Saturday, August 9, 2014

Wherin the liberal sheeple finally get the wake up call.

They say that if you are doing a deal in Vegas and you don't know who Mark or Patsy is in the deal, it's you.  The bad news is now getting slowly leaked out that big city pensions to public workers are basically bad debt.  A debt is a promise to pay something in the future.  Wimpy from the Popeye cartoon was always promising to repay that hamburger next Tuesday if you would only give it to him today.  Of course Tuesday would come and then go without repayment because Wimpy had no visible means of employment.

Liberal unions and liberal government have been colluding for a long time to make Wimpy promises to workers that cannot possibly be kept.  They appeared keep-able to people who believed the fairy tale that debt based prosperity was a sustainable strategy.  Some of those people simply never read any history or simply could not do math.   Others knew the math and history perfectly but recognized that you never give a sucker an even break.  Together they formed the coalition of the sheeple who have created an entire global economy based on a patchwork of massive, interconnected promises (debts).  Most of these cannot be kept.

Today the moron liberal public workers from NYC should be taking heed as the New York Times reports on under funded pensions and how they will never catch up to the spiraling costs of George Carlin's "vanishing pension" which, he correctly predicted, "disappears the moment you go to collect it".

As usual, the article mixes some truth with some bullshit in order to make it sound like there could ever have been a positive outcome.  I believe GW Bush called this "truthiness".  For example, the article says, "The city's pension system suffers from the same woes as other cities and states: hefty promises made to workers, the unwillingness of city officials to face up to the problem for years and overly optimistic assumptions for market returns.".  The key bullshit is highlighted in yellow because it implies that if "dear leaders" had just faced the problems in time that all would be OK.  But noooooooo-oooooooo, those bad leaders wouldn't face the problems and so here we are.   To the common man this sounds somewhat reasonable.  After all, people make mistakes, nobody's perfect, blah blah blah, right?

BULLSHIT.  If I, a relative late awakener to the con, could see this coming back in late 2007, how could these really smart people not see it?  The truth is, they made big promises for future payments that could not be kept in order to grow the public labor force far larger than it ever would have grown otherwise.  Many people enter into government "service" in order to get the long term bennies and pensions.   Paying them the honest way, that is, up front, would require much higher salaries in order to attract them away from the private sector when the country was in such a big growth phase.  So government and public (and private) unions LIED to their members, told them a fairy tale about the equivalent of 70 economic virgins they would receive in their economic afterlife (AKA old age) if they would just blow themselves up economically by accepting shitty pay today.  You want terrorism?  There it is.  Government sponsored economic terrorism.  What do you think these people are going to do when they get stiffed.  Do you think they will just accept it quietly?

Every government con man knows that taxation past a certain point kills economic output.  When people see that they have no life past their work day and that working all that time does not result in a rapid personal increase in wealth, they stop working so hard.  Government hacks are not stupid.  They are greedy and they are lazy but they are not stupid.  They know how to create spreadsheets and they know how to create productivity graphs.  They know that taxation demoralizes workers.  So instead of taxing everyone in order to create a pay as you go system of government, they created a government based on Wimpy Promises.

In order to run this con, they set up a pension system and, over time, they simply stopped funding it fully.  Each year the shortfalls quietly added up, always with the promise that government would play catch up at some point.  But Tuesday never came for government just as it never came for Wimpy because the middle class has been slowly dismantled by the growth of the fraudulent money supply in which the people receive more and more dollars which have less and less buying power.  I went to see a movie last night with the wife.  Tickets were $23.  1 coke and 1 popcorn were $10.  Total $33 to see a movie for two.  That's at least twice as expensive as it was 10 years ago.

Pensions are now only being funded to the point required that will avoid drawing attention to them.  At some point, the con men know they will collapse and so they will just stop funding them.  The old workers will demand their money and the young workers will tell them "go whistle for it".  Government will side with the young workers because they can produce future economic value whereas old people move into a role of pure consumption with no economic value add.  For government, it will be easy math.  Government is good at math.  This is why only a fool gives government the easy out of "oh it was just some bad decision making or lack of political will".   The truth is that the promises made were never mathematically possible to keep, government and unions both knew it and colluded to defraud hapless sheeple of their youthful labor output.  In other words, a con, a grift and a scam.

Of late some people I know fear that government will continue growing forever.  I try to explain to them how these things are cyclic, how big government is in effect the solution to big government and how trees don't grow to reach the sky.  Not, at least, in a country where every citizen of any intelligence whatsoever is armed and proficient in the art of self defense.  To summarize, government in the US got big by promising rainbows with pots of gold on the other side.  They did this by telling fairy tales to willing, wide eyed economic children.  But now that the money supply is peaking and contracting, government and their mouthpiece main stream media are starting to let on that the rainbow was always a vaporous illusion and that there is no pot of gold on the other side.

All future value comes from the labor of man (multiplied by tools and energy).  That is the one and only economic economic truth from which all other economic truths will derive and with which all economic lies will conflict.  An honest money supply is needed in order to store today's excess labor for later retrieval and conversion into the labor of others when you can no longer do for yourself.  An honest money supply specifically denies the notion of fractionally reserved credit which includes pensions (which are a form of debt which effectively but temporarily increase the money supply until they are eventually defaulted upon).

If you get screwed out of your pension or annuity or 401k, don't be mad at anyone other than yourself for it was your economic ignorance and your reliance on the charity of government which has taken you to that outcome.  You didn't stop to do the critical thinking required in order to avoid what is mathematically inevitable.  Your coming pain cannot be fixed, it is your punishment for being a willing patsy to the con.  But when you finally see that I am right about this, perhaps at least you will remember that the root enabler of this scam is nothing other than fiat currency and fractional reserve banking.  Vent your coming anger towards getting rid of this scam-ridden and completely fraudulent concept of "money".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lest those workers in the private sector sigh in relief that they are neither Mark nor Patsy, consider the role of stock options and RSUs.

While these are offered as part of the compensation for one's labor, they really are wimpy promises. Effectively, these workers accept less cash as compensation and take a promise to be paid in the future. Meanwhile, the value of their labor is cashed immediately by executives. Sure, eventually, the present value of labor will be used to purchase the past value of stocks. That is, if the stock value didn't fall, if the worker remained employed with the company, etc.

Whether it's in the public or in the private sector, startup or established company, if the worker is not paid in cash in whole, it's a con and, in case of doubt, he's Mark.

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