Business insider points out the that the CBO projects the deficit to fall as a percentage of GDP over the next three years, neglecting to recollect that the CBO has been projecting the deficit to fall as a percentage of GDP for quite some time, while it has continued to soar as a percentage of GDP. The CBO has a record similar to that of Anthropogenic Global Warming models. Global warming models always predict doom, which never arrives, CBO never predicts doom, which always arrives. CBO model is that normal growth is going to resume, any day now. We are not a society that peaked in 1972 and has been in accelerating decline every since.   We are not a society that was cooking the books and adjusting the statistics until things got so bad that the discrepancy between reality and official reality manifested, Soviet Style, as crisis. All that is needed is a a bit more stimulus. CBO model is that Obamacare is going to save us piles of money on healthcare.
Global warming models always predict doom, which never arrives, CBO never predicts doom, which always arrives.
Pardon me, Jim, but I have to say that every alt-right post about economics, ever, predicts doom “real soon now” – which never arrives.
For once I agree with Samson. Everything appears to be a slow decline instead of a drastic collapse.
Yes, our “country” is absorbing a lot of economic ruin. I’m not sure this is a point of pride. It is like a boxer enduring punch after punch and staying on his feet.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation. It is not obvious that its going to collapse to rubble any time soon – think how long Rome took to fall, but that it is falling is obvious.
Samson is right. Consider Dalrymple at Taki’s
The right’s Economic Doom is the left’s climate doom, always imminent, always delayed to the next imminence.
The apocalypse may not be imminent, but the CBO has been massive overoptimistic every year starting 2005
Whether the decline is fast or slow, it is decline, and the CBO says it is not.
Always delayed? The list of financial crises is very long, and if you count how many wars and revolutions were precipitated by economic strife you’d be ashamed to compare them with climatic disruptions, (although early humanity could reasonably consider them on equal footing)
I’ll confess to my times of Collapse Enthusiasm. Who here doesn’t want the left to get its full deserts, good and hard? A man’s gotta dream.
I sober up, and realize it’s a long slow slide. Maybe I should just tell myself, “Everything is more awesome in slow motion!”
Samson, I have some ZIP codes in Detroit and Los Angeles that I’d love to show you.
Doom arrives locally, like necrosis–if not stopped, it will spread. You’re like a guy who thinks he’s not in danger of frostbite or freezing to death because, well, it’s just his little toe that has lost feeling so far.
Historians generally say that the Roman Empire in the West fell in four hundred and ten Anno Domini
But as late as five hundred Anno Domini, people believed it had not fallen. They noticed that the provinces were no longer paying taxes, that the roads were unsafe, and that because it was dangerous to import food from the provinces to Rome, and Romans had no money to pay for food anyway, that most of the population of Rome had departed, with former noblewomen selling themselves into slavery in far away places for something to eat, that the few remaining inhabitants were mining the ruins of palaces and theaters for raw materials, but did not put these details together into the big picture – that the empire was no more.
Great post.
Re – speed.
Seneca Cliff.
Jim in the case of decline do you think we will get deflation, hyperinflation or neither?
At present we have a bubble in government paper – deflation, or low inflation.
It is hard to successfully predict when a bubble will pop, because if one could predict it will pop at date X, it would pop before date X. Thus in a bubble, the majority will always be wrong about the end of the bubble.
A bubble climbs a wall of worry. By and large a bubble pops when everyone who was predicting it would pop gives up or goes broke, and starts to believe it will go on forever. It pops when it runs out of doubters to convert to believers.
When the bubble pops, we get inflation, as more money buys less goods, followed by hyperinflation, which results in no amount of money however large being able to buy any amount of goods, however small, followed by deflation as government money can no longer buy goods at all, and whatever we start using to buy goods instead of government money rises in value relative to goods, and is in very short supply.
Ok thanks!
O/T. Photon crypto – will this work.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/10/14/quantum-key/
and do the Guardian suggestions work?
Everything that quantum crypto gives you, a one time pad gives you a lot easier, more flexibly, and for less expense and lower technology.
Quantum crypto does not get you anything that whispering in someone’s ear does not get you. It is essentially a whisper so quiet that you can tell if someone else is listening in.
You have to have optical fibre directly between the participants, which tends to be stupendously expensive.
To make a one time pad, one person creates a flash memory card full of random noise obtained from hashing his microphone and video camera noise, and then shares a copy of this card with someone else, then he can subsequently communicate securely with whoever he has shared this copy with.
The flash memory card full of random noise is a one time pad.
You exclusive or your message with some portion of the one time pad, never using the same portion twice. Once used, it is used up. You know that only the person with a copy of your pad can decrypt it.
Guardian suggestions?
https://guardianproject.info/
I was not aware of this project, but I was aware of some of the projects that it brings together.
Orbot and Gibberbot are good projects by good people.
Pixelknot claims to implement F5, a known good algorithm.
So, since Guardian incorporates at least some good code by good people, I would suppose the Guardian project to be good.
One piece of neo-reactionary agitprop that would be quite effective is a graph of CBO projections for the past few decades, for as long as there have been records, all superimposed on each other. They’ll all show close agreement to actual trends up to the point of the prediction, followed by a sharp divergence thereafter.
Throw that around wider-conservative media universe, and get people to see how hopeless the idea of a self-limiting government truly is.
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