Deficits Do Matter... Eventually

"Deficits don’t matter," said Dick Cheney....

If there were no tomorrow, Mr. Cheney would be right. Why not eat tomorrow's "seed corn" today? There would be no reason not to reach for another dessert, or park your car in a handicapped space, or tell your boss exactly what you think of him.

The trouble is -- there is a tomorrow. And tomorrow is when a drinking binge turns into a hangover, a bad marriage turns into a divorce, and your boss fires you. Tomorrow is when deficits DO matter. 

We don't know exactly what will happen or when. But we know the world still turns. Every boom not supported by real savings and real increases in output is phony. Tomorrow is when you find out.

Today's prosperity, such as it is, was built on fake money, fake savings, and fake signals from the Fed. The feds have pumped $37 trillion in "excess credit" -- above and beyond the traditional relationship between debt and GDP -- into the system over the last 30 years.

And now, the economy -- especially the parasitic half of it run by the Deep State -- depends on more and more fake money and fake credit. That's the one thing Republicans, Democrats, and Trumpistas agree on -- nothing will be allowed to get in the way of the fake-money flow. With the sluices open, the debt will rise. How much? No one knows. All we know for sure is that, with nothing to stop it, you can expect it to keep going up -- until the whole economy drowns in it.

-- Brian Maher (The Daily Reckoning) Sept. 22, 2017

two suns in the sunset

In my rear view mirror, the sun is going down
Sinking behind bridges in the road. 
I think of all the good things that we have left undone,
And I suffer premonitions -- confirmed suspicions -- of the holocaust to come.

The rusty wire that holds the cork that keeps the anger in
Gives way, and suddenly it's day again.
The sun is in the east even though the day is done.
Two suns in the sunset; could be the human race is run.

-- Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) 1983

The Undrainable Swamp

The establishment’s concerns have less to do with peace and security than raising sales, earnings, and stock prices in the Atlantic-area's military industrial complex. And the establishment won’t abide any threat to its power.

The Swamp is so undrainable that it will end up making mincemeat of Donald Trump.... The ultimate causes of his demise are anchored deep in the failing status quo. America is so addicted to war, debt, and central bank driven false prosperity that even the most resourceful and focused challenger would be taken down by its sheer inertia.

But [Trump] is so undisciplined, naïve, out-of-touch, thin-skinned, unfocused, and megalomaniacal that he is making it far easier for the Swamp critters than they deserve. To a very considerable extent, in fact, he is filling out his own bill of indictment.

-- David Stockman (The Daily Reckoning) August 4, 2017

surf progression

The idea that you can improve never goes away....  Surfing's evolved.  The boards have evolved.  I'm actually stronger now, and I have more control over my technique.  But I have too many injuries.   It's super frustrating because there are some days I don't want to surf because I'm in pain.  But I still feel, at this age right now, my best surfing is still ahead of me. 

I grew up idolizing Tom Curren.  I wanted to surf like him.  I wanted to hold my arms like him.  Then at some point I realized I'm not Tom Curren.  I have a different approach.  I think differently.  And if you're trying to be someone else, you're not offering the world what you have.  
 
-- Kelly Slater (11x World Champion) 2017

buried by the blues

Absolved forever into the darkest shades,
I'll vanish from the light to the still-calling me
Enslaved forever or buried by the blues?
Wear your wounds like a soldier; and let your ghosts run loose

Exploding waves, you wish you could belong
A piper at the gates to steal you from the dawn
No suicide could ever change your fate
Fold your hands in reply beneath the trembling rain

Against the night, you will rise and set your body free
Frontier of light, you desire to let your body sleep
Away from the static and noise
Away from the bombs and the war

-- Stephen McBean (Black Mountain) 2010

profound political disunity

[A] nation ruled by Imperial kleptocrats is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together.  The public sees the value system at the top is [to] maximize personal profit by whatever means available (e.g., complicity, corruption, monopoly, and rentier rackets), and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on.  But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top 0.1% and their army of technocrats and enablers; so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic....

When the system is rigged, "democracy" is just another public-relations screen to mask the unsavory reality of Oligarchy....  The conventional markers of democracy -- elections and elected representatives -- exist, but they are mere facades; the mechanisms of setting the course of the nation are corrupt, and the power lies outside the public's reach.  History has shown that democratic elections don't guarantee an uncorrupt, functional government. Rather, democracy has become the public-relations stamp of approval for corrupt governance that runs roughshod over individual liberty while centralizing the power to enforce consent, silence critics, and maintain the status quo....

-- Charles Hugh Smith (Of Two Minds blog)

Trumped

[Donald Trump] is now fully at war with the mainstream media and the national security apparatchiks of the Deep State — and nothing could be more conducive to exposing the folly of Washington's imperial adventures abroad and its fiscal bankruptcy at home.... [T]he "Trump is soft on Russia" meme is nothing more than the desperate attempt of the Deep State to protect its dirty secret that America has no real enemies that can militarily threaten the homeland.... The ruling elites are determined to take the Donald down, and whether they succeed or not, it is extremely probable that Washington will grind to a halt — Watergate era style — by early spring....

[E]conomic recovery and the restoration of honest democracy in America depend upon a plunge in the wildly inflated stock market. It is that event which would finally discredit the monetary central planners at the Fed, destroy the insidious regime of Bubble Finance they have created, [and expose] the financial fraud which has permitted the Imperial City to fund the nation's bloated Warfare State and Welfare State with reckless abandon. Fiscal rectitude will only return when a thundering financial trauma demonstrates to the American public that a money printing central bank is its mortal enemy and that the Fed's charter to buy government debt and rig interest rates and stock prices must be forever revoked.

-- David Stockman (The Daily Reckoning) Feb. 21, 2017