Tag: Budget Deficit
Nothing Matters Anymore

Nothing Matters Anymore

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Now we know, as if we had any doubts before: Nothing matters anymore. That might be an odd conclusion to come to for me, who has a Substack called Issues That Matter. But it’s consistent, actually. That nothing matters anymore is an issue that matters. Or should. Unfortunately, there is bloody little anyone can do about it except grin and bear it and suffer the consequences, or look for a way out of the madhouse that the United States has turned into. That’s the option I’m once more looking at.

So Jell-O Joe Biden, the Grifter in Chief, unilaterally has “forgiven” big chunks of student loan debt. Never mind that he has no legal power to do so. Even the Queen of Grift, Nancy Pelosi says so. But who needs laws any more? Laws are for the pissants, not for the Big Guy. Certainly not for the ruling elites (provided they’re of the right party). Whether it’s allowing people out of their contractual obligations to pay their debts or allowing now more than 2 million — heading toward 4 million — illegal aliens and border crashers to enter with impunity into the country, or using his official offices to further his family’s corrupt enrichment, law and the Constitution are irrelevant. If you haven’t noticed that, you haven’t been paying attention.

If you had student loans that you struggled to pay off, if you saved and scrimped so you didn’t need student loans, or maybe you never got to go to college, why would you mind paying off some rich kid’s loan? Are you really that selfish? Maybe you went in the military and risked, or even gave, your life or your limbs. Maybe you were counting on the GI Bill to pay for your education. You don’t think this was a fair deal, what Biden did? You self-serving bastard!

You pay your taxes and are distraught about our record $30 trillion-something national debt, and now you’ll be asked to contribute your share — estimated at $2,000 per taxpayer — to pay off the $300 billion (which is just a guess, no one can say how much this lawless act really will cost because no one has a clue how many people will be affected) this give-away will cost. You must not understand your role as a taxpayer, which is to support without question every mindless and insane thing your government does. Add the increase to inflation all this extra money going into the economy will bring, and the costs are likely to be even more. Who’s problem is that? Why, yours, of course!

And if recent history is any indication, fraud will take a big part of that money. Like the $100 billion-plus in pandemic relief funds that were stolen by fraudsters, only a very small percentage of which has been recovered or prosecuted. But that’s “official” fraud. Most of the funds will go to the “unofficial” fraud that lies at the basis of this whole thing. Biden’s “generosity” (at your expense) is aimed as a payoff to young voters to vote for Dems in the upcoming midterms, and an even bigger payoff to the colleges and universities that profit off the student loan program.

See those huge tuitions? $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, for at best a spotty education? When the student loan program was taken over by the federal government, it was just an incentive for college administrators to really jack up tuitions, which have risen at rates far in excess of the general inflation rate. Given the huge endowments most of these institutions have — not just measured in the billions of dollars, but in the several tens of billions of dollars — why should they not be forced to bear the costs of this largesse? Because this is really a payoff for all their contributions to the Democratic Party, to which 90 percent of university contributions go. When I lived in Key West 40-some years ago, it cost a six-pack of beer to buy a vote. The stakes have gotten a whole lot higher in the current game of political corruption and vote buying.

Nothing Else Matters, Either

Beat, rape, rob, or car jack someone in some of our biggest cities and at most you might face a misdemeanor charge, if that. You’re likely going to be back on the street the same day or the next one, all set to commit your next crime. Defend yourself against this kind of rampant criminality, and you might be the one who faces real criminal charges. This is not just speculation, but has become a daily occurrence in cities ranging from New York to L.A,. Chicago to Seattle, Philadelphia to San Francisco, and many in between. Is it any wonder that crime rates are rising at the fastest rates since the 1960s, or are reaching record rates in many places? If you’re a law-abiding citizen, just STFU and pay your taxes and take it. You don’t count. You don’t matter. You’re just some freaking racist if you complain about this kind of treatment. You’re getting in the way of remaking America, so move aside or get crushed.

Remember when Trump said there was a plan to do away with single-family zoning and moving urban problems right into your neighborhood? Well, guess what. That’s exactly what is happening. Not far from where I live, the city council of the city where I went to graduate school, Gainesville, Florida — home of the University of Florida and a city mostly of single-family homes — voted to do away with single-family zoning. The future is coming to a place near you, and it’s coming fast. Don’t like the idea? Tough. You don’t matter.

I’ve already opined and lamented what has clearly become a dual standard of justice in this country, and you can read about that here and here and in lots of others of my postings. This is no longer a collection of isolated incidents but has become what is called a pattern and practice. Combined with pervasive corruption, this might be the biggest threat facing our democracy, aside from the repression of any dissenting views and the near-total silence and even complicity on the part of the nation’s mainstream media.

When Nothing Matters Anymore, It Becomes Pervasive in the Society

If you have the stomach to watch the news, you’ll often see images of people being beaten, shot, and otherwise attacked on the streets while onlookers capture the scene on their phones, hoping for their 15 seconds of fame, while doing nothing to intervene or try to protect the victim. We’ve become a nation of voyeurs and cowards.

In the 1960s we had the famous case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman raped, robbed, and murdered on the street in Queens, New York, while onlookers observed from their apartment windows and did nothing. The incident shocked the conscious of the nation at the time. Today, we can’t even muster shock when these things occur. The onlookers that don’t scurry away watch and video the events.

This tendency was brought home to me yesterday. A young man doing some work for me related how he was driving down a busy street in the next town, and there was this little 4- or 5-year-old girl skipping down the center line of the street. Cars just drove by, paying her no heed as if she wasn’t a vulnerable little human but rather some curiosity or maybe even a nuisance to speed by. To his lasting credit, this guy stopped, turned his truck sideways across the road to stop traffic, began to try to get the girl off the road, and to find what careless adults had let her slip out from their attention. Down the road were a couple of guys looking at their boat on a trailer. He shouted at them, and they suddenly “noticed” that the little girl, who belonged to one of them, had gone missing. The damned boat was more important to him then the presence and safety of the little girl. The pair hadn’t even noticed she was missing.

It’s entirely possible this young guy saved the little girl’s life. But this is what we’ve come to. People can’t take a few minutes to stop and try to save a little girl skipping down the middle of a busy street. A boat takes precedence to a life. We see kids left to die in hot cars and people are advised to put their phones or their purses in the back seat so as not to forget their kid, as if a phone or purse is more important to them than the kid. People watch and look on as criminals attack innocent people, and they and the courts and the law look the other way. You struggle to pay your debts and your bills and your money is stolen and given to those who don’t.

The Romans at least confined their barbarity, their bread and circuses intended to placate and buy off the populace, to the arena. In modern-day America, the entire country is the arena.

When nothing matters anymore, nothing matters anymore.

Featured Image, Factory, Peter Hermann/Pixabay. Used with permission.

Wires, Cottonbro/Pexels. Used with permission.

Scrap Metal, Tom Fisk/Pexels. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Please comment, share this piece, and subscribe here, and there.

 

 

 

Buckos
What Does a Trillion Dollars Look Like?

What Does a Trillion Dollars Look Like?

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Back in the mid-1990s I was posted as Economic and Commercial Officer to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania. This was the time of the massive pyramid schemes into which most of the small country’s population sunk their funds and, with the schemes’ inevitable collapse, when Albania was brought to anarchy. I sounded the warning of what was going on and what would happen shortly after my arrival in Tirana in mid-1995, and my prediction of when the collapse would commence, in October a year later, was accurate almost to the week. To give proper credit, it was economy watchers in other organizations that brought my attention to the building crisis, though the U.S. Embassy and the State Department were blithely ignorant of what was going on until I started reporting on the schemes, gaining me an instant and very interested audience back in Washington.

In the midst of the schemes’ collapse some of the scheme heads and promoters bandied about references to large sums of money that they had taken in, such as $500 million, or even a billion dollars. This in a country of some 3 million people and a per capita income under $1,000. No one seemed to have any concept of what such amounts really meant or how big a billion dollars was, and many were willing to take the claims at face value. So I took it upon myself to write a piece about what a billion dollars – 1,000 million dollars – look like. You can see that piece here.

Now fast forward to 2018, and we here in the U.S. live in a country where not billions, but trillions of dollars, are bandied about like they’re nothing. Consider that the current federal government debt is $21.48 trillion, with an additional $1.2 trillion in state debt and $1.92 trillion in local government debt bringing total public debt to $24.6 trillion. Consumer debt – credit cards, auto loans, student loans, and personal loans – is approaching $4 trillion, and when mortgage debt is added in, private debt in the U.S. stands at $13.21 trillion. U.S. combined public and private debt, therefore, is nearly $38 trillion. Compare those numbers with the country’s Gross Domestic Product – the total sum of domestic economic activity – of about $20 trillion, or the entire world’s total GDP, known as Gross World Product, or GWP, which in 2014 was $78.28 trillion. That means the U.S. debt ratio is approaching (and sometimes surpasses) double U.S. GDP, and is nearly half of total world economic output. Meanwhile, the federal government budget for the fiscal year that begins October 1 is $4.407 trillion, with a projected deficit of $985 billion, which will be added to the debt.

All that is scary enough on its face, but it still doesn’t tell us what a trillion dollars looks like. So let’s dive into that question and try to put a face on that number.

First, the basics. Just as a billion dollars is 1,000 million dollars, a trillion dollars is 1,000 billion dollars, or 1 million million dollars. That’s a 1 with 12 zeroes after it. Like this: 1,000,000,000,000. So if you’re fortunate enough to be a millionaire, with $1 million in assets, you would just need to multiply your fortune 1,000 times to become a billionaire, or to multiply it 1 million times to become a trillionaire. There aren’t any trillionaires in the world – the world’s richest person is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, worth some $112 billion – but Apple became, at least for awhile, the first contemporary company to surpass $1 trillion in value, based on its stock price, on August 2.

Let’s use some of the same examples I previously used to illustrate a billion dollars, but now to give you some idea of what a trillion dollars look like.

  • Let’s say you go the bank and take out a trillion one-dollar bills. Just for fun, you decide to stretch them out end-to-end. You’d find this to be a tough task since they will stretch some 95,000,000 miles (150,000,000 kms), or 3,800 times around the Earth at the Equator. Actually, since the distance from the Earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles, you could spread them out across deep space between here and the sun, and a couple million miles on the way back.
  • If you decide you don’t have time for a trip to the sun and part-way back, you ask the bank to give you your trillion dollars in $100 bills, the largest current denomination bill issued by the U.S. Treasury. Laying these notes end-to-end, you’d only have to lay down a trail of 950,000 miles (1,500,000 kms), or a mere 38 times around the Earth at the Equator. If, on the other hand, you’re the space-going type, you’d be able lay them out to the moon and back – twice.
  • Now you go to the bank and just ask the teller to stack your trillion dollars outside. You’ll take them in $100 notes since you don’t have much room in the trunk of your car. You better be prepared, though, for a surprise. Your trillion dollars will stack 631 miles (1,015 kms) high, two and a half times the orbital altitude of the International Space Station. Now if you were to stack the federal budget deficit in $100 bills, you’d have a stack that reaches 13,554 miles (21,813 kms) high. Consider that the Earth’s diameter at the Equator is just 7,900 miles (12,714 kms), and you’ll have some idea of the scale of this. You see now why you had best not ask for your trillion dollars in singles, which would stack 63,100 miles (101,500 kms) high, almost eight times the polar diameter of the Earth. Now multiply that by 21.48 – the number of trillions in the federal budget deficit – and . . . well, you get the idea.
  • Okay, I get it. These dimensions are hard to picture. You’re more the saving type, so let’s see how long it will take you to save a trillion dollars. Notionally, you earn the average (median) U.S. national individual income of around $32,000. Since your spouse fully supports you, and you’re good at not paying any taxes, you’re able to stash away all $32,000. Hopefully patience is one of your stronger characteristics, since it will take you a mere 31 million years – 31,250,000 years, to be exact – to save $1 trillion. Of course, that could pose a problem. Humans in their current form have been on the planet only about 200,000 years. Humanoid ancestors were around about 6 million years ago. So you’re falling short by more than a factor of five of all human and proto-human life on Earth.
  • Now let’s say you’re doing a whole lot better than that and you can save $50,000, not in a year, but in a day. That means you can sock away $18,250,000 a year. In that case, it would only take you 54,794 years to save $1 trillion. If you were to save long enough to pay off all the public and private debt in the U.S., at $50,000/day it would take you 2,071,761 years, more or less, to get the pink slip on the debt. Kind of puts that 30-year mortgage into perspective, doesn’t it?
  • Forget saving. That’s not your style. You’re more the spending type, as is your spouse. You’re among the lucky one percenters, together earning $400,000 a year. You decide to spend it all (taxes be damned), and are aiming to spend a cool $1 trillion. Well, that would only take you a quarter million years – that’s 250,000 years.
  • Let’s say you’re the lucky type, instead. The very lucky type. Starting the year Christ was born, you buy a lottery ticket that miraculously wins and nets you $500 million every single year. You put away that $500 million prize, and the next $500 million prize, and the 1,998 $500 million prizes after that, and you finally reach $1 trillion in winnings – 18 years ago. Two thousand years after your winning streak began, your trillion dollars will go to your distant heirs.
  • Looking at things from a different perspective, the current U.S. federal budget deficit equates to more than $65,950 in debt for every one of the 325.7 million men, women, and children living in the U.S. Adding in all the other debt, and the burden becomes more than $116,000 per every single capita. Again, keep in mind that the average adult annual income is just about $32,000, and average U.S. household income is about $59,000.

So now you have some idea what a trillion dollars looks like. And if that isn’t enough to freak you out, or at minimum give you cause for pause, I don’t know what would.

If you have some other illustrations, please post them here in your comments.