Tag Archives: why we’re doomed

National debt

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Do you know what the current national debt is? It’s around $35 trillion dollars. A trillion dollars is a big number so let me give you a way to relate: if you took  $35 trillion dollars in $1 bills and laid them end to end they would reach to the sun and back….eighteen times*.

You know that enormous loop around the sun that this planet makes in twelve months? Those dollar bills, end to end, would cover that orbit…almost six times.

Want more to relate to? If you took all the US currency thats out there right now it would add up to…..around $2 billion dollars. Put another way, we owe, as a nation, around 17,500 times more money than actually physically exists.

Let’s keep rolling. The US population is around 330,000,000 people. Your share of that national debt is about $106,000,

Wanna seize all the privately owned land and use it to pay the debt down? Good luck with that…that won’t even cover half the debt since all the privately held land in the US is only worth about $14.488 trillion dollars.

What does a high national debt mean? People are less likely to lend to you if youre already maxed out on your cards. Who is going to lend you money when all your available cash is going to pay back previous lenders? So..you gotta sweeten the deal…and thats where those 30% interest rates on predatory credit cards come in. Now imagine that on a national level.

So..you’ve maxed out your credit cards to the point where you owe 17,500 times more money than you have in the bank. How do you get out of this mess? Well, you can try to pay it back but you literally will not live long enough to do so even if you lived several lifetimes. You can file for bankruptcy. Or you can shrug and just keep spending knowing that it is impossible to pay off the debt so you may as well go full kamikaze and spend like there’s no tomorrow.

Whats it look like if the US did that? Well, we coulud simply refuse to pay Japan and China, our two biggest creditors, and we’d probably be in an economic cold war with them for the next forseeable future. Or, we could renegotiate the deal which just kicks the can down the road and makes it more expensive later. We could just print the money, physically or electronically, to pay it off thereby devaluing our currency.

(/:Zimbabwe has entered the chat)
(/:Weimar Republic has entered the chat)

Or, more likely, we will just pay lip service to debt reduction and continue to spend because apparently austerity measures and budget cuts just aint gonna happen. And at some point there is only going to be two choices:  monetization or renunciation. Either one spells economic chaos on a global level.

On the other hand, we surpassed the level at which debt couuld be mitigated a long time ago and we are still here, still borrowing, still being loaned to, and still spending without cutting…although at this point cutting anything will have a virtually zero effect on things.

I bring this all up because I was curious about where the national debt was today and fell down a math rabbit hole. But, honestly, I’m hoping I’m simply being naive, unlearned, and grossly ignorant about economics, because everything I just wrote pretty much concerns  me greatly.

For a literary treatment about a US renunciation of the debt and the apocalypse that follows, I highly recommend this book.

To the sun and back, eighteen times……geez.

* = Math: one dollar is 6.14 inches long. 35t of them is 214,900,000,000,000 inches. That is the same as 17,908,333,333,333.33 feet, or 3,391,729,797.97 miles. The distance to the sun is about 93,000,000 miles. 3,391,729,797.97 divided by 93,000,000 is 36.4. Since its a round trip we cut that in half = 18.2 times the length distance to the sun and back.

Article – Drug Shortages Approach an All-Time High, Leading to Rationing

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Remember when things like drug shortages were things that happened in Third World and Soviet satellite countries?

Thousands of patients are facing delays in getting treatments for cancer and other life-threatening diseases, with drug shortages in the United States approaching record levels.

Hospitals are scouring shelves for supplies of a drug that reverses lead poisoning and for a sterile fluid needed to stop the heart for bypass surgery. Some antibiotics are still scarce following the winter flu season when doctors and patients frantically chased medicines for ailments like strep throat. Even children’s Tylenol was hard to find.

Hundreds of drugs are on the list of medications in short supply in the United States, as officials grapple with an opaque and sometimes interrupted supply chain, quality and financial issues that are leading to manufacturing shutdowns.

I’m lucky, I suppose, in that I don’t need any particular medication to keep my quality of life where it is. No insulin, no high blood pressure meds, none of that sort of thing. Sure, there are times I eat ibuprofin like M&M’s, but other than that….

And, fortunately, any meds I do want to keep on hand are all over the counter so I can keep a pretty generous supply around. Sure, maybe they lose a bit of efficacy after a few years but so what? Just up the dosage. I’d rather face a cracked rib with five year old Tylenol and Advil than I would without. Drugs that only deliver 85% of their effectiveness is orders of magnitude better than the 0% afforded by not having drugs at all.

Moral of the story: while you’re stacking up the .223 and 9mm, the freeze drieds and AA batteries, the water filters and toilet paper….stock up on the OTC stuff (and first aid as well) because thanks to Brandon we are, apparently, dipping our toes into the warm water of neo-Soviet supply issues.

The world we live in

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I simply don’t have the words:

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation.
……
Backers argued the existing proficiency levels for math and reading presented an unfair challenge for students who do not test well, and Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

This, more than anything else, is how a great society or great nation descends into mediocrity and, ultimately, collapse.

Because a particular demographic ‘tests poorly’, we should eliminate the requirement that they pass those tests. That way, when they go out to get jobs they’ll be qualified to….do what exactly? When you hire someone to do work and they can’t do math or read instructions, you know what you get? Unemployed. If they’re really concerned about these ‘marginalized’ groups, they’d raise the standards so that those folks can get thebest jobs they can.

This isn’t something that should surprise anyone. What’s surprising is that people think this is a good idea. And those people vote. And their vote counts as much as yours. (Unless, of course, they’re an Oregon ‘graduate’ and have trouble reading the ballot).

A long time ago I stopped thinking that society, mine or anyone elses, was capable of being saved from it’s inevitable decline. Remember the scene in one of the Terminator movies where the guy says that his destiny wasn’t to prevent Judgement Day, but rather to survive it? Same thing. I don’t have to prevent or decelerate the descent into whatever it is we’re heading into…I only have to survive it to come out on the other side of it. Thus, I’ve stopped worrying about the gaping hole in the hull and am simply working on making sure I have a clear path to the lifeboats.

But let’s recap: trillions of dollars for ‘infrastructure’ which we are told won’t lead to inflation, supply chain ‘disruptions’, a global pandemic, opportunistic nations jockeying for a better position as the main players deal with the Wuhan Flu, and an American populace that thinks its more important to use the ‘correct’ pronoun than it is to be able to be able to calculate your paycheck or read a job application. If that isn’t a recipe for a bright, new future…well!

And in this way, I feel vindicated for my growing misanthropy. Your mileage may vary, of course, but as for me I wash my hands of the rest of humanity and, frankly, they get what they deserve. If you don’t like what you see, be patient and let natural selection run it’s course. If you think this sort of virtue-siignalling-at-all-costs is a good thing, and it appeals to your ‘wokeness’, well….you’re an idiot but at least you have others to keep you company.