re: #97 Killgore Trout

I think politics is going to start to get very interesting now that these people have some power. I’m sure they’ll waste a lot of time with bullshit and investigations. They are going to do as little as possible but they are going to have to actually govern and the Tea Party agenda doesn’t work in the real world.
Make way for gridlock

It’s a very spooky prospect. What will they do? Follow the Tea Party and cause a global financial catastrophe? They are going to have to vote to raise the debt limit. They have to, there’s no choice.

If the “debt limit” is not raised, it becomes an actual limit. What an apocalyptic notion, that the words should mean anything at all!

Taxes would have to be raised, and spending cut, and both, right quick. Hard choices would have to be made right and left. If they could be made in any sort of approximation to good choices, the upshot might not after all be so apocalyptic. After a few weeks of market swooning, people would look around and note that the value of the dollar was stabilizing, the price of gold was down sharply, the price of oil was stabilizing, and that an unsustainable spending trend that had threatened to bankrupt the nation had been broken.

This has been done before. After the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, the Germans introduced the “Rentenmark”, a currency which their central government promised to not inflate. And the skies were about to fall because of a shortage of money when, behold, people suddenly realized that artificial scarcity of money is the only way that money can be of any use as a lubricant of commerce. A genuine scarcity of paper money is of course impossible, and if it’s abundant, everybody has plenty and doesn’t want it, but wants, instead, real goods and services. Which are always and unavoidably scarce.

Gunning the motor up to the red light and then standing on the brakes is no way to drive, and not raising the debt limit is no way to manage a retreat to lower taxes and spending. But we must make that retreat at some point, and in some manner. When we do, it’ll be painful as any drug withdrawal is. That doesn’t negate the necessity of doing so, at some point. Multi-trillion dollar deficits forever, while enjoying a dollar that amounts to more than fancy wallpaper, is not going to happen.