Tulsi Gabbard is sick and tired of the Democrat party, and she’s not going to take it anymore:

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1579788950696185859

A few thoughts:

The Key Log: As Berg’s Seventh Law foretells, one of the reasons that Democrats like to harp on the “extremism” of the GOP is to deflect away from their own. One can hope the popular Senator from the very blue state might be the crack in the dam that brings out this century’s “Reagan Republicans”.

Speaking of Reagan: There’s at least some conventional wisdom that Gabbard has made this move to put her name in the VP stakes for 2024.

“She’s a LIBERAL”, some of my conservative friends say.

Let’s back up a moment.

One of Ronald Reagan’s great bits of genius was his ability to reach across the aisle to get people to pull together on the issues that mattered to his agenda. His agenda, by the way, was two items: right the economic ship, and destroy communism. He used his bully pulpit to push others to make headway on other issues – abortion, 2nd Amendment, the border – but he kept his own political powder dry to get the deals he needed made with Dems like Tip O’Neil on the 1982 Tax Cuts, and with the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland on assisting the Eastern European labor movement against the USSR.

So – could a future Republican president focused on our society’s current enemies – the deep state, stagflation and China – benefit from reaching across the aisle to a center-left “libertarian” Democrat who shares those concerns (in as many words, in her statement above)?

It’s worth a look.

Plan to build small, modular nuke plants advances.

The good news for Republicans: all those price drops in gas will likely turn around and head north again starting Friday.

The bad news: the apparently upcoming rail strike is going to bodge up a good chunk of the rest of the economy.

And you’ve probably heard next to nothing about it. The typical Democrat-voting schmuck driving down Grand Avenue certainly hasn’t. Jim Geraghty:

We live in a country where the (currently) ruling political party and most of the national media have a symbiotic relationship. (Jen Psaki started work at NBC News this week.) One of the problems with this dynamic is that when the ruling class decides something is important — say, emphasizing the issue abortion as the midterm elections approach — it tends to squeeze out everything that the ruling party doesn’t want emphasized.

Don’t get me wrong; abortion is a hugely important issue to many Americans. You can read more about South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham’s bill from Alexandra DeSanctis and Charlie Cooke and John McCormick and Kathryn Jean Lopez.

But there are a lot of things going on in this world, and one issue that seems spectacularly under-covered — a ticking time bomb, if you will — is that starting at 12:01 a.m. Friday, or about a day and a half from now, if there isn’t a deal between freight-rail unions and employers, the U.S. economy comes to a screeching halt and . . . well, the term “derails” seems fitting.

Trains transport most of the crude oil that produces the gas we pay too much for. And with trains transporting none of it, gas get scarcer. Also – everything else produced with crude oil.

Not to mention the coal that powers all those electric cars that Governor Klink wants to force you into, to say nothing of providing a fair chunk of the nation’s heat in the winter.

To say nothing of the food that is already inflating faster than many Americans can afford, especially given that this is happening right at the harvest time that provides so much of the food that people will be eating until next year.

But yeah, by all means keep talking about abortion and Mara Lago.

I caught this Twitter thread last week, and wanted to make sure I got a chance to talk about it. It’s by Andrew Hammel, an American living in Germany. The first people to pass it around to are all of your friends who still think Angela Merkel was the real leader of the free world over the last six years.

After that? Pass it on to all of your friends and relatives who think that “Social democracy – Socialism lite – is financially self supporting, and doesn’t depend on literally everything going perfectly.

And while it’s about European macro economics, there is an inevitable Minnesota angle below Mr. Hammel’s piece, which follows. And speaking of Minnesota – whenever “Germany” is mentioned in the piece below, fill in “Minnesota”. It doesn’t all fit, but enough of it does that it’s worth sitting up and taking notice.

---

I think many Germans don’t realize how the energy crisis directly threatens Germany’s future as a prosperous country. Germany has a huge bureaucracy and social-welfare apparatus, and provides comparatively generous subsidies for the arts.

Universities are free, which means the taxpayer pays for them, and lots of vocational training is also heavily subsidized.

Where does all the money to pay for this come from?

If you ask the typical lefty voter, they have only the vaguest idea: Big companies and the rich people in modernist villas who always turn out to be the real killer on German crime shows.

The German media do a terrible job conveying the basic principles of economics and management to viewers and listeners, so most Germans who aren’t engineers or executives or factory workers or otherwise directly involved in producing goods don’t really understand where Germany’s wealth comes from.

But no, the only reason Germany can afford all these dead-weight investments which don’t yield any returns (or only indirect, generalized, time-delayed returns) is because Germany makes things people want to buy.

That’s what brings the money in. Germany doesn’t have many natural resources (at least, that it is willing to recover), so those don’t bring in the cash. Germany’s exports are the main, nearly the exclusive, source of its wealth.

Germany has much higher manufacturing costs than many other comparable countries, and the only way it can keep competitive is through a well-educated workforce, efficiency, high technology, and high quality.

That’s what generates enough value added to make it worthwhile to produce something in Germany, rather than in Hungary or China or the US or Russia, where all input costs are cheaper.

But the energy crisis has the potential to nearly or completely destroy this competitive advantage.

When energy costs are merely three times what they are in a competitive country such as the USA or Romania or China (depending on the product), German efficiency and technical quality and brand reputation can make up for that.

When energy costs rise to 10 times or even 15 times those of competitive countries, and the markets become convinced this is a lasting situation, Germany becomes unsustainable. It becomes impossible to manufacture high value-added products for a profit within Germany.

They may be designed in Germany, but they won’t be made there. It will just be too expensive, period. There’s no way to make the numbers work.

And this leads to long-term erosion of the tax base.

Gradually the money dries up for things which aren’t vital to the survival of the country. And what are those things vital to the survival of the country? Massive government subsidies to make energy and food affordable to the average person.

This is where much of the budget of many developing countries goes right now: to subsidies on diesel and wheat and rice which enable ordinary people to be able to pay their (artificially reduced) bills.

Half of the time you read about riots in places like Indonesia or Egypt, the cause is the government being forced to reduce subsidies on food and energy, often by a mandate from the IMF.

Once Germany reaches the point where it has to subsidize energy and food to prevent social unrest – something it’s about to start doing right now – then money for non-essential things dries up.

Those things include generous welfare, arts subsidies, free education, generous pensions, etc. There will be even more privatizations, and many arts institutions will simply go bankrupt.

Train travel might become something reserved (even more) for the well-off, since (1) subsidies which keep the Deutsche Bahn (even remotely) affordable will disappear; and (2) the average German consumer will not have enough disposable income to pay for a non-subsidized train ticket. Universities will gradually wither on the vine unless they introduce tuition fees, and even then, they’ll shut down entire degree programs which don’t channel graduates into well-paying jobs.

Goodbye humanities, it was nice knowing you.

Sorry regional symphony orchestra, we can’t afford you anymore. Bye-bye small museum, you’re becoming an Aldi. And sorry 2nd-oldest church in Hepperhausen, there’s no money to maintain you anymore.

We can just barely afford the 1st-oldest church, which we have to keep up because it’s a tourist attraction, and we are desperate for every tourist dollar.

And all those state-funded “streetworkers” and “night buses” providing basic assistance to the growing numbers of homeless? Sorry, you’ll have to find money elsewhere.

And then Germany will find itself in the trap many developing countries find themselves in: It will lack the productive industries needed to support the subsidies which it must continue paying to avoid social chaos.

It will go further and further into the red, and will need help from outside entities. And those entities will point out that the only way out of the red is to cut the broad subsidies for basic survival.

Which Germany won’t be able to do without plunging millions of people into genuine, real, not-enough-food-to-eat poverty.

Germany will survive, of course, but it will keep getting steadily poorer and poorer.

And that is very bad for a country’s psyche, since humans regret what they have lost much more bitterly than they regret losing a chance to get something they’ve never had. Deaths of despair will increase, as they did in Russia in the 1990s.

This is why the energy crisis poses a grave threat to Germany’s future as a prosperous country. There is still a way to avert it, but certainly not with the strategies currently favored by the administration. We’ll see whether the EU can pull a rabbit out of the hat.

I’m not optimistic.

---

The side angles – about things that Germans do when things break down – are too obvious and awful to think about.

Minnesota, and US, angle: we don’t have the Soviet…er, Russian government shutting off gas and raising energy prices by an order of magnitude.

Or do we? I mean, this winter is going to suuuuuuck, and we’ve got a governor who thinks, like Angela Merkel, that shutting off nuke and coal plants and driving people to solar and wind power makes perfect sense.

Originally in this tweet thread:

This may be the most badly-aged tweet of the decade so far:

Trump made some outrageous claims about German energy at the UN — and the German delegation’s reaction was priceless pic.twitter.com/izpa2fKC3B

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) September 26, 2018

sometimes it feels like the world is in a race between those who are inventing fusion Power too cheap to be metered, and those who are trying to send us back to the 1600s as serfs to the progressive nobility.

So on Tuesday, Brandon banged his sceptre on the floor of the palace and bade $20K to disappear from student loan balances, forthwith.

And his reasoning was the same, sober statesmanship we’ve come to expect from Brandon:

https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1562518492519493634

Unanswered – and, as far as I know, unasked by most of the media – does he actually have the authority to unilaterally erase loan balances and transfer it all to the deficit?

Of course not – not if you take enumerated powers seriously:

As of yet, Congress has provided no authorization for the executive branch to arbitrarily write off some of the money that borrowers owe to taxpayers. As of yet, Congress has passed no rules that allow down-on-their-luck presidents to throw money at people for political gain. As of yet, Congress has given no instruction that if the president’s friends might like a little more cash, he can raid the Treasury to give it to them. Certainly, Congress has set up a loan program. But the deal there is rather simple, all told: First you borrow, and then you pay back what you borrowed. There is no mention of “forgiveness” days or of “help” or of rolling Chekhovian jubilees, and by pretending otherwise, President Biden is making a mockery of his oath to uphold the Constitution.

To be fair and accurate, there’s never been any indication Biden understood that oath, even before his senescence.

But mark my words: colleges – their endowments untouched – will start telling prospective students “Borrow whatever you need – there’ll be another forgiveness soon”.

You and I, and our grandchildren, will be paying off the loans of these

I’m a conservative, and a Christian.

And I cringe at some of the things said in the name of “conservative Christianity“.

Which I hasten to add, because some of the things I’ve seen from “progressive Christians“, including some friends and classmates, this past few days have had me cringing even more.

Three things, specifically:

“Christ came to earth to forgive mankind‘s sins – so if you oppose loan forgiveness, you’re not a very good Christian“.

This is not “loan forgiveness”. This is transferring the loan to people who didn’t borrow it.

Will it benefit some people? Sure, it must be nice to have $10-$20,000 in balance disappear.

But this political act has nothing to do with Christ’s grace – dying for the sins every individual commits. It’s more like rounding up randos off the streets because someone else committed a murder. 

“It’s predatory lending!”

You can make that case. But unfortunately, the “forgiveness“ will do nothing to change that. In fact, it will only accelerate the “predatory“ lending, since everyone applying for those “predatory loans“ is going to figure “the first $10,000 is going to be free, again, anyway…“.

In fact, if the administration had sat down in a room to figure out the worst possible solution to student debt, this would’ve been it.

They could’ve made universities, with their hundreds of billions of dollars of endowments, share some of the risk. They could’ve even just cut interest rates.

But no. Fighting predatory lending by making everyone else pay is like fighting street crime by dumping piles of wallets out on the street and hoping people will stop holding other people up.

“New Ministers Go Deep Into Debt – and Don’t Make Much Money”

A couple of (it’s fair to say) “liberal” clergy I know have pointed out that their denominations require a Masters in Divinity (MDiv) to be ordained – which can cost up to $200K, as much as law school or medical school – but their first jobs out of seminary pay something close to minimum wage. And it’s fair to say outside Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar and Pope Frank, nobody goes into the ministry to get rich.

But isn’t that a little odd – an academic discipline (a product and service) that pays badly, and doesn’t necessarily cater to the children of immense wealth, costing well into six figures? I mean, if “products and services for people without a lot of money to spend on them” were prone to spontaneously inflating out of reach, the McDonalds cheeseburger would be $25.

At any rate – presenting this as a gesture of Christian grace is cynical, manipulative and profoundly wrong.

If it seemed to you that the Administration and Dems jammed down the “Inflation Reduction Act” – an agglomeration of “Build Back Battered“ and “Green New Deal“ policies – really really hard?

You were probably right. It’s because people are losing interest in “climate change“:

mericans are less concerned now about how climate change might impact them personally — and about how their personal choices affect the climate — than they were three years ago, a new poll shows, even as a wide majority still believe climate change is happening…Overall, 35% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of climate change on them personally, down from 44% in August 2019. Another third say they are somewhat concerned. Only about half say their actions have an effect on climate change, compared with two-thirds in 2019.

The story is, in fact, more climatemongery, and goes on to try to re-bury the lede – but between the lines, the message is there; other priorities are taking over for people in the real world, outside the upper-middle-class progressive bubble.

And if people ever make the connection between the output of the “green/sustainable/equitable“ mafia policies, and the depression in their standard of living, that’s going to be a big problem for the greens.

Poor people don’t solve problems.

Is there someone out there, anywhere, who read this:

I ran for president promising to make government work for working families again, and that is what the Inflation Reduction Act does—period.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 8, 2022

…and thought “Hmmm – government is clearly not working for my family, and the “Inflation Reduction Act is clearly a turd that will raise prices…

…but he ended it with the word “Period”.

Hmmm.

He must be onto something”?

August 1, 2025: “Residents of Manila garbage dump: “Californians go home! You’re ruining everything!”

I mean, it’s more and more plausible every day.

To: The Hon. Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03)
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Burning Daylilght, Bucko

Rep. Phillips.

You recently tweeted this:

We’ll soon be voting to bring great jobs back to America, mitigate inflation, reduce our debt, lower the price of prescriptions, and finally take steps to combat climate change. Would be pretty cool if our entire Congress decided to come together and show the world something.

— Rep. Dean Phillips 🇺🇸 (@RepDeanPhillips) July 28, 2022

Well that’s great.

But I’ve got some questions.

For starters: you’ve had two years with control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress. Why, 2.5 years into this period of complete control, are you suddenly concerned with jobs leaving, prices rising, debt skyrocketing, the price of medicine and “climate change”?

Did you used to wait to do your school projects to 9PM the night before they were due? Did your entire conference?

Also – as I asked your colleague Rep. Craig the other day – what powers to you, a Congressperson, have to affect any of those issues via your votes?

Most of the hard, empirical realizations I’ve had as a result of this blog started as satirical, sardonic or otherwise flippant remarks that turned out, to my amazement, to be true.

The canon of “Berg’s Law” is the closest I’ve got to a “famous” example.

Less flippant? My ever-more-frequent observation that Democrat politicians can tell “their” voters pretty much anything that suits them, because their base just doesn’t do critical thinking.

Case in point: the Administration apparently wants to borrow a page from Elizabeth Warren, and have the economy “identify” as healthy:

https://twitter.com/JacquiHeinrich/status/1551241924396343296

In 1984, the regime released the news that the chocolate rationwas being cut from 35 grams to 25 grams, by announcing that it was actually an increase from 20 grams. Maybe the people knew better, maybe they didn’t, maybe they just shunted the truth aside out of self-interest.

Not sure this is the same pathology – but I can’t think of a better one.

Dick’s Sporting Good is sort of the Angela Merkel of big retail. They kowtow to the left, and have an unearned reputation for doing things well, but at the end of the day you can see literally every choice they ever made is wrong. They’ve tried to become a big-box REI.

They banned “modern sporting rifles” after Newtown – and again after (IIRC) Parkland (and have kept it going since then).

And, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, they signaled their progressive virtue to the world by planning to pay for employees abortions, as well as up to $4,000 in travel benefits to get to states that allow the procedure, if applicable.

Unmentioned: abortion is cheaper than childcare. Which Dick’s doesn’t help with in the least:

America First Legal (AFL) asked the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to open a civil-rights investigation into the company, alleging multiple violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on parental status…The legal group claimed that the retailer discriminated against mothers who decide not to terminate their pregnancy by not offering them an equivalent benefit. It called the project “wholly detached” from the company’s business of selling sporting goods and golf equipment, which in turn may “needlessly destroy shareholder value.”

“Subsidizing travel for an abortion, while denying an equivalent benefit to a mother welcoming a new baby, is perverse and unlawful. Using racial balancing and quotas in hiring and promotion, as the company claims that it does, has been illegal for decades. DICK’S management is an avatar for the rot and danger of corporate wokeness,” AFL Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight Reed D. Rubinstein said in a statement.

My problem: There are so many “woke” companies to boycott – but I have been avoiding all of them for other reasons for a long, long time. I wiped Dick’s off my shopping list in 2013, and it never got back.

What’s a guy to do?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Lots of flights cancelled. Mayor Pete says airlines need to get their act together. It’s the airlines fault.

Airlines say there’s a pilot shortage, goes back to the Colgan Air disaster when FAA raised pilot minimum hours to 1,500, which makes it harder for new pilots to get hired. Airlines want FAA to raise the mandatory retirement age again, to 67, so they can fly with the pilots they have while waiting for new pilots to be trained.

Pilots say it’s inflation eroding pay, crappy scheduling and the vaccine mandate. Lost a bunch of pilots because of it, can’t hire new ones because they won’t take the vaxx.

Bernie Saunders says Congress gave airlines a bailout during the Covid crisis the Democrats created, which makes the airlines beholden to Democrats for their existence, so now he wants to fine airlines $55,000 per passenger for cancelled flights to punish airlines for failing to find enough pilots who possess the required number of hours and also have the mandated vaccine.

Pile up enough restrictions and you can kill any industry.

I was planning to someday retire to Florida. Guess we’ll be driving there on the racist roads, assuming the Lesko Brandon administration doesn’t ban interstate travel. That and quartering soldiers in private homes are about the only Constitutional rights they haven’t violated yet.

Joe Doakes

America had it so good, through the Reagan/Gingrich boom of the 1990s.

Someone just had to screw it up.

Deep thoughts from Chris Cillizza, circa 2015:

Joe Biden’s unique trait as a politician is — and always has been — his honesty. Sometimes that honesty gets him into varying degrees of trouble. Sometimes it makes it seem as though he’s the closest thing to a real person you could possibly hope for in politics.

This didn’t age too well, now did it? I can’t prove Cillizza’s childhood nickname wasn’t Corn Pop, or that he wasn’t at some point a classmate of Biden’s at the Naval Academy, but it’s a useful reminder that our betters have been carrying water for Ol’ Joe for a very long time now. There was more:

The Joe Biden on display with Colbert is the person who has inspired remarkable loyalty — over decades — from a tightknit group of staffers who would form the core of his presidential brain trust if he decided to run in 2016. It’s the guy who, for a time in 1987, was one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s who Barack Obama saw when he decided to pick Biden as his vice president in 2008.

1987. Do you remember why Biden fell from grace all those years ago? I suppose you could ask Neil Kinnock, whose speech Biden plagiarized. You could ask Barack Obama:

One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

After the last 18 months, no one seriously doubts The Leader of the Free World’s ability in that realm. 

 

 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Modern Monetary Theory says the government can borrow and spend as much as it likes without consequences. If we can afford a gas tax holiday, why not an income tax holiday, a social security tax holiday, a liquor tax holiday?

Or is MMT a lie and the gas tax holiday simply at attempt at buying votes with taxpayer money?

Joe Doakes

It is, of course, a purely academic exercise, like so much of the policy big left has been foisting on this country for the past hundred years and change.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

UBack when the Lesko Brandon administration was insisting price inflation didn’t exist, I detailed the recent history of price increases in a single product as a way to prove the lie.

Now that price inflation is admitted, turns out to be a good thing because it helps consumers cut back on needless expenses. Such as chip dip. Which just went to $5 per jar up from $3 less than a year ago.

Thanks, President Brandon, dieting has never been easier!

This photo explains why Democrats are in a panic about the upcoming election. They can blame Putin. They can blame oil companies. They can blame makers of baby food, tampons, and DEF. They can quote ‘experts’ telling consumers not to believe their lying eyes. But consumers don’t care about that. They see the evidence of inflation. They see Lesko Brandon’s policies hurting them. Whether they’re angry enough to do something about it at the polls, to punish the people who are punishing us, remains to be seen.

Joe Doakes

It certainly didn’t help Jimmy Carter much.

But at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I don’t think people are as smart now as they were back then.

…who disdain conspiracy theories, and like a little bit of corroboration with our hot rumors…

https://twitter.com/breaking911/status/1539350886702624768?s=21&t=ki5au52vmzHCHsbBTd2T6w

…the Biden administration certainly isn’t making things easy.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another change from the Trump years: now we have beggers on street corners in Woodbury. I suppose that’s more equitable than having them concentrated in the central cities. And we seem to have a better class of buskers, showing some musical talent instead of merely waving a sign.

Does make one question whether the economy is headed in the right direction, and whether the people in charge of any idea what they’re doing. I hope so. There are only so many street corners to go around.

Joe Doakes

The good news: out in the suburbs they have those Roundies. You can fit a lot of buskers and panhandlers on those.

Production: US currently run by an administration imposing a “radical restructuring” that will make society a dystopian droog state (for all but the oligarchs who will sit at the top. See also the USSR, or China).

Staging: Justin Trudeau’s Canada, where the next steps of the dystopian vision are trialed on a “western” population.

Experimental Red China. Where the surveillance state has come to life in ways that’d make Orwell blanche in horror:

https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1536704803073576962

Coming to a “free society” near you, if the powers that be have their way.

Claiming inflation and recession weren’t real didn’t work.

Blaming them on a pandemic only the media, the very comorbid and the most drama-addicted Karens really care about anymore is just absurd.

Blaming it on Putin? That reeks of desperation.

So we’re down to Plan D: gaslighting consumers and society.

One of the things without which democracy cannot survive is a media that actually asks the tough questions.

And so we can sleep safer at night knowing that at least someone out there is asking the questions that need to be asked, and not accepting the pat, canned answers we’ve become accustomed to seeing in our media.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Suppose you are an investor looking for a safe investment. You want some collateral for your investment, something the borrower has a strong interest in keeping and thus, a strong interest in paying the loan guaranteed by the collateral.

Mortgage-backed securities are great. People might fail to pay on their credit card bills but they don’t fail to pay their home mortgages. And if they do, the lender can simply foreclose and sell the home. This investment is literally “safe as houses.”

But buying a mortgage means paying off the bank to receive an assignment. You have to pay the entire balance due up front. That is expensive and you take all the risk of one homeowner defaulting. But if the lender were to pool all its mortgages together, you could buy a share of the pool for a smaller investment and reduced risk of default. In fact, if you only wanted the stream of interest payments generated by the mortgage and not the repayment of principal, you could buy in for an even smaller price. Your investment is technically not backed by the mortgage, it’s backed by the lender’s promise that the pool of mortgages is sound, but your payments are a derivative of the mortgages so it’s still a pretty safe investment.

Until it isn’t. If interest rates fall and everybody in your pool of adjustable-rate mortgages refinances to a lower fixed rate mortgage, they no longer make interest payments to you. And if the economy has a hiccup, marginal borrowers (who shouldn’t have qualified for loans in the first place) begin to default. That’s what happened in 2006 and it led to the real estate crash that lasted a decade and required billions in TARP bailouts, mostly for overseas lenders (and a few domestic corporations which hastily reorganized themselves as ‘banks’ to grab a slice of the pie – looking at you, Chrysler).

Lesson learned – don’t invest in derivatives. Except the housing market depends on investors to generate the funds to lend to borrowers to buy houses. If nobody invests, nobody can get loans, the housing market collapses. So the Federal Reserve stepped up and began to buy mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by a pool of mortgages. Safe as houses, right?

Maybe not. The Fed apparently didn’t foresee the Lesko Brandon Administration dumping billions of dollars into the economy in stimulus payments. Too many dollars chasing too few goods equals inflation and not just a little, the highest in decades. The Fed’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities inflated housing prices while racking up a mountain of debt instruments which cannot be repaid in this inflationary economy. It’s unsustainable but this time, we won’t be bailing out HSBC, Deutsche Bank or Royal Bank of Scotland, this time it’s the Fed itself which will go bankrupt. When that happens, the value of the American dollar disappears.

Don’t take my word for it. Read this article for yourself. Tell me where the author goes wrong. I’d genuinely like to know that his fears are groundless, that everything is rosy, that Uncle Joe will soon be riding in on a unicorn handing out ham sandwiches to save the day. Cuz I’m not seeing it, myself.

Joe Doakes

Me either.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

India not shipping much wheat to other nations,they’re keeping most of it to feed their own. They are hoarding wheat!

The tiny amount they grudgingly sell costs too much. They are price gouging!

Poor people in other nations will go hungry. They are playing politics with food, women and children hardest hit!

India is putting the interest of its own citizens first and letting the rest of the world fend for itself. They are ultra-nationalist isolationists!

Why aren’t we?

Joe Doakes

Rhetorical question, right?

Government is the things we do together, stupidly and incompetenty.

Case in point – the formula shortage.

Which is – you guessed it – the fault of big government.