Good morning, Gentle Readers! It has been quiet since the 4th of July, which used to be a fairly large holiday here in the United States of America. Which is not quite as united as they used to be, but that seems the nature of things these days. The President traveled yesterday to deliver an important address about the worst crisis the nation has faced since The Civil War. Or something.
In the Writers Section, we tried to think if anything else has happened since then, but the wars our Grandparents and Parents endured, and then one many of us attempted to avoid, and the Civil Rights struggle now more than a half century ago all pale in significance to the monstrous injustice of states attempting to have citizens provide a photo ID to vote. Thank God we have a rational government in place to protect us.
We will march forward at Socotra House, with the heroic figures of George Floyd and Britney Spears leading our quest for Justice!
But as the small group agreed, there are reasons things were quiet, and now more reasons for things to get noisy. It is about money, of course, that sometimes elusive commodity that appears to be at the root of some of the excitement. It is worth a glance at what is happening on the Hill as the Congress returns from the beach to get back to the important business at hand. As a practical matter, the Fiscal Year ends on September 30th, and a new one begins that midnight. We currently do not have an approved budget for next year, so some things must be done with alacrity. This was the headline from the weekly report we generate for Socotra Management to enable them to plan for a new business year. It starts out like this:
House to bring giant spending package to the floor in two weeks!
First Step: stave off government funding drama before Sept. 30! Pass legislation to allow more debt!
It will be curious and exciting. There is a package known as ‘The Minibus.” It is a little bill that rolls all sorts of things up into one convenient package in which no program needs to be analyzed for consequence. It will include 7 of the 12 traditional appropriations bills the old legislative system used to debate, rolled mostly into one large and unwieldy package no one has read. Those include most traditional spending bills: Health, Agriculture, Treasury, Legislative (Commerce, Science & Education). There seems to be a lot of controversy about teaching that our nation is based on evil, but we will leave that to the teaching professionals.
Bills not included in that version: Defense, DHS, State. That trillion may be considered next week.
But with all that cash floating around, the huge infrastructure bill is just another action item…$3.5 Trillion worth of action as of this morning. That is a single bill, larger than the regular total cost of the US Government’s annual tab. We are uncertain who exactly is going to pay for it, since current taxes won’t cover it and we will have to borrow the equivalent of the entire spending for a year of expenses.
Naturally, the Interns are excited, since the ruination of our economy could bring better broadband coverage to the country, and permit more flexible Netflix streaming access. That is a well known-known national crisis.
But that isn’t the only one. The National Crisis that may raise it’s head over the sultry Month of August is the one that is not as sexy as yelling at the weather or the abomination of the founding of the nation on the institution of Slavery. Which is sort of a funny issue, since the King of England said the institution was legal here when he ruled, and was overthrown immediately in some of the former colonies when we got rid of him as monarch. That discussion wound up costing 620,000 soldiers lives, not to mention all the civilians who died to end it everywhere in this nation. We agreed that the President is old enough that he may remember some of that.
But aside from the weather, we are a little concerned about all the debts laying about. The Treasure claims that in 1979 we had nearly a trillion dollars in total debt owed elsewhere. That seems like a lot of money. But we have made progress. Last November, we had managed to get the total over $27 Trillion owed elsewhere, and the money people say confidently we can get it over $30 Trillion by next year. Easy!
We tried to think about that in the context of Richard Branson’s recent trajectory into Space in his recent, privately-funded space adventure. A gentle, controlled take off to an altitude of 50,000 feet. Then release the rocket for a big Zoom! to Glory. It took two hundred years to build the debt we carried in 1979. We have increased that in our lives thirty times. Three-zero. The equivalent of living and spending nearly ten times our annual budget for each one we pay for.
The Interns assure us that the professors in their colleges have a new theory about money, and it doesn’t matter. We can print as much as we want, and the revelation that the 5.4% inflation announced yesterday is just a transitory thing. Some of the old folks think it is more likely that it is the largest fiscal bubble ever inflated, and based on history, will likely “pop” around the time the rent is due.
The Interns say it is all OK, so we will go with that. What could go wrong?
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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