Left, Lefter, and Leftest

BHO has repeatedly forced the federal government further and further into the economy, increased the national debt, and printed money recklessly.  In that light, read the following quotations:

(1) ". . . the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure nobody would want history to repeat itself."

(2) " . . . during the last months, we have been witnessing the washout of the entrepreneurship spirit. That includes the principle of the personal responsibility -- of a businessman, an investor or a share-holder - for his or her own decisions. There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results."

(3) "Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt -- are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game."

(4) "It is of vital importance that the countries responsible for the world’s reserve currencies offer more transparency for their credit and monetary policies."

Those quotations did not come from Mitt Romney; they came from Valdimir Putin.

Now ask yourself, who's actually further to the economic left, Obama or Putin, the former Chicago community organizer and current President of the United States, or the former KGBer and current head of Russia?  Who learned from the Soviet debacle and who did not?

Voted for the wrong guy, did you? 

Doubling Down on Ignorance and Failure

         You can no more break the laws of economics than you can break the law of gravity.  Try if you must, but the outcome is certain:  Rather than break such laws, you break yourself against them.  And if, against all sense, you try it again, the result will be the same.  Doubling down on ignorance and failure means more ignorance and more failure, not success.

         By re-electing Barack Obama, the American voters have doubled down on ignorance and failure.  They obviously think the boneheaded policies that led to:

(1) higher unemployment,

(2) lower household income,

(3) more jobs going overseas,

(4) the greatest one-term growth in national debt in history,

(5) expanded intergenerational dependency on the state,

(6) trillions of dollars of fiat money flooding the market place, and

(7) millions more persons living in poverty and on food stamps

will magically lead to something completely different in the future.

         It’s not going to happen.

         If you still think that the most partisan president is really the post-partisan president, then don’t be surprised if partisanship flourishes even more in the next term than it did in the last, when the Republicans were literally locked out of health care reform discussions and debates, and when every budget passed by the Republican-led House was killed in the Democrat-led Senate – every one.  If that’s what you think about partisanship, you are not thinking at all.  You are not even paying attention. 

         If you think that the Democrats, who failed to pass even one budget in four years will suddenly start passing them now, much less governing according to those budgets, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

         If you think that the politically motivated failure to protect our own land and personnel overseas against terrorist attacks on the anniversary of 9/11, despite repeated and desperate pleas for help coming from the victims themselves, and that the Obama administration’s craven lies and misdirection that for weeks followed the slaughter will make for a safer America or a safer world, you are the Jihadist’s dream come true.

         If you think that a culture that slaughters its babies for convenience or for money won’t slaughter its elderly for the same reasons, then please don’t be surprised when you, your friends, or your family are eventually disposed of by the very bureaucracy charged, ironically, with national health care.  Your capital offense, the thing that lowers the death sentence upon you:  Getting older and getting expensive.  When the choice is between you and money, and when the government has no money, you die.  Please notice:  the government has no money.    

         If you think that Barack Obama failed so miserably in his first term because he inherited a mess, then how can you expect anything but proportionally greater failure from him when he tries to fix the even greater mess he inherited from himself?

         Or, if you want it in an epigram:  “If you fail to learn the easy way, then you are doomed to learn the hard way, if you learn at all.”

Euro Folly

Forgive my indelicate language, but what the Hell are world leaders and Wall Street investors thinking?  The Eurozone is on the verge of colossal financial collapse, and the Euro itself is in its death throes.  In order to save the whole doomed package, Europe turns to Washington, which is already more than 15 trillion dollars in debt, for a bailout, and Washington consents.  In response to this dance of folly, Wall Street goes up nearly 500 points in a day.  Tell me, please, how can one bankrupt business bail out 15 other bankrupt businesses, and why do otherwise sane people cheer the vain and ridiculous attempt?

The Euro is gone.  It cannot sustain the multinational overspending that Europe has indulged in for decades.  The time to pay up has come, and the only money they've got for payment is money from a nation that has none, a nation more than 15 trillion dollars in the hole, a nation that borrows money from China in order to pay its own staggering shortfall, a nation that actually buys its own debt and simply ramps up the government printing press to warp-speed in order to conjure more fake money by which to do it all. 

The issue that confronts us is this:  Crushing debt caused by unsustainable multi-government overspending, the absence of a gold standard, looming hyper-inflation, and the folly of tying radically different economies together under one centrally manipulated currency, especially when nations like Greece shamelessly lie about their financial condition and cook their books in order to sneak into the Eurozone in the first place – all coupled with the buffoonocracy in Brussels, which neglected its due diligence and simply didn't notice the Greek chicanery.

The system almost collapsed under the burden of saving Greece, which is not yet saved.  When it has to save Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland too, the curtain will fall.  Then everyone will wish they were Switzerland, which declined a spot in the Euro’s mad march to self-immolation, and which now has perhaps the strongest currency in the world.  I’m not saying Switzerland won’t feel the rain and hear the thunder of the financial dungstorm that surrounds it on all sides; and I’m not saying it won’t feel the earthquake, both the tremors and the aftershocks.  It will.  But better to sustain those things in Switzerland than anywhere else on the continent.

The Euro and its zone were a doomed idea from inception.  It never could be made to work.  It cannot be made to work now, especially by economically-challenged community organizers from Harvard, who haven’t heard that Keynes was wrong, and who have not yet figured out that the more you invest trying to make an impossible idea work, the more you lose.

The best advice is to sustain the hit now, which will be painful but endurable, rather than tossing more (fake) money down that rat hole, which is just a one-way street to disaster.

The deeper you dig, the higher out you must climb.

Lay down your shovel, Mr. Obama.

Lay it down now.

You’ve rambled on wearily about shovel–ready jobs.

This is not one of them.

Inflation: Obama's Undeclared Tax Increase

         Contrary to common parlance, inflation is not rising prices.  Nor is inflation the result of rising prices.  Rising prices are the result of inflation.  Inflation is when the government floods the marketplace with printing press money -- as it now is doing.  The consequences of that flood surround us on all sides, as I aim to point out.

Like other commodities, the value of money is determined by the interaction of supply and demand.  When the supply of money increases dramatically compared to the supply of goods and services, the value of money declines.  In that case, it takes more dollars to do what fewer dollars used to.  Because the Obama administration prints money day and night without end, the gallon of gas that cost $1.84 when he took office now costs $3.92 just half way through his term.  The rise in gasoline prices is not the result of decreased supply or radically increased demand.  They remain basically what they were when Obama took office.  The difference is inflation and the wild-eyed speculation it engenders, which taxes you at the incredible rate of more than $2 per gallon of gasoline.

Naturally, Obama could not have gotten passed a new tax of more than $2 per gallon of gas. Just trying it would have made the mid-term shellacking he and the Democrats suffered even worse.  Instead, he simply amped up the printing presses, thereby stealing value from every dollar of every person who owns even one, making gasoline prices rise dramatically -- just as it did nearly everything else -- which you have noticed whenever you bought milk, bread, cereal, or meat for your family -- or bought gas.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president. 

Why would Obama do it?

He did it because inflation favors debtors.  The Obama administration, you’ll recall, is the world champion of debt.   In order to reduce its own financial burdens, the government induces inflation.  Inflation allows debtors to discharge their obligations with dollars of reduced value.  It steals from creditors.  Creditors, therefore, are reluctant to make loans because inflation makes lending more likely a losing proposition.  If borrowers can just print a batch of reduced value dollar bills in order to pay their debts -- in other words, if borrowers were counterfeiters -- lenders will be justifiably reluctant to give them loans.  You’ve probably noticed that loans are harder to get.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president, the Counterfeiter-in-Chief.         

Because inflation means that today’s dollar is worth more than tomorrow’s, inflation discourages saving.  If you get more for your money by spending it now than if you spend it later, you spend it now.  But if you spend it now, savings diminish.  When savings diminish, there’s less money from banks for investment.  Less investment means fewer jobs and higher unemployment.  That is, by undermining the value and stability of the dollar, government undermines capital investment.  On the one hand, investors can’t easily get loans.  On the other, they are reluctant to enter into long-term commitments when the very value of money itself is unpredictable.  They can’t calculate what they’ll earn or what they’ll owe.  Unstable money drives businesses overseas, to places where the financial climate is more predictable.  You’ve probably noticed both the high rate of unemployment and the flight of American businesses to other countries.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president.

         Think of inflation as government alchemy.  In the Middle Ages, alchemists tried everything they could think of to turn some other substance into gold -- with predictable results.  Governments try the same trick now.  When Roosevelt took the US off the gold standard, he wanted to make paper serve as gold.  Paper is more easily manipulated than gold, and he wanted to manipulate the money.  Roosevelt became the anti-Midas:  Rather than everything he touched turning to gold, the gold he touched turned to paper.  The value of the dollar dropped accordingly.  The results are devastating, especially to the poor.

For example, if you were born into a poor family in 1944, and if, over those intervening years, you worked incredibly hard and managed to increase your family income by more than 3000 percent, you’d have fallen even further below the poverty line because of government-induced inflation.  Inflation makes the escape from poverty even more difficult than it already is because it requires ever-increasing amounts of money from you to produce your escape.  Inflation is a chain that binds the poor to their misery.  Perhaps you’ve noticed that the percentage of persons in poverty in America rarely goes down.  The cliff of prosperity is too high and steep to scale.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president.

Think of inflation as a teenager’s credit card.  The teen gets the goodies and the parents get the bills.  For “teenager,” read “government,” and because government prints its own stage money, for “government” read “tyrant” and “counterfeiter.” With inflation, the tyrant-counterfeiter gets the goodies, and you are left to pay his bills with the reduced-value dollars he has printed.

Now do you see?

Inflation is a weapon.  This administration aims it at us.

Perhaps you are one of those who expect government to help protect you from thieves. Perhaps you think that government ought to track down, capture, and punish counterfeiters.  But what if the thief and the counterfeiter are the government?  What happens when, say, the government prints several hundred billion dollars or so in order to pay its bills, thereby stealing value from its citizens’ financial resources?  This happens:  Dollars lose their value; loans are hard to get; prices rise precipitously; investment slows; jobs go overseas; unemployment is high; the poor are chained; and the nation’s prestige is diminished.

Welcome to Obama’s world.

As long as he’s your president, it’s your world too.