"Devil on the Loose"
by Bill Bonner
"Just as every cop is a criminal,
And all the sinners saints,
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer,
‘Cause I’m in need of some restraint."
– "Sympathy for the Devil," by the Rolling Stones
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."
- William Shakespeare, "The Tempest"
SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – "As expected, Joe Biden will speed up America’s encounter with disaster. That won’t be easy. Adding speed, we mean… Donald Trump already had the runaway bus in high gear and his foot to the floorboards. Government spending increased more under Trump than under any other president since World War II. From 2017 to 2020, it rose nearly twice as much as it did under Lyndon Johnson.
As a percentage of GDP, government spending rose to 56% in the second quarter of 2020. Of course, that included $1,200 checks to 160 million Americans, the vast majority of whom were still working and didn’t really need the money. And we remind dear readers that it is neither Supreme Court appointees… nor climate change initiatives… nor Black Lives Matter protests… nor face masks that will crash the U.S. empire. It’s money. Or fake money, to be more precise.
Lost Cause: Fake money is the Devil’s fodder; it makes it possible for the feds to do things they oughtn’t do – hand out free cash… invade Iraq… jack up stock prices. Not that they couldn’t do dumb things with real money; but fake money makes them bolder. Nearly 50 years ago, your editor – then a callow youth, naïve and foolish – played a small role in trying to force some restraint onto federal finances. He pushed for a Balanced Budget Amendment. He thought that requiring the feds to operate on a pay-as-you-go basis would keep the Devil on a diet. But the drive for a balanced budget amendment ran right into The Swamp, where it sank without a trace. Restraint was the last thing the insiders wanted.
And that was in the mid-1970s, when the deficit was running between $50 and $70 billion per year… and total U.S. debt, from the beginning of the Republic until the beginning of the Reagan administration, had still not reached $1 trillion.
Trouble Ahead: Now, it is 45 years later. We are no longer callow. And now, the sinners are saints. The cops are criminals… The U.S. owes $27 trillion… runs deficits of more than $1 trillion a year… and seems bound and determined to stick with this kind of Banana Republic financing until the jungle swallows it up, as though it were an ancient civilization lost in the vines.
The whole crackpot system now depends on out-of-whack budgets funded with fake money. As to the unbalanced budgets, no one cares. And as to the fake dollars, they are considered a mere monetary detail. But like lug nuts flying off the wheels, they are bound to cause trouble down the road.
More, More, More: And now, Sleepy Joe, assisted by thousands of lifelong Washington insiders, has found the overdrive button. It will be a challenge for him… racing towards destruction… to beat Trump’s speed. But he’s the man of the hour… with plenty of geezer friends in Congress – Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, et al. – who can help get the job done.
The Associated Press is on the story: "The former vice president and senator will pursue a drastic shift in America’s economic policy. He [Biden] has vowed to reverse much of the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulation and indifference to domestic spending and economic development in favor of big investments in education, infrastructure and clean energy. He wants stricter rules to rein in big tech companies and to fight climate change.
And to help pay for it all, the president-elect would turn to large tax increases for corporations and wealthy individuals by reversing much of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts. […] Biden’s view reflects the warning from most economists that until the virus is controlled, the economy cannot fully recover. […] That slower growth, in turn, could intensify calls for more stimulus spending. Most economists, along with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, are warning that the economy needs more rescue aid from Congress."
More “rescue aid.” More fake money. More unbalanced budgets. More power to the feds. More money to the insiders. Long live the Devil and the Deep Blue State!"
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