A.k.a. why hyperinflation is just utter bullshit.

Yes, the Fed’s balance sheet and the balance sheet of the federal government are expanding at record rates. But these reflationary efforts should be seen as a partial antidote, not a panacea, to the deflationary effects brought on from the unprecedented contraction in the largest balance sheet on the planet: The $55 trillion US household balance sheet. Based on what house prices and equity valuation have been doing this quarter, we are likely in for a total loss of household net worth approximating $7 trillion this quarter alone, which would bring the cumulative decline in consumer wealth to $20 trillion. This wealth loss exceeds the combined expansion of the Fed’s and government balance sheet by a factor of ten. That should put the reflation-deflation debate into perspective.

And when I say “bringing out the big guns” they were quoted as saying a “Depression-Style Jobs Report” and that this “certainly is not a garden-variety recession.”

The other day, when I was talking about photographing America’s faceless, these are the kind of people I was referring to.

But then you read to the end of the article where vacuous celebrity governor Schwarzenegger did:

As well as increasing taxes, he has imposed drastic cuts in education, healthcare and services that will affect everyone living in the state.

We’ll all have to make sacrifices, but as usual we’re making the wrong ones in the wrong way. As usual, the poor, destitute and least-able-to-afford-it will be making the largest sacrifices while our legislators, politicians and upper bureaucrats suffer the least, but the people out on the streets like teachers and police offers, firemen and human health and services workers will be kicked out of jobs or have their pay decreased more drastically than the upper tiers, while having their taxes simultaneously raised. Spreading the wealth, as usual, in the wrong direction, the Republican direction.

Yes, great, lets cut back on education so the generation leading us out of this will be uneducated. That sounds like a win-win situation. Now that everything’s fucked and people are desperate, homeless and will be turning to crime when they reach their threshold, lets fire a bunch of cops and stuff! Don’t shit-can that $1.4 million dollar a year text-based county criminal justice information retrieval system where the department gets paid almost literally by the press of the return key on the keyboard (this is a true story and I’m trying my damnedest to get documentation to prove it), let’s fire some nurses and doctors instead of replacing that system with an automated web-based one for a few hundred dollars a year in maintenance.

Government waste is staggering, and yet they gut the problems that we can ill-afford to be without. Why not scrap some of the Department of Fish and Game, announce a moratorium on hunting since there’s no money to pay the people to issue the licenses? Sure, the licenses “bring in money,” but do they bring in more than the salary of a person or two per year (including their insurance, pension, workmen’s comp insurance and all that); anyway, in this Depression, who has the money or time to go hunting? Most hunters bag more booze than deer anyway so they can just go to their lodges and drink. Or stay home and drink.

Once again, I call for complete government budgetary transparency, so concerned citizens can investigate and expose waste or fraud, and highlight and expand the exemplary.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 10:02.