Then one of these friends axed what I thought. She axed me, "What does your big, fantastic, super-sexy, super-hot, totally amazing intellect think about all this?" I blushed for a bit and then wrote some crap. I've noticed that my writing voice is just as self-important in private emails as it is in public posts.
I don't know. The fact is there's no more money. If the Dems were running things then we'd just have a different set of conspiracies. What put GM into bankruptcy is going to take down just about every local and state government soon. That is - most government budgets go to pay for pensions and health care for old people - the most fantastic ponzi scheme ever conceived. And we're at the bottom of the investment pool, my dear. Current government workers don't get the gold-encrusted benefits your parents and mostly your grandparents get so they're not totally to blame. But we can blame everybody for feeling *entitled* to receive free government money and services.
I'm taking unemployment so I'm a hypocrite.
Oh, and the baby boom fuckers start retiring in mass quantities this year. And, as you know from personal experience, people are living way too long. Diseases that normally thin the herd at old age aren't working anymore so we've got incurable, expensive shit like dementia to contend with. My dad is a prime example. He's 87 and has seen an extra ten years that he would have missed otherwise. The last few years have been very expensive for taxpayers. I don't know exactly how much and why would I? I'm not paying for it! Then there's the overall bad health of the average fat-ass American.
So, maybe turning over insolvent municipalities to corporations wouldn't be so bad. At least they know how to read a fucking balance sheet and have an intrinsic motivation to get it into equilibrium. I'm sure most of these cities and states are in even worse shape than we can imagine. Fifty years worth of elected fools in and out every two years, running up the collective credit card. Municipal bond debt is legion, but you didn't axe me about that. And the most guilty of them all is the federal government. There's approximately $50-100 trillion in open-ended entitlement commitments out there. That's off-balance sheet stuff and doesn't include the $14 trillion debt. Then there's the $1 trillion structural deficit they've been running since '09.
This should be a blog post instead of a message. But you axed. The good news is that humans finally act when things reach a nightmare, crisis level. We're almost there. We've still got a ways to go because we still think that if we ignore things hard enough they will go away.
It will sort itself out and make for good TV.
