How are fiscal matters shaping up under the new renaissance Republican leadership? More like fecal matters.
The following chart is busy and some explanation is in order.
Top Pane
Tax receipts. This is private property God Blesses we the people through our hard work, ingenuity, risk taking, and industriousness that we empower an extra Constitutional central government to confiscate from us for our own good thanks to the enlightened votes of 51% of our nation. The confiscations peak in April and October and thus is volatile data in the bar graph so I’ve taken what little individual liberty I’ve left to smooth the data with a 12-month simple moving average in the shaded green
Center Pane
Spending by the extra Constitutional central government some of which is mandated and allowed by our Constitution such as national defense and occasional attempts at border security. Most of it is transfer payments from we the people to other we the people leveraging the guilt of those from whom property is confiscated against the dependency of the recipients to ensure 85%+ success of incumbents during Congressional elections. Again this is all for our own good or something like that.
Bottom Pane
Deficit derived by subtracting the center pane (spending) from top pane (confiscation). Yes this is a consistent deficit with occasional accounting lapses yielding a temporary surplus. The deficit detailed by the 12-month simple moving average (shaded gray area) is widening under benighted Republican leadership. Please pardon me while I feign surprise.
How is this sustainable? Not satisfied to have the extra Constitutional central government confiscate our and our neighbor’s Blessings in real time we are simultaneously confiscating our posterity’s Blessings in the form of $19,400,000,000,000 and ever growing sovereign Dollar denominated debt.
This is not my definition of Making America Great Again. Your mileage my vary. This is at best Making America Worse at the same or possibly slower pace than the alternative.
Keep your guns oiled and the edges of your Bible worn. We’ve learned exactly nothing, but at least have some awesome sick burns on Twitter!
But if the gop fails now it’s all the demon Trump’s fault, so the beloved steely conservative principles will remain unsullied, yo.
Sustainable? This is the United States. Nothing bad could ever happen here, because wealth.
Yeah, but then there’s the Math Party. AND no matter WHAT you believe, no matter what wealth we have, no matter whether you are liberal or conservative, the Math Party says this cannot continue indefinitely. So it won’t.
And as Brent says, when the Math Party wins the election, Katy, bar the door!
I used to say this can’t continue indefinitely, now I am not so sure.
That was back when I used to worry about the debt, but now think differently on the issue. Debt isn’t where this unwinds – the currency is where it collapses.
Additionally, it is clear that the Democrats enabled by big government Republicans have crossed us over the rubicon. There isn’t a shred of self sufficiency, humility, or living within our means among the majority of voters.
The only one that can humble us now is God and I am just praying to be on the right side of that lesson because it is coming and the Fed can’t print us out of it.
Big countries come and big countries go. We are large and wealth, but our government, like so. many others, has had a long standing tendency to overspend its means. J.P. Morgan gave the US $30 Million in his personal silver to get it out of potential bankruptcy. There’s no one today who could or would do that; the era of rich patriots is gone. Today we are run by a meritocracy that is afraid of its own mores and unwilling to be an example for people to follow. Murray described just that.
The East Coast, but more especially Washington DC, New York City, and Silicon Valley have all the “Big Brains”. But what is starkly demonstrable in history is that Big Brains usually screw things up. So we have these allegedly smart people running their lives properly but failing to be an example to others. Indeed, everything is “relative” – only it’s not.
The great middle of the country understands this. They realize 2+2=4, no matter inflation or how much taxes go up (or down).
The deficit DOES matter. While we are currently the world’s exchange currency, that can change, and one of the things that could change it is our deficit. As a friend of mine puts it, “We are the best looking horse in the glue factory.”
This last election was an attempt for the great middle of the country to impose some sense on the nation. None of the GOP seems to have noticed. They still believe the NYT, which has grossly misjudged SO much it is now laughable as an organization.
The hope is that the Middle won’t let go of the reins of power and push out all the mopes in the GOP who don’t seem to realize just how close they may be to a shooting war. The Civil War snuck up on the country, as did the Revolution. Neither was wanted by the majority of the people That’s true of the South as much as the North. But it came.
We just might be close.
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Regarding a shooting war, I wonder if the greatly improved communication compared to the 18th or 19th century makes it less likely that it would sneak up on us. At the time of the Revolution, people probably didn’t have a very good idea of what most of their fellow citizens were thinking. Even though the war was not wanted by the majority, that probably was not clear to people at the time.
That said, the scenario put forth in Kurt Schlichter’s book, The People’s Republic, is frighteningly realistic.
Strangely despite “slower” communications, I believe people knew what was happening. Notice that the tea blockade went on up and down the coast. At the time America was THE largest tea drinking area in the world. So all these East Indiamen are at anchor in American harbors as the longshoremen refused to unload them.
In the Civil War the first vote in the Virginia legislature on session was 75% against and it took the personal efforts of Tyler, a former president to convince the Virginians to secede. Meanwhile South Carolina had done so but then the sentiment started swinging back the other way and SC was in danger of changing their vote and going back into the union. A local pol noted that, “Somebody better get some blood in the streets or this could all come apart real quick.” So Beauregard started shelling Ft. Sumter. It was a deliberately provocative act.
Remember, by the time of the Civil War we had telegraph. Indeed Horace Greeley had editions of the NYT published same day across the country via train distribution.
I believe it takes some act to spark a shooting war. Somewhere there will be a violent Lefty “demonstration” by the SJW’s or BLM or AntiFa – and the other side will erupt with gunfire – and the fight could well be on. Doesn’t take many to create a revolution.
This is a scary and plausible scenario.
You’re both right. I hope I wasn’t so unclear that it appeared that I was arguing that nothing could ever go wrong in the US, which is obviously silly and untrue.
Wouldn’t be the first time, alas.