Amazing

I just read about Ford's worst-ever annual loss. There are a lot of worst-ever reports now and plenty more to come. Like this: more Americans are receiving unemployment benefits than have ever received them at any time in the past since recording began in 1967.

Or for those who don't like bare statistics: you can buy a share of Ford for $1.98 today. Ford, once the epitome of industrial organization and success, is less valuable per share than a BigMac. Or think of it this way: as of today the total value of Ford is $4.7 billion while the total value of McDonald's is $65 billion. How can America recover from this depression when a fast-food restaurant chain is 4.5 times more valuable than the company that once defined America's industrial might?

For whom the bell tolls

In response to an article about Mr. Obama's economic policies, I posted a comment on some blog the other day to the effect that Mr. Obama had doomed his presidency while still a senator by voting for the preposterous, disastrous Bush bailout last October. Mr. Obama, I wrote, has accepted the borrow-and-spend approach of Mr. Bush and raised the ante by trillions. Colossal new debt will not fix a depression caused by colossal prior debt, I argued, because debt is not wealth and we will not be better off by going deeper into debt. I concluded that Mr. Obama, like Mr. Bush before him, will devastate the American economy and that Mr. Obama will soon rival Mr. Bush as the worst president of the 21st century.

Another poster made a snide comment that nobody understands what is going on (even though people pretend such understanding), and that we Americans should sit back and watch and let Mr. Obama work his magic and see what happens. I wanted to reply (but refrained) that if this poster does not understand what is going on, the reason is that he has not bothered to find out, but other people do indeed understand because they have read and studied sound economics and are able to apply their knowledge to the world they live in. I've written before about the astounding lack of literacy in America and that the government's own Adult Literacy Survey reveals that fully 80% of adult Americans lack sufficient literacy to read and correctly understand an edition of USA TODAY. So I'm not surprised that this poster doesn't understand what is happening all around him; apparently he's one of that 80% who couldn't find out even if they tried. "Let's wait and see what happens to us" is not the approach to life of a literate, informed, responsible person, especially in these increasingly desperate times.

So I refer you to another of Paul Craig Roberts' articles in which he argues just what I argued: crushing debt will crush us. The scale of this year's budget deficit is staggering; currently it is approaching $3 trillion. Put this sum in perspective. Mr. Bush was the first president to submit a $2 trillion budget (deficit included) early in his presidency, and a few years later he was the first president to submit a $3 trillion budget (deficit included). That's his miserable legacy. Now Mr. Obama proposes a budget deficit that alone exceeds the total federal budget of just a year or two ago! And he says that he must maintain multi-trillion dollar budget deficits for years to come. Who will pay for this? What fool would loan America a penny under these circumstances? Paul Craig Roberts will tell you.

Read it here

More on the murder in Bay City, Michigan

Here's another article on the murder of a 93-year-old man by the government of Bay City, Michigan. You will recall that this man froze to death after the city's electric utility cut off the power to the old man's home in the middle of the Michigan winter. Can there be a clearer case of depraved indifference to human life than this? Surely any district attorney worth his salt should have no trouble getting indictments for murder in this case. There is no possible excuse for this crime, and those people in city government who are responsible must go to prison.

Read it here

If we kill somebody, is it wrong?

Bay City, Michigan, cut off electric power to a 93-year-old man because of unpaid bills. The old man froze to death in the sub-zero Michigan winter. The city (meaning the callous people who killed this man) say that they did nothing wrong. A city spokesman, eager to evade responsibility, blames the man's neighbors. Why? They didn't cut the old man's power. And how much did the old man owe? $1000. That's the price of human life in Bay City, Michigan.

Surely there's a district attorney in Michigan who cares enough about law and human life to convene a grand jury and get murder indictments against the responsible people in city government. Let's hope so before these detestable people kill somebody else.

Read it here

Melted brains

Everything has a silver lining. Do you believe that? Somebody named Jerry Nickelsburg, a "senior economist" at an outfit called UCLA Anderson Forecast, thinks so and opines that the disaster in progress in California is "kind of a mess" but its "negatives" are small. Just think: as hundreds of thousands are booted out of their jobs and lose their homes and government becomes paralyzed, this guy gets paid to emit opinions like this! In the "Book of Jobs for Village Idiots," the position of Senior Economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast figures prominently.

Leaving Jerry-world and returning to planet Earth, California is now living what America in general will soon experience: there is no way to keep borrow-and-spend government functioning but there is no politically acceptable alternative to it. Radically cutting government--its size, cost, and functions--isn't even on the table as a last-ditch Plan X. So the disaster keeps growing. And remember, all this misery is about only this year's budget. Nobody has even begun contemplating the bleak prospects for the next year or the year after that. California is just trying to survive day-to-day; all thought of any future--even the short-term future--is gone. Maybe because California doesn't have a future. Maybe America doesn't either. But Jerry Nickelsburg will no doubt find a silver lining in that, too.


Read it here

Beyond belief

This bit of news about Great Britain is simply beyond belief--and it's true! 49% of all economic activity in the UK has government as its source. Half of the economy consists of government payments for whatever happens. Half of the economy (the private part--that is, commercial business, industry, etc) is paying the government to keep the other half alive on some form of public assistance. Since government is a consumer of wealth and not a producer, at most only half of the UK's economy actually produces anything at all, and half of whatever that half produces is absorbed by government and redistributed to the unproductive other half. In some regions of the country, fully 60-70% of all economic activity is originated by government in some form! No wonder the UK is crashing into depression: half the country doesn't produce anything at all and lives off the declining production of the other half.

I'm willing to bet a dollar that if you totalled all the government-originated economic activity in the US (federal, state, county, city, township, etc), the US would be in a position similar to the UK--namely, a huge and growing part of the economy is merely the redistributed wealth produced by the dwindling private economy. And given the colossal bail-outs already executed and those planned for the near future, the private economy continues to be absorbed into government. Apparently both the UK and the US are giving up on retaining productive private economies and are instead replacing production with the consumption and redistribution of residual wealth. It sounds crazy. How can you have wealth without production? But that's the current state of Great Britain and, clearly, that's the condition into which Mr. Obama intends to take America. If you are a fern and can live on sunshine and air, you won't mind a bit. But when just us plain folks are all government dependents, who will pay the taxes we hope to receive as welfare checks?

Read it here

Something for nothing will save us

Once upon a time in America we thought that gambling was a vice. I certainly agree with Lysander Spooner that vice is not crime, so the ban on gambling was indefensible. Nonetheless, gambling was once thought a vice and with good reason. The enticement of quick riches corrupts sound minds; the rush of excitement, the intensity of anticipation, the crash of loss, the ecstasy of winning--all these states of mind essential to gambling conspire to corrupt good judgment, which is the very definition of "vice."

So now in modern America, state governments are trying to save themselves from financial ruin (caused by another vice, namely borrow-and-spend financing) by employing this vice for profit. In other words, the states hope to profit by corrupting the good judgment and morals of their citizens. What other evidence does a candid world need to establish the case that America is broken beyond repair? O tempora! O mores!

And what will the states try next to balance busted budgets, pimping and prostitution? How about drug pushing? The evil anti-drug laws could be junked--not because they are brutal, unprincipled, and ineffective--but because the state could profit by a monopoly on recreational drug peddling. Sound ridiculous? So did state-sponsored gambling for profit when I was young (not so very long ago). America is in free fall now, so be prepared for anything.

Read it here

Why we're in such a mess

Here's an interesting tale that illustrates exactly why America is in a big fat mess:

"Ron Nash - Carlsbad Calif.

Ron Nash is not someone who's shy about pushing to get what he wants; he's a motivational speaker, headhunter and author of "How to Find Your Dream Job; Even in a Recession."

But when it came to obtaining a mortgage workout, he wasn't getting anywhere -- even after months of trying. He finally wrote a letter to the president of his lender to try to resolve the issue. The results were very gratifying -- at first.

"I was contacted by the office of the president and apologized to profusely," he said, "and told that they would try to work things out."

After that, however, and after he was asked to send in all his paperwork for the fifth time, he didn't hear from them again for six months. Then, recently, he finally got a call back with a loan workout offer.

The lender offered an extremely low rate, 2.8%, which sounded great. The problem was the value of his property has dropped from $840,000 to about $620,000 and the lender would do nothing to reduce the mortgage balance. Nash believed he would be upside-down on his mortgage, owing more than the house was worth, for years.

Meanwhile, the slowing economy, with little hiring going on, has taken a toll on his income.

He looked around town and decided he could walk away from his house and rent another comparable place for half of what he would be paying his bank just for the mortgage payment.

He loves his house but he's choosing to give it up rather than shackle himself to a bad investment for years.

"The house is just a thing," he says.


Did you get what's going on here? Mr. Nash borrowed way more money than he could repay and got into financial trouble. He worked out a deal with his lender for a interest rate lower than he had freely, lawfully, and morally agreed to, but he didn't want to pay back the full amount of principal he borrowed (that is, he didn't want to return to the lender the full amount that he had borrowed) because the market price of his house had fallen below the amount of his mortgage. Apparently Mr. Nash feels no moral obligation to repay what he borrows; he thinks he should get free use of other people's money. So to solve his financial problems (which, of course, he blames on his lender and for which he accepts no responsibility), he intends to defraud his lender by "walking away" from his house (that is, he will cheat his lender by refusing to make payments on his loan and by abandoning his house). Who cares about morals, who cares about honesty, who cares about fulfilling obligations you freely accept, who cares about keeping promises? Well, certainly not Mr. Nash. California law allows Mr. Nash to defraud his lender without too much trouble; the lender will have no legal recourse other than taking possession of the now devalued house. The lender will lose $120,000 on the principal and all the interest due him. As California law permits fraud against lenders, is it any surprise that lenders do not want to buy California's bonds and that California is now in an inescapable $45 billion budget hole? Sounds like karma to me.

This is a small example of what Mr. Obama is trying to do with China, Japan, and other nations. He wants to make free use of trillions of their dollars to finance his grand plans, but he intends to repay these nations not a penny--either in interest (which is effectively zero) or in principal (which they will never recover). In short, fraud is Mr. Obama's plan to confront the Depression of 2009. Will foreign nations fall for this fraud? Would you?

How long before this is your story?

Here's a painful story about good people suffering the ruin of everything they've worked for. The story of the Khilling family is fast becoming the story of millions of American families and will soon become the story of tens of millions of American families for many years--even decades--in the future. Ever since the end of WWII, America has been living on credit supported by increasingly embittered foreigners accepting American government debt (a.k.a fiat dollars backed by nothing) for the products of their hard work. That way of life is now dead, dead, dead. We Americans are today living through the crash of this consume-now-pay-never lifestyle, and we are in terrible trouble. The suffering has just begun. Mr. Obama offers us nothing but a last-ditch, desperate version of the same thing that got us into this titanic mess: borrow trillions, spend them, and hope everything turns out right somehow. This is nuts; it won't work. Just ask the Khilling family.

Read it here

Read before you write

I don't know about you, but I think that headline writers ought to read news articles before they write headlines for them.

For the article below, here's the headline: "California's median home price falls 38 percent." Now in the body of the article, we read two different values for the price fall: (1) a 38% decline from December 2007 to December 2008 and (2) a 49% decline from the peak price in the spring of 2007. Isn't the 49% decline more important than the 38% decline? It sure would be if you bought a home in the spring of 2007! What's the point of matching prices by months? What information does that tell you? To gauge the frightful state of the home real estate market it is better to see how far prices have fallen from their peak. In sunny California, we're talking a loss of up to half--and the losses keep coming. Now that's a headline!

Read it here

The crash keeps crashing

The banks continue to fail; what's left of American manufacturing is going broke; even the once legendary Microsoft and Intel are dumping thousands and thousands of employees. As if all these were not enough, now we're falling into the commercial real estate crash. And it's no surprise given the preposterous overbuilding of the last decade and the on-credit consumer spending spree--both effects of the same cause: the government's unrestrained expansion of credit and money.

I've previously said that in this fiscal year alone, the government will run a $2 trillion budget deficit (or at least attempt to). Paul Craig Roberts sees my $2 trillion and bets another trillion. Can you imagine such a sum? The total federal budget of the last fiscal year was $3 trillion. Now that will be just the budget deficit! Who will loan America such a colossal sum? Who's got that kind of money?

And that $3 trillion is just this year's deficit. Mr. Obama expects trillion and multi-trillion dollar deficits indefinitely into the future. How can these deficits ever possibly be financed? Are Iceland and Zimbabwe our future? How can we escape that dismal future if we do everything possible to achieve it?

Read Paul Craig Roberts here

The next domino to fall

Here is a truly ominous piece on the terrible financial state of the United Kingdom. The British government engineered a bailout of banks in similar fashion to the American bailout. In both countries, the bailouts are failing rapidly as the real depth of insolvency both British and American banks face is becoming clearer--now after hundreds of billions of dollars have been thrown at them! Imagine what happened in Iceland happening in Britain. Then imagine that it happens in America. Even as Mr. Obama was taking the oath, bank stocks were being dumped on the market by investors desperate to get out before the next step in the dead-broke bank saga leads to out-and-out nationalization of the failed banks (like Citibank and Bank of America). All this Inauguration Day brave, optimistic talk is just whistling past the graveyard. The Crash of 2008 (and now 2009) isn't over yet by a long shot, and nobody in Mr. Obama's new administration (just like the British government) has a clue what to do about it.

Read it here

Are you still with Mr. Jefferson?

Do you agree with the following:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

I hope you do since this quotation comes from America's founding document, "The Declaration of Independence." The foundations of the argument Jefferson deploys are called "natural law" and "natural rights;" these mean simply that as human beings have a common nature (the human part), humans (merely by virtue of being humans) are obligated to behave toward each other in certain, specific ways (that's the natural law part) and humans have certain, specific claims they can make on other humans (that's the natural rights part). The adjective "natural" means "according to human nature" and should not be confused with anything about Mother Nature or some sort of neo-Darwinesque blather about evolutionary morality. Natural law and natural rights arise from the fact of being human.

To preserve our humanity (and its attendant laws and rights), we create government and positive law (laws we assert or posit). Just government and just law are consonant with natural law and natural rights; unjust government and unjust law are dissonant. Put another way, natural law and natural rights mean that we humans cannot justly and morally create government and law in any old way we choose.

In California, Attorney General Jerry Brown is using natural law and natural rights to argue before the state supreme court that Proposition 8 should be revoked. Equality before the law and a right to marriage are natural rights and cannot be revoked or infringed by a simple democratic majority in an election. These are unalienable rights. Crackpots like George Will (see below) and the pro-8 mob's lawyer Kenneth Starr are arguing that law is whatever we want it to be whenever we want it to be for whatever reasons we want it to be. The will of the majority today is the standard; tomorrow a different majority may decide otherwise. It is just astounding to see self-styled conservatives and the religious right argue that we humans can do whatever we please--at least whenever the human rights of gay people are involved. Of course, tomorrow they will argue for natural rights and natural law when the topic is abortion; abortion is unjust and immoral because a human fetus has all the rights and enjoys all the protections any other human enjoy--namely natural rights and natural law. But not gay people, who aren't really genuinely human and consequently can have their so-called rights stolen whenever an anti-gay majority mob wants.

So much for principled conservatism and the morality of the religious right. Their motto: I believe whatever I want to believe whenever I want to believe it for any reason that suits me for the moment.

Read Will's nonsense here

Another bailout waiting to happen

State pension funds have suffered huge losses and are going to suffer even bigger losses in the future as the depression deepens. What to do? Of course! Queue up for federal money. That's the answer everybody has nowadays (even pornographer Larry Flynt) to falling asset values and shrinking revenues. The trouble with this tidy solution is that the federal government is insolvent and has no money to "spread around" (as Mr. Obama said about wealth during the campaign). But, say some, aren't these state pension funds "guaranteed?" Well, what is a guarantee to pay worth when made by somebody without funds to disburse? How does one guarantee the future? You can't, obviously. So why did anybody buy into this "guaranteed" nonsense in the first place? Reasons like wishful thinking and playing make-believe come to mind. State pensioners will likely think of more when their monthly checks shrink or disappear altogether.

Read it here

My hat's off to a master!

I grew in a religious tradition in which proof-texting was a favorite in-door sport; so when Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu announced that he had discovered proof-texts that justify indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza, I grew nostalgic for my religion-saturated childhood and for all those formative years I endured listening to recitations of proof-texts about unrepentant, Christ-killing Jews burning forever in the lake of fire they so richly deserved.

A proof-text, if you don't know, is a passage of the Bible which is twisted, distorted, and mangled by someone who wants to use that passage as a weapon against people he dislikes so that he may disparage, defame, and denounce them with the stamp of ostensible divine approval. Every word, every phrase, every clause in the Bible is fair game for the proof-texter, and really adroit proof-texters can weave webs of proof-texts so tight that even God himself could be ensnared.

Our rabbi, alas, is not adroit. He claims that the Bible sanctions collective guilt; that, for example infants and toddlers in Gaza are guilty for the rocket attacks on Israel perpetrated by agents of Hamas just because the infants and toddlers live in Gaza. But collective guilt is a two-way street. Collective guilt was the device Nazis used to justify the extermination of six million European Jews. Some Jews (the Nazis alleged) committed sex crimes; therefore, all Jews were guilty. Some Jews killed Christian children; therefore, all Jews were guilty. Some Jews stole the wealth of hard-working Germans; therefore, all Jews were guilty. Some Jews conspired for war; therefore, all Jews were guilty. Such is the logic of collective guilt. One might think that collective guilt would be the last thing a rabbi would use to justify anything, but Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu obviously wants to see Gazans die so any old excuse will do. One wonders why anybody this vicious even bothers fishing for plausible excuses. Why not be truthful and say that you support killing certain classes of people simply because you want them dead? If you're going to be brutal, why not be brutally honest, too? Nobody is fooled by piety without conscience. We can always spot murderers by the blood on their hands even when the murderers are clergymen.

Read the astounding story here

Countdown

It is official: Today begins the last full week of the presidency of that congenital fool, George W. Bush. Do you remember America in January 2001? America in January 2008 doesn't look much like that country of eight years past. Today's America is bankrupt--the federal government is trillions of dollars deeper into an abyss of debt it can never repay; a growing majority of state governments are dead broke and so are a growing list of county and city governments; businesses large and small are seeking Chapter 11 protection or Chapter 7 break-up; and tens of millions of families face life without savings or income. Today's America has been bled white by two ruinous wars that have won us nothing and that continue without even a hint of abating. Our Consitution is in shreds; our liberties are mere ghosts of once real living things. Who would have thought that a great democracy could deteriorate so much in a mere eight years?

Let us celebrate that we've survived thus far and cross our fingers in hopes that we'll make it through this last week of misrule by a fool. And let us also hope that prosecutors across America have taken Vincent Bugliosi's urgings to heart and are even now preparing indictments that will bring this fool to the dock where he will be forced to account for his eight-year crime spree against the American people.

Our lord and master, the military

We live in a militarized country that is rapidly losing any recollection of its genuinely civilian past. I've actually heard people claim that not only does the military protect our freedoms, but that our freedoms arise from the military, that is, we are free because we have a military that creates, preserves, and protects our freedom. The Hohenzollern military autocrats of Prussia must be turning over in their graves in delight!

I was recently on a Southwest flight on which two army guys were passengers. The steward assigned to give that perfunctory "thank you for flying with us, please fly with us again real soon" speech you always hear just before landing decided to add a little talk extolling the virtues of the American military, the two army guys and their buddies-in-arms, and the whole idea of that we should be grateful to our military which keeps us free because if we travelled around the world we'd find lots of unfree countries (although the steward failed to point out that these unfree countries would also be military dictatorships). After the speech, passengers burst into a round of applause--except for me. Unpatriotic me just sat quietly in my seat wondering how soon these public appreciations of the military would actually be required by law, not merely inflicted upon me by a gushing waiter while I was trapped inside the fuselage of a passenger jet.

We owe no debt to the military, but we owe lots of debt because of the military. Trillions of dollars of debt, and that debt keeps growing every year. Our founding fathers created a civilian government under law; law creates, defines, protects, and preserves our civil freedoms. The founding fathers didn't create a military, and they didn't want one. They left the protection of the country in the hands of civilian militias--ordinary people, not star-spangled generals and admirals. They had no use for standing armies. They knew that militaries destroyed freedom because, unlike contemporary Americans, they knew history and had learned its painful lessons. That was then, this is now.

The militarization of America occurred in the total war of 1941-1945. Every part of America was subordinated to the military and its demands; that subordination persisted after the war in the form of the domination of the military-industrial complex. People like Harry Elmer Barnes and John T. Flynn warned their fellow citizens about this fundamental transformation of America and how a free republic would not survive. Few people listened to them. Everything they foresaw now exists. Few people nowadays see anything wrong because a militarized America is the only America they have ever known. The old free civilian republic is not even a memory.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, General George Washington put aside his rank, laid down his arms, and went home to Mount Vernon to resume his life as a gentleman farmer and businessman. He built no shrine to himself to commemorate his military exploits; nobody else did either. The citizens of 18th century America didn't think that the military was the highest, noblest calling of mankind. Free civilian life was the norm; anything military was an aberration. Nobody thought that because you once donned a uniform and marched in drill, you were then owed eternal gratitude, honor, esteem, and money.

Contemporary America has different values. In Bullhead City, Arizona, veterans believe that citizens owe them eternal gratitude in the form of an "eternal flame" shrine that will cost taxpayers thousands of dollars in gas bills each year plus eternal maintenance and upkeep costs. Apparently no civilian political leader dares point out the pointless waste of money for fear provoking veterans or for fear of being stigmatized as unpatriotic, which (of course) is defined as either opposing the wishes of the military to honor and fete itself or failing to show appropriate, ceaseless, fawning gratitude for the life-surrendering sacrifices that veterans now living comfortably in Bullhead City obviously did not make. Who in Bullhead City (or anywhere else in America) would dare say that?

Read it here

You heard it here first!

The Congressional Budget Office's current estimate of the budget deficit is (get this) $1.186 trillion. Here is a trillion: 1,000,000,000,000. That is a million million, or one thousand billion, or ten raised to the twelfth power. Try to grasp that number because from now on the American government's annual debt and borrowing will be measured in the trillions (note the plural). The CBO's estimate has yet to include the new spending Mr. Obama will impose this year, so this figure is merely an interim number. In a previous post, I said the real budget deficit will be on the order of $2 trillion, and I stand by that number. The money the US government will attempt to borrow includes many "off budget" expenditures, like the ruinous wars we are fighting. To deceive us, the government omits these expenditures from the day-to-day budget. Further, the deficit is understated because any Social Security tax surplus is spent now, not saved. Only the American people are fooled by this fiscal chicanery; the credit and capital markets are not fooled and are well aware of the colossal amount of borrowing the federal government is attempting for just this fiscal year. Further, we have multi-trillion dollar deficits staring at us for the indefinite future.

So, whaddaya think? Will people of the world, falling into depression, forgo saving their money for themselves and their families and instead ship trillions of dollars in loans to the US so that we Americans can bail out Wall Street bankers, car companies, investment houses, mortgage holders, bankrupt spendthrifts, and impoverished wastrels? Do you think that the people of the world will volunteer to go hungry so Americans can eat, that they will wear tatters so Americans can clothe themselves, that they will impoverish themselves so Americans can go shopping? Do ya really think that this is going to happen, do ya?

Mr. Obama does, and he's bet the future of the country on it. In a sober, sombre moment, reflect on the improbability of him winning that bet and on what losing this loony gamble will mean to you.

Read your fate here

Recovery with what?

Paul Craig Roberts has been a voice crying in the wilderness for the better part of a decade, first about gutting the American industrial economy and then about the immoral, ruinous wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. He writes today about an economic question few people have even framed, much less considered: What if there is no recovery?

To date, just about everybody in government and business assumes that no matter how severe is the depression into which the US has fallen, we will somehow "recover" at some unspecified future date for equally unspecified reasons. The hidden assumption is that "recovery" will be a restoration of the pre-crash prosperity. Since the pre-crash prosperity was a financial bubble created by the Fed's insane credit and monetary expansion, this assumption is plainly absurd. Nonetheless, that's what American government, business, and people in general are banking on.

Paul Craig Roberts will have none of this. This depression is not a pause on the journey to ever greater prosperity, he argues. It is a collapse, a fall into an impoverishment from which there will be no future escape. This depression, in short, is our permanent future. Once we were rich; now we are poor. We have wrecked our economy and destroyed the industrial infrastructure that would have enabled us to recover. We now have nothing to recover with. We refuse to see our predicament. We believe ourselves entitled to prosperity; we deserve it; it's our birthright. The rest of the world thinks that you earn prosperity. That's why we Americans are in it up to our necks. Happy New Year!

Read it here