Well, I feel tremendously disheartened by the fact that Barack Obama has won re-election. One could hope that Obama will actually try to be a leader in his second term, seeking to take action to ward off the economic Judgement Day that is in our country's near-future, and that he would want to be known in history as something other than the Nero who presided over the commencement of the catastrophic dissolution of the greatest country the world has ever known. However, he has shown amply that he knows only one direction to tread -- left -- and I think his second term will pretty much seal our country's fate. A viable currency is essential to any civilized society, and no country, no matter how large, can sustain annual trillion-unit budget deficits indefinitely; thus I believe that massive devaluation of the dollar due to hyperinflation is practically a dead-certainty at this point. (I once laughed when my friend Bob Maes showed me an envelope stuffed with near-worthless Argentine paper money and told me that all those billetes literally were what he received in change after paying for bus fare one time while he was serving his mission in Argentina in 1980. It doesn't seem nearly so funny now.)
It's instructive -- if unpublicized by the liberal propaganda-meisters in the media -- that a large majority of new U.S. Treasury bonds and t-bills are now "purchased" by the Federal Reserve. Just like a ditzy Peg Bundy, selling cosmetics to herself (and going hog-wild spending the commissions) in an old episode of Married...with Children, our elected officials act as though the revenue generated through sales of debt instruments -- essentially to the very government that spends it all -- materializes out of nothing and doesn't have to be paid back. I've begun to rethink the idea of living in New Mexico, simply because when it all comes down, I fear the Southwest will be the Bosnia of what will then be the former United States. Nobody will want to be here who isn't a predator; the 1980 New Mexico prison riot may prove to have been child's play by comparison.
[Update 1/16/13: Here are excerpts from the Married..with Children episode referenced above.]
