Will America Explode First?

 

There has been any number of editorials commenting about the presumed unrest in the United States. They all, more often than not, have referred to the extreme anger and protest existing on social media. They assume that as social media was largely quiet during the Presidency of Barack Obama and has been very noisy since the election of Donald Trump as President that the United States public was more unified during the former and very distressed now. There have been those who point out that there is this old expression of the “silent majority” which was described as what awoke to elect President Reagan. This was presumed to explain that the “silent majority” actually is silent. There is some support to this as these are presumed to be the older people plus ones who are not as computer active as the ones now protesting so vehemently. After all, they are presumably silent, right? Still, how completely upside down and fouled does the world, and the United States in particular, have to be for Donald Trump to be elected to the Presidency? That has been one of the overriding questions which are somewhat more difficult to answer. Had the election gone the other direction, there would be people asking how far things must have gone awry and has become to elect Hillary Clinton. The other question is how crazy have things become that an avowed socialist and former Communist to almost win the Democrat primary elections. Well, how far gone have things become in the United States?

 

The first point that we believe shows that the political class has completely lost all connection with reality has been the debt. Things were viewed as having reached the verge to going off the rails when George W. Bush was elected President and the debt stood near five-trillion dollars. Eight short years later the debt had all but doubled pushing towards ten-trillion dollars. Then enter President Barack Obama and another short eight years later and the debt had almost doubled again approaching twenty-trillion dollars. Things actually went off the rails far earlier when the politicians decided that they could only afford to pay the interest on the debt and never pay down the debt. When under President Willian Jefferson Clinton with a Republican Congress managed to make a budget that on paper did not add to the deficit, the nation celebrated as if President Andrew Jackson completely paid off the debt which was celebrated on January 8, 1835. By the end of 1935, the debt had returned to between thirty to thirty-five billion dollars. Apparently, the debt had been eradicated for just a few weeks and then Congress returned to business as usual. Debt appears to be the norm and not the exception. Eventually, one of two things are going to happen, either there will be a Constitutional Convention called by the States to amend the Constitution placing a balanced budget amendment onto the Constitution with a stipulation that some percentage, ten sounds like a good number, of each budget must be applied to the principle of any existing debt until all debt is vanquished and to be reapplied instantly should new debt accrue. Anything short will lead to the worst possible option, default.

 

Eventually the interest on the debt will exceed the ability to allow paying the full amount and still running the government and meeting promised payments and allotments. Now it is possible to continue to pay the interest and all government expenses as long as there is somewhere for the United States to borrow the necessary amounts of money. This became a problem when China closed its loan office to the United States. This led to some creative financing. The Federal Reserve sold the United States the needed moneys while creating this money through bonds which it gave to the main lending banks. This method works just fine providing that these funds remain dormant in the lending banks. The problem comes when the economy becomes more active and there comes a demand for more loans and these funds begin to be utilized by the loaning banks. This is called giving the money velocity in economics. This leads to inflation as the money supply begins to increase, and in this case possibly rapidly. With inflation comes the problem of removing this excess currency from the monetary supply. There are two means for completing this task, taxes and interest rates. There are, needless to point out, ramifications to each of these means. Increasing interest rates makes the interest on the debt, which is refreshed through short-term loans on the debt, rise and eventually this leads to default or spiraling inflation. So raising interest rates is out of the question and explains why interest rates have been artificially kept so low. The other means is taxes and increasing taxes ends the economic activity and leads to less tax moneys being collected. This would also eventually lead to default or spiraling inflation. Any means used will, eventually, lead to default on the debt which will cause a loss in faith of the dollar. What would that cause?

 

A crisis in the dollar would have any number of consequences. First, and likely the most devastating, the world would all but immediately demand that some different or group of different monetary notes be used as the new reserve currency. If a group of currencies were chosen, there would be some form of complicated and intricate formula to determine what the rest of the world’s currencies would be worth. The other choice would be some mythical means for establishing exchange rates and the various values of currencies. The reason for these confusions and problems is easy to explain, gold is no longer the basis of any currency. As the dollar was the reserve currency when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, he took the world off the gold standard and now currencies floated against the arbitrary value of the dollar. This is also why gold prices fluctuate against the dollar, though they actually do not gain or lose value. If you were to figure what a Ferrari would have cost in gold in 1971 and then figured the price of a Ferrari cost in gold today, the difference would be relatively negligible. That is why these claims that investing in precious metals, especially gold, will make you more wealthy in the future. It will not, you may receive more dollars, Federal Reserve Notes, but they will have very much the same purchasing power as the money you utilized to purchase the gold in the first place.

 

Tulipmania

 

Would defaulting on the debt ruin the United States? Interestingly enough, such a default would allow the United States to get out of debt faster. The dollar would immediately lose much of its value and imported goods would become prohibitively more expensive. On the other hand, it would make American made goods extremely affordable to the rest of the world, except China who falsely set their currency tied to the dollar, so China would also become a pauper nation. This would allow the United States to become a prime location for manufacturing, as American labor prices would be lower than almost everywhere else where the ability of the work force is comparable. Made in America would become desirable once again not only for quality but also for affordability. Still, a default would be ruinous for American business initially and numerous companies, especially those manufacturing overseas, would find they were no longer able to be profitable and they would be replaced by new companies which would spring up almost overnight. The largest problem would be foreign corporations and billionaires could buy large shares of American companies which would provide the United States with the funding to climb out of the hole they would find themselves to have fallen. The real losers would be those people holding stocks and other investments which were in dollars as overnight they would become almost worthless compared to their value just a few days, possibly hours earlier. Such a default might lead to another stock market crash but the following dark days could be avoided providing that Congress was locked in political gridlock and unable to act. Financial bubbles burst and that makes room for new smaller bubbles to begin. That is the normal cycle for investing, especially if you are investing in tulips in the Netherlands from 1619 to 1622 when the bottom fell out when one person decided that tulips were not worth their price and everyone realized that mania had led them astray. Those left holding tulips had lousy investments but very pretty flowers to show for the insanity. On that flowery lesson, we will let the American mania continue and see when their crash comes or if they might be saved by some sagely leadership, whenever that is proven to be found. In the meantime, stay tuned for more fun and watch the crazed social media; it can be amusing as long as nobody gets hurt.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Countdown to Impeachment

 

President Trump just made another major misstep; he failed to fight for his health care legislation empowering his enemies. Sure the media have been playing up each and every Tweet as if it were the crime of the century, but that has been hype, all hype. That is the job the media has in this attempt to overthrow democratically elected governance in the United States. The media are the shock troops playing the game as those infected with the screaming heebie jeebies. Their job is to foment the atmosphere of mistrust, suspicion and general mayhem so that anything which follows appears to have validity. When President Trump pulled the healthcare legislation admitting defeat, he opened the door to his downfall. His blaming the Democrats will only serve to instill in them more hate and spite leading them to become even more entrenched seeking his downfall. They were going to head in this direction anyways and this was inevitable, but now they will feel empowered and capable of blocking any and all attempts by the President to govern effectively. That always was the first step, take out President Trump’s ability to govern effectively.

 

The next step is already in motion and is being headed by the leading man of the disloyal progressive opposition, Senator McCain. McCain still believes he should be the leading figure in the Republican Party and has always felt they let him down and were the reason he lost in 2008. It has never occurred to him that the reason he lost in 2008 was that John McCain was completely outclassed and defeated by the media and his complete inability to excite the Republican base. John McCain actually believes he is a staunch and true conservative just because he opposes three or four extreme leftist ideas and otherwise is just as left wing as Hillary Clinton once those few ideas are removed from the equation. John McCain sees the election of Donald Trump not as a sign that he actually earned the election by getting the Republican base excited but because he got exactly who the media claim elected him, rabble and uneducated morons easily led off by Donald the Pied Piper Trump. McCain sees his position of fighting Trump as the Republican knight in shining armor saving the party from oblivion. McCain just cannot accept that his wing of Republicans are the lost sheep with nowhere to go and unable to ever win any national election and that the Republican Party has become truly conservative and originalist in their holding and understanding of the Constitution. The mainstream Republicans are now almost literally Tea Party Republicans who enforce the Constitution and its Amendments precisely as written to save the United States because anything less will allow the Progressives their eventual victory and the end of America. It matters not if that view is valid, it is where the base and the votes lie and McCain will never excite these people and they would rather stay home than vote for a phony conservative, a right leaning progressive.

 

So, now that the Democrats have been placed in the position of defending Obamacare which they see as the logical step to destroy heath care insurance and force single payer government healthcare as the saving grace along with the rest of their progressive pro-government programs which will lead to only one conclusion, they will rally and draw even tighter and any Democrat who was even considering not standing with the most radical of their party will be put on notice, stand with us or you will face defeat in the next primary election. The Democrats see the election of Donald Trump as their now or never position as they know that their cover has been blown and the “silent majority” has seen them for who they truly are. What is so sad is that many of their supporters still have their blinders in place and do not realize these monsters for who they really are. They still view the likes of Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters and the rest for loyal liberals fighting the good fight for the cause. If only this were true, there would be hope; but a full third to forty percent of the voting public are firmly supporting the people who wish to place government as the board of directors over every major employer and while leaving private ownership and the belief that freedom exists, their reality would have government dictating almost everything even to production demands and buying habits to government through over-regulation to simple direct control. The Democrats who have taken control of the Democrat Party are full behind this central control and have the voters fully behind their ideas and reasoning which include such fronts as Global Climate Change, Corporate Greed is Evil, the Police are Fascist Shock Troops and the like. The Police are Fascist Shock Troops actually is one of the most ridiculous of these claims as it was under President Obama that enormous amounts of military vehicles and hardware were transferred to police forces across the United States at prices that I could have afforded one of those heavy armored vehicles that the police have at their disposal had I been permitted to purchase one and likely you could have as well. These were priced just slightly more expensive than two squad cars and were heavily financed by the Federal Government making even Mayberry Police able to buy one for officer Fife (there’s a joke there if you are old enough to remember Barney Fife and his bullet in his pocket so he wouldn’t shoot his foot again).

 

The plan is to continue to play hardball and allow John McCain to run interference on the right and when sufficient Republicans are convinced that Trump is simply incompetent and unable to accomplish anything, then they will strike. The claim will be he is and always was a phony businessman and never built anything in his life, accomplishing everything with his Daddy’s money and name. They will play up the incompetency of his presidency and that the nation deserves better. There will be moves to paint Pence and Ryan as well as people unable to rule effectively as they are just as bad as Trump. The entire idea is to get sufficient numbers of the population, 15% to 20% is all it takes with all centered in the major cities, believing that the only path to good and steady leadership is the Democrat Party, the moderate Democrats who even John McCain claims can be reasoned with and worked with. The entire Republican Party leadership and most of its truly conservative base Representatives and Senators will all be painted as subversive elements who are trying to destroy the nation supporting this losing child-President Trump. Then there will be the placing of the impeachment charges which will be all formal and will find an actual plausible reason, one the rabble can latch onto as a cause celeb. Once the votes are secured, the charge is irrelevant as in order to impeach a President you only need the votes in the House of Representatives and then to remove the President you need the votes in the Senate. The Constitution lays out the reasons of which one is malfeasance or the ill-defined “high crimes and misdemeanors” which could include anything from impropriety to murder to tax evasion to jaywalking, it all depends on what the media can sell and sufficient numbers of people accept. Understand that once charges of impeachment have been leveled against President Trump we can expect that the opposition will have the votes necessary with a comfortable extra few in numbers in case some get cold feet and shrink from the idea. The idea will be to have governance handed to those adults in the room who know how to govern and in order to prevent such a disaster as another President Trump from ever occurring again, the Electoral College will be thrown out along with all the other parts of an obsolete and useless piece of parchment that the Constitution has become, after all it was written by angry, old, slave owning, anti-woman, white men who did not understand what the world has become, after all they probably thought man should not fly because they do not have wings and such things. They had muzzle loading rifles, what could they have understood about machineguns? They are as outdated as powdered wigs and their Constitution; it’s the Twenty-First Century already, time to modernize America. The new rallying cry will be something just like that, Time to Modernize America for the Modern Times. With this they will restructure governance in the United States and America will be born and the entire concept of the United States as individual states in a federal government will die and Europe will welcome the new America to their failing ways which are failing as we were watching and will then be joining. You will know the fix is in should the new form of government be parliamentary.

 

 

The push is coming to make America a nation run by its major cities under Democrat Party control with the rest of the nation dragged along for the ride. The name bandied around and used against President Trump will never be applied to the new America as they could never be fascist, even if fascism is defined as the government taking control of the steering wheel and dictating to industry and big businesses how they can and will run their companies while permitting private ownership. The new government will rule absolutely not permitting even a scintilla of opposition to their ideas and demands on the people. Forget freedom as that is such an antiquated and quaint idea which does not permit the government to do what is right and correct for the people. The people are not as wise and worldly as are their betters in the government who all went to the correct schools and majored in how to rule over a nation. What could the peasants possibly know about how to run a successful country with the responsibility for directing all the industrial and managerial giants and be so astute to every nuanced concept; after all it was exactly this which brought every advancement since the bicycle. There will be posters and they will be Yuge and Wondrous and everybody will feel like saluting the posters, after all that is what the man on the corner with the big gun expects and we would not want him reporting our lack of enthusiasm. The poster, if it were honest, would look a lot like the one above, admit it, you wanted to straighten up in your seat and look good as if the poster was looking back through your monitor, didn’t you. Don’t let little slogans bother you because as long as you’re a good citizen, do your assigned job, oh yes, that’s right, the job your chose or were chosen for from first grade, and as long as you are happy, then you have nothing to fear. And just to make this Brave New World be a little happier, you did take your allotment of Soma today, we would not want to skip our Soma after work, after all it is for the nation to keep and stay happy. There you go, be a happy citizen.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

When Polls Lie and Deceive What to Believe

 

In the last three major elections in the democrat and republican electing world the polls were as misleading as one could imagine. Not only did they get it wrong, it appeared that their polling was just as corrupted as their reporting. In this last election in the United States the polls predicted minor gains for the Republicans in Congress but with the Democrats probably retaining a slight majority in the United States Senate. The Republicans gained sufficient seats to rise to a dominating position in the Senate and further improved their position in the House of Representatives and as if that was not sufficient, the Republican Party also swept a number of State and local elections placing the party in a position of dominance unseen in decades. The liberal states of Massachusetts and Maryland elected Republican Governors despite their being the bluest of blue states.

 

In Israeli elections the polling and every indicator predicted that the Zionist Union, the marriage of the Labor Party with Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua Party, was going to sweep Prime Minister Netanyahu out of office. Further, it was predicted that with the aid of election specialists who had assisted in charting the course of the reelection of President Obama running a political operation called V2015 run by Obama election strategist Jeremy Bird and using the cryptic slogan of “Anyone but Bibi” was going to put in place an undefeatable election day tsunami sweeping the Zionist Union into power. Somehow Bibi Netanyahu won taking a commanding thirty seats beating the odds where the polling predicted the Zionist Union beating Netanyahu and the Likud twenty-six seats to a mere twenty-three seats. How could it have been polled so wrong such that the real results were Likud with Thirty and Zionist Union garnering twenty-four coming in a weak second. Again the polling was so wrong one could have thought they were blindsided by the actual results.

 

Finally there were the recent British elections where Ed Miliband and his Labour Party were supposed to sweep the Tories and David Cameron from office was also dead wrong with the conservative Tories and Cameron embarrassing the Labour Party so completely that Miliband resigned without bothering to wait for the broom to sweep him aside and replace him atop the Labour Party. This was simply the cherry atop the three layer cake with each layer sweeter than the previous as election results made lies out of the predictions by the pollsters. That begs the question as to how could they have gotten all three so completely wrong and should we believe anything we read about in polling.

 

There could be any number of reasons for the inaccuracy of polling from improper reading of the results leading to massaging the results in order to match the pollsters political preferences or that the media intentionally went with slanted polling data knowingly but fully believing that they had sufficient sway to bring about the results they desired simply by reporting the results they desired and willing them into existence. It is entirely possible that the methods utilized by the polling companies favored the liberal leftists over the right wing conservatives. One method of polling which had found produces such results is to utilize polling conducted by using land-line phone numbers during mainly daytime hours when the majority of the people who have jobs are working at those jobs and therefore are not home to take any polling calls, which is also why they use land-lines and not mobile, though even mobile polling would likely produce similar results just less skewed to the left. Then again, if people are anything like the folks I know then they only use their cell phones and only have a land-line because it came with the package they get their internet access or television cable and never give out that number thus never answer the land-lined knowing that the call is either a poll or telemarketer and either way undesired. But maybe the polling methodology was not to blame but the people themselves are the problem.

 

What if the people have been so beaten down by the seemingly endless efforts to force political correctness along with leftist propaganda down our throats using news reporting which is more electioneering or campaigning or simply editorial opinions wrapped up to appear like news coverage that the people react repeating the touch-words or positions constantly pushed upon them by a media which has completely turned to the left beyond any reason. People may have reached the point that they find it easier and less complicating for their lives to simply regurgitate the leftist mantras to avoid offending the sensibilities of anyone leftward-leaning within earshot who would immediately slowly turn in their direction and then questions by question slowly turn further until they are glaring directly at the malcontent who spoke words which are taken as offense and must be challenged until all descending conservative expression has been wiped from the public sphere. Where this may have silenced those conservatives who simply take the path of least resistance which in public discourse means not upsetting the leftist sloganeering policer of their immediate space, they cannot yet accompany everyone into the voting booth where everyone is free at last to vote their true mind and not be made to suffer the umbrage and wrath of the leftists in our midst. Perhaps that has so swept and crept its way into our lives that anytime other than within the safe confines of the voting booth we will simply become leftists for the duration while secretly voting our inner Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan, Jefferson, John Adams or Menachem Begin when the chips are to be cast, gathered and counted in order that our captains for the ship of state are selected.

 

Think about debates at work with associates or discussions with fellow congregants at our places of worship or wherever we toil, gather or socialize and my bet is there is at least one person in each of those settings whose stand is for Big Brother and makes sure any wrong-think is made sufficiently uncomfortable that fairly soon all but the lost causes simply speak the words our monitors desire to hear and keep our real thoughts happily dancing within our minds unmolested by the minders. There are also those few outliers who are true believers and speak their minds no matter who may add their names to a list of those to be watched, as many have made so many of such lists that one more will make little difference. These are the ones who can often give as good as they get. Only the few ever make friendship bonds with these people and if we should we often request they not reveal our true political kinship as we are amongst the quiet quiescence slumbering through life passing by semiconscious of the views expressed around us as there is nothing worth our fighting for as we still have the blessing of honest representation of our votes. Should we lose such honest accounting of the ballots then will we allow ourselves to be availed of out of our quiet accommodations and comforting silence and then hear us roar for when it comes to our votes we will not sleepwalk through such offense. There is much we can allow to pass as fact when we know it to be different, but the honest representation of our vote we draw the line and demand honest representation.

 

It is little wonder that those in the media can walk around claiming in all honestly that every person with whom they speak of such things all supported President Obama and thus it was an absolute impossibility that the President was reelected by so close a margin. These people are not delusional because they mean it when they claim that election results were completely skewed, opposed to the polling, and they are truly flabbergasted and personally destroyed that the Congress or Knesset or Parliament which was elected could have gone so wrong, as in their worlds their viewpoints are correct, good and the only honest result possible and the other side can only possibly win by deceit or trickery. We are all living more and more in small echo chambers where we hear little from the other side of political and social issues. Our bubbles are carefully chosen and seldom do we hear a disparaging word and our skies are not cloudy all day. Often we even go so far as to carefully choose from whence we receive our news so as to hear only those reports which inform us of how impossible it was that we lost an election or that the results were so much closer than they should have been. The most often heard reason for any loss in an election was simply that our side did not get the vote out and turnout favored the other side. There was a perfect such comment made after the recent midterm elections in the United States when President Obama actually had the nerve to claim, “To everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.” I likely could spend the rest of my life and never find somebody in high office who is so out of touch with reality that they would make such a statement. For your amusement, here is the comment straight from Obama’s mouth.

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Cusp