I tend to agree with this man. All this gloom and doom defeatism needs to stop, regardless of who predicts what or what prices rise.
I tend to agree too. But I wonder. What happens if the SC upholds Obamacare?
I too agree with him. Much of the U.S. (especially the South) is infected, but recoverable. The portion that is terminally subjected to government control will either collapse or be expelled by those who wish to survive as a nation.
It is time to DownSize DC. (Eliminate entire departments and their regulation of our lives- Education, EPA, OSHA, BATF and major segments of others) That is the only path out of this mess. Will not be popular, but must happen.
I wish I shared your and Johnson’s outlook, but it is virtually impossible to escape the math of our economic problems. Courage like we haven’t seen since that darkest days of early WW2 will be needed - that and an overwhelming majority in Congress plus a tough-minded President - because we must cut our budget by 40% permanently (and this also necessarily means big and permanent Social Security and other entitlement spending), because if we don’t then interest on the debt will overwhelm us in 5-7 years even without rates going up. If rates go up 2% or 3% to something approaching historical norms, that’s an additional $280-$420 billion/yr. in interest within 4 years, since we have to refinance most of the debt in that time
(and this is without adding to the debt, which we’re currently doing at a $1.7 trillion/yr. clip). If we don’t get our act together in 2 years or less, I fear that the world bond market will do to us what it (properly) did to Greece: force us to pay 5% over the risk-free rate...and then we would either have to default or inflate like crazy (which is default by another name
). In either case, our standard of living will be cut by 50% or more, overnight. Imagine if oil doubled or tripled in price Monday morning - it would devastate all commerce and seriously erode our ability to produce, process and transport food. We would become Egypt overnight.
Oh, and I am well aware that cutting the budget by 40% will hurt the economy a lot. We are talking 15%-20% unemployment, even with the grossly downward-biased measure used by the lying SOB’s in DC). But we are like someone who just drank an entire bottle of vodka - we can either deal with our problem by doing some painful vomiting RIGHT NOW, or die of alcohol poisoning in an hour or two when it is too late and the poison gets into our bloodstream.
Pain is already baked into the pie, the only choice is whether we do it to ourselves in a reasonably planned way now, or let the world do it to us later and in a rush. So says the math.