re Presidential Signing Statements, I find it difficult to believe that noone in our government has decided to test the validity of them in a courtroom. They are a step (closer to dictatorship) beyond EO’s which IMO should have been declared invalid when coast to coast telephone service became available to all.
re Ron Paul. If he was a better speaker and had more inside support, I think he could have accomplished a lot. But he doesn’t know how to get his ideas across to the average person very well and the inside execs don’t want to loise their positions of power.
re finances. Stock up on silver and gold coins while they are available or buy a warehouse full of canned and dried foodstuffs. The one other option is learn how to live off the land. Looking over the horizen, I do not see a bright shining future for the US or the world.
If you ponder it for a second, disaster is a function of time. If given enough time, people are able to adjust so much that disaster just becomes an annoyance at worst.
Right now, economically, the world has been gorging itself on easy credit since WWII. In a manner of speaking, economies all over the world have become morbidly obese. So is it really a disaster to return to eating a reasonable amount and losing all that bloat in the process?
For years, I’ve suggested the concept of “imaginary money”, as opposed to “real money”.
Real money is what we typically think of in economics: currency based on the value of real goods and services.
Imaginary money, on the other hand, is leveraged money, at first, speculative inflation of real goods and services; but then, leveraged money based only on other leveraged money, by two or three factors.
Say you own a house worth $100k. Then you go to a bank to get a loan, using that house as collateral. Nonsensically, the bank is willing to loan you $1M on just $100k collateral. Out of the blue, they have “created” $900k in imaginary money. But then speculators see that $1M loan on the banks books, and extend a line of credit to the bank for future loans worth $10M.
So based on $100k or real value, $9.9M of imaginary money has been created. This simplified version of grotesque excess was to blame for the Savings & Loan crisis. And it also severely dampened Japan’s economy for two decades. At one point, 2/3rds of Tokyo buildings were used as collateral in this pyramid scheme.
It works that way for government as well. Our entire economy is evaluated not on real money, but imaginary money.
Say the tax rate is a mere 10%. Someone pays you a dollar, so you owe the government a dime. But when you spend that dollar, whoever gets it also owes a dime. In just ten transactions, the entire dollar is supposed to be paid in taxes. But keep going. In twenty transactions, twice the real value of that dollar will be owed, so another dollar of imaginary money has been created.
That is why the strength of our economy as a whole is based not in real money, but imaginary money created by transactions. There is only enough real paper money to cover perhaps a 20th or a 50th the number of imaginary dollars out there, that only exist on computers and ledgers.
The number of US mints would have to triple and run continually to produce enough paper money for all dollar transactions. Million dollar bank notes would be common.
But again, this is economics based on gorging ourselves. By being forced to only use real money instead of imaginary money, we achieve a much more realistic economy. Government still gets tax revenue, but can only spend what it brings in, because no one will loan them the money to overspend.
The same with people. If you have money to buy things, then you can buy things. But no buying on credit unless you have more than 100% collateral. Real collateral. This is the way economics is supposed to work, not the fantasy world we have been living in for 60 or so years.
They built a world with easy credit, but on condition that we pay back the loans they took out.
Given enough time, we can handle it. But we will have to be responsible with our money, and stop gorging ourselves on easy credit. We can stand to lose a few hundred pounds of fat.