What a ridiculous joke this was. It's an insult to Americans and to the rest of the world. If you don't see this, please consider that in the 6 months leading to June 2011 Ben Bernanke will have printed up $600 billion from thin air and used it to buy treasuries (i.e. to fund government operations). How can anyone get excited over $38 billion? Bernanke can print that up as a weekend project or during a layover between flights or during half time at a football game. Seriously, where is the outrage from thinking people?
Of course we were told that this miniscule, rounding error and noise level budget cut is only the start and they are kicking around numbers that are more like cutting $400 billion per year, every year for the next 10-15 years running. Why are they not doing $400 billion today? Why is everything tomorrow? Perhaps we can derive a clue from other forms of theater. For example, from the movie, Annie,"So ya' gotta' hang on 'til tomorrow, come what may... Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya' tomorrow, you're only a day away". Or if you like Popeye better, think of Wimpy promising to pay you that hamburger next Tuesday. They are promising something that will never happen because making it happen will cause a crisis and the crisis will be an excuse for stopping the austerity measures.
Bottom line, all of this theater is being done to appease people in the US and our creditors across the world so that we can continue spending far more than we take in from taxes. It's a stall job done by con men. But what are they stalling for? What do they hope to gain? Well, it's hard to say but I think the leading contenders are:
- Hope that science will have some big, Earth shattering breakthrough that will overshadow the debt Ponzi and make people stop caring about it. For example, if science figures out how to reverse the aging process or if intelligent extraterrestrial life is found or if cold fusion/free energy becomes real. Whatever it might be, it would have to be truly life changing for everyone for it to matter.
- Hope that Bernanke can sneakily inflate us out of this mess without interest rates skyrocketing which would shut his money creation machine down. Gold and silver are already telling us that fiat currency is a fraud but if interest rates go back up above 10%, the debt scam is over, period. In that event we won't even be able to pay the interest on the existing debt. That's how the markets tell governments that they won't tolerate any more money scams.
- Hope that some other major player stumbles and falls, thus causing a global domino effect melt down. The powers that be don't care about having a melt down, they simply care about being blamed for it. So if someone else (like Japan, Euroland, or China) stumbles and crashes in a fiery ball then con men in the US can credibly declare that they had it all under control but they were taken down as part of a unforeseeable global economic collapse that they could not avoid once it got started.
- Hope that all the irresponsibility and gamesmanship pisses some people off so much that it generates a rise in domestic terrorism so that they can suspend the rule of law, suspend elections, grab all the power and become dictators in the name of saving us from the civil unrest.
- They actually have no hopes. They are stalling for the sake of stalling. They are milking the con for as long as the suckers will allow themselves to be conned. They are collecting salaries and racking up pension benefits for as long as they can.
- Some combination of all of the above.
