MUST SEE CHART: Sesame Street's Elmo Explains The National Debt
Two disturbing charts on the explosive growth of the national debt. The second graphic illustrates how much new debt is being piled on every month. It is the cost of this so-called recovery, and if people understood that cost, no one would think it was worth it. Guest post from Mark McHugh.
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Guest post from regular contributor Mark McHugh.
Understanding the National Debt -- Sesame Street Edition
Keep It Simple, Stupid
Words to live by. Remember that when someone starts explaining which way the smoke on an electric train is gonna blow, you should probably check your wallet.
I’m tired of convoluted explanations of simple problems. It distracts people from the truth, which is usually the intent of those doing the explaining. The end result is large numbers of people pretending to understand things they don’t. Bernie Madoff’s “success”, ETFs, Treasury auctions, the housing market.
The easiest way to confuse people is with numbers so mind-numbingly big they mean nothing to the average person. What’s 13 and a half Trillion dollars supposed to mean to Joe Sixpack? This is the best I could come up with:
Can you say “Unsustainable”?
Another way to confuse people is with words. Focus, if you will, on just two words from the Purposes page of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008:
The purposes of this chapter are—
(1) to immediately provide authority and facilities that the Secretary of the Treasury can use to restore liquidity and stability to the financial system of the United States; and
(2) to ensure that such authority and such facilities are used in a manner that—
(A) protects home values, college funds, retirement accounts, and life savings;
(B) preserves homeownership and promotes jobs and economic growth;
(C) maximizes overall returns to the taxpayers of the United States; and
(D) provides public accountability for the exercise of such authority.
Protect values. Sounds downright noble, doesn’t it? It does until you think about what those words really mean in this context. The inescapable conclusion is:
Protecting values means distorting prices
In order to distort prices, you must distort markets. Sure, that Commodore 64 you bought in ’82 would still be worth 600 bucks if we had outlawed improving computer design and Commodore would still be alive and well today. Thankfully, no one concerned themselves with protecting the value of the C-64 and Commodore declared bankruptcy in 1994. That’s how markets work and that’s why capitalism works.
Distorting prices and markets is an absolute fool’s game, so we find ourselves with a never-ending procession of Ivy League fucktards, who fancy themselves masters of the Universe, lining up to take a whack at it. Yes, you can keep house prices up, if you can keep interest rates low, but in order to keep interest rates low, you must rig the credit market. To rig the credit market without destroying stock prices, you must create money out of thin air to buy debt, which devalues your currency, so you have to hide it as much as you can. So now you’re rigging the Forex and precious metals markets to cover your tracks…..
Next thing you know, you’re selling choppers to Saudi Arabia.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Everybody with an IQ below 140, who’s not in politics knows that. What most of those people don’t understand is how much this little magic show costs. This next chart shows the monthly cost of the changes in the National Debt, per person. In other words, this is what it would cost just to stop adding to the National Debt.
This is the real cost of the so-called “recovery.” Is there a family of four on this side of the rainbow willing to cough up 2 grand a month to keep it going?
Anyone?
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Oct 1, 2010 at 2:11 PM
Reader Comments (15)
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ny-feds-dudley-action-likely-warranted-2010-10-01
Roughly $255 billion is still committed to related spending programs
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The wildly unpopular $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program is set to expire on Sunday, two years to the day it became law, as debate continues to rage over its performance and its final cost to taxpayers.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tarp-due-to-end-but-funds-to-live-on-2010-10-01
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/09/scientists-40-times-more-cancer-causing.html
Read this...
“My personal view is that there’s no chance of a loss,” Benmosche said in an interview with MarketWatch.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/aig-ceo-sees-no-chance-of-bailout-loss-2010-09-30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=druQ6olIfm4
In a series of speeches over the past two days, Fed officials made clear that they disagree about whether to embark on a second round of quantitative easing.
“Will it work and how much would be needed to make a difference? In my view a consensus on these pivotal questions remains to come together,” said Dennis Lockhart, the president of the Atlanta Fed, in a speech delivered Tuesday.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bernanke-has-votes-for-bond-buys-analysts-say-2010-09-29
It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin - who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate - is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.
"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters.
As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression - "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" - the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.
Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized medicine." But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself - half of his patients are on Medicare - he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason. "Physicians," he said, "should be allowed to make a comfortable living."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/kocherlakota-bond-buys-to-make-small-impact-2010-09-29
NOTE: I have now shortened the comment above and added a link to the story...
You won't find much disagreement from me...we can't stand sarah palin around here...and there are idiots in every party including the tea party...my views are pretty simple...
end the illegal wars...destroy the military-industrial complex...
stop the stimulus...(taleb and paul otellini from intel agree)
Actually, the problem is that most persons believe that a free (to them) lunch can and often should exist. It's persons with IQs of 130 or less who hold these beliefs.
Persons with IQs 130 and over know there are no free lunches and who know that political rhetoric can go a long way to getting done what one wants by manipulating those who take the promises of free lunches, gladly.
On an aside, the people behind Elmo and Sesame Street, for decades, have leeched off taxpayers by winning contracts to have their content broadcast by PBS. They get paid by taxpayers to advertise to sell their Sesame Street characters based merchandise -- clothing, dolls, lunch boxes, more.
No authentic American would let their child watch Sesame Street, the content of which exists to indoctrinate one's children into a collectivist, racist order.
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that's very true...
They violate the 1st Amendment by fencing-in demonstrators at G-20, banning books like “America Deceived II” and trying to take-over the internet.
They violate the 2nd Amendment by confiscating guns.
They violate the 4th and 5th Amendment by wireless wiretapping.
They violate the entire Constitution by starting undeclared wars.
Impeach Obama (and sweep out the Congress, except Ron Paul).
[Link of Banned Book]:
http://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000190526