I Hate Reruns

Nothing seems to be a bigger waste of time than to go the TV to see something I wanted to watch and then finding out it's rerun.  Especially if I've seen the show more than once and remember enough of the dialog to recite it along with the show. 

When I was starting this blog I tended to cover a lot of politics and a lot of economics - which means a lot commentary about the Federal Reserve and the insane politics of the Obamanoid years.  But covering the same stories and saying the same things over and over seemed like a waste of time.  Over the years, I had done a lot of "Techy Tuesday" posts, as well as a few series on technical topics and the shop.  At least some of those were very well received.  When the space programs visible from my yard started getting very active, I just naturally shifted in the direction of more technical topics and fewer political rants.  I first tagged a post with the label "space" in May of 2019.  I'm fairly sure I'd written on space topics before that, but that idea is harder to find.

So why do I bring this up tonight?  To introduce a rerun, of course!  Not a full column, but the critical ideas I've been writing about for the life of the blog. 

In the last few weeks, there has been almost a constant replay of a topic I've written about almost since the first year of this blog: the recurring disappointment of the "debt ceiling".  This wasn't a topic every  year because the debt ceiling isn't approached every year.  As I pointed out many times,  

The biggest lie, however, is that there's really a debt ceiling at all.  There hasn't been one time since the debt ceiling became law in 1917 that the ceiling has been reduced.  It's either raised, or suspended - which pretty much means raised - every time the limit seems like a hard limit.  If every time the ceiling becomes a restraint the ceiling is raised or ignored, how can they claim to have a ceiling?  Does it create even the smallest amount of restraint of spending in the congress?

In 2015, I added this:

Six times in history, they didn't pass the debt ceiling increase in time, and the country continued to run without going into default.  Either that, or they simply ignore the ceiling and allow the Treasury department to use "extraordinary measures".  If you or I did that, instead of "extraordinary measures" they would say we "lie, cheat and steal".   In July of 2013, I did a story on the Treasury Department's spending clock suddenly stopping from May of '13 until the debt ceiling got raised.  Newsflash: the spending didn't stop; they just lied about it.

The next big lie is "we're going to go into default."  Again: bullshit! 

This week's bullshit is that restraining spending so that our budget remains under the debt limit means the government goes into default.  That is not default - by definition.    Default would be refusing to pay the payments due on our debt - the interest on the debt.  Rather than default, this would be better called "living within their means" or "being responsible".  We will not default unless the administration chooses to. 

The Debt Clock tells me that the Time Of This Writing, the interest due on our national debt is roughly $568 billion.  The Federal Tax Revenue is $4.61 trillion, meaning the interest on the debt is 12.3% of revenue.  Only a fool, or someone deliberately trying to destroy the "full faith and trust" in the dollar would choose to not pay the interest on the debt.  Holding the spending limit where it is would not affect that at all.  I'm not saying they wouldn't do it, I'm saying that only a fool or someone deliberately trying to destroy the dollar would do it.  The more people who know they're trying to destroy us the less likely they are to do it openly.  

Then there's the whole idea of government shutdown.  I think I only heard one mention of that - so far.  When you see those words just cross out government shutdown (did it for ya) and write "paid vacation" for the lucky Fed.gov 's nonessential workers.  That's all it is. 

The longest government shutdown ever was 35 days between December of '18 and January of '19, under President Trump.  The essential workers had to work without pay until the deal was made and their pay could be issued and that must have been tough.  The result, though, was that while they suspended the ceiling, the debt kept going up.

So why do we go through this crap every time the subject comes up?  Political theater.  Kabuki (overly dramatic) theater.  They drag it out to the last minute so they can look like heroes.  If they shut down the Fed.gov, so what?  Those workers get their time off and their pay, so it's "no harm? no foul."  Feel sorry for them?  I think if one works for fed.gov, one should have a savings buffer of a few weeks to ensure you can buy your groceries in the even of shutdown.  It's not like nobody knows a shutdown is coming. 

There's a cartoon I've been running for years, almost every reference to the debt ceiling since 2013, that I really think sums up the whole story.  In a way, a Star Wars parody reference.

Yup.  They drag it out as long as they want, make it sound as dire as possible, all so that they can look like heroes, as in the last panel.  I went to the credit, in the lower left of the cartoon and the web site appears to be gone, with just a place holder there.

Oh, yeah.  I also reference to the Trillion Dollar Coin Scam, too.  Yeah, Divemedic said he saw that in the last couple of weeks.  Can't leave any piece of LCS theater untouched. (Where LCS = lying, cheating, stealing)  We're on Modern Monetary Theory now, and it must be unethical to ask them if that has ever worked anywhere or any time in human history because not one reporter has asked that.