Let’s take in some Points of Interest, just for fun, as we speed down the Road to Perdition.
(My dad used to call roadside historical markers “hysterical markers.” Still makes me laugh.)
– While the big spenders in Washington debate whether to spend $1.7 trillion in the next trough-full of borrowed swill, or more like $6 trillion (Sen. Bernie Sanders’ fervent wish), I find myself worrying about my cute little red-headed grand daughters – ages 3 and 1. I’m worried about the debt their generation will inherit, debt shamelessly racked up by self-interested politicians to buy the votes of my generation.
The only way I can get to sleep at night is figuring that our education system will turn my grand kids into wild-eyed socialists, who figure money grows on trees, in which case I won’t have to worry, because I’ll be busy being deceased.
What would it be like, I wonder, to go shopping with Bernie Sanders, who considers $6 trillion in new debt (we’re already $28 trillion in debt) a pretty reasonable amount? Or with the more tight-fisted Democrats in Washington, who consider themselves thrifty adding a mere $1.7 trillion? We’re told cooler heads in the Senate might succeed in getting it down to a downright frugal $1 trillion.
(!)
Anyone who has figured out how to work a checkbook knows this can’t go on forever, even though it has gone on forever in my lifetime (and that’s a long time). But heaping ever more debt on future generations is the definition of wretched, selfish, piggish profligacy.
Oink, oink, oink.
We should be ashamed of ourselves.
– Whenever you hear politicians – Democrats are the worst, but Republicans aren’t much better – talk about making “investments,” my advice is to go down in your basement or storm cellar and stay there until the all-clear is sounded, probably next November when the not-much-better-Republicans retake the House and Senate.
Imagine “investing” with someone who has amassed a debt of $28 trillion already, and is itching to add trillions more.
– I wonder if, while President Biden enjoyed his swell holiday in Nantucket, he followed up his order to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve by 50 million barrels – an amount that would supply this country for about 2½ days – by spitting in the ocean.
It would have about the same impact.
– People on both coasts are a lot smarter than we are out here in deepest Flyover Country – if you don’t believe it, just ask them. They’ll tell you how much smarter they are than we are.
So it makes you wonder why they aren’t smart enough to realize that doing away with cash bail for those arrested might result in more repeat offenders out on the street. Cops in New York complain that people they arrest are back on the street almost before the arrest paperwork is complete.
These political geniuses apparently believe that doing away with significant cash bail is somehow making progress, even after a guy with a 50-page rap sheet in Wisconsin was released on $1,000 bond, and is now accused of driving a car into a Christmas parade, killing six and injuring over 40.
This is progress?
– Out in San Francisco, where it’s OK to do Number 2 on the sidewalk, you can shoplift up to $950 from stores and only get a ticket, a ticket that probably won’t be pursued in court. Shoplifters are reportedly carrying calculators (probably stolen), to stay under the felony limit for stolen goods. Walgreens and other companies are closing stores there as a result.
The powers that be apparently are willing to live with shuttered Walgreens stores. But they draw the line at last week’s large-scale “smash and grab” thefts that hit a Luis Vuitton store, a Nordstroms and even a Home Depot (to get sledge hammers and crowbars). What next? The French Laundry?
Apparently a Walgreens “desert” in San Francisco is no big deal. But not a Luis Vuitton desert. Food and drug “insecurity” are OK, but not expensive handbag insecurity.
– As we travel merrily down the Road to Perdition, I’m having serious doubts that these people are smarter than we are.
