Dumbfuck Of The Year

They grow 'em stoopid in Tin-ass-cy:

SO HERE’S A QUESTION: Would a default on Treasuries accomplish what the Balanced Budget Amendment was supposed to achieve, by forcing the government to spend no more than it takes in?

I dunno, Glenn...would shoving a stick in your ass make you smarter than wood?

Bruce Bartlett goes over the reasons this latest moronic trope floated by the Right Wing Talking Trash Elmo doll won't work.

1. The Treasury can never default on the debt
[...]
2. Even if the Treasury somehow defaulted—that is, failed to make a timely interest payment—it would not achieve what Reynolds and other conservatives wish: an end to all federal borrowing and de facto imposition of a balanced budget by cutting all spending in excess of revenues.
[...]
3. The disruption to financial markets, commerce and the well-being of all Americans from a Treasury default are really beyond my ability to fully describe. But here are a few points to ponder. Interest rates would skyrocket to unprecedented levels, which would cause a collapse of private borrowing and massive capital losses for all bond holders, which include pension funds, insurance companies and foreign central banks, among others. It might be impossible for pension funds to make payments to millions of individuals depending on them for life itself.
[...]

...Bartlett goes onto mention that the cost of borrowing for the United States would skyrocket, since our Treasuries are back by "the full faith and credit" of the US government, which of course would default as quickly as the bonds.

Reynolds, of course, backpedals in the face of such an exhaustive and detailed analysis of what one can only hope was an opiate nightmate.

But since this has become a fairly common trope among the chattering monkeys on the right wing porch as it ties in neatly with the Teabaggers and the Paulists, you need to be aware of it.

First off, we've already been through a dry run of an American bankruptcy: the stagflation of the late 1970s, early 1980s, caused in large part by the OPEC nations holding the rest of the world hostage: de facto, we were operationally bankrupt as a nation.

How? When the Fed tried to loosen up the economy, there was no proportionate increase in economic activity. The money went to oil. This created an inflationary spiral and next thing you know, we've raised interest rates (the prime reached not only double digits, but approached 20%, a rate usually associated with third world military juntas).

Which only served to dampen down the economy.

By the way, we are currently in the middle of yet another stagflationary period. Oil, again, played a large part in it. Remember $5 a gallon gas? It wasn't that long ago.

Odd, considering we had two oil men running the country at the time it kicked off.

Monetary policy hasn't worked this time, either, as the money supply was pretty much dried up going in, due to low interest rates and the availability of cheap mortgages drying up investable cash reserves.

But I digress into territory not suited for a blog devoted to snarcasm.

Too, defaulting on national obligations is not like going to bankruptcy court because you can't pay your mortgage anymore. China (which has started dumping Treasuries, so beware) isn't about to accept pennies on the dollar in exchange for a clean bill of health.

We will be forced to pay it back in some form or other. If you don't believe me, just think of how we've bullied and badgered third world nations to repay their debts to us, funds that could have been used to improve infrastructure, or for economic development.

You'll note the Bushies only got involved because they wanted Iraqi war debts forgiven, and Iraq sits on the second largest oil reserve in the world.

If anything, defaulting on American treasuries would force even more spending on domestic social programs, while forcing the United States to cut back on its defense programs.

Hm. Maybe it's not such a bad idea, after all!

On The Clock

Each morning, I sit and read my e-mail in the bathroom.

This morning, at precisely six, ThumbPer meowed. He meowed the meow of a cat who was patiently waiting his turn. It was time to go meditate with a cup of coffee and a cat.

At precisely six. I wondered how he knew, what biological mechanism made his clock tick at that exact moment? Can he read a clock? Does he own a watch?

Then I began to think about the world. We're all run on clocks and calendars. Most people in this country, and many more in the world outside it, have to live by a clock. We log into work, we run to catch a train, our TV shows are on at a specific time.

And then I thought about my job, and something odd occured to me: the people who own the company, they aren't really beholden to clocks. Things get done when they want them to get done, on their schedule. Yes, to a degree, where necessary they have to genuflect to time.

But not as often as you might think.

All this leads me to some thoughts about Barack Obama's address last night:

[W]e have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.

Well, that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.

He's right, you know, and he didn't single out anybody, didn't exempt you or me, the rich or the poor, the bankers or the brokers (well, maybe the bankers a little), or Democrats or Republicans.

We've all lived as though time was a renewable resource. But it's not. Time is the avenger. Time is what happens when you've lived one way, always looking in the other direction. Time is the wall you run into.

The most curious struggle within life is to balance two things: now and then.

We should all plan for the future and make contingencies for what happens then.

We should all "live in the now," as we say in acting classes.

Funny thing is, we've failed miserably at both.

We've had a thirty year headstart on renewable energy, a fairly simple, logical, and healthier alternative to burning mushed dinosaur soup. We import more of that goo than ever before.

We've had twenty years of warnings with respect to the rising costs of healthcare, and the declining wages to pay for them. Yet here we are, watching an American go bankrupt every thirty seconds because he or she can't afford to pay for the God-given gift of a healthy life.

We've had decades of warnings with respect to global warming and the twin disaster of sudden ice ages (and conservatives? These are not conflicting ideas. The earth can warm up as a whole while we plunge into an ice age in the northern and southern temperate zones), yet our planet is getting hotter and the warmest ten years on record have been the past ten.

And we've sat on our asses and did nothing, except mock Al Gore, mock Jimmy Carter and mock Hillary Clinton.

(Hm. Those are all Democrats! But I digress...)

The Obama stimulus package/budget announcement tries to reconcile these two aspects of time. The stimulus package is for the now. The budget is for the then.

It is a bold and grand vision, to be sure, and the real test comes in a year or two, when the economy has (we hope) recovered and the deficit inches down at first. Can Congress be mature enough to sit on its hands and continue to tinker with the deficit or will the special interests begin to ratchet up the rhetoric, which actually began with Bobby Jindal's amateurish and childish (Fox's words, not mine!)response to Obama's speech last night?

Time waits for no one, and it is on this basis that we, the people, must take control of our country again. It is we who must keep our Congresscritters responsible and it is we who must keep Barack Obama responsible (admittedly, I sense this will be the easier task). And it is we who must keep our local politicians responsible for the funds they receive from the Feds and from our tax dollars.

We have to get off our asses and own our time on this planet. Own the now. Own the then.

If the farm subsidy to Big Agra is about to be snuck through a late night session by the critters from the cornfields, then it's up to us to rally up the rest of the nation to put a stop to it.

If the Defense Department is insistent on buying yet another legacy weapon for a war they fought twenty years ago, it's up to us to call them on the carpet.

It's our future, not our elected officials, who, like my bosses, have forgotten what a clock really is.

A marker in the river of our lives that delineates the now from the then. We live on the clock. We need to act like it.

On The Up Beat

Apropos of my column yesterday about denial and America comes this story:

President Obama's address Tuesday to a joint session of Congress will have a heavy emphasis on the economy and will try to strike an optimistic tone, aides said.

That's a sign Obama has heard the criticism, including from former President Clinton, that he needs to mix sober talk with an upbeat bottom line.

"He believes we will meet these challenges and lift ourselves out of this" recession, one top aide said. "He will say, 'The best days are ahead of us.' "

First, you'll note that this isn't being called a "State Of The Union" address. That will likely come later this year, once the stimulus package has begun to work its way through the economy (figure in May).

More important, comparisons have been drawn between Obama's recent doom-and-gloom speechifying and Jimmy Carter's, which has given a talking point to the mainstream media, beholden as it is to conservative talking points, owned as it is by conservative white men.

A President walks a difficult line, to be sure, which is why we will accept little white lies from him (or her). He can't appear too optimistic or too pessimistic.

Let's take Jimmy Carter as an example. Here was a man who truly was as honest as a President could afford to be. He spoke plainly about the need to conserve energy (the man was a visionary) and to analyze the country's mood, speaking to the general malaise we were suffering.

And got hammered for both.

In Obama's case, his emphasis on looking forward will be a tonic against the whining, mewling little children on the right wing, who talk about deficits and debt as if it was something they suddenly discovered after 8 years of Bush spending us into oblivion. After all, what's a trillion dollars to help your countrymen, when you spent at least that much on a nation 6,000 miles away that you will never visit populated by people who don't particularly like you much.

That's not to say that the deficit is nothing important...even if Dick Cheney said we could safely ignore it. It is, and Obama is correct to address the need to tighten belts.

There are, however, precious few places where one can cut spending much and have a measurable effect on the deficit as a whole. In 2008, entitlement spending, apart from Social Security and Medicare-- both of which are funded off-budget under their own trust funds, but which represent roughly 43% of tax revenues, about $1.3 trillion-- is roughly 27%, of which about 2/5 is mandatory. Interest on outstanding debt is another 10% (and rising).

Leaving defense spending of 21% (absent the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have always been unbudgeted, until the Obama administration).

So factor in the defense budget of $626 billion, plus another $500 billion for the wars, and you see that defense spending rivals and might even exceed the budget for any other individual entitlement.

US defense spending is twice the combined defense spending of the rest of NATO. The US spends roughly 47% of the world's defense spending, meaning that if we avoid pissing the entire world off, we have more weapons than we could possibly need. Ever. Right now.

That's not to say that we should stop finding more and better means of defending ourselves. It just means that we can make do with what we have for a while, and do not need shiny new aircraft carriers every year or spanking new planes every quarter.

It means, in short, making Federal spending fall more into line with the actual revenues received from the various states. Fortunately, most of the governors who lined up against the stimulus package have been from states who net more in Federal spending than they contribute in taxes!

They don't want the money? Fine. No problem. We'll leave that money on the table, and cut defense spending, close bases and cancel contracts. I got no problem with that.

We are, quite literally, at a place where we can and must choose butter over guns. You can't eat a bullet, unless you intend, you know...