[nathanbedford]

If Trump was president, be sure you’d be seeing our screens flooded with images showing this.

I think there is a better than even chance that these are precisely the images that will flood our screens because there is a better than even chance that when Donald Trump takes the oath he will have inherited a giant, stinking turd of a rapidly sinking economy, soaring unemployment, tax shortfalls and kinetic threats abroad. It may come at a point when merely reviving the energy sector, cutting regs and taxes cannot become effective in time to write our sinking fiscal ship.

These remedies might well come too late to restore the nation's capacity to borrow because the nation has lost credibility altogether, leaving us with no capacity even when we, presumably, have the desire to borrow and spend our way past this next crisis.

Images of bread lines which confronted my parents in the 1930s are quite conceivable considering the precarious state of our federal, state and local finances. Sadly, our government institutions are no more profligate than our personal finances. Our credit card accounts, automobile repossessions, mortgage foreclosures, and general personal indebtedness data constitute but the tip of an iceberg of visible and submerged debt.

Our financial world is grotesquely leveraged in conventional terms but I for one cannot even begin to understand or contemplate the dimensions of our leveraged liabilities lurking in the dark corners of the world of derivatives.

Trump might inherit the bitter harvest of Democrat profligacy but have very few effective levers with which to work. Even if he knows what to do he might be prevented from doing that which he knows is necessary by a leftist Congress operating selfishly under air cover provided by the media.

A hardscrabble situation in which the rest of the country begins to look like those parts afflicted with the images described in this article means that Trump would likely be confronted with a desperate and disaffected citizenry that will turn not to the economics of the von Mises Institute but to the siren of Marxist class warfare.

The history of people in distress in modern times shows them turning reflexively not to the right but to the left. We have virtually no institution today in the United States upon which we can rely that will stand against the tide of demagoguery which must inevitably surge. One is hard-pressed today to name a single institution upon which we might rely today while the music still plays on so one is even more hard-pressed to conceive of an institution upon which we might rely in a world of want and hunger.

When Donald Trump lifts his hand from the Bible he might find he has very few cards to play.

[Sequoyah101]

"A hardscrabble situation in which the rest of the country begins to look like those parts afflicted with the images described in this article means that Trump would likely be confronted with a desperate and disaffected citizenry that will turn not to the economics of the von Mises Institute but to the siren of Marxist class warfare."

We are there already, the dependent class is so many generations deep they don't know any way to live but by handouts. What is more, there just are not enough meaningful, living wage jobs in the US any longer for them to care for themselves even if they would. The dependent class is fully entrenched and not going away. It is getting bigger all the time. It is a large section of our population and fjb's flood of illegals is making it even bigger.

Making matters worse, they and state and local governments have all baked in the largess of covid relief into their budgets and expectations of life. I give you Richmond, Calif. who are fleecing Chevron to the tune of $50 million a year for at least 10 years to make-up the disappearance of covid relief moneys that have now become part of their budget. Spending is unsustainable already but there are no signs it will come under control willingly ever.

People wonder where inflation came from. Trump wrongly put it on energy prices. It comes from still too many dollars chasing too few goods. All one has to look at to see how dramatic the flood of covid relief money is, is to look at the meteoric and unprecedented growth of M1 and M2. Local groups of all stripes and small towns here simply have so much money they are still having to invent places to spend it. One local example is the county fair grounds who have now poured concrete in all the show barns with covid relief money. We never had concrete in a show barn because we never needed it. The local boys and girls club has money from covid relief to build a half-acre indoor sports building but only if someone will donate the land for it and the locals will raise money for fixtures and HVAC. Who is going to pay the operating cost for this facility? Raised unrealistic expectations, that's who.

Unrestrained spending will bring us to our knees.