All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Who o’er the herd would wish to reign,
Fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain!
Vain as the leaf upon the stream,
And fickle as a changeful dream;
Fantastic as a woman’s mood,
And fierce as Frenzy’s fever’d blood.
Thou many-headed monster thing,
Oh who would wish to be thy king!
Sir Walter Scott
Though I hate to admit it, I seen nothing in Trump’s temperament or previous governance to indicate that he is the man to do it. In his 1st term, there was nothing accomplished or even proposed that would indicate debt reduction was an even a low level priority. Remember the early covid days and the multi-trillion dollar public buyoffs sent as $2000 checks per family?
Reality is that the issue won’t be dealt with until reality shows that it ultimately WILL be dealt with. At some point, a tripwire will occur and hyperinflation will start. If you have a good memory and track retail prices, you will have to conclude that inflation has been significantly larger than officially stated. Especially since the covid era.
There is nothing on the political horizon from any political entity that indicates a willingness to take on budget and reduction.
Debt reduction will occur via inflation, whether severe or hyper remains to be seen.
The average US house is climbing toward $500,000, average car $50,000, hamburger over $7/lb, good ribeye $18+/lb, etc, etc, ad nauseam. “Tom’s Official Inflation Monitor Based On the Price of Cat Food” tells us that a 5.5 oz can of Friskies cat food which sold for $.38/can in 2020 now costs $.87/can. Everything else is on the same slope.
Solve for X ( 1+X%)^5= 2.3 Hint, around 18% per year.
And this curve will not prove to be linear.
What do you think is behind the historically meteoric increase in the price of gold and silver? I bought gold 20 years ago for $600/oz and silver for around $7-$8, an increase by a factor of around 8-10. A lot of the increase has happened since covid. Do I sense a commality here?
I suspect that most of the sorta recent increase has been as people and institutions see something coming and are looking for something more stable than the US dollar.
Picture by TomD BTW, part of a series I was commissioned to do for an Australian coin dealer.
So, we went over to see the grandkids and watch “Project Hail Mary.” I read the book a few months ago and I’d been waiting to see it with them but everyone has been so busy this summer we just never had a chance. But with school starting in Dunwich next week, I made a point of setting up the visit.
So, we sat down surrounded by all the kids and all the dogs and up went the curtain (metaphorically speaking). Well, it was pretty good. Of course, a movie couldn’t spend the time that the author Andy Weir lavished on the technical details of the astro-phage biology or the star ship that it fueled. And neither could it explain the project to selectively breed taumoeba to survive in Venus’s atmosphere and several other technical details that fill out the story. But the movie does a good job of fleshing out Ryland Grace and detail the friendship that develops between him and the Eridian alien that he names Rocky. And in fact, it more than matches the book’s description. It adds a good amount of comical interplay between the human and the alien.
I intend to do a full review of the movie soon but I just wanted to give a few impressions tonight. And since it’s so late I’ll leave it here. It’s a good movie.
Ridicule, the weapon of all others most feared by enthusiasts of every description, and which, from its predominance over such minds, often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.
Sir Walter Scott
Here’s a relatively even-handed article about the ongoing clean-up going on at “60 Minutes” by Bari Weiss.
Tick, Tick … Boom Bari Weiss blew up 60 Minutes. What if her version of the show is better?
It’s hilarious how the quotes by CBS veterans paint Weiss as some sort of MAGA puppet of the Trump administration when in reality she’s a New York Times veteran who’s also a liberal lesbian leftist. But she is at least trying to imitate impartiality in the newsroom and that’s better than nothing. Worth a read if you’re interested in how the dinosaur media is being dragged into the twenty first century kicking and screaming.
Regardless of how little or how much the Democrats gain in the midterm elections Donald Trump will not have a congress that can legislate what he wants done in the country going forward. So, what’s a great disrupter to do?
I think Donald should declare a state of emergency and fix some stuff. I think he should use this state of emergency to balance the budget. Unilaterally. Unashamedly. I guess it would be a revolutionary move. But it’s needed. The country has been bled dry by the titanic waste of the federal budget and waiting anymore time would be dangerous. Now it’s not possible to eliminate a seventy trillion-dollar debt overnight. It will take decades to do that. But it seems necessary to at least make a start. It’s shocking to think that the last balanced budget was under, of all people, Bill Clinton. Of course, the “War on Terror” put an end to that but for the last quarter century American politicians have pretended that printing money endlessly was their God-given right. Well, it’s not. And acting like it is has brought us to the brink of hyperinflation. So, calling it a state of emergency is, in my opinion, completely accurate.
Now, this would be a very large undertaking. Slicing the budget down to size without undermining the stability of the economy or causing undue pain to the taxpayers requires the wisdom of a Solomon. DOGE had the right idea about eliminating boondoggles, leftist set asides and waste but it was just the tip of the iceberg. There are over a hundred years of malfeasance and stupidity in that seventy trillion-dollar debt and it will be necessary to close down whole governmental departments and cancel thousands of projects that either we don’t need or we can’t afford. So, there will be many, many oxen gored during this effort.
Luckily, the most important asset for an operation of this nature is a very skilled salesman; someone who can sell the idea based on the belief that the ones benefitting from all this waste is anyone else than the long-suffering American taxpayer. There’s nothing a taxpayer likes more to hear than that all those “leeches” out there are about to be removed from the federal budget and forced to do honest work or starve. So, Trump can sell this based on the idea that trimming the waste will drive inflation down to a very tolerable minimum and eventually taxes can also begin to drop. Not immediately of course. The accountants have to figure out how long it takes to reduce seventy trillion dollars to zero.
Now I’ve been told that not having a debt is actually bad for the country and the world. Well, I kinda don’t believe it. Sure, government bonds and bills are a very attractive way to spread the costs of expensive programs and systems over the course of several years but making believe that a balanced budget is a bad thing doesn’t add up for me. It’s one thing to buy a dishwasher on time. It’s an entirely different thing to be in hock to loan sharks for amounts you can never pay back. Donald put the United States on a permanent diet. It’s an emergency.
Bluid is thicker than water.
Sir Walter Scott