Amerika

People are easy to fool. Tell them that they need to watch to make sure the water level doesn’t rise, then lower the dock. They’ll be all wet before they notice.

That’s what’s going to happen with our economy. While the government is busy creating make-work to cover its ineptitude, a slow but steady decrease in the value of goods and services in this country.

Read my lips: prices will stay the same, but the underlying quality will fall.

This isn’t just the obvious example of a cereal box keeping the same price but going to a “family size” that’s four ounces smaller. It’s across the board. For example, state education will be underfunded and do less, but you’ll pay just as much. You’ll pay the same taxes and receive fewer and less competent services.

It’s kind of like what has happened with the Post Office: if we can’t make ends meet, slash quality and with it, cost, and charge the same price. So if your mail didn’t arrive, well, you should have bought the expedited service of registered, overnight mail.

Registered overnight mail is guaranteed to arrive. Anything else? LOL, we’re sorry: you don’t get it. America changed while you weren’t watching.

Back in the 1930-1990s, I guess, you could rely on public services to have a basic level of quality. But not any more. We traded that income away to the entitlement state, and so we’ve had to cut quality to stay on budget.

Investors are betting that an aggressive push by the Federal Reserve to revive the US economy could drive up inflation, with Treasury bond markets pricing in the effects of a return to emergency monetary easing next month.

Inflation expectations in the US have jumped sharply this week, with one measure rising to its highest level since late June. So-called breakeven inflation rates, which are the bond market’s expectations of future inflation levels, have leapt on the growing belief that the Fed will initiate a fresh round of quantitative easing — in effect, pumping money into the economy — at the November meeting of its interest rate-setting committee.

…

The dollar on Thursday tumbled to a fresh 15-year low against the yen and hit its lowest level in 8 months against sterling. The Australian dollar rose to its highest against the US currency since it was floated in 1983. – CNN

Yes, America — you devalued your currency by devaluing the nation behind it.

When you were a nation of innovators and leaders, the world wanted to be you and would extend to you any credit that you asked for.

Now you’re clearly a dying ruin. Your leaders are corrupt, and your politicians fight over trivial issues. You have entertainers testify and take them seriously, as if they were qualified sources of information. Your industry is collapsing but you’re more interested in selling us neat stuff on Etsy or your latest dot-com startup, Shnort or Vomette or some cute name like that.

In short, America, you’re like a trailer parked down the road where everyone is always drunk, each person thinks they’re gonna be a movie star or rap hero, and they still have no idea who’s going to pay the water bill. You’re dysfunctional, America!

But by all means, keep fighting over who gets what benefits. Obama doesn’t care what he hands out; he’s not going to pay the bill, or even get blamed. The whole thing will collapse into Mexico II or Brazil II and your leaders will shrug, say “I wonder what went wrong,” and then get on their private planes and fly to the French Riviera.

That’s what happens when any nation goes third world. And that’s what’s happening to you, America. It’s not going to be a sudden collapse. It’s going to be a long, steady decline into kleptocracy.

And it all started when we let politicians manipulate a huge group of people who want entitlements, because now, they can hoodwink the clueless and when smart people object, they can blow them off — who cares what the 2% think? The rest want easy answers from notable political science PhDs like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, George Carlin, Bill Hicks and Bono.

Gosh, maybe there’s a reason why this democracy thing always goes bad, and goes bad faster in a media age. It’s so easy to make short-term promises. The Democrats live on it. The Republican strategy, which is to make institutions stronger so we all benefit, is much harder to sell. So we’ve been drifting toward the Democratic model steadily since 1945.

According to a soon-to-be published study by researchers at Harvard and Duke universities, Americans believe US society is much more equal than it really is, and want it to be even fairer.

…

Studies show current US wealth inequality is near record highs, with the top one percent of Americans estimated to hold around 50 percent of the nation’s wealth.

…

In a blind test, about 92 percent of respondents said they preferred a model closer to Sweden’s wealth distribution to that seen in the United States.

The study’s authors also reported a “surprising level of consensus” among different groups, with 92 percent of Republican voters backing the Swedish model versus 93.5 percent of Democratic voters, with the richest and poorest also voting along similar lines. – AFP

We’re fighting over the results, not the causes of those results. You get wealth distribution by having a healthy economy and healthy society. You can’t fake it by handing out money.

Sure, it’s problematic that the top one percent are “estimated” to hold around 50 percent of the nation’s wealth — although I’m sure we’ll find that estimate is about as accurate as a $2 watch.

But the reason they’re on top is that America has assembled a huge pool of people who are distinguished by not having direction. They have no culture, no heritage, and no real activities outside of their jobs and personal pleasures. They have no attention span. They were cabbage even before the education system fails them, and now they are “informed” by the talking box, which somehow neglects to tell them that it’s there for entertainment, not to tell the truth. So we have a lynch mob of fools, rushing back and forth in a dramatic panic over symbolic touchstone issues, not fixing the underlying infrastructure.

And that, America, is why you’re experiencing not inflation of prices but a depletion of value to goods and services. You’re spiraling downward.

The American middle class won’t disappear. However, where previous about 1/5 of you could afford a decent middle class existence, that number is going to shrink. All of you households under $140,000/year will not be able to afford the expedited goods and services which you’ll need to get any basic level of care in this country.

And so soon we’ll have three social classes: the ultra-rich, the 2% who are truly upper middle class (doctors, lawyers, politicians) and then the 95% who are not wealthy enough not to be poor, but now are wondering if their money will buy anything worth having at all.