Reflections From a Murky Pond

I’m not one to pay overly much attention to the various things that spew from the maw of Paul Krugman. The pontifications, ramblings, and rants of a rabidly fanatical Keynesian neo-Socialist who makes his rent working for the filthy rag known as the New York Times aren’t the sorts of things that I, or any other American, normally pay much heed to – except to keep an eye on what our nation’s enemies are thinking or emoting.

Krugman is willfully dead wrong more often than not on causation and dead wrong, again willfully, every time when it comes to remediation

All that being said, Krugman is not an idiot and he is skilled enough to make solidly plausible predictions of future events, especially relatively near-term ones.

Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like:

1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.

2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany.

3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals.

3b. Alternatively, or maybe in tandem, huge draws on ECB credit to keep the banks from collapsing.

4a. Germany has a choice. Accept huge indirect public claims on Italy and Spain, plus a drastic revision of strategy basically, to give Spain in particular any hope you need both guarantees on its debt to hold borrowing costs down and a higher eurozone inflation target to make relative price adjustment possible; or:

4b. End of the euro.

And we’re talking about months, not years, for this to play out.

Of course this isn’t exactly rocket science or even one of the more arcane examples of the semi-mystical art form known today as the study of Economics. Both hyperinflation and the end of the Euro in the near future are easy predictions to make in the wake of Greece’s Keynesian meltdown and financial collapse.

NOTE: Krugman’s prediction of a European financial meltdown matches my own and naturally feeds into whatever level of Confirmation Bias that I’m saddled with.

Of course these events will happen and happen soon. They were foreordained from the moment of Greece’s financial implosion under the weight of their Socialist economic policies.

I’ll add though that these event will, in turn, most likely lead to the breaking of the European Union by 2015. They can’t hold together as a government – or meta-government, or whatever they are – without a common currency.

Seventy years – a little over three generations – can completely change the societal landscape. How women have changed in that time is astounding, and not in any way that could be rightly considered good or flattering. Their devolution from Great to Grift is a national tragedy.

From Greatest To Grift In 70 Years

A first blush it truly amazing that the granddaughters of the generation of women who took to the factories and built the US war machine in WW2 degenerated into Sandra Fluke’s generation of grifters seeking hand-outs from the government. It just doesn’t, on the face of it, make sense that We Can Do It turned into We Can Get Free Shit because this seems to be a prima facie reversal of feminist goals and thought.

A deeper look, however, reveals that this degeneration had to be expected. Feminism and gender equality has been billed as a Civil Rights issue and in America all the Civil Rights movements have degenerated within three generations into grift and dependency upon the government for subsidence and/or convenience hand-outs. It’s just more shocking and painful to see it happen to American women, who have done so much and come so far.

Plenty of Americans wonder if Obama has a jobs strategy given that America’s faltering economy and continued grim prospects for employment are dark shadows on Americans’ consciousnesses. They’re afraid that Obama and his handlers have no plan or strategy at all.

From what I can see, these people are wrong; they’re scared for the wrong reason. The boy and his handlers do have a jobs strategy but it is one based upon a war of attrition, misdirection, and legalisms. That’s why Americans should be both afraid and lethally angry.

Obama just plans to wait it out and use “nuanced” mendacity and misdirection to “deal with” the nation’s unemployment problem.

Congrats! You’re No Longer Making Me Look Bad

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday that in April US unemployment fell to 8.1%, which is the lowest it’s been since January 2009. This is something that will help Obama a bit in the polls because his constituency is ignorant and easily led.

If more people were aware of the fact that the drop in unemployment has mainly been due to people leaving the labor force, meaning the BLS had stopped counting them as unemployed, things might be quite different and quite worse for Obama.

In actuality 12.5 million Americans are still unemployed, and according to the BLS a record 88.4 million Americans are officially considered as being “not in the labor force.” At 63.6% the labor-force participation rate – defined as the percentage of the work-age population either working or looking for work – is the lowest since December 1981. Yes, this is the lowest American labor-force participation rate in thirty years!

Not that Obama should be taken too strongly to task for the current real unemployment figures. The government does not meaningfully create jobs. He can only be blamed for fostering a legislative atmosphere that is hostile to business, making it that much harder for those businesses to justify adding staff or expanding domestic operations.

No, what Americans should punish Obama for is his presiding over- and cheering on from his bully pulpit a Congress that added a record setting $5 trillion to America’s national debt in under four years, most of it spent supposedly to create jobs.

That is what Obama and the Liberals in Congress should be punished for. They’re whole “job creating / saving” spending glut is either a $5+ trillion lie or the biggest example of fiscal, legislative, and governmental failure in the history of America.

It’s time for Americans to teach Obama and his cronies what unemployment means. It time that we, the People made it a personal issue to the them and their families.

Legend has it that, at the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, a king rose up to hold the land together. His name is given as Arthur and he is famous for his Knights of the Round Table.

Most likely he held his power through science and engineering as much as by force of arms, which led to interesting situations.

The fattest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Circumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

Now that’s history and legend that isn’t talked about much! 😆

Attempts to curb America’s federal government’s spending addiction go back to the days of President Reagan. He was the first POTUS to make a considered and concerted effort to starve the beast that was, and is even more today, the gluttonous animal that our government had become.

Sadly for us, it didn’t work – not at all.

This is not to say that President Reagan’s attempt rein in government spending was wrong or misguided. He approached the situation quite correctly.

Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.

The only problem was that approaching Congress as parent approaches their recalcitrant and spoiled children, while a perfect analogy, has the same flaws as it would with one’s real children. It only works if they can’t go running to their mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, or the neighbor down the street to get a handout.

While it was already proven in Reagan’s day that it was impossible to curb spending before reducing the government’s revenues – i.e., cutting taxes – the mistake was thinking in terms of Starve The Beast. We weren’t trying to starve a ravening beast, we were trying to starve Wimpy and Wimpy never starved.

I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Reagan’s idea was economically and logically sound if America’s government was running on any normal and sensical form of economics. He just didn’t understand or was powerless to change the fact that the government runs on Wimpynomics and that whenever it grows hungry it will cheerfully borrow money for its next snack and stick we, the People with the tab.

Worse even, one of the underlying postulates of Wimpynomics is that, as long as the government can keep raising its debt ceiling and as long as they can coerce people, institutions, and nations to loan them money, Tuesday never comes.

Wimpy never starved but we, the People will in order to pay for our government’s excesses if things don’t change. Tuesday is just around the proverbial corner.