This time, I'm nervous. In fact, I am more than nervous, I'm the one that is truly frightened.
A sane person must look at the cold facts and admit just how much these numbers represent. $14 trillion in debt? $1.5 trillion in deficit for as long as we can see? $200-$500 billion just in interest on the debt?
This could go waaaayy wrong in a nanosecond. What if interest can't be held down by Bernanke and his printing press? We could be paying trillions in interest alone in just a matter of days. You and I know the repubs will hold out for spending cuts to raise the debt limit. What if Obama won't budge and pushes the wimp repubs to the wall and makes no cuts? Will we really default to make a point?
We are already broke, we just have the ability to kick the can down the road till we break a toe. Eventually, just like a dentist visit, the tooth has to come out. It's there right in front of us, but are we really sure it's not going to be the end.
The only sure fire way to know if we will fail will be to see if I buy out of the money calls a few months out when the day comes. If that happens, America is done! We will be bankrupt never to recover. It will be all my fault. If I freeze and just stare at the screen, it will be like the flash crash and recover in an hour leaving me to mumble I coulda had a triple in one hour.
What we should be doing on FR is discussing the new barter system. How many .45 200grn hp does it take for a loaf of bread? How many 9mm = one .45? Can I get a pound of navy beans for a box of .223's? All these years of collecting and investing will finally pay off.
We can get out of this in five years if we open up currently public lands to energy, mining, and forestry.
I believe that. The jobs are there, there’s cheap money to loan, and there are unions available to teach skills like welding. I know that last sentence sounds funny, but I remember a day when they used to train their folks quite well.
We need a leader willing to stand up and say, “Here’s where we are at, and here’s what we are going to do.”
The first environmentalist that says something out of key should be bound, gagged, and deported to New Zealand. They can colonize out there, and if they can generate enough GDP, then they can make war on the rest of us here in the US who decided to dig their way out of the hole they dug.
We aren’t dead yet. In fact, resources-wise, we are fixed pretty well. We have a moat, one border that’s mostly desert to defend, and we’ve just had record floods, which means we have water and silt covered farmlands.
Seriously, any environmentalist that can’t propose an alternative economic plan that can work in the next 90 days will be told to stuff it.
Cut the EPA back to nothing in terms of enforcement, and let the economy run hog wild for three years - pulling back in year four to make sure we haven’t legitimately destroyed some ecosystem somewhere, and then keep going.
The barriers to our recovery are ARTIFICIAL. They aren’t REAL. We didn’t run out of ANYTHING HERE.
China’s sold off 97% of it’s US debt, so telling them we won’t be needing 40% of their exports isn’t going to be the problem it used to be.
They are about to have a world of their own nightmares about to begin.