LEAD WATER PIPES IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA?

One of the things that was instantly clear to me as the housing bubble collapsed 6 years ago, was the miseriecorde sticking out of the neck of the banking industry. It had been jammed firmly into the investor and banking communities by the Federal Government and its agencies and apparatchiks who dominated the regulatory and enforcement arm that had been geared up to implement Social Justice policies at any cost. They stuck it in again and again over the years and always confirmed that it was just a little prick. It wouldn't hurt a gigantic industry like the investment banking industry. No no.

I remembered hearing much the same things week after week during the Savings and Loan collapse of the 1980s. A man who knew better would tell me again and again that his bank had just written off another 2% in non-performing assets. The following week it might be another 3% and then another 3%. It kept going on and on. His bank had been convinced by the federal regulators to buy up the assets of a couple of S&Ls that had gone belly up. His bank did as the government asked and then was stabbed in the back when the regulators revised the minimum capital requirements for banks and declared his bank insolvent because they had run down their balance to buy up the failed S&Ls.

Barney Frank, the single most destructive congressman of the 20th century, finally revealed the other day that he had been instrumental in killing and damaging near to death, the entire US Investment Banking Industry, by forcing Wall Street and all the major lenders to make loans that EVERYBODY knew at the time, could never be repaid. Trillions of $ vanished literally overnight when the bubble collapsed and investors and regulators realized that there was nothing behind the facade.

I read today the words of one particularly soft-headed liberal who believes so much in the power of the state that he feared what would happen if the government shut down after the shenanigans in Congress, that he blames only the republicans for, when the Fed runs out of money and no longer pumps money into the stock markets. I had to ask him if he was ever aware that the Fed never had any of the money it is pumping into the markets. It's just making it up. It's all a charade. He simply refuses to believe that could be true since it is 90 degrees off his worldview.

I can understand that people can disagree about policy and even stupid theories like Social Justice, but I think anybody who simply refuses to face the fact that the government cannot continue to spend two or three trillion dollars more than it takes in every year, is too stupid to vote. When Obama talks about the country paying its debts, the first debt is interest on the national debt which will soon rival the budget of the DoD or all the other discretionary spending of the federal government combined. It can only increase in size and scope which means less and less money for programs and discretionary spending next year and the year after and the 4 generations that come after that.

The cretins argue that people simply must pay more taxes. They fail to grasp how large the debt is. It is far larger than the US gross domestic product. Fiscally, this country is in far worse shape then Detroit. Obamacare has been the law of the land now for 4 years. The federal government has been collecting taxes to pay for it since it became law. Is anybody asking where that money went? Did it vanish in the same way that all the Social Security money disappeared in the endless pork barrel that is politics in DC?

Did you notice how social security is now referred to by the government as a Federal Benefit Payment? It's not a benefit. Working people and their employers paid 15% of their income before taxes, in social security taxes. It's not a federal benefit. It's earned income and if it had been invested properly and not stolen by the government, retired workers would have much larger retirement checks.

That's all water over the dam. The important thing is that now the government is going to force workers to pay a lot of money for health care insurance most don't need. That's because most of the health benefit will go to the wealthiest segment of American society, the retired baby boomers and greatest generation. You will pay and pay and then, again, when it's your turn, there won't be any money there. The hospitals will have crumbled away and doctors will have left because let's be honest, what incentives are there to build hospitals or pay doctors? We in California saw some of this with the rolling blackouts imposed by ENRON and others when the Power Generation industry was turned over to the Independent System Operator and it turned out that the only incentives offered anybody were those designed to maximize profit for shareholders. There was nothing about building more power generation plants, increasing energy efficiency, running new power lines. Nope. Every single incentive built into the scheme by the government was based on screwing the consumer.

Welcome to the brave new world. 

Is there a cure for massive persistent lead poisoning?

Found it!