The Coming Crisis

This is an interesting documentary on the 2008 crisis, and contains a prediction about the next one. 

Romney’s 20%

Romney has promised that if elected he will reduce federal spending from 25% GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to 20% by 2016. This would be enough for me to hold my nose and vote for him, if I believed him, but this is not consistent with his other promises.

Romney has promised no cuts in Social Security or Medicare to anyone over 55.. My joke has been that since I am 58 I support this. He has also pledged to not cut defense. About 20% of the budget goes for defense (probably an underestimate as there are parts of defense hidden in the Energy Department); about 20% of the budget is Social Security; about 15% of the budget is Medicare. So 55% of the budget is untouchable. That would thus require a cut in all other government programs by over 50%—color me skeptical. This also ignores the increase in medical costs every year.

How then does Romney say this with a straight face? As in the case with politicians of all persuasions it is a combination of cunning lies and personal delusion. Apparently Romney expects that if he is elected the oceans will cease to rise, oh wait, that is someone else.

In particular the Romney/Ryan delusion is economic growth. Here is the Anerican Thinker explanation:

One way it is possible to get near 20% of GDP for government spending by 2016 is to factor in economic growth. Unadjusted for inflation, economic growth averaged around 4% in 2010 and 2011 (factoring in inflation, the growth is much lower). Let’s say that Romney’s economic policies are effective and that growth starts to take off. Rather than 4% unadjusted growth a year, let’s estimate 6% growth. Six percent annual GDP growth is a very attainable number. The second term of the Clinton administration matched that number, and the first term also came close. Reagan’s presidency also saw about a 6% annual GDP growth per year.

Read more here.

The American Thinker is assuming 6% growth over the next 4 years. They are delusional as well. The title to their magazine is a misnomer.

In the last election I held my nose and voted for McCain as I lived in a swing state. McCain won Missouri by 7000 votes, one of them was mine. I am not sure how I would vote if I lived in Colorado, Iowa, Florida, or Ohio, especially Ohio. Since I live in California—the bluest of blue states—my vote is worthless.

As you may have figured out by now, I have a well-developed sense of the absurd.

Roseanne Barr for President! She wants to bring back the guillotine.

Band of Angels (Behold He Comes)

One movie I remember watching, back in the day, was Band of Angels. I never forgot the painfulness of watching it. It was about a young southern belle in the pre-Civil War days who was shocked to discover she was black. Anything with Yvonne de Carlo was always of interest, but this movie also had Clark Gable. Here is how Wikipedia summarizes the plot:

Amantha Starr (Yvonne De Carlo) is the privileged daughter of a Kentucky plantation owner. However, after he dies, a shocking secret is revealed: These two movie posters show how this movie was marketed.unbeknownst to Amantha, her mother had been one of her father’s black slaves. Legally now property, she is taken by a slave trader to New Orleans to be sold. On the riverboat ride there, he makes it clear that he intends to sleep with her, but desists when she tries to hang herself; as a beautiful, cultured young woman who can pass for white, she is far too valuable to risk losing.

Amantha is put up for auction. When she is callously inspected by a coarse potential buyer, she is rescued from further humiliation by Hamish Bond (Clark Gable), who outbids the cad, paying an exorbitant price for her. Expecting the worst, Amantha is surprised to be treated as a lady, not a slave, by her new owner. At his city mansion, she meets his key slaves, his housekeeper (and former lover) Michele (Carolle Drake) and his conflicted right-hand-man Rau-Ru (Sidney Poitier). Rau-Ru is grateful for the kindness, education and trust Hamish has bestowed on him, but hates him anyway.

Of course this is Hollywood, so after a number of crises (apparently that is the plural of crisis), the two flee the South together. While this made an enjoyable, if possibly somewhat controversial, movie at the time, it does led to one obvious question. How common was this? 

The short answer is to look at black Americans and the abundance of Caucasian features that are present. 

I have heard many times about the greatness of the American Constitution. To some degree I agree. However it was based on a faulty foundation, that of slavery. Having a country that was 1/2 slave holding and 1/2 non-slave holding was not a situation that could continue indefinitely. When you build a building, it is only as good as the foundation. The flaw in the American foundation was not solved until the Civil War—you might say it is still unsolved. 

I remember reading as a youth how our Founding Fathers were against slavery and loved their slaves. Maybe they loved their slaves, but not in the exact way I thought then. 

As in President Thomas Jefferson’s household, the use of lighter-skinned slaves as household servants was not simply a choice related to skin color. Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their own children or other relatives. Six of Jefferson’s later household slaves were the grown children of his father-in-law John Wayles and his slave mistress Betty Hemings. Half-siblings to Jefferson’s wife Martha, they were inherited by her along with Betty Hemings and other slaves a year after her marriage to Jefferson, after the death of her father. At that time, some of the Hemings-Wayles children were very young; Sally Hemings was an infant. They were trained as domestic and skilled servants and occupied the top of the slave hierarchy at Monticello.

Since 2000, historians have widely accepted that the widower Jefferson had a nearly four-decade relationship with Sally Hemings, the youngest daughter of Wayles and Betty. It was believed to have begun when he was US minister in Paris and she was part of his household. Sally was nearly 25 years younger than his late wife, and Jefferson had six children of record with her, four of whom survived. Jefferson had his three mixed-race “natural” sons by Hemings trained as carpenters, a highly skilled occupation, to enable them to make a living after he freed them when they came of age. Three of his four children by Sally Hemings, including his daughter Harriet, the only slave woman he freed, “passed” into white society as adults, according to their appearance.

While paternity of a child born over 200 years ago is not something that can be settled today, modern DNA tests have determined that at least one of Sally Heming’s children was a descendant of a Jefferson male. This is not in dispute. But the father could have been Jefferson’s brother, or his brother’s sons. There were in fact 8 different Jefferson males that could have been the father that lived within 20 miles. 

Here is how Wikipedia describes the controversy:

Jefferson's Grandson In response to a PBS Frontline special on the DNA study in 2000, John H. Works, Jr., a Jefferson descendant and a past president of the Monticello Association, a lineage society, wrote that DNA tests indicated that any one of eight Jeffersons could have been the father of Eston. The team had concluded that Jefferson’s paternity was the simplest explanation and consistent with historic evidence, but the DNA study could not identify Thomas Jefferson exclusively of other Jefferson males because no sample of his DNA was available. 

I agree. Jefferson was probably the father of Sally’s children, with the possible exception of her eldest. Remember that Sally had no real choice in the matter. 

This post is a continuation of the series about sexual immorality and war. In this case there was no war involved until the Civil War. Such liaisons were relatively common in the South. It was built into the custom and society of the time. George Washington was likely involved in this kind of situation as well. Yes, the reason so many recently emancipated blacks chose the names “Jefferson” or “Washington” was to honor the forefathers—but some many have had a more direct claim to the surname. 

A Gettysberg AddressSo why am I writing about this? 

My main point in this series is that “what goes around, comes around.” Keeping generations of black women as sexual playthings, and then keeping the children as slaves was a practice of generations of slaveowners. America still suffers the consequences of it. 

Did God reach down and aid the Northern cause in the Civil War? Who knows? The Battle Hymn of the Republic is sung by many churches, and that song thinks that was the case. But the very existence of slavery was one of the reasons the South failed in its secession attempt. The South was unprepared to fight a heavily industrialized North. Fancy southern horsemanship and superior martial skills was not enough. 

No one will ever know how many died as a result of the sin of slavery. The current estimates of 600,000 deaths during the Civil War are now being reevaluated with the estimate now at 750,000 dead. We will never know.

America today is just now finishing the recovery from the Vietnam War where only 50,000 died. 

The sins of a culture build and build until the situation explodes. Two scriptures come to mind from this, the first being 1 Thessalonians 2:

¹⁴ For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews ¹⁵ who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone ¹⁶ in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last. (NIV) 

Sins build up until the situation explodes. In the case Paul is talking about here, it was the Jewish leadership that Jesus fought with that were ultimately destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. In this case the Bible tells us that God was directly responsible for the punishment. 

I also thought of a frequent scripture I quote from Revelation 18:4-8

Get out, my people, as fast as you can,
    so you don’t get mixed up in her sins,
    so you don’t get caught in her doom.
Her sins stink to high Heaven;
    God has remembered every evil she’s done.
Give her back what she’s given,
    double what she’s doubled in her works,
    double the recipe in the cup she mixed;
Bring her flaunting and wild ways
    to torment and tears.
Because she gloated, “I’m queen over all,
    and no widow, never a tear on my face,”
In one day, disasters will crush her—
    death, heartbreak, and famine—
Then she’ll be burned by fire, because God,
    the Strong God who judges her,
    has had enough.

Even if you were not a slave holder in the South (my family archives say they were slave owners until one of my ancestors became a Christian—the denomination—minister), if your society crumbles you suffer too. For the adage that I have been repeating, “What you sow is what you reap,” applies to cultures and nations too. 

The inhabitants of the South could not escape the judgment, even if they were not personally responsible. In the same way today, Americans may not  feel responsible for their collective actions through government. It does not matter, for what a country sows that it shall also reap. 

Maybe I should change the name of my blog to “Flee from the Wrath To Come.” But, where does one flee to? Our flight has to be metaphorical today. Are you ready to flee? 

Let it Be

Our Photon Controls Are Damaged

Lord Keynes was once asked what his policies would do in the long run. He famously said, “In the long run we are all dead.” While I have mocked this answer in the past, there is an element of truth to it. When in a tough situation one might do things that otherwise would not be done. But the idea is that when things are better one could repair the damage in better times. This was actually what Keynes advocated. He wanted to have a balanced budget over the length of a business cycle. This has never been done. Instead the debt just gets higher and higher. The potential effects of this when, not if, interest rates rise is the proverbial elephant in the room no one talks about. Keynes is dead, and has no worries. We the Living have to deal with the bad economic decisions of the past. 

As I mentioned in my earlier post 3 to 7 Years, I still have hopes we can muddle through in spite of a lack of evidence that either party actually understands the mess we are in. We must take action immediately to avoid a worse crisis later. 

A lot rides on the ability of the US economy to grow. While I think the growth assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office are overly optimistic, and Ryan’s are even worse (I have not looked closely at Romney’s growth assumptions), I do expect growth.

But what if this is untrue? The last 250 years of growth may be unique in history and may not continue. The economic law of diminishing returns says this:

The law of diminishing returns (also law of diminishing marginal returns or law of increasing relative cost) states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant (“ceteris paribus”), will at some point yield lower per-unit returns. The law of diminishing returns does not imply that adding more of a factor will decrease the total production, a condition known as negative returns, though in fact this is common.  

Have we reached that point? Martin Wolfe always makes you think and his article in The Financial Times is getting some buzz. 

Prof Gordon notes further obstacles to rising standards of living for ordinary Americans. These include: the reversal of the demographic dividend that came from the baby boomers and movement of women into the labour force; the levelling-off of educational attainment; and obstacles to the living standards of the bottom 99 per cent. These hurdles include globalisation, rising resource costs and high fiscal deficits and private debts. In brief, he expects the rise in the real disposable incomes of those outside the elite to slow to a crawl. Indeed, it appears to have already done so. Similar developments are occurring in other high-income countries.

The whole article is well worth reading. (You will have to register to read it.) 

While I expect growth to continue, it cannot do so forever. The advances in Nanotechnology might continue this growth spurt for a while, and then into a sustainable society. Maybe I can ask my son for a guest post on this issue as this is his area of expertise. 

But in the meantime we need to reorganize, tighten our collective and individual belts, and prepare for bad weather. In other words our photon controls are damaged and we must withdraw. 

If you do not like my clichés, use your own, but act.