Inflation Nation – Page 11 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Wherein I Discuss Home Mechanical Systems, The Economy, Otters Running A Nuclear Plant, and Pelosi Alcohol Consumption

“Iced tea. . . air conditioning . . . water.” – Stargate SG-1

I went to an air conditioning conference once. It was pretty cool.

Let’s begin our tour of the economics world with the lowly thermostat. When The Mrs. and I were first married, The Mrs. would turn the thermostat on our air conditioner way down in the summer, say, to 62°F (45km). This led to the house gradually beginning to cool down, but the air conditioner would labor on like a Billy Barty attempting to oil a “modern” Sports Illustrated, um, model with a stepladder and a 55 gallon bucket.

This electrical effort by our air conditioner would continue until the outside of the house would resemble Joe Biden after he’s seen his latest approval ratings: a cold sweat on the exterior of the house as the moisture outside condensed on the meat-locker temperature windows.

I asked The Mrs., “Why do you turn it down so low?”

“So it gets colder, faster.”

The Mrs. says I’m an absolute 10 – on the Kelvin scale.

Now, on the surface, that sort of logic makes sense. If I spin the dial on the stove farther, it heats up my Dinty Moore Beef Stew® and Orange Jell-O© mix faster (goes great with corn and doughnuts). Twisting the dial puts more energy onto the stovetop. But (at least in every house I’ve lived at) the air conditioning doesn’t work like that – at all.

The air conditioner at our house is either on or it’s off. There is no “kinda on” or “working as hard as a Supreme Court Clerk deleting his phone texts” setting. Nope.

On.

Off.

Two choices. So, if you want it to be 68°F, and you put it to 68°F it will get to 68°F exactly as fast as if you put it down to 40°F. But not everything works that way, and The Mrs. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that when we met. Plus, in our case, the air conditioner dries the air, so when I woke up in our 40°F house in the summertime, the air was making fun of Hillary Clinton since it was as dry as Norm Macdonald’s wit.

I hear that when Norm got to Heaven, St. Peter told him, “Norm, you have to have an eye test. Cover one eye.” Norm covers one eye and reads the chart: “E-I-E-I . . . Oh, come on! I wasn’t that old!”

The economy is certainly more complicated than a household HVAC unit, but I’m not sure the incompetent participation trophy award winners at the White House have any sort of clue. At all. They’re like putting playful river otters in charge of running a nuclear reactor. Sure, it’s all fun and games watching them be all nimbly-pimbly with the control rods. But sooner or later (mainly sooner) the control rods will be pulled and the uranium will eventually melt into a radioactive mess that’s slightly more destructive than the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial after the core melts down.

I believe this is actually from the trial – Lawyer: “Did you see what happened after you left?” Depp: “I wasn’t there after I left.”

The point is that our economy is complicated, and we’re dealing with a current Resident of the Oval Office that would find running a YouTube® video complicated. “What do you mean, I press the button and the sheep start to talk? How does that happen? Who puts them in there?”

It would be hilarious if we weren’t actually living through this, like when Caligula named his horse a Senator of Rome. My sides are still in stitches about that one! But when it’s us, it’s scary. I mean, Kamala’s not exactly a horse, but, still, the analogy holds, even in this case if it rhymes.

The air conditioner analogy (as a very simple one) actually does have some meaning in this case. When an economy is stalled, there is a case (not the best one, but at least a case) for using money to restart it. Sure, it’s dangerous. And I can make the argument that we’ve done it so many times that it’s really messed up the entire system.

I hear she’s auditioned to be a Batman® villain – The Giggler™.

But after the system is going, by continually forcing more money into the system, well, as Joe said, “I did that.”

If that were the only issue, it might be solvable. It’s just one variable. Have Kamala and AOC eat all the spare money and then it might be as okay as Buddy Holly in a parachute. Might.

Joe, however, has other ideas. When you put sanctions on a nation, the idea is to hurt that nation. Really, that was their plan. But the sanctions against Russia (along with the war, which I also blame Biden for – he could have stopped it with ONE PHONE CALL) have resulted in soaring fertilizer and food prices. That’s bad enough, but it has also popped fuel prices to record highs – The Mrs. wanted to give me something rare and valuable for Father’s Day, so I just asked for five gallons of gasoline.

Fuel impacts everything.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Janet Yellen doesn’t care about you.

The combination of these sanctions and war have effects that haven’t been felt yet – not remotely. An example: a farmer normally fertilizes his alfalfa to increase yield. Not this year – the cost increase for fertilizer far outstrips what he expects to make in revenue. So, he deals with the “natural” yields. Due to high diesel costs, he also gets less money after the cost for harvesting is deducted.

What eats alfalfa?

Well, for one, cattle. So, less alfalfa, more expensive food for cattle. More expensive food for cattle? Well, if the rancher can’t make a profit, he’ll sell the herd. Those aren’t magic, and cattle don’t regenerate immediately like Wolverine®, so if you think we have high beef prices now . . . . just wait.

That’s the second idea: every action has a reaction. Some are immediate, like lower amounts of oil leading to higher prices. Others are longer-term. There’s a delay between taking the action and the result.

Going back to houses, this is like water hammer. That’s what happens when a valve closes too fast in a poorly designed plumbing system. The closing of the valve sends a pressure wave back and forth through the system, rattling the pipes as the pressure goes (at the speed of sound!) through the piping system. If you’ve ever lived in a house with water hammer, you know the sound. It’s loud.

But a simple act, closing a valve, can send waves of pressure moving back and forth through the system.

If you find a bomb that explodes when it’s stepped on, let me know. It’s mine.

We haven’t seen the end of those pressure waves from the magical sanctions that were supposed to have weakened the Russians but have instead raised the value of the ruble and thrown the food and fuel systems of the world into turmoil. Again, my analogy of otters running a nuclear reactor doesn’t appear to be far off as these secondary impacts reverberate through the system.

Eventually, these systems come back into equilibrium. However, unlike the consequences of a 40°F house, in this case we end up with the possibility of an economy more wrecked than the Pelosi family after about 11 AM.

As Nancy would say, “Cheers!”

Why We Are The Luckiest People, Ever.

“Keep a memory of me, not as a king or a hero, but as a man. Fallible and flawed.” – Beowulf

Donate one kidney, you’re a hero. Donate six, and all of a sudden you’re a monster.

We are the luckiest people who have ever lived.

“Why, John Wilder, you must be insane! Look at what’s going on,” you say. Well, the nice men at the sanitarium said that the whole “insane” thing was in the past, especially since the surgery. The doctor said the lobotomy was a no-brainer.

But really I believe that we are lucky.

When you look at the state of society, we see an amazing breakdown. I chronicle that breakdown, week after week with this blog. We see our government falling apart. We see it brimming with fraud. We see our lives mocked and insulted.

I hear summer in Finland is the best day of the year.

Functional cultures run on shared values. The values built over hundreds or thousands of years of hard-fought experience on how to make that culture work? To make a stable government? These are all being subverted.

Discarded.

On purpose.

In a time like that, it’s easy to give in to depression. It’s easy to give in to despair.

Seriously, though, why would you?

We can’t lose. Why?

My boss calls me the computer at work: if left unattended for ten minutes, I go to sleep.

We have the whole world against us. We are called horrible names because we have beliefs rooted in those timeless values. Even though they hate us, they’re more than happy to take the fruits of our labor – to tax and to take our productivity. Despite that, at every point our politicians again and again take the road that gives them power – a road that is rooted in evil and lies.

And the world? Many in the whole world have fallen for the lies, utterly. Timeless values are overturned in the span of less than a decade. In 2000, if young boys were dancing nearly nude in the streets, dressed as women, taking money from men, there would have been arrests.

Now, the pictures are printed and celebrated.

This is not evil, this is the Evil of books for children, of such a caricature that they’re nearly comical. Charles Schumer? Nancy Pelosi? Joe Biden? Soros? Really? They’re so over the top Evil that central casting wouldn’t send them to a serious movie – they’d be given roles as the Wet Bandits from Home Alone.

Pictured: Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

Their tactics are no better. They brag about being tolerant while using the power of government and media to ruthlessly suppress any opposing voices. They use the levers of government selectively – citizens visiting the Capitol on January 6, 2021 is the worst thing that ever happened. Riots in the streets causing billions in damage, theft so brazen that stores pull out of major metropolitan areas? They celebrate that. Congress is used, again and again, to pass laws that push society away from values, destroy the family, and increase the power of the government over the governed. Oddly, anarchists and Antifa® applaud that, and celebrate things that even thirty years ago would be called tyranny.

They hate us. They are attempting to use the education system to make children hate the very culture and society that allowed the prosperity that they’re leeching off even now. They want to erase the history that built this nation and the heroes that tamed a frontier and invented entire industries.

Galileo said that everything falls at the same speed. He never saw Biden’s stock market.

Why do you think they want to destroy and desecrate our monuments? Why do they hate our flag? Why fill the media with propaganda?

They want parents to fear children in a mirror of the Soviet era. They want to turn wives against husbands. They want to split the atom that makes up society, the family, and replace it with the state. Even religious institutions are rotting from within as the values of the Current Year replace the values that have proven themselves for over 2,000 years.

I started drinking brake fluid – it’s okay, though. I can stop anytime.

That, my friends, is why we’re lucky.

Our backs to the wall, the entire world against us, we owe our enemy nothing. We stand by our beliefs. We stand by God. We stand by our families, our wives, and our children. We stand by the future that we are even now building. To win, we will need to show virtue, courage, and strength greater than any generation that has ever lived.

We will do so.

We are in a place to bring heroism back to our world. The future will remember us, not as the remnants of a world gone past, but as the founders of a world reborn. They will speak of us for a thousand years. They will write stories about us. They will write songs about us.

That is why we are lucky.

When Will The Bubble End? When We Give Up.

“Oooh! Ahhh! That’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” – Lost World: Jurassic Park

What do you call a swimsuit a girl wears to an animal park? A Zookini.

One time, Pa Wilder told me he had been interested in buying Sears® stock in the early 1980s. In addition to growing, it also paid a nice dividend. He’d calculated that the dividend from the stock would have paid for the stock, and he could have sold it in the 1990s and been dollars ahead. He didn’t. Ma Wilder flatly refused. She didn’t like stocks during the day, and I know she would have hated bitcoin in the evening. I’m sure it would have been her crypto-night.

Ma’s philosophy was that hope isn’t your friend when it comes to most things in life. And especially the stock market. The stock market is really built on hope. Many stocks have projected growth “priced-in”. This means that they sometimes sell for many times their projected earnings.

Since 2008, the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury have done absolutely everything that they can to keep the prices of stocks up. The biggest thing they did was to cut interest rates to zero, on everything but dirt. On dirt, the Fed™ charges high-interest rates – I guess you could call them loam sharks.

In one sense, interest rates serve as an alternative to buying stocks. If I can park my money in Treasury bonds and make a few percent (essentially keeping up with inflation) then that’s a stable investment. Horses hate that as well – they often can’t invest because they don’t have a stable income.

I named my horse Mayo. Sometimes, Mayo neighs.

But when the interest rate is zero, the government is printing cash as fast as it can, investments are pushed toward stocks, and more and more cash piles in.

This makes the investments silly, as more and more cash chases revenues. In a world filled with eternal hyper-growth, this works. But that world doesn’t exist, so essentially the stock market becomes a Ponzi scheme or a cargo cult of prosperity.

It’s good if you get out on time. You get the upside of growth. You can get dollars out of the market that you can buy things with. Like me, I blew all my stock market gains on a limo without a driver. Spent is all and nothing to chauffeur it.

But eventually? The market falls.

Sorry if that joke didn’t land well.

Normally, that’s healthy. Falling markets weed out weak and bad companies. Falling markets are actually healthy since they clear out the junk. On top of that, CEOs will never be worthless, since there is a pretty healthy market for slightly used internal organs.

We live in a world, however, where the markets have been aggressively managed. The idea of a recession is scarier to a politician in office than almost anything. People without jobs look for someone to blame, and politicians will do anything to avoid blame. Heck, Joe Biden would do whatever he could to set Hunter up for life, that is if Joe was ever tried for murder.

The result is that the economic policy is aggressively tied to growth, regardless of the consequences. It’s like trying to keep a party going long after everyone should have gone home. The best way to do that? Switch from beer to wine. When people start to lag? Swap out to vodka. Then, for a final shot? Pure grain alcohol. Sure, that sounds like Nancy Pelosi’s breakfast routine, but when you’re trying to run an economy like Pelosi’s daily frat party, eventually it has to stop.

And the longer you’ve been drinking? The worse the inevitable hangover.

Did you know Helen Keller had a cat? Neither did she.

That’s where we are. The booze has been pulled away from the table. At some point, I’m certain, that the Fed® will run out of tricks to keep the party going – even they have a limited supply of cocaine, especially since Johnny Depp found the spare key they keep under the mat.

I’ve been wrong before. Perhaps the party isn’t over at this point. Perhaps there’s some adrenaline that they can inject in the eye socket of the economy to keep it dancing a few more years. Biden would love to kick the can down the road and have it keep going until at least 2024. I mean, he’d love that if he knew what day of the week it was.

But every party has an ending. And as long as this one has been going, it will be bad.

We never really paid for the party in 2008. Sure, the Great Recession was bad, but the housing bubble never really cleared. How can I tell? It happened again.

Right now the average rent in the country (I read in some disreputable source) is $1,800 a month. I’d say housing prices were so high that NASA put them there, but NASA can’t put anything nearly that high. If people didn’t learn the housing bubble lesson, the housing bubble never really popped.

I hear NASA wants the next person on the Moon to be a woman – so dinner will be ready when the men get back there.

The housing bubble pops when people start buying houses again – not as investments, but as places to live. The stock market bubble pops the same way – when most people don’t want to buy stocks.

And from May, 2022, there’s a lot of pain left before that happens. The way the stock bubble ends is with utter capitulation, with people being so disgusted that they ever thought that stocks were the road to riches.

Only when people stop thinking that houses and stocks are magic money machines, will it be over.

The reason Ma Wilder wouldn’t let Pa buy the Sears© stock is that she had seen the aftermath of the Great Depression, and had seen stock speculation ruin the lives of many, many people.

When we get there, we’ll know it’s over. Will it be this year? In five years? In ten?

Being a waiter might not be a glamorous job, but at least it puts food on the table.

I don’t know. But I feel the combination of debt, inflation, and the generally fragmented nature of society will bring crisis. The good news?

It’s still a beautiful night, and I think someone left a beer in the cooler.

Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement

“Get old, you can’t even cuss someone and have it bother ’em. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing.” – Bubba Ho-Tep

Hunter wanted to start a new delivery service, but Instagram® was already taken.

I’ve stumbled on a principle that I think is currently guiding the flow of history. Being a very humble person, I have named this Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement. Put simply, it’s the idea that if there are two more or less equal outcomes, the most amusing outcome will happen. It’s like instead of being dead or alive, Schrödinger’s Cat had a choice of being a polar bear or nuclear warhead.

Amusing, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean good. It doesn’t mean beneficial. The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald (PBUH, who I’m sure was part of the branch of the MacWilder side of the family) put it this way, “The job of a comedian is to make comedy. Comedy is when something unexpected happens. So, what’s funnier than a comedian that tells a joke and the audience doesn’t laugh?”

Norm’s joke.

I think, for reasons to be explained below, that we are in a time in history where the most amusing thing that could happen, will happen. And I have evidence. And not the burn a body at a funeral home it’s a cremation, but burn a body at home all of a sudden it’s “destroying evidence” sort of evidence. Nope, most every story is one you’ll be familiar with.

The Trump Election in 2016 was my first clue. I’m fairly sure that Trump thought he was going to lose on election night, but after the polls closed? Amusing as can be. Hillary’s mental breakdown and gin-infused refusal to admit that no one would announce her as “Her Cankleness” at the United Nations?

Amusing.

Also amusing was COVID. Remember the pictures of people collapsing on the street in China? Yeah. People fell for that. In the end, it became a meme. Again, I’m not saying it was positive, but how amusing would it have been if people had said, “Oh, it’s a really bad flu.” Heck, there are still people who so mRNA addicted that they get the Pfizer® shot into their eyes every other week.

Why did Hunter sniff artificial sweetener? He thought it was Diet Coke®.

Amusing. Even more amusing? If the mRNA vax didn’t actually help people and was instead an amazingly irresponsible experiment where we tested it on people before we tested it on mice. Oh, wait . . . .

Not mine.

Although I wanted Trump to be re-elected in 2020, I have to admit that the 2020 election was amusing. What happens when a bunch of well-funded Leftists and Globalists decide they want to change the rules and control information flow so a barely-living reanimated corpse of a political hack so limited in intellect that he plagiarized law school work and so limited in charisma that houseplants regularly get more attention gets close enough that they can commit (what is likely) the biggest electoral fraud in history?

And Biden is doing such a wonderful job that he’s making Jimmy Carter look like an effective and competent President, while displaying worse morals than Teddy “pants optional” Kennedy. Sad that Biden doesn’t remember any of that from day to day, and that his son Hunter doesn’t remember the years 2008-2021, and that the New York Times® doesn’t remember anything bad anyone named Biden ever did.

When NASA shows a picture of a hole at work it’s a scientific breakthrough. When I do the same thing, it’s an HR violation.

It’s certainly amusing, and probably more amusing than if Trump were in his second term. And what if that child-sniffing dementia patient picks the most vapid and, well, retarded mentally challenged person to ever sit as Vice President?

Amusing as can be. Mike Pence was boring, mostly. Kamala Harris regularly shows that her knowledge of foreign policy came through watching game shows and infomercials. Sham-wow®!

If Kamala was amusing, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was even more so. To have Joe Biden state, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a . . . .embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable,” less than a month before that exact thing actually happened?

Amusing.

Like salmon return to spawn in the rivers, COVID-19 laid its eggs and became the Ukraine. The Mrs. heard one young high schooler say, “Hey, COVID’s over! We have World War III!” The Ukraine became the Next Big Thing.

And then?

Elon Musk. Pretty much everything he does is amusing. Twitter® is hilarious. Beating NASA with 1/1,000^th of their budget even more. And selling electric meme cars to Leftists that now hate him?

I hear that Amber will soon be touring with Korn.

That’s amusing! He even showed up in commentary at the Johnny Depp/Amber Turd trial.

I think, maybe, that The Market Collapse of 2022 is at least partially from the Left trying to take down Musk and keep Twitter™ as the main source of Leftist indoctrination. It bothers them so much that they actually panicked enough to appoint a Ministry of Truth.

See? Amusing.

Now, just this week, I hear that “men” are lactating. And that “men” can have abortions. Oh, and did I mention the Supreme Court decision?

Yeah. Amusing.

The dead writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote about this (when he wasn’t writing about Oedipus) in his Future History. He called it the Crazy Years. The Crazy Years were just that – the years after society broke down. Heinlein didn’t write about that period much at all, mainly because it’s not a great story.

I do hear he was a savvy shopper, so they called him Bilbo Bargains.

J.R.R. Tolkien was going to do a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He didn’t. Why? After the One Ring was chucked along with Frodo’s finger (note to self, that would be a good band name) and destroyed, things were good. The world had been saved from Evil, and anything that would be a sequel would have been dark. It would have involved (from his notes) Aragorn’s kids idolizing Orcs and slowly being seduced by a decadence that prosperity brought, eventually leading to degeneracy and corruption replacing morality and virtue.

Heyyyyyyyyyy . . . .

Most years, most decades, haven’t seen as much amusement as these last six years. We live in those dark years that neither Heinlein nor Tolkien wanted to write about because it was depressing.

That’s okay. We’re not in a story.

What we are in, though, is a history moving ever so quickly that the novelty content is ever increasing.

There is one thing that we can do, and one thing only. In the darkness of years where degeneracy and corruption replace morality and virtue, be moral. Be virtuous. Stand for what is right, even when the world flows around you and tells you that good is bad, and men can breastfeed. Be virtuous, especially when those around you count virtue as the greatest sin.

Why? It’s right. And it’s not at all what they’re expecting.

I guess that makes it amusing, right?

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless: it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something: that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate. Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal. This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense. If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer. To make it clear: The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource. Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs: “Cocaine use? I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™. That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line. As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons. You might want to soap up when you get out. Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example: back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive. The CPU was the pivot point. In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast. Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too. But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap. There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up. I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized. Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers. If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month. Unless you’re in a Boeing®. Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff. What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!” Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup. And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend. What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity. It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies. It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small. It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive. But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances. I think it was Baltimore. Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved. We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup. Totally solved. More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©. Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares. Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry. But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes. Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food. But that world hunger thing? Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh? I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon? Well, no. Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008. The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did. And now interest rates are higher. But who needs money? The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy. The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup. Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up. And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance. Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.

Joe Biden: Tasting Your Frustration Edition

“I can taste all the flavors from the past sixty years. I can taste the Korean War.” – Bob’s Burgers

I have the memory of an elephant. I recall seeing one at a zoo once.

Yesterday, thankfully, Resident Joe Biden indicated he was really in tune with modern Americans. During a press conference, Joe stated, “I understand the frustration. I can taste it.”

Taste it. Yes. Normally, I goof on Joe about being a bit addled, but here he’s nosing in on my gig. “I can taste it.”

I wonder, what exactly frustration tastes like? Is it like the dinner I made last month when Pugsley asked, “Was it supposed to taste like this?”

I wonder if, to Joe, our frustration tastes like something exceptionally expensive. A fine Bordeaux or, say, gasoline?

Thankfully, Joe is willing to devote all of his senses to solving our problems. I wonder if Biden smells our bank accounts? Probably not, though I heard that Joe took an interest that the supply chain issues have made stores run out of Pantene® – Joe said he’d personally sniff out the situation.

What’s the difference between The Mrs. and I? When she says “sniff this” it’s usually pleasant.

Thankfully, in the very same press conference, Biden also said, “. . . inflation is our strength . . .” Yes. He said that. Pretty quickly, Nina Jankowicz (the Jerry Springer of government officials, except Jerry would kill for her jawline) got up and echoed that thought: “Inflation is our strength, and war in Ukraine is peace.”

Okay, I’m making fun of these people, but in truth, they aren’t serious people. They’re an administration that might actually think that Robert Downey, Jr., is really Iron Man® and really might come and save them after he stops the Russians in Kiev. And that’s me being charitable in my assessment.

When it comes to government, one of the Leftist talking points was that, with Biden in the White House, we’d have the “adults back in charge”. In this case that’s an apt description, but only if the adults in question are a collection of diversity hires unable to get a job where an IQ greater than room temperature (Fahrenheit, not the meter thing). Oh, and they are in favor of The Current Thing, whatever it is.

Pictured: White House security badge.

Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine dresses and calls xirself a woman. Xir also dresses like and calls xirself an Admiral.

As the assistant secretary for health, Levine told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera, about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.” It’s no wonder that Biden appointed a Supreme Court Justice that said she couldn’t define what a woman is. How ever did she decide what to put on her driver’s license?

So, that leads me to several options when it comes to the economy. The first idea is that we have left the equivalent of a group of dim-witted glue-eating children in a room filled with razorblades, poison ivy, cyanide, and whatever hellish creature that Australia might produce that I haven’t had a nightmare about yet. Carnivorous, poisonous koala bears that fly and have scorpion tails, perhaps?

Why did the koala drop out of the tree? It was dead.

Regardless, these idiots were saved from being Marxist perma-baristas by vote harvesting and have somehow gotten the keys to the economy. Of course, never having heard of debt, inflation, or Zimbabwe, the best idea that they had is “make everyone rich by printing more money”. Really. That’s it.

That’s the first option, actual idiocracy.

But what if this is the desired result?

Thus, the second option. The Cloward-Piven Strategy dates from the 1960s and was based around breaking the system through welfare. Cloward and Piven were two married professors that decided that since they were making money from the public for doing essentially nothing, that everyone else should be able to get a piece of that action, too. Economies aren’t based on people being productive, right?

The end idea of their strategy was bankrupting the country through increased pushing of social programs. Why do that, to help people? No, the aim was revolution in the United States. And this wouldn’t be a revolution like the French one (which was a head of its time) which proved that the French can win a war, if it’s against the French.

What’s a good way to start a revolution?

King George was only 11 inches tall – he was unfit to be a ruler.

Doing exactly what the current idiots are doing. It used to be just the commies like Cloward and Piven and their cousins Pol Pot and Stalin who wanted to change man, to make him perfectible. Now, the World Economic Forum (LINK) is on with the same old idea that’s caused so much grief over the past century and change. They have an agenda to make man a global economic cog in a machine where only one culture, one set of ideas is acceptable – in the world.

Strangely, the outcome of the “toddlers in charge” plan looks a lot like the outcome of the “Global Commie Power Grab” plan.

So, was Joe being stupid when he said “inflation is our strength” or was he just slipping and sharing the quiet part of the plan that he wasn’t supposed to say?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – Ministry of Truth, and Socially Coming Apart

“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” – The Matrix

TEN

My day was great until noon. Then I woke up.

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

I’ve kept Clock O’Doom at the same location. For now. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Ministry of Truth – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Abortion and Conflict – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 690 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Ministry of Truth

We now have a Ministry of Truth. Oh, I’m sorry – it’s the Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board. Why? Presumably because people say things the Leftists don’t agree with.

I’ve heard that calling a groomer “groomer” really makes them mad.

The leader of the board that determines what is true and what isn’t?

Nina Jankowicz.

Nina, if you’re unaware, is the poster child for insufferable Leftist blather. She is, first, a low level, stooge for the Left. Her expertise in all things disinformation allowed her to opine that Hunter Biden’s laptop was expressible only in the holy high words of the Left: Russian disinformation. Russian disinformation was, according to the legend of the Left, the only reason that St. Hillary wasn’t elected.

Sadly, this Nina has no luftballons.

Now, ordinarily I don’t mind such creatures – their trajectory is predictable – they write a book, take a position washing dogs for their political masters, and then gracelessly drift away. These sorts of political vampires are what make writing fun.

But Nina’s different. Nina wasn’t hired by the political bits of Washington, she was hired by Homeland Security. What’s the difference? The Department of Homeland Security is primarily a law enforcement agency. It’s (sort-of) okay having a reptilian partisan hack at the cabinet level, but infesting law enforcement with Leftist partisan robots is a step too far, especially when Resident Biden is talking about Ultra MAGA, or whatever the voices in his head were telling him that afternoon.

At least, though, the mask is off.

Violence And Censorship Update

It’s been fairly quiet on the political violence front, at least recently. We do have plenty of Censorship news.

Okay, this isn’t real.

For the first time ever, got some good news up first:

Twitter®. If you had a wheelbarrow, you could have made a fortune mining salt from Leftist tears. The very same Leftists that were overjoyed that they controlled Twitter® aren’t exactly thrilled by the idea that they won’t control this platform. Here’s some salt to share:

It’s even better to mine the salt from a famous person.

Twitter isn’t done censoring, though. They censored info about the FDA containing info from the FDA.

DuckDuckGo® had to counterbalance the loss of Twitter© – they decided that the only news sources they would handle would be trusted. I’m betting Nina will love that.

And never forget that having an opinion that the Left doesn’t like is punishable by violence.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence is again flat. Perhaps turning back up in May or June – Antifa® seems primed?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a little in April. Much more in June?

Economic:

I had bet the economic numbers would be worse, and I was wrong. If the stock market slide continues, though . . . .

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year. All-time record levels. Again.

Abortion and Conflict

The draft abortion decision by the Supreme Court is out. It shows a huge divide in the country. An example of the salt to be mined is here:

There were even a few words from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

And the Federal Reserve© had a comment:

The United States is hopelessly divided. An example?

This was thought of as a negative result that would make people on the Right mad, rather than the desired result. Tinder® and all of the rest of the hook-up culture has been horrible for the people involved, especially women. I spent some time watching a YouTube® of a pro-life march at a college in some city. The pro-life folks were kind and polite, but the people on the other side of the issue were mean, angry, and wouldn’t listen, at all.

The idea of a rational discussion and debate with the Left is nearly impossible. The objectives are 100% out of sync.

The end result of all this program changing is an America that is far more divided, and a step closer to Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1509177129044488192

https://twitter.com/i/status/1502074883550892033

https://twitter.com/i/status/1510413517509255175

https://twitter.com/i/status/1520557517130153989

https://twitter.com/i/status/1510909715961679873

https://youtu.be/iykHLx65WNw

https://twitter.com/i/status/1507576908099293189

https://twitter.com/wdsu/status/1506375168058343427

https://abcnews4.com/news/local/video-gunfire-rings-out-at-little-league-game-in-north-charleston-wciv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnEdeUbWAlg

https://twitter.com/ATLUncensored/status/1516757571570348038

https://twitter.com/OsintUpdates/status/1510581397458599936

https://www.inquirer.com/news/shooting-philadelphia-kensington-mantua-strawberry-mansion-20220415.html

Good Guys

https://www.tmz.com/2022/04/02/sucker-punch-high-school-track-runner-press-charges-lawsuit/

https://youtu.be/-qUgXFN2aLw

https://twitter.com/t0masimp8000/status/1503871472498257920

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/houston-car-dealership-employee-flips-script-on-attempted-robber-sends-him-running/ar-AAW5MYE

Two Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10684433/Gun-wielding-Texas-man-shot-dead-girlfriends-ex-husband-not-face-charges.html

Body Count

https://southfront.org/from-30-to-40-ukrainian-children-disappeared-without-a-trace-in-spain/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/avian-flu-has-spread-to-27-states-sharply-driving-up-egg-prices/ar-AAWgZBQ

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/bird-flu-27-million-birds-dead/

https://airtable.com/shrbaT4x8LG8EbvVG/tbl7xKsSUIOPAa7Mx

https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/04/08/athletes-833-serious-540-dead-post-injection/

https://palexander.substack.com/p/us-military-doctor-testifies-she?s=r

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/number-covid-patients-us-hospitals-reaches-record-low-83819273

https://www.revolver.news/2022/04/black-lives-matter-reign-of-terror/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGb748VOcYU

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/opioid-overdose-deaths-teens-skyrocketed-due-fentanyl/story?id=84035862

https://cowboystatedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/wyo-nuke-map-1.jpg

Vote Count

THE STEAL WAS REAL – WATCH “2000 Mules” NOW: https://www.bitchute.com/embed/TizNoVq1qcwb/

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/29/film-2000-mules-offers-vivid-proof-of-voter-fraud/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/dinesh-dsouzas-2000-mules-ballot-trafficking-expose-has-evidence-can-it

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/29/dishonest-pivot-heart-new-voter-fraud-conspiracy/

True The Vote: https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1513585569779040262

https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/08/true-the-vote-previously-undisclosed-details-show-rico-crimes-in-2020-election/

https://www.truethevote.org/election-integrity-testimony-in-wisconsin-on-thursday-march-24-2022/

https://www.truethevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FILE_5193_no-meta.pdf

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/04/30/exclusive-true-the-votes-catherine-engelbrecht-mules-went-routes-trafficking-ballots-repeatedly-day-after-day-ahead-2020-election/

Zuck: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/rigged-documentary-details-zuckerbergs-400m-vote-juicing-for-biden

https://www.hastingstribune.com/ap/agriculture/zuckerberg-helped-fund-the-2020-elections-now-republicans-seek-to-ban-future-grants/article_24dae7d5-3989-50b3-8c63-528185976ade.html

https://newrepublic.com/article/165939/election-funding-voter-suppression-zuckerberg

AZ: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/07/brnovich-interim-report-finds-serious-vulnerabilities-in-2020-election/

FL: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/florida-voter-registration-republicans-overtake-democrats-100000

GA: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/investigators-georgia-ballot-harvesting-probe-zero-funding-eyewitness

PA: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/15/pennsylvania-compelling-evidence-shows-blue-counties-scored-grants-in-2020-election/

PA: https://www.wfmz.com/news/area/lehighvalley/lehigh-county-da-likely-hundreds-of-instances-where-people-deposited-more-than-1-ballot-into/article_90b9cd12-b451-11ec-b79a-9f2106bb481b.html

USA:https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/24/poll-one-in-six-biden-voters-would-have-changed-their-vote-if-they-had-known-about-scandals-suppressed-by-media/

USA: https://www.newsmax.com/us/biden-usps-election-funding/2022/03/28/id/1063188/

USA: https://www.axios.com/2022-midterms-out-state-money-71487d18-76fd-452a-9020-d93ddf4e3106.html

Civil War

https://dnyuz.com/2022/04/03/flurry-of-new-laws-move-blue-and-red-states-further-apart/

https://aninjusticemag.com/contrary-to-popular-opinion-we-are-not-winning-this-war-196bc828bfdf

https://medium.com/politically-speaking/will-war-break-out-between-red-and-blue-states-93cac4d8c219

https://newrepublic.com/article/165959/global-age-civil-war

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-democratic-socialists-of-americas-civil-war-over-bds/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-civil-war-for-americas-banks/

https://www.businessinsider.com/civil-war-violence-2022-midterm-elections-texas-republican-trump-2022-3

https://www.denisonforum.org/current-events/is-america-headed-toward-another-civil-war/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRhTPOXVIAEyVYU.jpg

Inflation, Velocity, and Bikini Economics

“Well, you already know my name. I come here to, uh, unwind, because my job can be intense. I often dream I’m Clint Eastwood.” – Psyche

A picture from the last Federal Reserve® meeting.

There are several things that are wrecking the economy. One of them that isn’t Joe Biden (or his sidekick, the Amazing Giggle Girl) is the sheer amount of cash in the system. M2 is one of the broader definitions of currency – it includes ready cash, savings accounts, quarters under seat cushions, winning lottery tickets, tears from Leftists over Elon buying Twitter™ and, really, anything that can be spent fairly rapidly.

I want to send a shout-out to the guy who plays the triangle in the orchestra. Thanks for every ting!

I’ve brought up before that this measure, M2, has shot up. It sort of has to – the national debt doubles every eight years so they have to get more and more into the system to build that sort of debt. Half of M2 has been created since September 2013. In the United States, we have so much debt you could rename the country “Owen”.

Although (in theory) cash is supposed to grow in tandem with the economy, inflation has been the inevitable result, especially since the dollar is no longer backed by anything other than kind wishes and Nancy Pelosi’s belly button lint.

So why aren’t things worse?

Velocity.

What’s velocity? A simple definition is how fast cash moves in the economy. I’ve had a collection of pennies in a piggy bank since I was in junior high. Why pennies? I spent all of the dimes, nickels, and quarters on beer when I was underage stuff, so over time, it became a penny fest. But those 1,000 or so pennies are definitely part of M2, but have had zero velocity since I could drive.

So, inflation happens when you line up bikini girls in order of height?

The $20 in cash I spent at Walmart® moved to the bank, where it was deposited. Walmart™ then got a deposit and spent it on wages to a clerk. The clerk then spent it on PEZ®, and then it was recycled again. That currency had a pretty high velocity, just like that one girlfriend that told me she needed time and distance. That’s velocity, right?

Some cash moves around. Some doesn’t.

Here’s the dirty secret of the economy since 2008: the velocity of M2 has dropped from a “healthy” economy velocity of 1.7 or so to a “piles of cash under the mattress” level of 1.1.

People hang on to both cash and ratty underwear (this is true – one sign of a depression is lowered sales of men’s underwear) during times of uncertainty, and a quick view of the chart shows that despite all of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve™ has done since 2008, things are still broken. Cash is sitting in piggy banks, in accounts, and at least some is sitting in dark pools in accounts to prop up the reserves of the banks.

Things get tough right around the elbow.

We’re seeing the stock market dip now, in a system awash in cash. Why is the stock market dipping when prices of everything are skyrocketing? What is the dipping sauce, is it ranch? Why aren’t stock prices going up, too?

Certainly, some companies are having record profits – oil companies, timber companies, fertilizer companies. But how many people are going to buy luxuries when the price of eggs is $5.00 a dozen and a hamburger costs a kidney “donation” at McTransplants®?

So, is this a kidney Bean?

Inflation causes failure. At first, it looks good. It increases some profits, like that fertilizer company’s profits. Housing prices take off. Most people enjoy this, at first.

But after it gives, then inflation takes away. Prices have to go up at the restaurants because beef and broccoli and potatoes go up in price. Then, people look and decide that they can cook at home for cheaper. And those higher house prices? The result is higher taxes on the property.

Now prices at the restaurant have to stay up, because the restaurant can’t make up for higher prices by charging less than it costs to keep the lights on. But there are fewer customers.

So businesses, especially businesses built on disposable income, fail harder than Joe Biden on a crossword puzzle. But that’s just the start, at least as long as we keep Joe away from actual decisions.

The scary part (besides Joe hanging with his invisible friend, JoJo) is that no one really knows what happens when all of it unwinds.

Well, it’s sort of like a bikini picture.

What will make the velocity of currency go up? When people are afraid to hold on to their money because they’re worried that it’s losing value.

But that is (my guess) not quite yet.

I do expect, especially when the stock market unwinds to see a deflation first, across multiple asset classes. It will be “catch a falling knife” time because in many cases it won’t be clear what is a good bargain, and what’s junk. In 2008, gold dropped from nearly $1,000 to $710 as the market melted down.

Gold was obviously safer at that time than the stock market, but even it was driven downward – because cash was vanishing from existence as home loans defaulted. How does that happen? Remember, if I have $100 in the bank, it’s not really there. The bank loaned it out.

So, I think I have $100, but so does the person who borrowed it from the bank, so M2 shows that there is $200. When the loan defaults, there’s only $100. And it’s $100 the bank is on the hook to pay back to me, so they have to borrow it from someone else.

Yup. Defaulting loans and business failures cause the economy to contract, even during inflation. And if that causes the Fed® to print more money?

We’ll be in even bigger trouble.

Update: our appeal at Google® was approved. The podcast was restored (LINK). Our livestream is on tonight (Wednesday at 9 Eastern), at our channel.

Inflation: Crowding Out The Real Economy

“You don’t? Well, you don’t have to understand what it eh, it eh . . . It was printed in eh . . . Washington. Well, and when they print something in Washington, they know what it means.” – Green Acres

“Never trust an actor with a gun.” – Abraham Lincoln

Like the beginning of a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin, you know one thing: the pain is only starting.

The pain I’m speaking of is inflation, though. I’d love to be the bearer of happy news. I’d love to say, “Nah, as soon as things straighten out in (spins wheel) China West Taiwan, things will be better. Nope.

Let me explain.

The Federal Government is really good at exactly two things, and one of them is spending money. Since they already donated a few billion bucks worth of stuff to the Taliban, they decided to go for a few trillion to everyone who was breathing.

What’s the difference between a rake and an AK-47? Don’t ask me, I just fly the drone.

The spending has been amazing, and it has created the expected result: inflation. It’s not done, though.

As I said, the Federal Government is good at spending money, but it’s slow at spending money. Although it looks like the Federal Government is just willy-nilly stuffing the money it just printed into the mouths of anyone nearby, it’s much more complicated than that.

First, a bureaucrat has to invent the program. And that means?

Paperwork. That has to be reviewed and approved. And every buzzword of sustainable and underserved and economic equity has to be mashed into the program and form. Once complete?

The program has to be announced, and various states, counties, alternative bands, and alternative energy providers then pounce on the paperwork to ask for buckets of cash. Biden’s grants for free crack pipes won’t figure out what communities they need to go to by themselves!

This process takes months. Then, once awarded, people need to order the crack pipes from China Terre Haute. Why not China? This is the Federal Government, and we know it is charged with protecting the American Crackpipe Maker Equalitarian Sisterhood (ACMES). So, all the crack pipe materials will be locally sourced from approved Wiccans.

How to cook crack and clean crabs: step one – use commas.

If it stopped at crack pipes, it would be fine, probably. But it’s not just that. It’s concrete for a burst of road construction. It’s rebar for the concrete. It’s plywood for the forms.

There was already price pressure on almost everything. Now that some of the largest steel (around 100 million tons of production) works in the world are shut down or sanctioned due to Vlad’s Spring Vacation, (not to mention fuel costs shooting up higher than a T-72 turret) that rebar is now much more expensive.

If that were the only problem, these sort of crushing cost increases would probably be something that we could live with. But whenever the government wants to buy a cubic yard of concrete to make a new office to process paperwork for Build Back Better Bux applications, well, that increases the cost.

For everyone.

In Denmark, they tried to repave a street with Legos®. They ran into a lot of roadblocks.

It makes the cost of building or expanding a business higher, unpredictable, and perhaps unattainable. Government spending – trillions of dollars of government spending that came from money that was simply wished into existence – crowds out private spending.

That means the new Pizza Hut® can’t be built because concrete is too expensive. That means the new PEZ™ factory can’t be built to keep up with the PEZ© demand because steel for the machinery costs too much. The alternatives that create a productive economy are walled off due to increased costs.

So, it’s happening now.

A little.

I’m telling you now, the big waves of Fed.Gov spending have yet to hit. Hundreds of millions of dollars more than the usual printing are hitting the economy – each month. The pressure from printing has yet to stop. It has yet to slow. It is still increasing.

I don’t think my doctor likes me. I called him and told him that I took a bunch of sleeping pills. He told me have a few drinks to relax.

The economy of every country that hyperinflated did so because of one simple reason: the leadership seemed to not understand that printing didn’t lead to prosperity. They had some sort of belief that money was a magical totem so that they could print more, and people would be happy.

In small quantities, it works. Home prices go up. Prices go up. People who save (as always) are the ones that get burned as their saved cash lowers in value.

Germany hyperinflated in the 1920s because they wanted to print cash. Lots of it. They didn’t have the good fortune to be able to create all they wanted with computers and the press of a button, so they had to hyperinflate the old-fashioned way: printing.

How bad did it get?

That certainly didn’t lead to any sort of social upheaval.

They managed to double the capacity of the printing press by only printing on one side.

I bet we can match that: I bet we can start making electronic money with only four bits per byte. I guess I can be the bearer of glad tidings and report there is good news, though:

We don’t have to watch a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin. We’ve got that going for us.

The Economic Fate Of The United States: Two Choices

“No, you’ve already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.” – The Matrix Reloaded

I spent hundreds to rent a limo, but there was no driver. All that cash on a limo, and nothing to chauffeur it.

I did posts about inflation before inflation hit, but I’m not a psychic. It’s not like I work for ESPN or something. No. This inflation was absolutely predictable, and in fact, has been absolutely predictable since 2008. Ben Bernanke’s Fed© Approved™ solution to the Great Liquidity Crisis during the Great Recession was simple: print a lot of money.

Make no mistake, the economic problem was big back then in 2008. I personally saw an entire segment of the economy reach a full dead stop. Rail cars piled up at the sidings on my drive to work near Modern Mayberry because the railroads had no place to put them – miles of them. I mean, without rail cars how could new railroad employees train?

Why did this happen? Nobody knew which banks had money and which ones didn’t. The trust that underlies the system had been blown up by a series of banks defaulting, with stocks crashing, and bonds plummeting. Heck, even physicists stopped trusting atoms – they make up everything. The Fed’s® solution to this lack of trust? Like I said, print money.

They were sneaky about how they did it – they printed money and gave it to the banks by buying up the awful assets they had on the books. The money vacuumed up the bad debt like Charlie Sheen on the set of Two and a Half Grams.

Something tells me he’d be a more thoughtful Fed® chairman than the one we have now.

The printing also kicked the can down the road. We could spend all day about the causes, but the reality is that we are the can that was kicked down the road. Our current inflation is the result of keeping the party going even when the system should have cleared out the bad debts, cleared out the dead companies, and cleared out the waste that caused the crisis.

Would it have been tough? Sure, especially on elevator repairmen – but their business is always up and down anyway.

So, now what?

The reality is simple. As a nation, we face only two choices.

The first choice we could make is to keep doing what we’re doing. We can keep printing money, and keep pretending that the economic problems are created by the sanctions we put in place over a regional border conflict that we helped create and certainly encouraged.

The result of the decision to keep printing will first be higher prices. Higher fuel prices mean less driving, but they also mean that the cost of nearly everything you buy costs more: food, trash service, beer, PEZ®, posters of Elvis (especially posters of the The King after he discovered carbohydrates), everything physical will cost more.

Why can’t Elvis drive his Cadillac™ in reverse? He’s dead.

Oh, sure, hyperinflation seems like fun at first. Rising prices, rising wages . . . but the wages never keep up with the prices. And businesses can’t keep up with the rising costs, so long-term contracts that had been great are now unprofitable. Bare shelves show up. People rush to ditch cash to buy stuff because they know that Kraft© Mac n’ Cheese™ is going to be 20% more next week, so canned goods have a better rate of return than the stock market. Some people don’t like canned food, but for me it’s ate out of tin.

But then banks have finally gotten wise, and we’ll see higher interest rates on car loans, home loans, and student debt. Higher costs on cars plus higher interest costs mean lower new car sales, especially when people are struggling to find change in their couches to buy Pizza Rolls® and Twinkies™.

Lower new car sales mean fewer new cars made. Which requires fewer workers. Which increases unemployment. Eventually, there’s a recession or depression as economic activity ceases to be meaningful – weird things happen as people resort to a manic level of activity.

The banks finally get wise and loans don’t come with an interest rate, they come with a scheme to create a way that the bank doesn’t go bankrupt as the currency value plummets. The values are pegged to a commodity (like gold) or an inflation index. Bankers have been through this before in country after country and know every trick to keep themselves whole. I assure you, inflation has their interest.

I saw a homeless man talking to his shadow. That means six more weeks of inflation.

Ultimately, the orgy of printing results in destitution, unemployment, and a political and moral crisis. How bad is it? Reminders of the hyperinflation caused by worthless money during the Revolutionary War are still in the Constitution – “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver tender in payment of debts.” I even keep a copy of the Constitution on the wall – The Mrs. calls it the Decoration of Independence.

Wonder why the German bankers are so crazy about not letting the euro hyperinflate? They’ve been through that before. And German bankers are generally pessimists, which is why they study Russian.

Sadly, we’re seeing these impacts even though many of the trillions in printing haven’t even hit the economy yet. Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill hasn’t even hit the economy yet. Think construction is expensive now? Wait until there are a trillion more dollar in construction contracts that hit the economy in the next six months. That will lead to millions of guys standing around trying to look busy.

I wanted to build highways, but I decided not to go down that road.

So, that’s path one – keep going and wait for everything to blow up like slobber from a pasty dingo with a bag of decade-old beef jerky, which seems like an oddly specific analogy, but I have my reasons. What will be on the other side? No one can say – often, hyperinflation destroys the entire fabric of the country, making the people desperate, willing to do anything, even watch another Marvel® movie.

There is, of course, a second choice:

Quit printing money.

Stop entirely.

Have the Fed® increase the interest rate to slow down the economy and re-value the currency. Stop the shenanigans.

The result of that is, of course, also a major recession – probably worse than the Great Recession of 2008. Possibly as bad as the Great Depression.

There will be plummeting home values as interest rates increase. There will be unemployment. But once the debt clears, in a decade or so, what will be left will be an economy that is based, perhaps, on a more fundamentally sound currency, or even one that won’t inflate until it is worthless. I can dream, can’t I?

It’s not a pleasant idea, going through that pain. But in the end, it provides a chance for economic prosperity.

That’s it. Those are really the only choices I see in the economy. We’ll have to pick one.

I have no faith that the second path will be taken. Why? This graph, for one. Looks like people who like free stuff, vote for people who give them . . . free stuff.

Romney supporters signed their checks on the front, Obama voters signed theirs on the back.

It requires making a hard choice, a knowing difficulty. It’s like having the discipline to eat the broccoli and skip the ice cream before they wheel you out to read things off the teleprompter. I have seen no sign of the political class of the United States being willing to make any difficult decision. I have seen only a little appetite in the general populace to take the tough road.

No, I think we’ll make the first choice. When inflation gets worse? My bet is that the reaction of the political leadership will be to send checks to everyone. Wait and see.

No, I’m not a psychic. But I wish I was a remote viewer. I’m still looking for the one from the stereo.