Scared

Ok, I'm gonna do this:

For the first time in a long time, I am scared.

Let me begin by saying that I am well. Fuck all, I am VERY well. In my body, I feel more comfortable than I ever have. In my interpersonal life, I am blessed with more kind hearts and kindred spirits than I deserve. In my soul, I feel I have achieved a peak of spiritual being that allows me hope in even the darkest moments.

Yet I am terrified.

I am back in that dream with the bomb. I know it is going to go off soon. I am pointing at it right now. We are each and every one of us in that heavy few seconds before our lives are changed forever. I only hope that I can do as I did in my dream and make hope out of that chaos.  But I am scared.

I am scared because of our economy.

In my new found discretionary time, I've been researching our economy.  I want to understand this world.  I want to figure out what I can do to make it better.  In doing that... I see where things must go.  I am scared.

Ok, ok, enough vaguities, just spit it out.

Math: if the US stopped ALL government spending, every department, every cushy govt job, every war, every research project, every meeting, and PURELY pay our unfunded liabilities like medicare, medicaid, and social security, we would still be unable to pay off our debts and obligations.  Our REAL debt is well over 70 trillion.  Don't listen to what you are told, go calculate that number for yourself as I have.

Stimulus programs saved us in the 80s from an inflation crisis.  But back then, our debt was less than 30% of GDP.  The whole thing feels like it just put a lie on what should have happened because when this lie is found out, all the other lies will bite us in the ass.  We are currently doing more stimulus and it's doing just what it sounds like, injecting a small amount of adrenaline into a dying body to keep it moving.  We need medicine.  We need interest rates to be on par with the rate of inflation to reward saving and producing if we ever want to pay off our debts... but that causes too many problems.  Could you imagine if our current practically ZERO percent interest rate jumped up to the advertised 5-8% (which is most likely more like 10-13 if we forget the BS hedonics where we weight things increasing in value like food LESS than things decreasing in value like TVs or devalue a 10% inflation if the sold item is 10% safer)?  Could you imagine our national debt rising by 8% every year?  That's 1 trillion dollars per year even EXCLUDING our liabilities.  Truly the only way we are going to get out of this is to bankrupt (which we can't as the world's reserve currency) or simply print enough money to pay off our debts in full with gold valued at an appropriate price.

Now I can't say this for sure as our gold hasn't been audited since the 50s (at which point we had enough gold to pay off our debts for FEBRUARY ALONE), but if we printed the money to cover the debt with our gold reserves, we will devalue our currency by 98%. To put this into perspective, I want to buy a loaf of bread for 2 dollars. At today's value, two dollars is it.  But devalue the currency by 98% meaning one dollar is now worth two cents. My two dollars is now worth four cents in real value. Meaning I need one hundred dollars for the loaf of bread. Granted there are now trillions more dollars in circulation, but seriously...

Upside: mortgages will be easy to pay off, debts would be erased.  Downside: we'd relive what happened recently in Ghana and begin to pay with gold dust instead of worthless million dollar bills with Bush or Colbert's face on them.  It's a great depression on a scale that makes it the 1% looking down on the rest of us 99%.

I do not worry about myself. I worry about the world. I worry about the powers that set in motion all of this. I like to imagine there is some monstrously intelligent evil behind it like the Illuminati.  Surely they would have some kind of misconstrued REASON for all of this.  Also, a dark and sinister enemy gives rise to a great and powerful force of good to fight it.  I would like that in this strange world we live in.  But what if it isn't.  What if there is no master enemy to face?  What if all of this madness is simply greed?  No enemy to fight, no catharsis to be met... just chaos.

But either way... the people will have to stand up and simply live as it ought to be.  Farmers, miners, producers.  Construction workers, artists, philosophers.  Peace workers, cooks, distributors.  Friends, neighbors, lovers.  No us and them.  Just us.  Just me.  There is no difference, we are all just planet Earth.  Love you all, talk to you next time.