trillions. We built an economy that expects more of those kinds of trillions to keep flowing. But they have now stopped – well, not quite entirely, but almost. The CDOs failed before the treasuries, but of course those will go next, have already gone, except for the fed buying treasuries to the tune of $1t over the last year.
Much of Obama’s budget is propping up the economy built on ponzi money.
I don’t know what the economy will look like without it.
But let me cut to the chase. I’ve stopped reading the financial press the last few months, but was talking to a real estate agent. He’s talking about how there are many people now in default on their loans – that is, not paying, but not yet officially in default. Banks would rather lose their payments than admit the problem and reschedule the loans according to the government programs. So, TONS of bad loans are not even on the books.
And I know why.
The Geithner/Bernanke plan is to ignite “moderate” inflation while (somehow) keeping interest rates from rising correspondingly. This will monetize the real estate debt – and perhaps the treasury debt, too. BUT INFLATION HAS FAILED TO IGNITE! Again, the textbooks are failing us.
Anyway, much of Obama’s budget is certainly meant to fuel inflation, just like that moron Krugman keeps wailing for.
So, what about this plan to inflate and monetize the debt? Well, at the trillion dollar levels, it’s like roasting your marshmallows over a couple of chunks of plutonium, “just move them a little closer, we need just a little more heat”.
God bless us one and all.
It occurs to me how the ancient scriptures are just so very right. Over and over and over again the people fall away from God, abandon righteousness and embrace idolatry with all the fads and fancies that go along with it. In the old scriptures the consequences of this falling away was drought, famine, pestilence and war.
Those ancients were hit where it hurt. This is done because consequences follow in such a way as to gain the maximum attention of those who need reminding most that peace and prosperity lie along a path that leads to God. Those were agrarian or pastural societies. Failed harvests and the decimation of herds got everyone’s attention. Just as the failures and calamities of modern societies are failures of the modern generators of wealth and security. Our failures are obvious for any who care to look. They now threaten to overwhelm us.
I am certain that the events recounted in scripture didn’t happen overnight. I am equally certain that God did not decree disaster. What happened was that people became enamored of fads and theories that distracted from the core responsibilities and attendant practices that had built their cultures and ensured continuing sustenance and even prosperity when pursued with diligence. Instead they ran off after phantom promises and false gods. And so the irrigation systems were neglected and fields went fallow and storage of water and food were decreased or allowed to dry up and surpluses consumed. And sooner or later this had to lead to calamity – starvation, disease and opportunistic attacks from aggressive neighbors.
The war on God is never ending. We see battles lost and won all through history. Foolish men run after whatever flatters their vanity. In the old scriptures the foolishness seemed to always spread from the top down. The king would become corrupt and unrighteous and this would spread to his retainers and on down the heirarchy until the people themselves became corrupt. The ancient prophets would inveigh against the spreading rot and issue warnings and dire prophecies of what would happen if people didn’t change their ways and return to the path of righteousness. And, of course, they were always ignored. And the consequences would follow inevitably.
One of the notions that accompany the hubris of fallen men is that THEY alone out of all the billions who have lived through the ages are exempt from the wheel of cause and effect. Foolish men believe that THEIR time is different and that THEY will break the chain of causation and defy God and so break “free” to pursue their fancies without consequence. We see it over and over again. And we see disaster come over and over again.
The people of this nation (or ANY nation) cannot abandon God, spit on virtue, ignore or persecute the righteous, live as libertines and idolators and expect that peace and prosperity will be theirs forever. The ways and means of attaining peace and prosperity stem from a firm belief in God and the practice of virtue. Thrift, probity, fair-dealing, diligence, sobriety and the wise stewardship of the earth come not from the fancies of men but from the mind of God transmitted to inspired men and taught from generation to generation so as to ensure that each child has the opportunity to know what is right and what is wrong and to freely choose with an awareness of the consequences that result from the choices made.
There is no new system that will allow men to live their lives in foolish transgression – to ignore or spit upon God – and never experience the negative consequences that follow. Every system that the mind of man can devise to get around this has been tried and all have failed and will continue to fail because they attempt to overcome Reality with a fantasy. God is never mocked.
America is on the path to ruin just as every other civilization in history has coasted to ruin. Some fell quickly and some slid slowly but all of them succumbed to the temptation to place the lesser above the Greatest. Many can and do see this coming and strive mightily to reverse matters and set things right. I am unaware of any who have succeeded. But America is different from other places. For the first time liberty and the God-given rights of men were enshrined as the highest of ideals and men lived their lives in accord with these. So it is possible that the top down model that has led to the destruction of so many civilizations will be confronted by those ordinary men and women in whom allegiance to God has always been strongest. And it may be that these ordinary men and women will reverse the tide. If they do it will be a unique victory.
Men ignore God at their peril. They toss off the warnings as the maunderings of the ignorant and superstitious. They did this thousands of years ago and they have continued to do it right up to this very day. The warnings are trite in their hearing. The people who do the warning are boring bigots who understand nothing and whose bleating only serves to stir up the unwashed ignoramuses and incite the rubes. You can just hear the jibes and ridicule in the courts of the ancient kings and these echo right thru to the council chambers of modern rulers and administrators. They all KNOW BETTER. And they will continue to know better right up to the end. Only those that God touches – whether it be by way of the still small voice or by use of a 2X4 upside the head – understand rightly.
Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are inspired documents. Our Founders were inspired men. Recent years have seen these documents and the men who wrote them ignored, twisted, slandered and marginalized. Today they hardly matter in the halls the power. This is the heart of the struggle. The political class has, in large part, abandoned the path that leads to the guarantee of God-given rights and liberty. They substitute rights granted by men which always results in the elevation of some above others and the elevation of those who grant the rights above all. The opportunity to reverse the trend peacefully is rapidly passing. The opportunity to repair the damage already done will soon close. It is up to the people to make the correction – it will not come from the top.
Walt You MUST get a small pocket book of your work published. I am broke but will contribute anyway. America needs to read your thoughts and enjoy your talent.
Matt
“Obama’s budget is really just an exercise in speculative fiction. The spending cannot happen, the money doesn’t exist, and the physical economy cannot withstand the disruption any longer. It’s like the last line of coke left in the phial, the one you take to stave off the dawning realization that you spent all your money, wrecked your personal life, and you haven’t been home in three days.”
Your right of course, but the average American is not paying attention [yet] and they just think in a year or so everything will be peachy kine and back to the good ol’ days. (What ever they were)
Even most of the elites are thinking that way. Not knowing that they are as screwed as the rest of us peons. High fences and dogs won’t protect them.
The Senators and Representatives of the left still think that our Nation can not be sunk or destroyed by their manic spending and disregard of reality. They of course think that they personally are not only protected but really above the problems of the common people or even the world.
Buddy Good advice on the canned goods, but don’t forget the dried goods such as beans, rice and pasta and such. But you also have to remember that you can’t cook much without WATER. You must have stores of water in your possession. You must also remember that water will not keep forever. In order for it to be safe after long periods of storage it must be treated as it is stored.
It can not be over emphasized that water is the most important thing you have to store and have for your survival. It matters not that you have a room full of canned, dried or other foods…without drinkable water you and your family will die.
For life saving information here is one website that I favor: The Survival Blog
But there are many such websites and our Nanny State Government even has many such sites. But what you really need is an ol’ Gram Pa or Gram Ma to talk to. They can tell you how to get by. And you know what the first thing they will tell you?
Buy More Ammo
Papa Ray
Well this is another grim read to start the day. I love to read Belmont Club in the morning for the intellectual ferment Wretchard draws out of his commenters. But I hate to read BC in the morning because it leaves me depressed. Are things really this bad?
Obama might indeed want to destroy the US, but is he smart enough to know how to do so? Surely Ayres, Holder and Axelrod are smart enough to do so, and the traditional media will aid and abet. But will the JCS go along? Or Wall Street (I know, they gave huge sums to Obama’s election, but they surely realize how severely he’s reduced their rice bowl). Or talk radio.
One year into the Obama administration it appears many voters who supported him now realize that was a mistake. Perhaps more importantly, the so-called tea party movement has roused a lot of people who were formerly content to go about their business and let Washington do whatever it wanted. Demographics appear to favor the US just slightly more than Europe, China and India. Perhaps most importantly, as Lech Walesa pointed out, we were once the the world’s best hope and there are many in this country who remember that. I think they’ll come out of the woodwork eventually.
The biggest problem I see right now is a very large population who are comfortable living on the dole. Getting them off the government teat and making them productive taxpayers will be a major effort and the Democratic party has no interest in doing so — they are a large and reliable voting bloc right now. If something can ignite their imagination and inspire them to create instead of only consuming there is hope for us. If not, we will all look like Detroit. The only thing I see inspiring them is ideas, not promises of more leisure on someone else’s dime. And if they are not inspired to be responsible for their own future so-called entitlements will only continue to grow, eating up the budget. F
Richard’s titles for his posts are always interesting, but “Tacks n’ spend” is especially funny.
How was Obama going to tack, given the headwinds he was facing? To the center? Nah. Spendward!
To everyone who has pointed out that the only strategy Obama knows is the double-down, you were right.
Josh @ 94, Wise words. I agree with your analysis. The plutonium analogy made me smile. Dave @ 68 has me wondering what happens if every nation in the world is trying to monetize their debt through inflation. Under that scenario, a plot of USD/Euro would be flat as a function of time even though both economies were going down the drain.
Does it follow that the price of gold will sky rocket? I’m not sure it does. Gold is simply a pretty metal with no intrinsic value. It’s valuable only because we all agreed that it’s valuable.
Does it follow that the price of copper will sky rocket? I’m not sure it does. Copper is arguably the most useful metal on Earth. However if the economy is dead and there’s no manufacturing, what use is there for copper?
Common sense and rational analysis no longer seems to work. The DJIA is currently up by 65.75 points. How much of that is due to the PPT and the dollar carry trade? The stock market is no longer efficient and no longer reflects the true value of the stocks being traded.
It seems the whole system is grinding itself into dust but all the obvious indicators have been broken through government intervention. The stern of the Titanic is lifting up out of the water and there’s a big smiling Happy Face painted on the side of it.
TrangBang68@52:
“Like I said , I was still groggy, coffeeless and all. My mind started wondering, Is this an electro-pulse attack? How am I going to cook those cans of beans Buddy spoke of that are in my garage? Man there ain’t even no wood to burn here in the Sonoran desert.”
Good to know I’m not the only one who has gotten to the point where such thoughts invade when the lights unexpectedly go out.
But those are useful thoughts. In the case you cite, you should put a camp stove on your list of stuff to get when you can. I bought one this winter, along with a lantern and bottles of fuel which I now keep adding to, as they’re only a couple bucks a pop. This week I’ve finally gotten the chance to get a Country Living grain mill…top of the line and should be at $400. My first project for the spring/summer is to install the wood stove I bought last fall and have sitting in my garage (as soon as I can afford the flue). LOTS of wood chopping this summer. I want AT LEAST 8-10 cords before the snow flies next fall. Minnesota winters are nothing to mess with. I heaved a sigh of relief last week when the gas company filled up my tank, which if necessary should at least get me out of the danger zone for this season.
All the preps I’ve been doing at the back of my mind I always thought were “just in case”, with 50% chance I’ll be using this stuff at some point in the coming years. The clincher in my mind was when my wife saw the new budget/deficit figures and her first comment was “maybe you’re not such a nutcase for stocking all that stuff”.
She finally starts to see it. Music to my ears.
no mo uro @ 20:
“The commenters (1, 6, 8, 10) above on this thread have it right. It is impossible to tax a nation into prosperity and stability.”
I’m curious, what was the top marginal tax rate in the 1950s, a time of unprecedented economic growth? A time in which America had to pay off the massive debt accrued from WWII.
If you said 91%, then you know your history. Somehow we got through it, and it’s odd how so many social conservatives praise the apparent social stability of the 1950s without looking at the economic structure entwined with it.
As fast as the phatom money is being spent, there is never going to be a “We will take our money back” moment, even if GOP wins both houses in 2010.
What could the new Congress do, except to rein in the spending in 2011. And to ‘investigate’ and hold some people as scapegoats. And these clowns will say they’ve spent it all. It is literally down the drain. Gone.
What did America ‘buy’ in return?
Papa Ray @ 96 said:
“It can not be over emphasized that water is the most important thing you have to store and have for your survival. It matters not that you have a room full of canned, dried or other foods…without drinkable water you and your family will die.”
This is absolutely true and I’ve been worrying about this. The recent calamity in Haiti has made me more conscious about earthquake preparedness (I live in the San Francisco Bay Area). For years I heard that a single person needs one gallon of water per day. I previously thought that number was nonsense. However my son’s Boy Scout troop recently camped out at a reserved spot where there was no running water (it was a mistake). The boys had to continuously send out runners with 5 gallon containers to fetch water. Some of the fathers were keeping tabs on the amount of water being consumed and sure enough it was about one gallon of water per person per day. Important point: This water was for eating and drinking only (no toilets and no bathing).
I currently have enough food in the form of MREs and cans to feed the family for about 3 weeks. I also have adequate camping gear and propane gas for the same duration. However I only have 10 gallons of drinking water set aside along with 30 gallons in the hot water tank. That’s 40 gallons. I have a family of four, so the math says that I have enough water for 10 days. However I was preparing for 3 weeks. I need to set aside another 40 gallons of water to be fully prepared for an earthquake.
Getting back to Papa Ray’s point about preparing for economic collapse. Obviously there is no way I could set aside enough food and water to keep my family alive for months. My house and backyard would be filled to the sky with water bottles and MREs. Doing so would be counter productive because my neighbors would insist upon “sharing” this food and water after their own supply ran out. The only real practical solution is to form a community at the beginning of the economic collapse. The minimum number would be about twenty families. The men would need to be armed and maintain a security parameter. After the food and water ran out, the community would need to move as a single unit to where food and water could be found. In essence it would be a return to tribalism where the tribe survived through hunting, gathering and raiding.
“The biggest problem I see right now is a very large population who are comfortable living on the dole.”
That’s big, but I think Foont has the proper formulation for what’s happening. The really, really big problem is that all of us have lost our way in a major, cosmic sense. If we realign with the natural order, those other things will be fixable. If not, they won’t and we won’t.
We have what it takes, but the forces of hubris and immorality have to be put back in their cage for at least long enough to do the job. Walesa was spot on. The world needs for us to come through. But not even the best scenario will be easy or back to business as usual.
Time to step up. Maybe get centered by pulling out Nock’s “Isaiah’s job” again.
CG/101; re Eisenhower: from Bruce Bartlett’s compressed outline of tax history:
(snip)
Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism carried a heavy price. There were three recessions during his administration–July 1953 through May 1954, August 1957 through April 1958, and April 1960 through February 1961–and real growth of the gross domestic product averaged just 2.5 percent over those eight years. In large part, that sluggish growth was due to high tax rates, not just on the wealthy but on the middle class as well. In fact, as Figure 2 shows, increasing tax rates on the wealthy led to increases in tax rates on middle-class incomes (defined as $50,000 for a family of four in 1992) as well.(40)
Thus, Democrat John F. Kennedy was able to run as the candidate of growth in 1960, promising to “get the economy moving again.” Republican Richard M. Nixon, saddled with the legacy of slow growth during the Eisenhower years, paid the price, loss of a close election.
(end snip)
Eggplant @ 99: The DJIA is currently up by 65.75 points. How much of that is due to the PPT and the dollar carry trade? The stock market is no longer efficient and no longer reflects the true value of the stocks being traded.
I think the entire distance of the Dow down to the 200ma is PPT.
But it’s not the fault of XYZ Corp that the fed is rotten, so if shares of XYZ are going for $100, then they’re probably worth $100 – or at least a de-PPT’d $90 – as long as the entire economy doesn’t collapse. So, maybe most valuations are close to real values, times some fudge factor.
IOW, maybe the system is intact, I mean, two plus two still equals four at some point, but my arguments about trillions already ponzi’d and spent, are the real issue.
My mind just doesn’t do debt properly, I guess – or I would have bought a dozen houses when the buying was cheap, like any rational agent did. So, I try not to pontificate, just to understand.
But as an exercise, I should try to work up a top ten or at least two or three things I would think would help, if I ran the circus. It’s a good exercise to help understand.
I see Paul Volcker has some screed out today, to try to separate banks from “hedge funds” and the like. That, certainly, I support. Seems much more limited than Glass-Steagal.
#97 F
I hate to add to your morning despair, but the rest of the thread inspires/depresses me too.
I will just add two thoughts to the mix.
1) Yes, it is time to organize now. We literally do not have that much time left to salvage something that can possibly be used to rebuild the Republic. However, while organizing politically, do not make any assumption that the elections will in fact take place in any meaningful way, or that if they go against the regime that they those elected will be allowed to take office and try to undo what has been done to us.
When you are evaluating what an enemy is likely to do, you view their past actions and capabilities; not what you hope that they will do. The actions to date show that they are either incredibly malign [my vote] or incredibly stupid. If it is stupidity, yes they are dumb enough to try to hold power illegally and blatantly. In either case, they have not been even marginally restrained by the law or Constitution so far. If through calculation or stupidity they decide to seize power in the name of the proletariat; we will find that 2008 was one man, one vote, one time.
My SWAG is that the elections have a <20% chance of being successfully and honestly conducted. One should bias ones preparations to that level. Work hard politically, but also think tactically, operationally, and hopefully someone is thinking strategically as a fallback position.
Assuming no foreign involvement, there will be a burst of uprising at the moment of truth that may or may not [probably not as the regime will have the initiative] defeat them. If it doesn't, then after a short period of Sitzkrieg it will be on again for the long term as people get organized. And everything will turn on how many of our Oathkeepers remain true to the Oath.
One advantage is that the regime’s base is concentrated highly in a relatively small number of densely populated enclaves. Look at the Red/Blue vote maps, broken down to county levels and not states, because most Leftist controlled states are really one or two urban areas outvoting the rest of the state.
I further remind my fellow BC-ers of past advice NOT to be in a major urban area when the organic waste impacts the rotating airfoil in any natural or man-made disaster; because urban areas cannot survive without constant inputs from outside of food, water, and utilities. Malthus and Darwin can kick in with a vengeance if such is interrupted, even if the process is not pushed along artificially from the outside.
Being in a small to medium sized town with a secure water supply, surrounded by like minded people/family/patriots and over a day’s march from a major urban area is a good beginning.
Have a plan ‘A’, ‘B’, and maybe ‘C’ to secure you and yours depending on your location.
Just woolgathering there, of course. We all are just pure theoreticians here.
2) I do not discount what Whiskey writes, nor do I accept it all uncritically. Which is the approach each of us should have to each other here anyway. Some of what he writes may be considered overblown by some, but I also recognize passion, belief, and perhaps the odd rhetorical flourish along with kernels of truth about those who would be our kings. Take what you can. He has more than a few points.
Under stress, race will be a factor. Once you strip off the veneer of our comfortable and pampered lives, things get feral right smartly. I do not know if any of you have ever observed a disturbance in any sort of correctional facility. I promise you that the first reaction is to form by racial groups. The concept being that if you are [insert Black, White, Hispanic, Asian as needed] you can safely turn your back on a fellow whatever to deal with the others. Later, it breaks down to various gangs, etc. within each group as they vie for supremacy within their racial classification, and then within the larger group.
You may argue that felons will do that, but not “regular” people. I would not bet on that, and in any case what percentage of the felon population is composed of the same sociological, political, and cultural groups that support and are enfeoffed to the regime?
Having lived for generations under Federally mandated division of everyone into favored and unfavored classifications based on ethnic origins; for many that is a component of their loyalty. Race will be a factor whether we like it or not. It would be well to be considering how to give primacy to cultural and political loyalties over the coarse sieve of racial classifications.
Perhaps some quotes from Theodore Roosevelt might help in that:
There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.
It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.
A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.
A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.
If these saying resonate through an individual, he or she is our brother or sister.
Subotai Bahadur
re: water. Glad you brought that up… I had forgotten the ratios myself. I’m pretty sure there’s a shelf life on bleach, but I think tincture of iodine lasts quite a while.
Iodine Preparations
Preparation
Iodine
Amount/Liter
Iodine Topical Solution 2%
8 drops
Iodine Tincture 2%
8 drops
Lugol’s Solution 5%
4 drops
Povidone-Iodine (Betadine®) 10%
4 drops
Tetraglycine hydroperiodide
(Globaline®, Potable Aqua®, EDWGT®) 8 mg
1 tablet
2 drops of Bleach per quart of water
8 drops of Bleach per gallon of water
1/2 teaspoon Bleach per five gallons of water
If water is cloudy, double the recommended dosages
Don’t forget to have something that will prevent former tax eaters from switching their diet to your MRE’s when the taxes dry up.
20 is a big number to network with… almost impossible to form consensus. Keep a loose network with smaller elements, 3 to 5 family groups should do nicely.
HOW CAN THIS TRADE DEFICIT NOT BE KILLING US? I kept asking. I never got an answer. It wasn’t in the text books.
Economic growth is higher is years when the trade deficit is high. The trade deficit doesn’t kill us because, unlike its portrayal in the economically illiterate MSM, trade deficits are not debts and do not need to be “financed”. Further, if trade barriers really did make us better off in the presence of a trade deficit, doesn’t that imply that Minnesota can make itself better off by erecting trade barriers against California goods? The obvious nonsense of the latter shows why former is nonsense too.
Eggplant–if the unthinkable should come to pass don’t move to where I live, if you please.
Folks around here say that during the early 1930s the game was essentially gone. You won’t be able to hunt for long.
What are you going to gather? Morels and cattails?
As for raiding…I have an HK 91, among other tools. What have you got?
Prepare now, or take your chances.
Does anyone here have any experience with the crack ups in the Balkans from the 90′s? I’m interested in reading about how the social dymanics changed, were there runs on the stores? On consumable goods, petroleum products etc… any info or links would be wonderful.
I have a similar resource to what I’m requesting from this blog, which might have been linked from a contributor here, or perhaps a prepper site which is worth reading.
http://ferfal.blogspot.com/2008/01/most-important-need-in-first-few-days.html
Unsk @ 61:
Yeah, whiskey does paint with a rather wide brush here. When I read what he says I see the illegals as his target rather than the people I know – many generations going back to the original settlers of the SW that include many groups. Hey, whiskey, ever heard of the crypto-Jews? They came to the farthest reaches of the Spanish empire after forced conversion under The Inquisition to escape for their lives.
Then there are the families I know who have come to el Norte for a real chance at a better life. One friend owns his car repair business, his kids have become citizens and he is as American as they come.
Then the illegals who have come north to plunder. They do not work and their barrio looks like sections I remember of Juarez before that city became a war zone. They run the drugs and human cargoes. Yeah, human. That trade goes on even in your sacred country people. Young girls for disposable purposes are more common than you think. They find their bodies all the time in various places. Evil does walk among us.
See? MC accepts the norm of pricing people – it is the EU ideal.
Nice.
Eggplant @ 70:
My mental picture is of the ‘ape-men’ in 2001 ASO turning away from the monolith in fear instead of curiously moving to touch it. (As a youngster I awoke early for every launch I could and was upset with holds that delayed – it meant I had to go to school and miss the actual launch.) We have now turned away. The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs gave so much to the world economy – think micro-computing and what it brought. Oh, well, back to the cave or maybe mud hut.
cfbleachers @ 78: Just, WOW! Great rant. And true.
Buy more ammo. Try Ammo Engine.
I’m not an economist, but really, if we want to expand tax revenue there is a way that would not create a drag on the economy. American businesses spend about one trillion dollars a year to comply with Federal regulations. If they didn’t have to do this it would be profit, which would be taxed.
And how much is paid as salaries to the people whose jobs consist of writing, enforcing, and documenting compliance with those regulations? If most of these regulations were dumped we could dump those people as well and cut down on the number of Federal employees.
Perhaps there is a silver lining to the cloud, or at least some good talking points. If Progressives whine about doing away with most Federal regulations one can rightfully ask them what they have against making businesses pay more taxes which they would if the regulatory burden was diminished. What are they going to say? I mean, paying taxes is patriotic. Why are you trying to keep businesses from being patriotic?
And then there is the flat tax. If not for the contorted tax laws we have now capital would be allocated more towards creating things that people want to have rather than towards things which create the minimum tax liability. Just think how much tax revenue that would create. And we could lay off most of the people who work for the IRS. That should resonate.
As the saying goes, when life hands you lemons you should make lemonade. Opperknockity tunes. Join the choir. The ability to turn “Progressive” talking points back against them exists like never before. As the saying goes, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
Think Ju-Jitsu.
Thought I’d try again, last couple comments never appeared.
Papa Ray, you’re right, buy more ammo!
1200 rounds of Hornady 5.56 T2 75gr today!
How many rounds can you get for a bar of gold after SHTF? ONE, possibly fired.
F
The biggest problem I see right now is a very large population who are comfortable living on the dole. Getting them off the government teat and making them productive taxpayers will be a major effort and the Democratic party has no interest in doing so — they are a large and reliable voting bloc right now. If something can ignite their imagination and inspire them to create instead of only consuming there is hope for us. If not, we will all look like Detroit. The only thing I see inspiring them is ideas, not promises of more leisure on someone else’s dime. And if they are not inspired to be responsible for their own future so-called entitlements will only continue to grow, eating up the budget.”
Take it from an ol’ man. The only way to get people off the tit be it government or daddys, is to force them off of it by just saying “NO MORE”. Of course being reasonable, we would assist in training them to do something other than deal in drugs, beat their sugar momma, stand on the street corner and/or have a government job.
But then it would be, “Get out there and take care of yourself!”
But being as the democrats have created most of these freeloaders and discontents we should have them out there with them looking for honest work and shuck this Republic of all of them in our governments.
I can dream can’t I?
Papa Ray
Buddy Larsen @ 105: You’re missing the point: JFK was able to lower taxes BECAUSE Eisenhower’s high tax rates payed off significant portion of the WWII deficit. Second, the three recessions of the 1950s were very minor — overall growth for the decade was spectacular.
You want to trade Bruce Bartlett analyses? Yours is a little stale, from 1993, try 2003: According to Bartlett, Ronald Reagan was responsible for the largest tax increase IN HISTORY!
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_bartlett/bartlett200310290853.asp
“In 1984, Reagan signed another big tax increase in the Deficit Reduction Act. This raised taxes by $18 billion per year or 0.4 percent of GDP. A similar-sized tax increase today would be about $44 billion.
The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 raised taxes yet again. Even the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which was designed to be revenue-neutral, contained a net tax increase in its first 2 years. And the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 raised taxes still more.
The year 1988 appears to be the only year of the Reagan presidency, other than the first, in which taxes were not raised legislatively. Of course, previous tax increases remained in effect. According to a table in the 1990 budget, the net effect of all these tax increases was to raise taxes by $164 billion in 1992, or 2.6 percent of GDP. This is equivalent to almost $300 billion in today’s economy.”
Now Buddy, here’s a question. Did Reaganomics, that is real-world Reaganomics and not the rhetorical version, work? Were the 1980s a period of rising prosperity for America?
For more current Bruce Bartlett, try here:
http://www.capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1447/oregon-tax-vote
If you want to survive I would recommend reading Survival.com blog daily and the books by the blog owner. http://survivalblog.com/
Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse
~ James Wesley Rawles
http://tinyurl.com/yj8sn9p
Those of you just getting started are already way, way behind the curve so you’ve got some preparation to get done. Good luck
Finally , it’s not enough to just have water and ammo. You’ve got to have a solid body of knowledge on the entire range of survival…and you MUST practice .. a gun in the closet does you no good at all.
foont:
It occurs to me how the ancient scriptures are just so very right.
The scriptures that advocate the death penalty for adultery and working on Saturday and sassing one’s parents?
Over and over and over again the people fall away from God, abandon righteousness and embrace idolatry with all the fads and fancies that go along with it.
The very offense of idolatry implies that there are other gods than Yahweh. Think about it. If there are no other gods than Yahweh, then idolatry is impossible.
In the old scriptures the consequences of this falling away was drought, famine, pestilence and war.
In the new scriptures, righteousness comes by faith, not by the deeds of Law.
The war on God is never ending.
How does one go about attacking an invisible enemy that is indistinguishable from an enemy that does not exist?
For the first time liberty and the God-given rights of men were enshrined as the highest of ideals and men lived their lives in accord with these.
Nowhere in scripture are the rights of men listed, only obligations of men to God and his annointed kings. When the founding fathers overthrew the yoke of King George III they did so in defiance of Romans 13:1-2 which says, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are inspired documents. Our Founders were inspired men.
If you say that divine inspiration is still open, and did not close with the death of John at Patmos, then you have no intractable objection to novel doctrines being declared the word of God, like, say, the Book of Mormon.
AWM said:
“Papa Ray, you’re right, buy more ammo!
1200 rounds of Hornady 5.56 T2 75gr today!
How many rounds can you get for a bar of gold after SHTF? ONE, possibly fired.”
Along those lines: How many rounds can you get for a backpack full of MREs? Same answer: ONE! Fired between your eyes. I might add that you probably get the same answer if your backpack is full of 5.56 rounds and you’re only armed with a bolt action rifle. After TSHTF, the people who will survive will be members of well organized groups armed with infantry rifles, wearing body armour and very focused on staying alive. Alvin @ 110 summed it up nicely. Hunkering down by yourself in a cabin on 3 acres of land, clutching a double barrel shotgun and sitting on a pile of MREs does not put you on the path to survival.
Teresita@118:
“The very offense of idolatry implies that there are other gods than Yahweh. Think about it. If there are no other gods than Yahweh, then idolatry is impossible.”
I love your sass. If you weren’t such a bitch sometimes, a guy could fall in love.
“The very offense of idolatry implies that there are other gods than Yahweh. Think about it. If there are no other gods than Yahweh, then idolatry is impossible.”
It implies that only the foolish try and elevate himself or other things to Godhood. It’s simply pride, and sloth as in “I know better than God” or “Baal has rules that are easier to follow”. A great many people (and beings) have ordained themselves as God, so far all these have all ended poorly for them.
I fully agree about training/practice. There’s nothing wrong with a bolt action though folks, especially if you can hit what you point it at. Scatterguns win up close and are a lot handier for small game hunting.
If you haven’t been already consider going to an Appleseed event. See just how wrong you’re going about using that thing. Good networking there at the very least. http://appleseedinfo.org/
Heard a leftie radio show last night. The thesis, if I get it right, is that there are a number of actors working to break up the United States of America; balkinize it if you will, so that it is no longer a single political entity. Mostly, these people are the “shadow fascists.”
The agent to make this happen and to preside over the breakup? Sarah Palin.
In the disorders, the US military will not be able to provide martial law. The “militias” will be deputized to do so. The leftie made it sound like these militias are composed of some of the people who comment on Belmont Club.
Of course, this lefty never did make sense.
Alvin @110: Folks around here say that during the early 1930s the game was essentially gone. You won’t be able to hunt for long.
Forget living off the fat of the land, unless you’re in someplace super remote and on your own. Think about it. In a moderately populated upstate New York village of a few hundred people, if faced with starvation how long would it take to clear every trout out of the local streams? A few days. To shoot every deer? Maybe a few weeks. And once they’re gone, they ain’t coming back. The infrastructures we’ve put in place to feed the nation (and much of the world) are genuinely amazing, yet require all of civilization behind them. Power grids, gasoline, distribution networks, etc. We could go from fat to starving in no time flat.
Whitehall @123. Yeah, I highly recommend listening to crazy Leftwing radio now and again (the Pacifica network in particular). It’s both enlightening and hilarious to hear just how nutz these people are. And so grimly earnest about their own delusions. And on the off chance your radio Leftist was correct, I will happily move to whatever part of the broken up country Sarah Palin presides over.
So who gets to control the other part? Rachel Maddow? Just imagine life in such a world.
I find a lot of fantasy here and not much facts.
Fact: Blacks voted something like 98% for Obama, and remain his core of support (highest approval ratings). Blacks vote something like 95% for Democrats. FACT: Hispanics (we are speaking basically of Mexican origin who remain the largest group of Hispanics by overwhelming margins) vote Dem. Solidly and reliably. GWB managed to get about 34% of the Hispanic vote but that is it.
We are not talking about individuals. An Ann Coulter does not change the fact that women AS A GROUP vote reliably harder left than men, and favor harder left policies (the Gender Gap). A Thomas Sowell does not change the fact that Blacks favor redistribution of wealth AND resources AND spending from the White Middle Class to them.
Nor does this change the growth of government which because of Affirmative Action policies means few Whites hired, and mostly Blacks and Latinos hired. The Justice Dept for example wants the NYC Fire Dept. to HIRE Blacks/Hispanics AT A RATE OF 70%!
Bottom line: This is a spoils struggle. Period.
Ben — Detroit is a mess because it is in fact, made up of Black people whose cultural capital collapsed further and faster than any other group. [Blacks remain America's canary in the coal mine.] You are correct to point out single motherhood as the culprit, and it is important to note that even in Segregated New Orleans in the early 1900′s, dirt-poor, there remained a civil society among Blacks that functioned to mitigate against collapse and preserve social and cultural capital. Nevertheless, Detroit is a mess, will be a mess, until Black people themselves reform themselves by a massive cultural transformation which frankly I don’t see anytime soon.
ALL Black majority cities are variants of Detroit’s hellish collapse, from Oakland to Washington DC to New Orleans. White British Chav cities face the same dynamic and have the same symptoms.
The issue is public spending. How big will government be, what will it do, who will it spend it on.
The Bush-Clinton-Bush consensus, which was limiting Government growth, spending a significant portion on the White Middle Class, and pushing strong private sector growth against preferences AGAINST Whites in government hiring (except the top) is DEAD.
WHO is hiring?
Not the private sector.
If you are unemployed or underemployed or seeking job stability, and are WHITE, government is the only game in town, but the DOORS ARE CLOSED BECAUSE OF RACE.
This is nothing more or less than a spoils struggle, divided by race.
On a separate note, I’ll say that America cannot call back the multicultural bullet. Its not possible to “celebrate” every other race but the majority and not have significant consequences. Indonesia and Malaysia had constant anti-Chinese riots until economic growth helped put an end to them.
IMHO a majority locked out of the only job growth available, told it will be soon a minority (and one that WILL be discriminated against in all possible ways) is a recipe for social disaster. Fundamentals of human behavior remain the same. Look at the Tea Parties. They are nearly all White. This is leveled as a criticism by the Media and Dems, but it is also a measure of how little served the White majority is by these institutions.
Republicans are becoming, by default, the White Majority Party, favoring policies and spending choices (basically, government spending/patronage FOR THEM) that appeal to the White Majority, and Dems are White elites plus non-Whites against the majority.
I don’t find this a healthy development. It is a guarantee of social disruption and the emergence AS IN EUROPE of a BNP type party incorporating both nationalism/identity for the majority and socialism patronage. However the overt goals of population replacement (Harold Myerson’s “End of Whiteness” column in the Washington Post, the Labor Party’s importation of non-White immigrants, etc.) GUARANTEE THIS RESULT.
I don’t see this as overblown hyperbole. Rather, solid facts in the shifts in spending and government hiring and employment that have come all at once. Really, just what are those unemployed White guys supposed to do?
Its like watching a slow motion train wreck.
Sheeeesh! The survivalists on this board give me the creeps! Buy more ammo?? For what?
To protect yourself from raiding hordes of orcs upon your Helms Deep? I imagine it being closer to “Escape From New York” and not Tolkein’s LoTR. And if it comes to that I think I’d rather die.
Or maybe all that ammo is for hunting deer and squirrels to feed you and your family? Even suburban areas have populations in the hundreds of thousands. How long do you think the squirrel and deer populations will last?
If bread doesn’t get to the grocery market; if water pipes run dry; if electricity stops…etc., then 10,000 rounds of .223 aint gonna mean squat. Instead, why not just grab your ankles and kiss your ass good bye?
Shit this is depressing!
15. Josh:
Obama gets one right?! (cancelling Moon program)
Not really, although we were too broke to have any realistic chance of funding and implementing a complete Moon program. For better or worse, America’s manned space program is a source of pride to a lot of Americans, and even to those who don’t care much either way, they do have an expectation that if any nation should have a manned space program, it ought to be us. Obama’s move here will be viewed as just another instance of him trying to bring his own country down a peg. Also, the elimination of the Moon program against the backdrop of staggering increases in both the 2010 and 2011 budgets will NOT look like a cost-cutting measure to many, but rather, a realocation of something in the national interest towards the needs of special interests.
Right Wing Realist – there’s always cannibalism!
Or maybe all that ammo is for hunting deer and squirrels to feed you and your family? Even suburban areas have populations in the hundreds of thousands. How long do you think the squirrel and deer populations will last?
Maybe about as long as the beef/chicken/pork populations have lasted. We killed them all off a long time ago–uh, or did we not?
RWR@126:
“To protect yourself from raiding hordes of orcs upon your Helms Deep?”
For your standard orc, I recommend AT LEAST .223, and for those big hybrid ones I’d go with minimum .308, and .50 if you can get it. A shotgun would be nice for the bats. Of course, you’re going to need RPGs or grenades or something if you come up against a balrog, but I don’t want to deal with the legal hassles, so I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. If I see them or a nazgul, I’m running for the hills.
“I imagine it being closer to “Escape From New York” and not Tolkein’s LoTR. And if it comes to that I think I’d rather die.”
Then if it does come to that, you probably will. That’s the same attitude mi madre takes, and I’m not really sure how to handle that situation if it DOES come to pass. At least the wife is finally showing signs of coming on board. Because I’d really, really, REALLY like to live through whatever comes. Not sure exactly why yet, but I do want to.
#130 – Mr. Plumber,
“Because I’d really, really, REALLY like to live through whatever comes. Not sure exactly why yet, but I do want to.”
Reminds me of Herman Kahn’s “On Thermonuclear War” – his best line – “Will the living envy the dead?”
As regards that chart, I think George Bush has an unfair advantage over President Obama. His numbers are not getting worse. We might have to take a red magic markers to the lines under Obama’s name. I think the new estimate for 2010 is 1.6 trillion. That is 400 billion higher than the estimate on the chart — an improvement of a tad over 33 percent (it is more money for widows and orphans and otters — I mean others). Or we could say that the Democrats have allocated more resources to the National Debt. Or we could say, “if it weren’t for the stimulus, the defecit would be even bigger!” Or that money has merely been redeployed from your future to their present. Thank you!
Maybe I’ll call Washington Deadwood, in honor of the Democrat Controlled Congress. As in: “The Deadbeat Democrats down in Deadwood are inundating us in debt.”
or:
“There sure is a lot of dead weight and dead ideas amongst the Deadwood Democrats.”
Just a thought.
Whitehall@131:
“Will the living envy the dead?”
Probably. I’m currently reading “Lucifer’s Hammer”, after reading “Patriots” by James Wesley Rawles, just before I tear into “One Second After”. I’m just a barrel of laughs lately.
But I wanna live…and on further thought I don’t really CARE why. Maybe it’s my American-ness, or maybe it’s my stoic Norwegian/Swedish ancestry showing through or maybe it’s because ice cream has no bones. No idea why, but the impulse to survive is there, and I can’t get over the idea that if a person survives enough bad stuff for long enough, then they get to come out the other side and actually THRIVE. Or maybe their kids do, which is almost as good. And maybe the kids will be smart enough to put more money into manned space exploration so we can finally get some of our eggs in some other baskets.
Heck, by the time I’m at retirement age, most of the boomers will have bought it, and after a period of disenchantment with entitlements it’ll come back into vogue and be possible enough with the lower demand just enough for the dopey Dems (if they still exist then) to push through legislation with a provision for dropping off a wheelbarrow load of cash on my doorstep once a month.
It could happen.
TCobb @ 113: “American businesses spend about one trillion dollars a year to comply with Federal regulations. If they didn’t have to do this it would be profit, which would be taxed.”
Right on! In fact, that substantially understates the ultimate increase in government tax take from cutting regulations. Lots of good industrial jobs & investments have been driven overseas by the delays & uncertainties introduced by ever-expanding regulation. Switch into regulatory roll-back mode, and watch investment & jobs return to the US. Streamline & reduce business taxes, and watch that economic growth explode — finally making it possible to meet all the Ponzi scheme obligations of Social Security & Medicare.
As mentioned up-thread, there is opportunity in the current crisis, as well as risk. Rolling back regulations could be embraced by Democrats as well as independents & Republicans — at least by real Democrats, not the Ruling Class variant in Washington. It is an opportunity right across the political spectrum. Will anyone grasp it?
Josh @ 15 earlier said:
“Obama gets one right?! (cancelling Moon program)”
Don Rodrigo @ 127 replied:
“Not really, although we were too broke to have any realistic chance of funding and implementing a complete Moon program. For better or worse, America’s manned space program is a source of pride to a lot of Americans, and even to those who don’t care much either way, they do have an expectation that if any nation should have a manned space program, it ought to be us.”
Earlier today I attended a meeting where they officially told us the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) project was cancelled. It was fairly emotional. Many of the people at the meeting had spent almost 5 years working on the project (Orion was very close to Preliminary Design Review). The managers giving us the bad news were having trouble not bursting into tears. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I did some thermal protection work for Orion. Again, I never got emotionally attached to Orion because I disagreed with the basic design, mission goals and didn’t see where the funding was going to come from. Still, it was hard seeing coworkers who believed in the project suffering such emotional distress.
Since a little sacrifice is called for:
From a 2006 report it was estimated there were 121 million Americans who drew wages but paid no taxes. If each one of those were taxed $20, it would raise 2.42 billion for the deficit per year. At $100 each it would raise 12.1 billion. Sure, 12 billion does not sound like much when you are throwing around trillions, but eventually it adds up to real money.
Eggplant & DR, I’m very sorry if anyone in the STEM community loses a job, and sorrier still if the US disbands ANY of its remaining capability in space exploration. It’s not like it’s that huge. I suppose I’d favor continuing it. And yet, as strategy, lift needs far more priority. Of course Obambus oversimplifies when he cuts the remaining modest capabilities to pursue a better goal, that’s him all over. So, let me revise and NOT say that Obambus even gets this right, at most he gets it half-right, putting more resources into lift as is appropriate. Return to the moon? I dunno. We haven’t done that in forty years, maybe we can wait another few. Certainly we’ve wasted a lot of dough on the ISS.
RWR said: If bread doesn’t get to the grocery market; if water pipes run dry; if electricity stops…etc., then 10,000 rounds of .223 aint gonna mean squat.
I guess that depends on which end of the rifle you are holding.
#126 Right Wing “Realist”
“And if it comes to that I think I’d rather die.
What is this crap, stolen dialogue from the fallout shelter episode of “Happy Days”?
Not what I’d expect from your previous posts here at all.
Are you serious? Your words are like those of a prissy school girl who says, “I wouldn’t eat that even if I was starving”. Bullshit. The prissy girl would wolf down homefried cat rectums like they were prime steak, if she had any idea what “starving” really means. And you, sir, would have a very different attitude if faced with the need to defend yourself and your loved ones in real crises and didn’t have the luxury of being able to pontificate about them in theory.
No, you say? Die, then. More deer and squirrels for me and mine, and I’m REAL good at cooking them.
What kind of a “right winger” has that condescending attitude about firearms and their use, anyways?
Do your wife and kids know that you say you’d just roll over and die if TSHTF?
Are they proud of you for that?
Man up, fer chrissakes.
And as far as those who theorize that game will be wiped out quickly…..
The decline of game populations is actually a much-studied subject. The decline in game populations in N.A. was not due to subsistence hunting by settlers and locals but was primarily due to agricultural practices of the 1800′s (which would not return in a SHTF scenario), and a big secondary cause – market hunting by professionals. It is also reasonable to assume that that type and level of market hunting won’t return, because if TSHTF, transportation infrastructure would be far less intact than during the post-Civil War period, where excellent rail existed between rural and urban areas, enabling the “market” for market hunting (no market, no market hunting).
Game populations would certainly decrease but people hunting in rural areas for themselves isn’t the reason deer, ducks, etc. declined so much during the late 1800′s. Any “wipe out” happened for completely different reasons.
@111. I rember reading a blog by a young Bosnian girl. I will try to find her link when I get home tonite. She essentially said what FerFal said except they had to deal with snipers as well.
#126 Right Wing “Realist”
“And if it comes to that I think I’d rather die.”
As I say to the population bombers -
YOU FIRST!
#139 no mo uro,
No condescending attitude here for firearms. I just don’t think stockpiling ammo is gonna do it for me and mine. And just to assure you that I’m not a prissy school girl, I’ve got several rifles that will each do better than half minute of angle with 5 shots…plenty good enuf to take a squirrel’s head off at 200 yards leaving the rest for the dinner plate; intestines and all, if need be! And anything threatening my wife or kids wouldn’t have time to blink!
That man enough for ya?
As for declines in animal populations in the 1800s? We’re in the 2000s, and the deer herd population today would be wiped out if everything came to a grinding halt. I have a herd of some 30 deer in my immediate locale, and propbably 1,000 humans in the same vicinity. You do the math!
141 Thank you sir.
103 Eggplant
“Obviously there is no way I could set aside enough food and water to keep my family alive for months.”
Cap’t Dave has a lot of good advice and knowledge on water and such. Down at the bottom check on “Contents”. Pay special attention to the chapter on “Protecting your Stuff.” Read it and heed it. Remember that some of those on the public dole won’t be able to use their food stamps and drug money and after they scavenge the last bag of potato chips from the grocery stores, they will come for your food and supplies…. and your women.
107 Subotai
“I further remind my fellow BC-ers of past advice NOT to be in a major urban area when the organic waste impacts the rotating airfoil in any natural or man-made disaster; because urban areas cannot survive without constant inputs from outside of food, water, and utilities.”
I agree wholeheartedly. Don’t think you can hold off the hordes of zombies like Will Smith did, that was just a movie.
In fact, most of us in my group have moved out into the country in the last couple of years. The two that can’t afford to move have an open invitation with the rest of us.
Not just because they are friends, but damn good shots and have amassed quite a bit and have it in trailers in their garage and only have to hook up to them and move out.
An Idea that many should make their own.
A gas powered chain saw is the number one thing you want to have in order to escape (well, besides your trusty shotgun and such) because your garage door may be jammed, your trees across your drive way and other obstacles on the streets.
And S’s advice on plans is on the money. Map out your escape routes, drive them, note possible detours and other info. Survival is not something that you want to be making up from scratch. Read, prepare and train. And yes, race and class will be factors as well as your location.
Count on it. Also count on the love and responsibility placed on men (and women) that have to procure food and water for their own. It is the most powerful awful force that will be driving everyone with a family. They will stop at nothing to ensure their families survival.
108 LFMayor
Thanks for the info. See the link to the Cap’n for more info. Close friends should be the only ones in whatever group you form. An emergency is not the time to be testing out new friends or acquaintances.
From LF Mayor’s link:
“If you have enough food, stay put at home and keep track through the TV of what’s going on. Don’t go out there just to fool around.
IN our case, martial law and curfew at 8 PM was established, people could not gather in group greater than 2 or 3 persons, so it was not safe anyway. None the less, few obeyed all this crap, but it was still established so you know what you were dealing with if cops caught you.
The greatest need when the lootings started was means to defend yourself. Maybe that’s why I encourage everyone to make weapons part of their basic preparedness kits, right along with food, water, money, and medicines. We watched daily as the lootings spread everywhere, and when the mobs of distressed people started looting homes along with the supermarkets and shops, things got really scary. I watched such a mob pass about 15-20 yards from my home. At first I only heard drums ( used during the protests) but these protesters were also looting along the way. The mass of looters was huge, covered the entire street and sidewalk, all across as far as I could see, a block long or more.
So, having means to defend yourself is very important during the first days as well as later on, after the veil of fear of “punishment per crime” is removed from the society.
People that seem normal during “normal” times, unleash the animals they keep at bay during law abiding times. The evil among normal people also surprised me. Average Joe takes advantage of the possibility to loot without getting punished for it if he sees the chance. Hell, nothing people do surprises me anymore.
Then there was the need to get cash, which disappeared within hours from ATMs after banks closed. The “NO credit card” signs showed up instantly. Only cash. And cash was getting very hard to find.
Many supermarkets closed their doors, fearing looters, and those that were opened quickly started to run out of basic supplies.”
114 AWM your right gold will be worthless or nearly so. Food, Water, Medicinal goods, Ammo and Security will be the only barter worth having or worth fighting for.
Lex Talionis Thanks for the links I have the first, not the second one. And your right, knowledge, training, preparation and execution are the stones that we must have to stand upon to protect our families and our Republic.
119 Eggplant
“After TSHTF, the people who will survive will be members of well organized groups armed with infantry rifles, wearing body armor and very focused on staying alive. Alvin @ 110 summed it up nicely. Hunkering down by yourself in a cabin on 3 acres of land, clutching a double barrel shotgun and sitting on a pile of MREs does not put you on the path to survival.”
Your right of course in the strictest sense of tactical survival. But your average American is not going to have a platoon of military trained friends outfitted as you suggest, so they are going to do the best that they can or afford. I would appreciate it if every American had some kind of preparation and plan and was aware of what could happen. I won’t discourage them in their meager efforts.
Whereas I do have a platoon of Vets that are trained and are damn good shots and I think that our chances are just marginal to survive. But you can bet we will give it our best and we are prepared and we will not give up or give in.
124 peterike
“Forget living off the fat of the land, unless you’re in someplace super remote and on your own. Think about it. In a moderately populated upstate New York village of a few hundred people, if faced with starvation how long would it take to clear every trout out of the local streams? A few days.”
Your right but you can live without meat. Some of us have thought about that and our Redoubt is adjoining acreage that does have cattle and other animals. Can we protect it and our meat?
That is the question isn’t it?
125 whiskey
“Its like watching a slow motion train wreck.”
Let me add to that..
Its like watching a slow motion train wreck where you are in it and know what is going on but everyone else doesn’t or is happy about it.
126 Right wing Realist
“I think I would rather die”
I think that sums you up neatly except that you should change your handle to Left Wing Realist.
Well, got to run, fixing supper for my girls and then baths for both of them.
Papa Ray
Josh @ 15:
“Obama gets one right?! (cancelling Moon program)”
Another stake in the heart of American pride and exceptionalism.
Everything about the Obama misadministration is designed to tear down traditional American values … the kind that made your country great.
#143 RWR
Fair ’nuff.
FWIW, I have about a hundred times the deer herd you do in my locale, so maybe my POV is skewed.
I forgot grain, wheats and such. You can find them on the internet (or in some rural stores) large bags of grain for sale. Double bag them with dessicant for storage. If you keep them in a cool place (in basements or buried in Keeps they will last a long time.
In olden times bread was almost all that poor people lived on, and if you have to all you have to do is dig a hole start a fire in it, get a bunch of good coals and put your skillet or dutch oven in it and cover it with dirt and you can make bread.
In order to use them you will need a Grain Mill which there are several good ones but they are not cheap. Don’t be fooled with a cheap one, they don’t do a good job and wear out fast.
Papa Ray
It may seem like small potatoes compared to the general economic, social and political catastrophe that Obama’s budget would produce, but reducing the charitable deduction as he proposes would kill off the arts in this country. 80%+ of symphony orchestra, operas, ballets, and art museums in the country would have to close.
Papa Ray@145:
“In fact, most of us in my group”
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to find like-minded people in my area to hook up with in a MAG-type situation. Are you aware of any good web sites or other ways to find them? I’m thinking of going to a semi-local Appleseed shoot this spring, but beyond that I’m kind of stumped. I know of one local family that I think might be like-minded and I’m going to approach them soon, but beyond them I have no leads at all.
don rodrigo:
For better or worse, America’s manned space program is a source of pride to a lot of Americans, and even to those who don’t care much either way, they do have an expectation that if any nation should have a manned space program, it ought to be us.
If you want to have a moon program, put your money where your pride is. Contact your Congressman and say, “I really want to have a moon program. I’m willing to pay an extra $30 a year for ten years, which will generate the trillion dollars in revenue a moon program will cost.”
Maybe we could conquer the Moon as part of the war on Terror, since Muslims have a crescent moon as their symbol.
There is nothing a man walking on the moon can do that a rover can’t do, much cheaper. The Opportunity rover has been working continuously on Mars for five years, when it was originally planned to operate for only three months. We could even have our moon rovers driven by the CIA guys who operate our Predator drones as that operation winds up.
There is this disease that liberals have, where they will spend billions of taxpayers dollars building light-rail (and stadiums and concert halls) so they can make their podunk town look like a European city, and then they refuse to build park&ride lots at the light rail stops so people can’t actually use them to get their cars off the road. That’s not the point, you see, solving the traffic problems. That would actually be counterproductive, because only gridlock will convince people to move out of the suburbs where people vote funny and locate downtown where they can walk anywhere they need to go, or take light rail. And it struck me that the moon program is a right-wing mirror image of that same tendency. All the science can be done cheaply by remote control, but that’s not sexy. Any country can do that. But only superpowers have moon programs.
“Obama gets one right?! (cancelling Moon program)”
A lot of symbolism there. In less than a human lifetime, the US went from the first heavier-than-air flight to the first landing on the Moon. And in another 20 years or so, most of the people who remember watching the Moon landings will have died off. I wonder what future historians will make of it.
It is also a good reminder of the long term impact of decisions. After the Apollo program, NASA put most of its marbles on the “International Space Station”. “International” – already, political correctness was sneaking in. And a Shuttle which sounded so reusable & politically correct, but was an economic & technical dead end. Only role for the Shuttle was to go to the ISS, and there was no real need for the ISS anyway. The money was spent, and now there is nothing much to show for it.
While NASA was falling victim to politics, the French built Ariane and took most of the commercial market for launching satellites. Then Bill Clinton traded a lot of the hard-won lessons on rocketry to the Chinese for some under-the-table campaign contributions.
The future historian will probably conclude that nations are destroyed from inside, not outside.
Buddy@67,
Ah yes dearhearts. Brother Dave Gardner doin standup in Biloxi nightclubs! Keesler AFB 1961.
Actually, it was Baby Doll who was chilled ridin on the back of that cycle, and made Charlie give up his jacket and put it on her backwards. Post crash, Charlie had “hair, teeth and eyeballs” all over that chrome headlight. Miss Baby Doll, she was alright til we turned her head around.
I’m between baths now and noticed that I didn’t talk about the second most important thing concerning bread. Yeast. Of course you can use commercial yeast and if kept dry and frozen it lasts for years, refrigerated for many months if not opened. I bought a pound package and keep it frozen except when I need some then I put it out on a paper plate and let it warm up for a couple of hours before using it.
But what do you do when you don’t have yeast or it is too old and dead?
There is a way to make excellent bread without commercial yeast. It is a way that has been in use thousands of years.
We call it sourdough.
It is made with flour and water and it is just like a little baby. It has to be fed at least twice a day and kept at a comfortable temperature. It can be made by almost anyone if you follow a few rules.
But it is not for someone who is hardly ever home or doesn’t have a little patience and has never cooked any bread. Of course you can learn how to cook bread it is not rocket science and I think it’s very satisfing to set down and offer bread to my family that I made for a few cents instead of buying it.
Here is a guru’s website on sourdough bread and the mysterious starter of same. There are other good links there too.
Happy baking and a good night all.
Papa Ray
Eggplant in 103
Get self a gravity-fed water filter like the British Berkefeld or Doulton water filters. I’ve been using one since I lived in the Bay Area. My brother’s famous addiction to Coca-Cola lead me to snag some of the avalanche of screw-top plastic drink bottles to store tap water.
The Berkefeld filter is a stainless steel cylinder with a reservoir at the top and torpedo-shaped filters using compressed Diatomaceous Earth, with activated charcoal and (I believe) silver particles as anti-bacterials. Takes about an hour to filter about 2 gallons or so, by gravity, to the bottom receptacle, which has a petcock.
This type of filter has been distributed for many decades by the International Red Cross in disaster areas. Cost $250-280.
Read up on the 1993 Milwaukee Cryptosporidium outbreak, if you wonder if it’s worth it.
Also took a 12-week Red Cross course in Wilderness Emergency Response, which was based on the premise that you (victim or rescuer) might be days and days away from medical care.
That class trained people in first responder skills wounds, injuries, all sorts of CPR, assessments, hypothermia, heat stroke, frostbite, mass casualty incidents, monitoring vital signs, and lots of things to NEVER EVER DO.
Now when there’s a rending auto crash in the intersection next to me I know all I have to do is sit on the curb with my head down and I won’t FAINT!
Also, around the SFBay in the 1990′s, each community’s professional fire department offered CERT courses – Community Emergency Response Teams. Learning how to determine whether to turn off utilities, assessing building safety, urban search, rescue, triage, basic first aid, cribbing to stabilize crashed vehicles, how to use fire extinguishers, and more.
Finally, it turns out that people who spend a lot of time in “historical re-creation groups” tend to practice a lot of low-tech self-reliance skills. This might include such groups as Black Powder enthusiasts, Civil War re-enactors, participants in Fur Trader Rendezvous events, and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).
For most of a decade I attended a lot of SCA events, learned a lot about living simply. It’s proven mighty useful dealing with adversity.
Hasn’t done a thing to reduce my verbosity.
heh –Brother Dave Gardner. from Barrier, Louisiana. said his little town didn’t even have a name until one day the highway crew come along and put up a roadblock that that had the name of the town on it.
***
tax-raiser-man upstairs, Ronald Reagan, despite a hostile Dem congress except for i think one house for two years or somesuch, kept marginal rates low, so lit up sunny smiles for enterprise, set off a 25 year boom (that natch, anybody can find angles to shoot holes in from, but meanwhile the people ‘felt’ a boom). Also rescued USA and economy from Carter’s marxist brane trust, which then as now are utter clusterfuggs on all fronts, including making a decent person barf just to look at the god-i-hope-i-don’t-slip-and-say-what-we’re-really-doing expressions they wear on their fezez.
Whiskey
Allow me to make an analogy. As the Federal govt has the power to intervene in the market and cause massive harmful distortions it can also distort and damage our cultures. The grandparents of the 70-80% of Detroiters that are from single parent households came to Detroit to work in the industrial capitol of the world. Many did, and were gainfully employed without a problem. Then the federal govt started paying for single mothers causing an ever increasing number of them. With no father figure in the home the kids grew up feral, impregnated and abandoned teenage girls. These kids naturally did poorly in school. Eventually the school system became a kleptocratic patronage machine. While all this was happening state and federal money kept rolling in and anybody who pointed out that a)this was a waste of money and b)this was actually harmful to the communities causing a cycle a dependency was called a racist.
So as you can see it’s not “because they’re black” it’s because a bunch of people are getting paid not to work and they’ve gotten used to it. One way or the other the money will dry up and like it or not Social Darwinism will kick in.
Let’s suppose you and yours lose that spoils war. Do you really think a bunch of collectivists are really going to be able to feed themselves? Look at the USSR (I’d mention Cuba or Zimbabwe but…). Even if they win they lose and the productive people are left standing in the end.
Me? I put great faith in the Tea Party.
Papa Ray, re: seeds. I picked up a pre-packaged “capsule” of heirloom seeds this past year, good for 20 years. I figure in 18 I’ll plant it if I haven’t needed to by then. 125.00 for 1 full acres worth of planting, all vacuum sealed.
Another book I have that I’d recommend is the FOXFIRE BOOK. Written by hippies looking to re-connect with lost Appalacian skillsets, it’s got loads of rough living skills such as practiced by the groups that Fiddler mentioned.
Plumber… go to that Appleseed… I think you’ll find some decent “prepper” minded people there before it’s over.
#51
What can overcome racial/ethic factionalism is a strong national identity which is not based on blood kinship.
America has had that, it’s not gone completely, but the “progressives” have been attacking it for more than a generation.
LarryD/159; so true about national identity –and think of all this discussion of survival –we had THAT too –we called it ‘civil society’ –not gone but under attack –
#158 LF Mayor
Great series of books which gives lie to the “dumb Appalachian” myth.
The story about the chestnut blight should be required reading to get a high school diploma.
Papa Ray,
That grain you keep will do something even more wonderful than make bread, it will make beer. When water supplies are suspect or you are drawing from a river/lake, beer clears all organisms…if the boiling doesn’t get ‘em, the final ph sure will.
Beer is how the ancient Egyptians stored their grain. In fact, building the pyramids was sort of an annual beer-party activity.
The advise about filling the spare bedroom with canned goods is right on. With the “LIBERALS” in control hording food is sound financial advice.
We need common sense to take hold. Enter Sarah Palin>> RUN SARAH RUN
From the results in NJ, Va, MASS, the Dems. are running the Republicans are Gunning