The sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!

[billvon 2,384]

> Bill beat me.

Again?

[Shotgun 1]

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> Bill beat me.

Again?

Yes, please.

[ds8221 0]

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I just wanted to be the first here to say it.

Having lived in a number of countries wherein the economies had collapsed at one point or another, I am acutely aware of the horrors that may ensue.

When the German economy imploded after the Great War, the devastation was hard to imagine. Germany remained a net exporter of food, yet hundreds of thousands died of hunger. The bad craziness that came of this time gave us the Great War, Part II - as well as the Holocaust.

One thing to note is that Germany at that time was not a petroleum-based economy. Rail transport was largely powered by coal or lignite, and horses were responsible for much of the rest.

In the US of A we are in much worse shape than was Germany before its economic collapse. We have been running up a tab for the last forty years with no thought given to balancing the books; if anything, we have come to think of spending money we do not have as a collective birthright. The last two presidents have gone out of their way to establish their legacy as the most profligate national leader in human history - while the last guy was a wastrel of unimaginable proportion, the incumbent has seen fit to make him look like an amateur by comparison.

The election that just took place had qualities that were right out of South Park in terms of the quality of the candidates from which to choose, but there was a single issue that might have made a difference. One of the candidates had a track record of turning a profit on a large scale. In both the private and public sectors he had overseen operations that wound up being fiscally sound. The significance of all other issues pales in comparison to what will happen when we are handed the tab for the last 40 years of spending that we cannot ever afford.

All the fuss about whether I can marry another guy, or whether I will have to carry the baby to term if I get pregnant or whether I can get free medical treatment (and a pony and a puppy...) are truly irrelevant when the dollar reverts to its inherent net worth (zero). This outcome is, of course, inevitable.

Thus "recovery" is effectively impossible, since there is no going back, so our only option was to put someone in charge who would follow Bob Hoover's dictum that one should fly as far through a crash as possible. We have, however, put back in charge someone who is convinced that crashing is impossible, and is intent upon trying to get through a granite cloud by using full power.

The snarky commentary to the effect that we always muddle through after a "disastrous" candidate is elected is demonstrably false. The cumulative damage inflicted by the dunderheads we insist upon putting into high office tends to be permanent, so we conclude that the result is simply the new normal.

At any rate, given that mandatory expenditures, such as entitlements and servicing the artificially cheap national debt, met or exceeded revenues in 2011 for the first time, and every other expenditure made by the Government (Defense and so forth) was made with borrowed money, it will be "interesting" when there is the slightest hiccup in the process of borrowing further money.

You think Katrina or Ike or Sandy involved privation? Buckle up kids, you're in for much, much worse for the whole country, and for years at a stretch. We will look back fondly at the '30s as the "Good Old Days."

I wish I was wrong. It was fun while it lasted.


BSBD,

Winsor

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse
from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes
for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury
with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal
policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the
world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

[winsor 186]

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It didn't happen for the last 4 years -- why would it start now?

Wendy P.

Just because Bernie Madoff got away with it for so long did not made the ultimate collapse of his pyramid scheme anything but inevitable.

Every time a Government has relied on an endless supply of fiat currency to underwrite its expenses (it has been done repeatedly), the result has been collapse. The collapse of the currency is inevitable, the collapse of the Government is reasonably likely, and the collapse of the country is quite possible.

It is my longstanding contention that our only inexhaustible resource is stupidity, but I suspect that our stock of hubris is a close second.


BSBD,

Winsor

[SkyDekker 1,121]

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unless of course someone happens to be a public sector worker. In which case, yeah those people are laughing ... all the way to the bank.

Yes, because there have been no lay offs in the public sector.

Your post is so full of political spin and political hatred, it isn't even worth discussing. When you can handle more than: "Liberal bad, conservative good", then it will be good to have a discussion.

[aphid 0]

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Your post is so full of political spin and political hatred, it isn't even worth discussing.

(psssst... play nice, the Yanks might be watching)

[Remster 24]

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> Bill beat me.

Again?

Yes, please.

Remster

[Zenister 0]

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“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse
from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes
for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury
with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal
policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the
world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

Good thing we are not (and never have been) a Democracy.

____________________________________
Those who fail to learn from the past are simply Doomed.

[regulator 0]

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unless of course someone happens to be a public sector worker. In which case, yeah those people are laughing ... all the way to the bank.

Yes, because there have been no lay offs in the public sector.

Your post is so full of political spin and political hatred, it isn't even worth discussing. When you can handle more than: "Liberal bad, conservative good", then it will be good to have a discussion.

---------------------------------------------------

Oh because youve never had a conservative bad liberal good bias in your past...like ever.

[SkyDekker 1,121]

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Oh because youve never had a conservative bad liberal good bias in your past...like ever.

Considering I have voted both liberal and conservative in the past, I like to think that bias is small. Now, the Canadian version of conservatism might still be considered as socialist by many American Republicans.

[lurch 0]

I once worked in a factory that made 2-liter coke bottles. They were handled and stored in blocks called Units about 9 feet high and 4 feet wide on pallets, stacked 3 Units high in the warehouse in rows and columns roughly 27 feet tall all the way to the ceiling of a warehouse. Stable once stacked, but precarious and easily toppled when an individual 3 stack would get isolated, shifted moved or disturbed by the act of adding another stack.

Someone would, from time to time, get the upper Unit snagged while pushing a 3 stack into a row, and slowly...very slowly... the stack would topple. If you caught it early enough and you were really good with a forklift you could sometimes save it.

More often though, some of the bottles in the base stack would finally crumple under the imbalance and accumulated loading and you'd know the game was over, grab tight to the forklift wheel, hunch your shoulders and trust the safety cage because that sucker's comin' down, and you, are directly under it.

When the toppling would begin it'd happen in super-slow-motion. The stack standing all the way to the roof would slowly, slowly lean till it was obviously suspended by nothing at all anymore and only its own inertia was still holding it up. You'd see it and know it was utterly inevitable, but the watching was like a train wreck, you couldn't look away. Long before it was actually falling, you could see that it WOULD fall and that there was just no way to stop it.

The stack we call the USA appears to be built on a stack of assumptions about debt and growth built as high as the moon out of trillions of half-nonexistent inflation dollars. The only way for the whole thing to remain standing is if all those optimistic assumptions turned out to be true.

But social security got looted to buy more guns. Medical care continued to ramp to infinity as if every middle class American would somehow be able to still pay when even a simple broken leg can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars- most of that wasted in bureaucracy... on supplies inflated to 500X their actual value... on whatever.

The industries driven off our shores leaving half the next generation wondering how to pay off their 150,000$ college education when all they can find to work for is wal-mart.

Everywhere I look, all I see are ridiculous unsustainable stacks, starting to topple, or already well on their way down, all of them dependent for their existence on an unlimited, confiscated supply of other people's money.

The next decade will be interesting.
When gas goes through the roof again... when suddenly impoverished McMoms can't afford to get the kids to day care and commute their Escalades to their Mcmansions anymore... when they start getting hungry... When the unaffordability of movement means property values crash again while the price of everything in stores triples...quadruples...
If I had money, real money, I'd be converting it to hard assets and doing whatever I could to get it the fuck out of the country before the currency starts to go.
When it does, we're fucked.
I wonder how long till starving parents get jailed because they chose feeding the kids over purchasing their mandatory Obamacare insurance. Build your safety cages and put on some popcorn because this is gonna be one helluva show. We got to read about it in the news when the USSR fell apart. Now we get to live it.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[CanuckInUSA 0]

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Your post is so full of political spin and political hatred, it isn't even worth discussing

You take exception to my post. What else is new. Tell me what was it that I said that offended you. Was it when I called both the Alberta and Ontario Provincial governments corrupt? or was it when I called both the the Alberta and Ontario Provincial corrupt progressive governments? What part of reality are you not living in? Both Alberta's and Ontario's Provincial governments are corrupt to the core, how many scandals do you need to ignore not to see how dishonest both of them are. And what part of reality do you fail to live in where you don't view both governments for their progressive policies.

Or did you take exception to my comments about public sectors workers. Too funny, did I hit close to home? Are you upset that the public sectors are being downsized. Welcome to the real world. If private sector workers can be downsized, so can the public sector.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[kallend 1,621]

Invest in wingsuits, Brian!

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[SkyDekker 1,121]

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Was it when I called both the Alberta and Ontario Provincial governments corrupt? or was it when I called both the the Alberta and Ontario Provincial corrupt progressive governments? What part of reality are you not living in? Both Alberta's and Ontario's Provincial governments are corrupt to the core, how many scandals do you need to ignore not to see how dishonest both of them are.

Any organization has its corrupt elements. A provincial government is not going to be exampt from that. If you want to see corruption to its core, one would be better suited to look at Montreal and the Quebec construction industry.

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Or did you take exception to my comments about public sectors workers. Too funny, did I hit close to home? Are you upset that the public sectors are being downsized. Welcome to the real world. If private sector workers can be downsized, so can the public sector.

Didn't take exception. Just indicating you are just repeating talking points without basis in fact. I don't work in the public sector, nor is there anybody in my immediate circle of friends or family who work in the public sector.

And public sector workers do get downsized...

[CanuckInUSA 0]

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If you want to see corruption to its core, one would be better suited to look at Montreal and the Quebec construction industry.

As corrupt as the Alberta and Ontario Provincial governments are, I will agree that things in Quebec are much worse.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over