Nothing has happened to change my conviction the world will change dramatically before Christmas. We won’t recognize it.
But let’s pretend for a moment my conspiracy theories about how it will change are all wrong. Let’s take away the one major variable of human choices, choices by some alleged global elite. Let’s further pretend all my dire predictions of really bad policy moves also fails to come true, and we just muddle along with the government unable to act.
What’s left? The economy is still headed down. It won’t matter what anyone does at this point, or what they believe. We are all — not just the government, but the entire nation as a whole — so deep in debt, we cannot climb out. If the government folks do what amounts to nothing, we will crash into a deep spiral of collapsing economic activity. There is no means to reawaken consumer spending, on which the entire economy depends, because the consumers have almost nothing to spend. And they won’t be getting any more, because nearly the entire industrial base has been off-shored and we don’t actually make anything here except a few weapons systems and such.
That alone will change our world. At a minimum, there will be no materialist Christmas paradise. At a minimum, all that imported merchandise will stay on the shelves and in the warehouses, and even more of it will never reach the ports here. Our most recent Gilded Age is over.
People will still be losing homes, businesses shutting down and making ever more folks unemployed, and transportation will become mostly a matter of feet. Folks will get hungry. Lots of folks. Crime will skyrocket like nothing we have ever imagined. Violence will grow with it. Try to imagine massive metropolitan areas without the mass of life supporting goods coming in to stock the shelves.
Next, imagine how government will operate without tax revenue. While the Fed can keep feeding itself by having the Treasury borrow at the current rate, and the Federal Reserve keep buying the debt bonds back through proxies — which it now does — there will still be a major drop in actual tax revenue, because there won’t be anything to tax. State and local governments don’t have a money printer. More unemployment, as the massive revenue losses sweep the nation, and government services simply stop.
This will happen, and soon.
But if this is all that happens, assuming I can still access the Net at all, I’ll keep my promise and shut down this blog. We have roughly a month left, I believe, before the Powers That Be start putting the squeeze on us. So I will give it until roughly mid-October.
