Scoundrels Found in Washington!

14 Apr

Scoundrels Found in Washington!

D.C. Doesn’t Care About the Dollar or Debt

A lot of timely questions and second thought about the coronavirus and the lockdown are appearing in the news right now.  We think it is always wise to question everything government does, but as we’ve said many times, we are neither virologists nor epidemiologists.

Our expertise in money.  And we can see what is going on in Washington in this moment of our national crisis.  

It is not good.

We view it as hard evidence that the US debt problem will not be solved.  It will end in a tragic bankruptcy and the destruction of the dollar.  It will cause people to flee to gold and silver.  

But we’re getting ahead of our short story.

At the end of March, Congress passed and the President signed into law the CARES Act.  It is a $2.3 trillion emergency spending measure aimed at tackling the US economic shutdown and the coronavirus pandemic.

$2.3 trillion is a lot of money.  It is the largest relief bill in history.   Trillion-dollar deficits are new enough that they are still shocking to most thinking people.  But with the CARES Act, what was going to be a trillion-dollar deficit has exploded.  

The 2020 deficit now is on track to be more than $3.8 trillion!

But it is a crisis, right?  Who cares about the price tak if all that spending is necessary, right?  These are emergency appropriations, right?

Well, apparently not.  Former Reagan administration Budget Director David Stockman has gone through the 880 page bill.  We’ll pass along some of what he found in his own words:

$25,000,000 for additional salary for House of Representatives (blows your mind, right off the bat!)

$100,000,000 to NASA (because, who knows why?)

$20,000,000,000 to the USPS (because, why the hell not?)

$300,000,000 to the Endowment for the Arts (Ah, screw it – let’s do it! They’ll never know)

$300,000,000 for the Endowment for the Humanities (because, not that many people even knew that was a thing?)

$15,000,000 for Veterans Employment Training (for when the GI Bill isn’t enough)

$435,000,000 for mental health support (Man, oh man, that’s a lot of suicide hotlines)

$30,000,000,000 for the Department of Education stabilization fund (Whoa, that’s a big one! Wonder how much goes to the NEA?)

$200,000,000 to Safe Schools Emergency Response to Violence Program (I guess the virus is kind of violent)

$300,000,000 to Public Broadcasting (NPR has to be bought and paid for by somebody. That somebody is you.)

$500,000,000 to Museums and Libraries (Who the hell knows how we are going to use it?)

$720,000,000 to Social Security Admin (But get this – of this, only $200,000,000 is to benefit people. The rest is for admin costs.)

$25,000,000 for Cleaning supplies for the Capitol Building (Seriously, it’s on page 136)

$7,500,000 to the Smithsonian for additional salaries (Wait a minute, what about the virus?)

$35,000,000 to the JFK Center for performing Arts (See above)

$3,000,000,000 upgrade to the IT department at the VA (I guess $3 billion ought to cover it.)

$315,000,000 for State Department Diplomatic Programs (What the hell does this mean?)

$95,000,000 for the Agency of International Development (What is this? Let’s keep the money here and clean up the streets of S.F. and L.A.)

There’s much more like that, but we’ll stop there because you get the point.  The national debt was unpayable before this bill, but even that is not enough for the scoundrels in Washington.  They will even use a deadly crisis to fund their pet projects and to spend money that benefits their crony constituents.

They are not capable of acting statesmanlike, not even in a crisis.  They will not deal with our fiscal problems.  They will not address the debt.

They will tank the US dollar.

Buy gold and silver now.