FedUpUSA

Archive for August 4th, 2011

America's Primary Crack Dealers

One day you call your doctor because last night you felt a tightness in your chest.  You feel fine now, but it was bad last night.  He chews your ass, telling you that you know better and should have called 911.

But you didn’t, not because you didn’t think you were having a heart attack (you did), but because you were in the middle of a crack binge, and had you done so, you would have gone to the hospital – and then straight to jail.

So you toughed it out, and didn’t keel over.  He tells you to come in – right now.

When you get there he hooks you up to the EKG and looks you over.  Then he asks: You’re doing drugs, aren’t you, and don’t worry – I’m not going to call the cops, but you have to level with me – this is about your health, not the law.

You admit it – you were, in fact, binging on crack last night. 

It started out as just a little high, you see, with some friends.  But then one night you did too much, and the next morning when the alarm went off you had trouble getting out of bed.  So you took a hit before going to work.

Soon you needed it.  You had a hit in the morning when you got up.  You took some powder cocaine in a little vial and had a snort at lunch to keep going.  And then in the evening a bit more, just so you didn’t collapse before you had dinner.  And finally, as your system ran out of (fake) energy, you collapsed in bed.

As the months went on the doses increased.  A lot.  The one hit in the morning became one when the alarm went off, and one after your shower.  Then it was three – one just before you left the house.  Then four.  The one little snort at lunch turned into two, three, four.  Then one at each bathroom break – which you “needed” every hour. 

The price of all the drugs started to cause problems too.  First to go was the beer and nights out – you were paranoid anyway that someone would know you were doing dope, so you didn’t want to go out anyway.  Then the girlfriend – she left you but she was an evil bitch anyway.  What does a woman know who doesn’t enjoy the finer things in life (like crack)? You were sure you were better off without her and besides, now you have more money for drugs..

The night you had the chest pains was really scary.  You thought you were going to die.  But you didn’t, and the next morning you feel fine – with another hit off the pipe, of course.

The doctor delivers his sermon: Stop the drugs, right now, or you’re dead.

You solemnly nod your head in understanding.  You know he’s right – you had that feeling the night before.  But you also know that if you quit you won’t get to work the next day and you’ll get fired.  You might get thrown into the street and starve.

When you get home you gaze longingly at the pipe.  “Just one more hit” you promise yourself.  “I can taper it off… over ten years” you say.  “It’ll be ok” you reassure yourself.

And you reach for the pipe……..

Was that crack cocaine, or was it this?  Was it the Hummer in the driveway? The big house in the suburbs?  The $40,000+ in college tuition for the kids – each – five times what you paid to go just a couple of decades earlier?  The boat down at the lake?  The fancy vacations to Europe - and Maui – last year?

2008 was the tight chest where you avoided death.  The chart even looks like a heart attack.  But the debt ceiling increase and the refusal to admit to the truth and talk to the American people about what’s really going on, that we’ve been binging on drugs and nearly died, and that if we don’t quit now we will expire is you, sitting in that apartment, right after you get back from the doctor and see the old glass pipe on the nightstand.

Your buddies who talked you through the scary night are Tim Geithner, President Obama, the CNBC crew and the ivory-tower “eCONomists” like Krugman.  Then there are the bankers, who have been selling you the dope.  The latter, of course, will go broke if you stop doing the drugs and they bribe the politicians with campaign contributions and buy advertising on the media outlets, insuring that their point of view gets wide dissemination – and nobody else’s does.  In fact, they both call the doctors names and claim they really don’t know what they’re talking about.

You’d think that all the above would care if you die, for a dead man doesn’t buy any drugs.  You’d be wrong because your drug dealer managed to get the title to all your assets in his name before you took the first hit.

So let’s ask the question: Are we prepared to “Just Say No” yet?  Or do we prefer death?

See, we’re getting another warning right now.  The wild gyrations in the market?  Those are heart palpitations, and they’re scary.  If you’re in the market you probably have had that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach over the last week.  It wasn’t as bad as 2008 but it sure had that familiar tinge to it…..

We’ve trashed our economy folks and it didn’t happen overnight.  We offshored our labor, destroyed the incentives for capital formation and bought more and more drugs – including the legal sort – instead of eating reasonably and being active.  It’s easier to take a pill (or a snort) than to go to the gym, ride a bicycle or put on a pair of running shoes.

The politicians think they have years.  Most believe we have a decade, some (like Ryan) think we have two or more decades.  We don’t.  The warnings are emergent now.  The heart palpitations are happening as you read this.  The first “heart attack” was bad, and we nearly died.  But the damage was not repaired: employment has not come back, trade policy was not rationalized, the illegal aliens in the country are still sucking down tax funds we need for citizens, the people who sold us the drugs originally were not cut off and jailed and we all didn’t stop binging.  All we did was get our dope from a new pusher – the Federal government - and the government told us we didn’t have to pay for the drugs as they called them “benefits” and “entitlements.”  In short we squandered the opportunity of 2007 when we could have accepted a 15% contraction in the Federal government’s size.  Now we have to accept a forty percent contraction.  The required contraction to restore balance not only has gotten worse it will continue to do so the longer we wait before we act.

It is time to choose America, even though choosing to get well will be painful.  It will result in much more unemployment in the short term, and the government will not be able to increase assistance.  It will result in the stock market plunging.  And it will result in the big banks and may over-levered firms, large and small, being gutted, with many of them going out of business.

But if we don’t do it – and do it now – we’ll have “the big one”, and that voluntary assumption of pain will pale beside the outcome that will occur.

It is time to choose, and remember: Choosing to not decide is, in fact, a choice.

Is the debt ceiling deal supposed to be some sort of a cruel joke?  Is this what the American people have been waiting months and months for?  The “debt ceiling deal from hell” is a complete and total fraud.  Barack Obama will not need to worry about the debt ceiling again until after the 2012 election, and no “real” spending cuts will happen until after the 2012 election.  The way the political game in Washington D.C. is played today, if you don’t get something right now, you probably will never end up getting it.  The Republicans have traded a massive debt ceiling increase right now for the possibility of very skimpy budget cuts in the future.  Meanwhile, this deal establishes a new “Super Congress” that threatens to fundamentally alter our political system (and not in a good way).  The funny thing is that everyone is running around proclaiming that the Tea Party won this battle.  That is a complete and total lie.

So what about the $917 billion in “immediate” spending cuts that the Republicans are getting as part of this deal?

Well, they aren’t really spending cuts at all.  Rather, they are spending caps.  Basically what is happening is that future spending increases are being cancelled and our politicians are selling that to us as “spending cuts”.

What is even sadder is that the $917 billion is spread over ten years and the vast majority of the “cuts” are in the latter years.

For example, even if you consider these to be “spending cuts” (which they are not), the deal calls for only about $25 billion in “cuts” in 2012 and only about $47 billion in “cuts” in 2013.

25 billion dollars is far less than one percent of the federal budget, so needless to say these “cuts” are not very impressive at all.

Okay, so how about the second stage of the deal which will produce “spending cuts” of between 1.2 and 1.5 trillion dollars?

Well, yes, these would actually be spending cuts and they would be spread over 10 years.

Near the end of the year, the new “Super Congress” (more on that in a minute) will submit a proposal to Congress which could cut spending over the next 10 years by a total of up to 1.5 trillion dollars.

If the recommendations of the “Super Congress” are not implemented, then “automatic” spending cuts of $1.2 trillion will go into effect over the next 10 years.

However, there are some very important things to remember about these “spending cuts”.

First of all, none of these “automatic” spending cuts would even go into effect until 2013.  The face of American politics will be dramatically different by then, and there is absolutely nothing that makes these cuts binding on Congress.

As Gregg Easterbrook recently noted, Congress can cancel spending cuts at any time and for any reason….

By projecting the only tangible savings — which aren’t even specified, but are merely caps — into the future, the plan allows Congress to cancel them. In 2012 or any future year, Congress will say, “We can’t have caps this year because of the [INSERT ANY WORD CHOSEN AT RANDOM] crisis. We are postponing action till next year.” Rinse and repeat.

As I have written about so many times before, the U.S. national debt is completely and totally out of control.  This was supposed to be the moment when at least some members of Congress were finally going to get serious about our exploding debt.  Unfortunately, our politicians have sold us down the river once again.

Even if the best case scenario happens (which it never does) and Congress sticks to this deal for the full ten years (which is about as likely as hell freezing over), the “savings” that this deal would produce are quite pathetic as Peter Schiff recently explained….

The Congressional Budget Office currently projects that $9.5 trillion in new debt will have to be issued over the next 10 years. Even if all of the reductions proposed in the deal were to come to pass, which is highly unlikely, that would still leave $7.1 trillion in new debt accumulation by 2021. Our problems have not been solved by a long shot.

Keep in mind that Congress can change this deal whenever it wants.

So nobody should get excited about these “spending cuts”.  After all, when was the last time that “future spending cuts” actually materialized in Washington?

The reality is that neither political party seems to want to do much to cut government spending.

So the band will play on and the can will get kicked even farther down the road.

When Obama was inaugurated, the U.S. national debt was $10,626,877,048,913.08.

Today, it is $14,342,358,440,969.10.

But what this “debt ceiling deal” will do is it will give the congressional leadership of both parties much more power.

The new “Super Congress” that this deal establishes will be granted “extraordinary new powers” that regular members of Congress do not possess.

For example, The Huffington Post says that any new legislation produced by the “Super Congress” will not be able to be filibustered or amended….

Under the reported framework, legislation the new congressional committee writes would be fast-tracked through Congress and could not be filibustered or amended.

So who will be a part of the “Super Congress”?

The members will be chosen by the leadership of both parties.

So anyone that is not part of the “establishment” is not likely to be included.

The following is what U.S. Representative Ron Paul had to say about this new “Super Congress”….

“Nothing more than a way to disenfranchise the majority of Congress by denying them the chance for meaningful participation in the crucial areas of entitlement and tax reform. It cedes power to draft legislation to a special commission, hand-picked by the House and Senate leadership.”

It is this new “Super Congress” that will decide what will be in the package of “spending cuts” that will be voted on by the end of the year.

Regular members of Congress will be frozen out of the process.

On December 23rd, Congress will be required to vote up or down on the spending cuts proposed by the “Super Congress”.  Regular members of Congress will not be allowed to amend the legislation in any way, and no filibusters will be permitted.

Does that sound very “American” to you?

The more that one examines this “debt ceiling deal”, the worse it looks.

Meanwhile, many Democrats are running around and acting as if their lunch money was just stolen.

For example, the following is what Politico is reporting that U.S. Representative Mike Doyle said about this deal….

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

Democratic congressman Emanuel Cleaver was even more dramatic when he proclaimed that this deal “looks like a Satan sandwich“.

Well, this deal is a total nightmare, but not for the reasons that Cleaver is suggesting.

This deal opens the door for more rampant deficit spending, and nearly all of the “spending cuts” are put off until after the 2012 election.

Basically, the Republicans got taken out behind the woodshed and beaten to a pulp on this one.  Any Republican that is trying to proclaim that the debt ceiling deal is a “great victory” is a complete moron.

But in the end, it really does not matter which political party gets a “victory” out of all this.  What matters is that our federal government is still steamrolling toward a date with financial oblivion.

If this is the best that our politicians can come up with, we are absolutely doomed.

The Economic Collapse