Musings Of An Indie WriterWednesday, March 31, 2010
Worth 1000 Words
A TSA worker pats down a traveler at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on Sept. 22, the day the government introduced stricter security measures.
”The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.
We now live in a society where the arrest of 9 “christian militia” nutcases who are most likely the hapless victims of a government agent provocateur garners above the fold front page media coverage while suicide bombers in Moscow who murder scores are relegated to a page 4 report that fails to even hint at their religious affiliation.
Outrage anyone?
I thought not.
Defeat from Jaws of Victory Dept.
Or maybe I should post this under the rubric of “News Stories I Just Don’t Have the Heart to Read.”
Or, “Gutless, Clueless, Boot-Licking Republicans.”
Whatever.
“GOP Wary of Campaign to Repeal Health Law.” By Charles Babington and Philip Elliott, AP, 3/31/10.
Highlighting the irrelevant, concealing the relevant.
The liberal media get the story out:
It’s curious to me that the lamestream media is tiptoeing around trying to avoid mentioning that the latest suicide bombers in Russia are muslims. However, they’re having no problem labeling milita members as “Christian.”
Comment by momcat617 on “Defending Against Enemies Domestic.” Investor’s Business Daily, 3/30/10.
Safire’s Ghost: To Verb Or Not To Verb?
One of the minor sins prevalent in common English usage is what the C.S.O. colorfully terms verbing: the use of a noun, or some transformation of a noun, where a verb would normally go. Consider all the following:
- Did he butter his toast, or eat it dry?
- The ambassador tabled several motions after the recess.
- He oiled the chainsaw before committing the mass murder.
All the above are easy to understand, but why? Butter, table, and oil are nouns. Usage has coined verbs from them, not because there's no other way to express the intended meaning, but for convenience and concision. In particular:
- Butter replaced "spread butter on," consuming two fewer words.
- Tabled is jargon that pertains to negotiations and parliamentary procedure.
- Oiled is shorter than "lubricated," and includes as a bonus what kind of lubrication the murderer used, which might be of paramount interest to the forensic technicians.
These usages are blessed by custom, having entered our common speech through relentless repetition. Yet of this we may be sure: When they were first used, they elicited raised eyebrows and double-takes.
Should you play games like those? Perhaps you prefer Philly to churned creme de la cow. In that case, why not say you cheesed your toast? Or perhaps you're a low-grade prankster. In that case, why not say you wedgied your classmate? After all, there are no laws against it. (Against verbing, that is; the legality of the wedgie varies from state to state.) Perhaps this will be your opportunity to acquire a reputation for charming verbal eccentricity, and thus win entry to a few literary cocktail parties. You might even leave your mark indelibly on the English language. That would be an achievement of some magnitude; English is destined to be around far longer than you are.
It's a dangerous game. You won't be killed or maimed, but you might get a reputation as an abuser of helpless nouns. There are localities where persons so marked are not permitted to buy real estate.
Innovation in language is best avoided, except when you're deliberately striving for a quirky or poetic air. If you want to be clearly understood, using words strictly according to their conventional function and meaning is usually the preferable course.
There are exceptions, of course. In the case of the ambassador above, the use of tabled could only have been avoided by a somewhat awkward construction: "The ambassador submitted several motions for consideration after the recess." That's why the parliamentary jargon was originally coined. However, the more prudent course is to avoid verbing an innocent noun, unless the nefarious practice had closed its jaws upon that noun and had its way with the poor thing long before you got there.
Ironically, the use of verbs in place of nouns isn't just non-controversial; it's actually a formal aspect of the English language. The practice takes two forms:
- Infinitive: The "to" form of a verb, which expresses the action it describes in a numberless and impersonal way: "To go to the Moon was an early goal of the space program."
- Gerund: The "ing" form of a verb, which serves much the same function as the infinitive: "Sweeping the sidewalk is my job."
...so we don't get to call this "nouning."
In the previous essay on noun and pronoun agreement, your Curmudgeon mentioned that there are agreement rules that extend to verbs. In particular, a predicate verb should agree with its subject noun in number:
- A wise mechanic employs a plumber's wrench to adjust this fitting.
- Baseball players employ considerable eye-hand coordination.
But here the English language is a bit stranger than in most places: Singular and plural verb forms apply almost exclusively to the present tense. The perfect, past perfect, future, and future perfect forms of an English verb are number-independent:
- The mechanic [employed | had employed | will employ | will have employed] his plumber's wrench on the fitting. The baseball players [employed | had employed | will employ | will have employed] their eye-hand coordination.
The joker in the deck is the little-understood imperfect tense:
- The mechanic was employing his plumber's wrench.
- The baseball players were employing their eye-hand coordination.
...because the imperfect tense, used to refer to an action after it's begun but before it's completed, compounds an active or passive verb with a form of the cognate verb to be. However, this is seldom of consequence in either spoken or written English; most persons will avoid a number mistake in the imperfect tense without having to think about it.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
When I look at President Barack Obama, I don’t see black. I see red.
My pick for President last go around wasn’t Barack Obama, but it wasn’t due to some racist DNA molecules or because I picked up some venomous hate for blacks sitting on a toilet seat someplace or became a hater some other way experientially.
Actually, my pick for a guy to run for President last time out wasn’t a guy at all. It was Condi Rice. I believe she’d preserve, protect and defend the Constitution with her life.
At this point in time, if Allen West asked me to work for him for President, I’d be reporting for duty tomorrow. If I had a son, I’d be overjoyed if he were exactly like West, skin color and all. On the other hand, say I was left of the Black Caucus, a full blown female racist, I could still call a spade a spade without fear of somebody calling me a racist. Because, the fact is, the race card has run its course. It’s thrown a shoe. The hate drug has lost its potency. Label it impotent. Partly, because people like Al Sharpton have so overused it.
But mostly because President Barack Obama along with Attorney General, Eric Holder, killed it. I can trace the exact day. May 15, 2009, the date on which they decided to drop an open and shut case of voter intimidation against the Black Panthers.
Over the last 14 months, they’ve proved themselves to be the racists of racists. I could site example after hateful example, but I’m not going to waste the ink. You all know them chapter and verse.
It’s a whole different world, though, when you call a politician a Communist.
I like to throw around the term “neo com”, but it just doesn’t have the same ability to engender knee jerk politically correct appalled reaction as using the word, Communist.
Which I can’t resist. Which I can’t refrain from because Obama is as Communist as a Lenin or Stalin. Obama simply hasn’t grown enough in his Communist ideology to start killing the opposition willy nilly. Obama’s only at the stage when he can support the wholesale slaughter of the unborn. But like they used to say, once you smoke marijuana, the trip to heroin, cocaine, yellow jackets, reds, blues, Amy’s and rainbows often doesn’t take long, just pack a change of underwear.
Of course, part of the reason I’m mad as a hatter at Obama is his crusade to financially run this country into the ground. In eight more months, our national debt will be 17 trillion dollars. Only if you use Obama math does the figure not scare you.
President Obama is going down in history as by far, unanimously, the worst President in the history of the United States. And on so many levels.
When I look at Zero, I don’t see black. I see red. Not even crooked accountants can straighten this administration out. Obama’s not just a Communist. He’s the most corrupt one alive.
Long winter
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California’s race to the bottom.
In short, we are witnessing a highly advanced and prosperous state [California], long endowed with superior human capital, turning into the exact opposite in just one generation. What can be done to stop this race to the bottom? The answer is simple: California and Washington need to enforce existing immigration law. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince the public that this is necessary, so deeply entrenched are myths about illegal immigration.
One myth is that because America is a country of immigrants and has successfully absorbed waves of immigration in the past, it can absorb this wave. . . . Research has shown that even after 20 years in the country, most illegal aliens (the overwhelming majority of whom are Hispanic) and their children remain poor, unskilled, and culturally isolated they constitute a new permanent underclass.
Perhaps the most disingenuous myth about illegal immigrants is that they do not impose any cost on society. . . .
“National Review Online: Stop Illegals, Save CA.” By Alex Alexiev, NPR (“Partner content” from NationalReviewOnline), 8/24/09 (emphasis added).
Monday, March 29, 2010
Trends And Processes
HMPH! If that Fran person thinks he can out-philosophize a Curmudgeon Emeritus, he's got another think coming! This Christian stuff is just a smokescreen, you know; he's really a secret Illuminatus, one of their elders, in fact, and they've got big plans.
Well, anyway. It's high time someone addressed one of the epistemological fundamentals we seem to lack: the significance of a trend of some objective sort, and how one determines it.
On any given day, the temperature of the ambient air begins to rise with the rising of the Sun. Here on Long Island, the difference between the temperature at dawn and the temperature at Noon is sometimes as high as fifty Fahrenheit degrees. That ciphers out to a temperature rate of seven to eight Fahrenheit degrees per hour.
HEAVENS! If that trend continues, it could be 200° by midnight! A crisis is upon us! We must drop everything else and act now!!
Of course not, but why not? Because we grasp the process that's driving that increase in temperature. We know how it works, and have observed it in action for long enough that we're confident it won't "run away" today, or any other day. Natural laws are involved.
Comparable things could be said about the "global warming" thesis. Those promoting it assembled some numbers -- let's leave aside for the moment whether those numbers bore any demonstrable relation to reality -- argued that they displayed an upward trend, and plunged immediately to the depths of crisis-mongering. The world is running a fever, and Mankind is the reason! This must be combated at once! Sell your SUV and buy a Prius!
That set of assertions bears considerable resemblance to the extremely foolish one described above it. Even if the temperature measurements beneath them were trustworthy, the most important aspect of the matter, the underlying processes causing temperature escalation, would be undetermined. The argument of the warmistas has been:
- We have this mechanism called the greenhouse effect;
- It's driven by certain types of atmospheric gases, including the effluents from the use of fossil fuels;
- Mankind's use of fossil fuels is therefore a contributor to global warming;
- Therefore, Mankind must sharply curb, perhaps eliminate altogether, its use of fossil fuels.
But the warmistas' argument is badly founded, on process grounds:
- The greenhouse effect is a laboratory phenomenon that has been reproducibly demonstrated only in a closed volume of gas, not something that verifiably causes a temperature increment in the Earth's huge, open-to-the-sky atmosphere.
- We know of other temperature-influencing mechanisms of demonstrated power, including radiative input, radiative output, precipitation, albedo regulation, and convection against the Earth's surface;
- The nomination of a single highly controversial mechanism, whose power is not yet established and might never be, as the source of the postulated warming, while dismissing all the others as irrelevant is arguable at the very least; it certainly isn't "settled science."
In other words, even were there absolutely no doubt that the atmosphere is warming, we could not be certain what's causing that, given our current knowledge and the data we've amassed. A trend is not probative until one is certain what process is driving the trend.
Just now there's an enormous political contest over whether domestic American oil exploration, extraction, and refinement should increase. You might think the notion absurd, but nevertheless, there are interest groups, the warmistas prominent among them, arguing that the expansion of any aspect of our domestic oil industry should be prohibited by law. They've advanced a number of reasons: the anthropogenic global warming thesis; the environmental impacts of drilling, extraction, and refining; dislike of corporations; and opposition to the advancement of technological civilization. The reason you'll hear will depend upon what particular species of activist is haranguing you at the moment.
A new one, which your Curmudgeon has only heard recently, is that further domestic exploration for oil is pointless. After all, the U.S. only has a few percent of the world's proven reserves of oil, so why look for more when we know it's not there?
Such folks should have chosen periods other than Vocabulary to catch their naps. "Proven reserves" are deposits of oil that have already been found and verified seismologically. Our proven reserves at any given instant reflect only the amount of exploration and verification done to this point; we cannot base on them any non-risible statements about what we haven't found.
Alongside that, there are political and economic considerations. When the price of oil is low, there's no great incentive to find further deposits; when it rises, that incentive rises as well. Advances in exploration and extraction technology also play their part. Equally to the point and possibly more important than all else, when political forces forbid oil exploration or extraction -- particularly in likely-looking regions such as the continental shelf or Prudhoe Bay -- it will not occur, freezing the "proven reserves" at whatever figure they attained before such bans were enacted.
The process that drives changes in the proven-reserves figure is quite as important as the one that drives changes in the atmosphere's temperature.
Among America's contested social issues, few are more hotly argued than that over sex education in our government-run schools. You might recall that the big campaign for such curricula began in the late 1960s and flowered fully in the 1970s. The result has been the institution of mandatory sex education courses in the great majority of the government-run high schools in the United States.
The original argument for those courses was that they were a necessary component in the public-health campaign to reduce teen pregnancies and teen venereal disease. Yet subsequent to the wide institution of those courses, teen pregnancy rates and teen venereal disease rates both experienced substantial increases. Those increases have confounded the proponents of mandatory sex education ever since. The closest they came to a response was to claim that "things would have been worse" without the courses. This is an assertion that can never be verified or falsified; it's an article of faith.
Ironically, the pre-sex-education decades had been a time of declining teen pregnancy and venereal disease rates. If the public-health data of the time can be trusted, they'd been slowly but steadily declining for about twenty years. That trend lacks a definitive explanation as well. It's possible that demographics were involved, or perhaps the widening availability of contraceptives in those years. But we cannot know.
When we cannot know, we cannot be legitimately doctrinaire about "what to do."
Much of the special-interest activity of our time is advanced through the tendentious use of trends, whether actual or fictional. Few of those trends are firmly tied to an underlying process in which we can repose confidence. Large-scale systems such as the Earth's atmosphere remain beyond our grasp. Our understanding of social forces is partial as well; it contains many anomalies and exceptions. We know more about quantum mechanics than about the thermodynamics of the atmosphere. We know far more about the physiology of the brain than about what moves a people toward this or that sort of behavior, the conceits of psychologists and sociologists notwithstanding.
You'd think the members of our "intellectual elite" would draw the moral. You'd think they'd be reluctant to take firm positions about such things, especially considering how foolish being doctrinaire but wholly mistaken would make them look, some years down the road.
You'd be wrong.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Knowledge Versus Vision: A Palm Sunday Rumination
Palm Sunday. Holy Week is upon us once again.
American Catholics who go to Mass today will hear, and participate in, the recitation of the Passion according to Luke. Yet today is the commemoration, not of Jesus's trial and execution, but of His entry into Jerusalem, the sacred city of the Jews. He was greeted with jubilation by His admirers in the city. They spread cloaks along His way, and palm fronds before His mount. They chanted hosannas, overjoyed that the promised Messiah had come at last to His capital. He and His disciples entered the city through a celebration that might be compared to a victory parade.
Mere days later, an even larger and louder crowd, in which were many of those who had chanted hosannas at Jesus's appearance, demanded His torture and death.
He knew. He had always known.
Among the great and permanently insoluble mysteries of existence is the nature of time. We don't perceive time directly, as we do the other manifestations of our universe. We infer it from duration and change. We see things happen, pairs of events whose elements cannot be rearranged by our perceptions, and deduce that time has passed between them. We experience causes and effects. We see birth, growth, and death. We watch as the mainspring of the cosmos, in obedience to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, gradually, inexorably runs down.
No lesser creature endures that burden. An animal's whole life is a single flash of its consciousness. Things happen, but he does not sequence them nor draw conclusions from them. Blessed is he.
Time is both the ultimate gift and the traitor whose guaranteed betrayal cannot be pinpointed. Indeed, time is even more than that. Because it invisibly suffuses our universe, it renders us temporal creatures incapable of grasping the absence of time: the condition called eternity.
As we cannot comprehend eternity, we cannot comprehend the Being Whose nature is founded in it: God.
We know only this much: God created time and embedded Man in it. Time gives us the opportunity to become more than we were; in this, it's among the greatest of our blessings. But it also gives us a universal matrix for reality as we know it, confining our thinking without release. If we study greatly and strain much, we can see forward in time, if only a little way. But we cannot stand above time and view its tapestry whole.
He does.
Man, with great effort and diligence, can know a little of the world. He can attain a partial understanding of the laws graven into the fabric of reality. With that knowledge, he can make some confident predictions about the outcome of certain processes, the effects that will flow from certain causes. For it is the nature of knowledge that it's involved in its entirety with prediction, which cannot be separated from time.
God does not "know." He doesn't need to, for He has no need to predict. He sees -- all at once.
The only partially comprehensible analogy we have to eternity is the mathematical concept of infinity.
An infinity cannot be measured or manipulated by ordinary means. Add one to infinity, or take one away, and it remains as it was. Indeed, add one infinity to another, and the result might be no larger than either of the addends. It took a very unusual mind, that of Georg Cantor, equipped with a sheaf of unprecedented techniques, to bring Man a glimpse of the nature of infinities.
But infinity, as elusive as it is, is more comprehensible than eternity by far, for it is a mathematical concept bounded in ways to which eternity is not subject. Cantor was able to deduce that there are orders of infinity -- that infinities of one type contain more members than infinities of another. No human mind can perform a similar operation on eternity. Whatever we conjecture about it will remain only that -- conjecture -- until we pass beyond the veil of time.
But some conjectures about eternity confer a peculiar sort of illumination. Some such conjectures might be the closest we can come to appreciating -- not understanding -- God's Plan for Man.
One of the many magnificences of Christianity is its celebration of the cyclicality of life. The Christian calendar is a three-year cycle, which embeds a one-year cycle familiar to nearly all of us in the West:
- Advent: the time of preparation for the arrival of God made flesh;
- The Nativity and the passage of Jesus's early years;
- Jesus's time preaching and ministering to the Jews of Judea;
- Lent: the time of preparation for the Passion;
- The Passion and Resurrection of Christ;
- The forty days to the Ascension;
- The ten days to the Pentecost;
- "Ordinary time," during which we celebrate the Apostles and their embrace of their mission to "Go and teach all nations."
That one-year cycle repeats endlessly, and well that it should, for the repetition is a human-scale recreation of God's own view of those events. To us, they are in the past: we can read of them and commemorate them, but they are temporally behind us. To God, they have happened, are happening, and will happen forevermore, until the end of time itself.
To God, the incarnation, birth, maturation, ministry, sacrifice, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus is, in our inadequate human language, an ongoing event.
Man knows; God sees. His Now is unbounded. What He sees is in His vision always. He does not discover, remember, or forget.
Jesus, being God Incarnate, stood simultaneously in time and outside it. As God, He saw. As Man, He knew -- and we know from the story of His final hours that He feared and suffered as a man would, not with the indifference and invulnerability of an eternal and omniscient God.
The cycles of the calendar are a common man's sole pale foretaste of eternity. The seasons will repeat inexorably, for as long as we live. Each day has a clock-face like all the others. Each hour is like the hour before and the hour after. And so with the minute, and the second, down to the tiny time-reversible cycles that characterize matter and energy at the lowest levels to which we can penetrate.
These things, from their repetition, give us a little of the flavor of eternity, but they cannot reveal anything much of its nature. It might be best to say that it has no nature, for "nature" in human terms is inseparable from definition: the assignment of a thing to a genus according to the characteristics it shares with other things, and the elucidation of the differentia by which it's distinguished from those others. Those aspects of eternity, if I'm not distorting human language merely by saying so, are barred to our examination as temporal creatures.
Yet we will see them when we come into eternity. We've been promised so. Holy Week, from Palm Sunday through to Easter, is our most dramatic reminder.
As there are greater and lesser infinities, there could be multiple eternities as well. A creature outside time has no experience of duration; in that regard his consciousness is closer to that of the animals than that of a living man. Thus it's feasible that one could experience an eternity in Hell and an eternity in Heaven. It's a conundrum no theologian, past, present or future, can unravel.
But of this we may be sure: God endures. He Who gave us the gift of time awaits us in eternity. As He sent His Son to inform us, we who wish to do so can join Him there. Just as the rainbow was His seal on His promise to Noah, that His Son died and rose from the dead is His seal on His promise of eternal life.
The hosannas at the gates of Jerusalem did give way to the jeers and tears of Golgotha. But those too gave way: to the Alleluias of the Resurrection, and Christ's promise to mortal Man:
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen, and ye receive not our witness. If I have told you of earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. [The Gospel According To John, 3:11-15]
And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round the throne and the beasts and the elders; and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; Saying with a loud voice,'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain
To receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength,
And honor, and glory, and blessing.'And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying:
'Blessing and honor, and glory and power,
Be unto him that sitteth upon the throne,
And unto the Lamb for ever and ever.'And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever. [The Revelation of St. John the Divine, 6:11-14]
In eternity, it is all one.
May God bless and keep you all.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Food for thought
I read Scott’s post below with great interest. It got me thinking about an image I’d seen recently:
Most things in life are subject to diminishing marginal returns - can you really make use of that 7th plasma TV you just bought? - but one thing that’s been oddly missing from that discussion is debt. Debt is an interesting beast - it wants to be deflationary but can inflate if the circumstances are right. It’s actually fairly easy to distinguish the two cases. Consider the trader who begins with $20,000 to purchase a particular stock. Now, consider the case in which another trader levers up another $20,000 and puts it into the stock.
If the stock appreciates from $5 to $10, trader 1 comes away with a return of 100%, while trader 2 comes away with a return of 200% after paying his lender back, or twice as much! Because the debt was tied to a process that generated extra value (the company took trader 2’s $40,000 investment and made something with it that it sold at a profit), the debt inflated the economy.
Now, consider a different case. Mr. Smith is jealous of his neighbor’s brand new plasma TV and wants to outdo him. The only problem is that Smith’s expenses eat up all or nearly all of his income. To solve this problem, Smith goes to the bank and takes out a line of credit on his home equity (a HELOC) and uses that to purchase the TV. At first blush, there may not seem to be a lot of difference from the previous case. After all, Smith’s purchase produced a profit at the manufacturer, who was able to use it to hire a new employee or build a new factory.
On the other hand, consider Smith’s situation. He now not only owes the $7,000 he borrowed to purchase the TV to the bank, but interest on the loan going forward. By the time he is finished paying, the bank will have taken in far more of Smith’s money than the manufacturer did in profit margin, and if Smith uses any of the refinancing or “credit card roulette” games that were popular over the last several years, even more wealth will be destroyed. That is debt’s deflationary side.
In the meantime, the “assets” sitting on the balance sheet of Smith’s bank are basically IOUs from Smith and others like him. As soon as enough of them default, the bank’s asset based is wiped out and any entities that relied on the bank for financing their spending will have to go elsewhere. If a lot of banks are facing similar situations, financing gets awfully tough to find. That is roughly what happened to the United States and most of the rest of the world in 2008.
So, is the debt the government is pouring on the inflationary Dr. Jekyll or the deflationary Mr. Hyde? The government, of course, is not like the stock trader or Mr. Smith, because it can print money and legally steal it from others raise taxes. Still, the above chart is striking. We’ve gotten used to thinking of the goverment as “special,” but the government is part of the overall economic system - the government’s debt is another tally in the nation’s total debt, all of which is supported by the nation’s income.
What the above chart is showing is that the nation has hit the wall in terms of the productivity of debt. The cause is simple enough - the nation’s income can’t sustain the total debt load in the system. The private sector has done what it’s supposed to do, namely begin the process of shrinking the debt through repayment or default. In response to this, the federal government has done precisely what it shouldn’t have, namely try to replace contracting private debt with its own. Oh, I understand all the theories - the government gets to borrow at cheaper rates, so its debt isn’t “as bad” as Smith’s - - - oh wait, forget that - several private corporations are floating debt at lower rates than the government is now. But even if that weren’t true, the government has to service its debt just as consumers and corporations do. Even if today’s rates are cheaper, private expectations change based on what they could be going forward.
More problematic, government money is “printed” in the form of holdings added mainly to banks and other assorted funds. Keynesian economics says those banks should then go out and lend that money to spur production, but right now there is hardly anyone both willing and able to take on more debt. So, the money is just sitting around losing value as time goes on. This is the source of the chart at the top of this post. Now that the threshold has been crossed, each new dollar of debt is destroying the economy rather buoying it, whatever the government’s GDP “growth” numbers say.
Obamacare is another swarm of locusts unleashed on an already credit-starved economy. Paying the insurance companies to pay the government to pay the insurance companies to pay for health care is such an absurd Rube Goldberg device it’s hard to fathom, and because the middle man will be taking his cut at each step, it promises to raise the price of health care services while destroying their value. Additionally, all of it will be financed by more deficit spending with some taxes thrown in.
I think the Democrats’ (particularly Obama’s) bet has always been the majority of them would be out of office before the **** really started to hit the fan, and that the “entitlement” (actually welfare) would be so firmly entrenched that the only option would be to keep raising taxes rather than cut the spending. Everything that I’m seeing leads me to believe the room is going to start getting smelly a lot sooner than they anticipated.
Go find those Chris Christie videos I posted awhile back and watch them if you haven’t already. That’s the future, not Obama.
