18 July 2011

Naughty, naughty

The President of the Unhited States of Americais threatening to shut down the operations of the USA unless he gets his (as yet undefined) way.

What does he threaten to shut down? Mandatory payments to Social Security. Paychecks to serving troops. Medicare. Medicaid.

But the mail must go through! (Postal Workers Union). Twentyseven different Tsarships he has attached to the Executive Branch.

The man has decided to use spite to target the highest-profile and most obviously used branches. Close the museums, but keep the Department of Education SWAT teams on. Close the National Parks System, but keep the Department of Agriculture SWAT teams on moments notice, in the event of illegal sale of free range eggs.

This is not the first time this has happened. This is "nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah" negotiation.

This is Daddy Gov saying you can't have the icecream cone because I need the money for my private jet. This is bad faith negotiation.

Any "Agreement" that says that in exchange for a hamburger today I will gladly pay you Thursday recognizes that on Thursday Wimpy will claim that the arrangement was entered into without full understanding of the intervening economic realities that intervened and is of course now subject to renegotation due to the changed economic climate.

In exchange for jam tomorrow, we're expected to give money, not just today, but for generations, in the expectation of spending cuts diffused over the next ten years.

Lemme whisper into your ear. It ain't gonna happen. The spending will increase, the taxes will go up, but the Iron LAw says that the expenditures will not decrease. There may be a "nominal decrease in baseline spending".

Baseline spending is predicated upon a Ponzi scheme: inflation, plus underutilization, means that it can't work without more money.

We all understand "inflation", but "underutilization"? That means that not enough money has been spent. It works both ways: a policy that uses too much money would be efficient if itr just had more money, and the reason that the other policy is not working is that there's not enough money in it!

As PJ O'Rourke said, the best possible outcome of government spending is a public restroom.

I'm not a pundit, I'm not an expert in macroeconomics. But I'm not as dumb as I look, either. I recognized years ago that the ethanol for gas nonsense was mathematically unsupportable, and I may still have the envelope backs where I made the original equations. For the love of God, I foresaw mandatory insurance when it was disavowed in the 1976 Texas Legislature, and I foresaw the passage and later reccission of the Helmet laws.

Please allow me to phrsae this in simple phrases: Big likes Big.

Big Business likes Big Government.

C'mon, tens of billions to save financial gamblers from bad bets? I'm looking at you, Sherson Lehman Bear Stearns.

I'm looking at you Capital Bank.

I'm looking at you with a death-stare you dudes at Fannie Mae and Freddie MAc who dived under cover with performance bonuses in excess of $10 million per month of your term of employment. Having followed the directions of your political masters, you now get "performance bonuses" on the order of ten million dollars in what used to be good US currency for performing a massive act of fraud under cover of law.

Shame.

1 comment:

Falloure said...

Get em, JC!