Joy for the holidays! The to-do list is virtually complete. Except we are running out of ‘gates’ to use. We did the Water-one a long while ago, and everything else after that has been tried. Russia was popular for a while. This morning we are trying “Qatar” and “Morocco,” even if we were not certain they actually had the swinging things.

It is the holidays, after all. We had some of the family in the place yesterday, the subject of interest being that soccer match in Qatar. It was fun, and combined a social-learning experience with some old fashioned family chaos. The kids understood the details on the event we were watching on the flatscreen. The questions were vigorous. Like, did you know the clock goes upward in a soccer match? Well, not the actual clock. But the time.

And this game was being played someplace seven or eight hours of daylight different than the one we are in. Ten in the morning is a little too early to start a real tailgate party and we were trying to learn enough about the game to make it interesting on just repeated infusions of coffee.

We practiced falling on the rug with grimaces and shaking limbs like the players do, and we had a great time looking at the performance of France and Argentina. That swirled around inside a stadium that appeared to be woven in gold. One political pundit on the TV argued that the brand-new facility had been built with forced labor from America more than a hundred years ago. We were still working on that until our Economist in residence Buck told us to relax, because it was just about the reparations to which we are going to contribute.

We don’t understand that, but the golden stadium in the Middle East is as good a symbol as you could ask for regardless of what we were discussing.

Buck was alert enough to explain the whole thing. “It is a pair of new Gates,” he said. “They have been planning for this for a while. One of them is Qatargate and the other is Moroccogate.” He sat down and took a sip of coffee.  “We have been watching the FIFA World Cup matches now for about seven months.” He waved a hand at the kids clustered in front of the flat-screen. Their devices had been confiscated for the duration of the match under parental direction, so they were watching it like they did when schools were conducted on the tube.

Splash was trying to access a different information source, since as a grownup he still had his iPad. He waved it in Buck’s direction, who had returned to looking at the game as the Argentinians scored a couple goals.

“The media claimed there were some arrests of serving members of the European Parliament. They say the Qatargate scandal has mushroomed. It started out as a criminal probe into a bribery ring aimed at buffing up the public image of the current World Cup host. There was a lot of other stuff that leaked about it. Qatar has some restrictions on proper clothing, alcohol use and gay stuff. Overcoming resistance to those issues and having the first World Cup in the Middle East was a huge event. It is so big that it seems to have spawned corruption on a massive scale.”

Buck looked back from the match, where France had scored a goal and got the crowds both there and here a little agitated. “Yes. My British sources, the ones who Brexited themselves from Europe, claim the Parliament in Brussels is in acute damage control mode about it. They just pledged a wide-ranging reform package will be presented to the Parliament in January.”

Loma laughed and sat up straight. “I hear it will include measures to bolster whistleblower protections, ban all unofficial parliamentary friendship groups, and review code of conduct rules for Members of the European Parliament.”
“Sounds like something we could use on this side of the Atlantic.”

“There has been some discussion about that, but the larger question in Europe- and here- is the corruption in the Executive branches of the European and American deep states. There is a legitimate question about the impartiality of the people who run the agencies that are supposed to implement what the Parliament legislates.”

“Or the Congress.” There was some general laughter at that, since some of us had been in the budget business back then, when the Peace Dividend was being harvested. “But that was the big change that happened here. We didn’t talk about it when it happened, except we had won the big struggle and we were going to do a bunch of great things.”
“Which we did. We made the budget go away.”

“Don’t be silly. The power of the purse resides in the House of Representatives, just the way it always has.”

There was general laughter at that, too, since we are doing it the new way again today. The news says we are going to run out of money unless the House passes a gigantic multi-trillion bill no one has read in the two days it has been available to review.”

“But they obviously aren’t reviewing anything except where to put all the extra stuff that didn’t come up in the last year because of the elections. So, all the vital issues that we used to review are just accepted because they were jammed into some other multi-trillion dollar bill that they didn’t have time to really talk about in some other year. Now, those decisions just ride on into the future.”

“That actually isn’t true. The new process is to ship the money to trusted Non-Governmental Organizations that are staffed by good reliable people who make excellent salaries to do the stuff that government can’t do if we all knew about it.”

“Isn’t that what the budget process used to do? The individual components of the budget were debated over the summer, evaluated for effectiveness and voted on by subcommittees, forwarded to full committee for a vote, then passed to the whole House. Then on to the Senate, which had a similar procedure. If both those bodies pass the bills, they go to the President for signature and implementation by the Executive Branch.”

“That provides a means for voters to understand who is responsible for all the little irritating stuff like inflation and unemployment and the rest of the things that happen when inefficient policies are implemented without discussion and then passed year after year because they were in some other budget that wasn’t discussed.”

“That is not exactly what is going on. If it was, people would be concerned. Everything is OK. It must be. Somehow we will get through this week, have a nice holiday and start out the new year just like we always do.”

“That is the new system. And it is also how we have a national debt of $31 Trillion dollars.”

The laughter that followed had a bit of an ironic tone to it, since we all knew that the debt wasn’t really that number. It was one that changed only with a debate about some future number. It is like inflation and unemployment. Splash was waving around an article that claimed two separate government organizations had claimed dramatic differences in employment. They were different by a total of almost two million jobs. One seemed pretty good and the other claimed the old full-time jobs had turned into a combination of part-time opportunities that people had to accept in a jumble of opportunities that meant they worked two or three of them.”

“Is that the same deal as inflation?”

“Precisely. They tell us there is a number, and we assume it has some relationship to other numbers. What it actually means is that they changed the categories of things they add together to get to the one they report as being the inflation they would like to have rather than the same one they used to report.”

“So, you are saying changes over the past several decades hide the real numbers?”

Buck smiled. “Sure. The government statisticians now employ an arbitrary non-market price for things like rent and gas, removing actual housing prices from the calculation.”

“It only makes sense, since the core inflation rate they report strips out housing, food and energy prices because they’re volatile. Monetary policy is made on core inflation factors.”

“Which are different than the way they used to report the numbers. So, saying the inflation is the worst in forty years doesn’t actually mean what we think it means because they take out the items that hurt consumers the most.”

“You mean things are actually worse than they were four decades ago?”

“Maybe. We don’t know what they were lying about back then. All those people are retired or took their calculations to the Pearly Gates with them.”

“So that is why we don’t review the budget the way we used to?”

“It certainly makes things easier, plus there are all those great paying full-time jobs for the people who know the people who are supposed to be reviewing things for accuracy and consistent reporting.”

“Are you saying that we outsourced our budgets?”

“It worked for shipping all the manufacturing jobs offshore. Like that new stadium in Qatar for the World Cup this year. They got rich on that one in places like Morocco.”

“If what you are saying is true, there could be another bubble that is going to burst.”

“Possibly. The 2008 real estate bust happened because the government told the banks to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them. It became a matter of fairness and equity.”

“They couldn’t do housing again, so they are trying it with cars at the moment. The rate of repossessed cars is skyrocketing.”

“You would almost think they don’t want us to have the means to travel where and when we want.”

There was more laughter. “It is a Monday before a major holiday,” said Loma. “We should probably go to the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control outlet and stock up.”

There was generalized nodding about that. The Belmont Farms Distillery down by the Farm is too far to drive on a chilly Monday. We will find a way to make this seem like it makes sense. And we don’t have to worry about the new year until next Monday after Christmas is done. We have taken appropriate steps. We already asked Loma and Rocket to find out how to say it in Hawaiian. We can always add as many ‘gates’ as we need.

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