President Donald Trump continued his non-interventionist rhetoric from the campaign trail in an interview that aired Thursday on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“We have to rebuild our country. Our roads, our bridges, our tunnels, our schools,” Trump told Pat Robertson. “We will have in another few months, have spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. Seven Trillion.”
This number President Trump is using falls in line with the high end of expenditure studies. A Brown University study said: “By 2053, interest costs will be at least $7.9 trillion unless the U.S. changes the way it pays for the wars.”
Trump went on to say: “And then if you want to spend two dollars on building a school in Iowa, or in Pennsylvania, or in Florida, they don’t want to give you the money.”
“How ridiculous is this?,” Trump added. He said that the U.S. got “nothing” from all of its engagement in the Middle East. The U.S. has toppled the governments of Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq in the past 16 years.
The Taliban is now resurgent in Afghanistan, Iraq is fending off ISIS, and Libya has become a haven for radical Islamic terrorists.
“The Middle East is a mess,” Trump said.
I used to think that where you really see the difference between r and K is in looking at the guys who run Ponzi schemes. Not only do they blow through investor money with no eye to any long-term consequences, they blow it on the stupidest items. One guy had something like 250 garden gnomes. And that was the smallest part of a massive collection of useless shit he had just massed all throughout his house. Bejeweled pens, paintings of clowns, a five foot rabbit sculpture he left on his front lawn, even autographed celebrity memorabilia with no purpose. The guy basically blew the money on junk, just to spend it. It was clearly some sort of bizarre compulsion to acquire anything.
And yet, one look at government and you realize our government makes the Ponzi guys look like pikers, starting with Social Security:
Social Security’s unfunded liabilities total $12.5 trillion in present-dollar terms over a 75-year timeframe, the administration’s trustees reported Thursday, an increase of $1.2 trillion from last year’s estimate.
The trustees report showed that Social Security’s combined trust fund can only pay scheduled benefits through 2034, a projected date that is unchanged from a year ago. Medicare’s trust fund, though, is in better shape than previously estimated and will run out a year later than previously anticipated, in 2029.
Medicare’s trust runs out in just over a decade, and that is assuming they don’t roll everyone into it, and begin offering free addiction treatment, abortions, and transgender surgeries. On top of that, as we approach the collapse anywhere there is stored value is going to be raided, to distribute it to the noisiest group to prevent them from experiencing sufficient amygdala to become violent. So any trust will be cleaned out, probably to keep welfare flowing and minimize the carnage in the cities.
As for Social Security, these are the rosy numbers they let out, assuming there is no Apocalypse between now and then. I’d bet the real numbers are much worse, and if an Apocalypse hits and nobody is working as in the last Great Depression, all bets are off and the empty trust is the least of their problems. No money coming in means no money going out.
I view Social Security and Medicare as the fail-safes, to make sure the Apocalypse happens if everything else fails. But in reality there are so many other triggers I would be shocked if we make it that far. Long before then amygdalae will develop, people will lose the irrational exuberance that has kept the system afloat this long, and everyone will stop loaning and investing money because the risk of it not being paid back will outweigh the desire to acquire the interest or profit on it. Already you can see the psychological shifts, and those are just the tip of the iceberg that our nation is cruising toward. Add in the ever increasing number of migrants consuming government resources in ever larger amounts and driving more amygdala development, and Apocalypse is going to happen sooner, rather than later.
Once that protectionist mindset kicks in and people become competitive and cautious, all of the wasteful irrational spending we see now will just be icing on the Apocalypse cake.
[…] When A K-Strategist Spends Money […]
The supposed “trust” is a mirage anyway. It’s got nothing but IOUs from the govt to itself. They never put aside excess SS revenue. They spent it years ago and replaced that with worthless IOUs that are just future obligations. It’s all a sham. Only in rabbit world is this possible.