(This is one of our old signs from around 2008. It is starting to fail around the edges, but we have a new Good Idea on how to fix it so we can use it again for the next big emergency. Our last great idea seems to be failing, so we are drafting the language for the new Act now!)

Just a quick note from the Fire Circle down at Refuge Farm. We support everything going on, are loyal and can be counted on to support Good Government. As you know, we have considered the Chairman’s enterprise down here in the Country as being of a certain size and breadth that would enable it to lurch on through what looks to be a challenging time. He bought the place as a consequence of the last Good Idea that came out of Congress on just about the ten-year plan. That was the housing collapse in 2008 resulting from the legislation that directed the banks to loan a lot of money to people who could not repay it.

It was a pretty swell idea, the only problem being that the loans were the equivalent of hurling baskets of dollars randomly out the windows of our speeding cars.

Maybe it was a hangover from the money we spent on Y2K. We were pretty hysterical about that, what with all the jets falling out of the sky, but we may have miscalculated. Things change quickly in our digital world. Heck, we were part of it as well. We don’t claim anything was “wrong,” about what happened, much less that it was illegal. It is naturally a little more complex. First, Congress would need to hire some people who can dream up descriptive titles for legislation that does the opposite of what the title claims. The latest such example is the “Inflation Reduction Act.”

Most people would agree that inflation is a negative thing, and would agree with an Act to reduce it. Candidates running for office in this mid-term cycle want to be able to say they are against the mess they helped create. Supporting a bill to reduce something irritating for most, and fatal to some, can only be a good thing, right?

Of course, the Act actually is not about Inflation, but Climate Change. It gets the discussion off of the first falsehood in the chain. It spends the equivalent of nearly a quarter of the annual Federal Budget, and that is based on nothing but good intent. Billions of dollars are distributed direct to the friends who run some of the Non-Governmental Organizations that actually pass out the cash. Without the same oversight a governmental organization would get. Which includes everyone paid by the NGO’s lavish salaries plus all the people to whom the money is eventually handed.

The new system amounts to a new branch of government that serves to provide a revolving door for people who have worked in Government. They take a spell in Government, learn the trade, then work at the NGO, run for office and hire people to think up improbable names for new legislation. An example is Rep. Liz Cheney, who had her net worth increase to $33 million in five years of work on a $185K salary. And all legally, if completely innapropriate. We won’t for an instant raise the net worth of the Speaker of the House, which is more than several magnitudes larger than what Liz was able to accomplish. But she has been working on this a lot longer.

Any of this would have been enough to at least raise headlines even as late as our day in Government, but there used to be a different type of journalism. It now goes unspoken as the gigantic flow of cash goes out the door without comment. It is going to a good cause, after all, even if it in’t exactly being spent on what is named in the title of the legislation. Remember the “USA Patriot Act?” We reinvented all sorts of things with that one, including the contents of your phone’s contact list.

The Congress is doing it outside the old Regular Order in which the big appropriations bills are actually debated and then voted on for approval. That was always a merry process, and subject to hanky panky. But there was at least a theoretical means of knowing who was in favor of some of the more egregious examples. Now, outside the old Committee process, the money simply flows out because it was in last year’s budget and not worth talking about. “We are working on inflation this year!”

By printing another trillion dollars to fix the crisis. There was a small headline last week that claimed there is more than $31 Trillion in the revolving debt of our nation. That is another part of the rapid change. “National Debt” doesn’t exactly mean what it used to, since no one actually expects it to be paid back. It is too big, and that would mean sharing an extended and unpleasant process. Instead, we have a system that takes the money from taxpayers, chalks up a number on a dusty chalkboard, and says we will get to paying it back “in good time.” After the current emergency is done. They just keep changing which emergency we are talking about.

Which has brought us to the same rigorous central planning the Soviet Union used. Their motto went something like: “We are lying. The people we “pay” know we are lying, and the people taxed to get the money know we are lying. But because they know we are lying, and we accept that they are lying, and other people are encouraged to loan us money to keep things going, because they believe us when we say we will for sure pay them back with interest just a little less due to inflation.

This is hardly new, but it is definitely something unique in scope. The way it actually works is the creation of gigantic bubbles of activity, funded by ordinary people who are at least mildly concerned with impending doom. At the moment, that one is Inflation, which is a “now” sort of issue, so they have changed it to “Climate.” Humans have been complaining- sometimes yelling- at the sky for several millennia. The current emotion is probably as effective as it always was. On the first Earth Day we recall, for example, it was just ten years until the next Ice Age scoured our streets.

That was a good try but didn’t work. A decade was not long enough for the weather to actually cooperate. We have now been through four or five of the “Ten years to Doom!” campaigns. They had to drop “cold” for “warm” nearly 40 years ago. Then it got a little cooler and we then settled for a more flexible meme like “change in a century!” That was a useful one, since it could not be proven while anyone capable of speaking was still alive. But it still seemed bad, and we should therefore spend now and have some other generation pay for it.

Which leaves plenty of room for a certain self-centered altruism favoring “money now” rather than hoping “someday we will be better.”

We know how we got swindled this time, and it is pretty cool. A fig-leaf of legality became a shroud for a torrent of cash headed toward friends and somebody’s family. For example, “foreign aid” money is now “re-cycled.” The recipients at each stage often “donate” a chunk back while building rockets for someone else to use on some other people. Not on the taxpayer, of course, or at least not directly. Instead, the money is returned from the government of Ukraine or the Public Sector Union in donations to the individual politicians and their campaigns. The various narratives supporting how this works are now routine practice, and it it goes without much comment.

It is an impressive system. The only problem is when the bubble becomes so large that it can’t be permitted to fail. That would demonstrate it was a bad idea. Everyone is saying the current recession we are in isn’t one, but rather a transitory issue, since the current and really big bubble can be maintained until next year.

They may be telling the truth about that, but we know they are lying about the original emergency. In turn, they know we know they are lying, and we all know that there will be consequences, but only after the current emergency is done. The smart folks are working on a new Act that will fix everything, just in time. It is all too big to fail. Just read the title of our new Act!

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com