It all seems a bit silly. On Monday the National Park Service declared that the open-air Veterans Memorial would be closed during the shutdown. After all they have to prove there is some “pain” involved in shutting down the government. But a bunch of 80-90 year old veterans would have none of it and they tore down the blockades.
So the park service made a 180-degree turn and declared their visits now constitute protected “First Amendment activity” .
Basically they had no choice, what were they going to do? Shoot the old war heroes? Put them all in jail? It’s like a bit of a joke. No their backs are against the wall, somehow they must impress on us common rabble how important the Government is… after all without the government the Bureau of Labor Statistics website isn’t being updated and the Washington Zoo is closed. Somebody must do something quick… after all without the BLS we have no Inflation Data to publish… worry, worry, worry oh my what will we do?
Perhaps we will have to go to other free market sources like Gallup and MIT… hmmm, maybe the data will even be more reliable. The government better hurry up and reopen before everyone figures out they are better off with it closed. ~Tim McMahon, editor
The Default Nobody Wants – Except Us!
by Bill Bonner
All the commentators are talking about is the looming clash in Washington over the debt ceiling.
We didn’t read about it in any detail; it seems trivial. But if Congress doesn’t get off its collective butt and pass another law the government will have to shut down. That’s because a previous law requires the feds to stop borrowing when they reach a certain limit.
According to the Financial Times over the weekend: “Shutdown looms over budget.”
As near as we can make out, everyone is in favor of seeing the feds continuing to spend money they don’t have. The fight is over what to spend it on. The Republicans want to stop spending on Obamacare. The Democrats want to spend on everything.
Unless they can agree, spending will stop on almost everything.
Here’s another headline: “The Default Nobody Wants.”
That is surely incorrect. We would be delighted with a default. It’s precisely what should happen.
Congress spends more than it brings in by way of taxes. It has done this for years. In a rare moment of clarity, it saw the handwriting on the wall and vowed to stop. It set a limit on how much debt the government could take on. The feds will reach that level soon. So the borrowing should stop.
We’d like to see it happen. Not so much for the financial health of the nation. We’d just like to see the looks on their faces – all those zombies suddenly cut off from fresh blood.
More Cake?
But wait. Who are we kidding? This is like a fat person who has decided to hold the line. He watches his weight inch up. He resolves to stop eating so much when he hits 250 lbs. He feels good about himself for having taken such resolute and forthright action. Now he has his weight under control, right? His wife should be proud of him.
Then he hits the magic number. “Oh, my…” he says.
That evening the dessert is passed around. He begins to think: What’s so special about 250 lbs? Why not 260 lbs? Or 270 lbs?
He could not eat the dessert. But it’s his favorite chocolate cake. So, heck, he changes the resolution! He’ll eat the cake. But starting in the New Year, he will bring his weight down to under 250 lbs again.
Congress has the nation watching. Everybody wants a piece of chocolate cake!
The military-industrial complex Ike warned us about wants more planes, more drones, more tanks, more snoops, more contracts, more retirement benefits – in short, more money. So does the education industry. And the healthcare industry. And the poverty industry. And all the other industries that have put the government in their pocket.
And what about all the retirees? Haven’t they earned their Social Security? Don’t they have a right to Medicare?
Yes, everyone thinks he has a need… and a right… to a piece of cake.
So, what to do?
Pass another resolution!
A Real Deficit of 33%
Besides, the deficit is going down. There’s nothing more to worry about. As a percentage of GDP, it’s only 5.7%. That’s well down from the levels of 2009-10.
Wait a minute. What kind of flimflam is this? Colleague Simone Wapler points out that expressing debt as a percentage of GDP is nonsense. GDP is the income of the whole nation, not the income of government.
It would be like telling people that your excess spending was equal to only 2% of the income of the people on your block.
The government doesn’t have everyone’s income to draw on for debt service. It only has its own tax revenues. Deficits only make sense in relation to the resources available to pay them. In the first 11 months of the fiscal year, the feds had record income of $2.4 trillion. But they spent $3.2 trillion… or one-third more. As a percentage of its own revenues, the US government deficit is running at 33%, NOT the 5% people are talking about.
The spectacle is vastly entertaining, provided you’re not hooked on the cake. That’s why the best place to watch this farce is from the sidelines… well away from the action. Out of stocks and bonds, that is.
But is there any real chance the feds will default?
Maybe they will do a symbolic default. One side – Democrats or Republicans – will try to gain some partisan advantage from it. But the system works by paying off zombies to retain political power. There is no way it will come to an honorable or voluntary end.
Instead, it will come to a bitter end – when the feds really do run out of money and are unable to get any more.
When will that happen?
Wish we knew. It could be many years in the future. For the moment, their credit is still good. And they have a willing central bank backing them up too.
Editor’s Note:
Another problem with measuring government debt as a percentage of GDP is that GDP includes government spending so the more money the government wastes the bigger the GDP even if nothing is produced. So wasting more money makes the debt a smaller percentage of the total. How can that work? In the old days we used to use GNP (Gross National Product) which didn’t include Government spending… but then some brilliant economist reasoned that all that paper shuffling should count for something. And so here we are. ~ Tim McMahon, editor.
See Also:
- What is the Real Definition of Inflation?
- What is Quantitative Easing?
- What is Deflation?
- What is Velocity of Money?
- What Is Fiat Currency?
Photo Credits: Original Photo taken by Tim Evanson Used Under Creative Commons License.
This article was originally published in “Diary of a Rogue Economist” and was reprinted by permission.
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