unserious people making for serious times

are we living through late stage rule by rube?

it’s a wild world these days. the collision course is obvious:

on the one hand we have been giving ever more power to governments, regulators, central banks, and central planners.

on the other hand, the people chosen to run such things are getting ever more stupid, incompetent, and uncomprehending.

it’s like trying to fix bad drivers by giving them ever faster formula one cars loaded with ever more volatile and explosive fuels and then letting them drive up into the stands with the crowd.

the risk value seems to be a simple equation:

power X incompetence = danger

and the speed of the growth is making me wonder if there is really some sort of exponential in here. you pass a point and the speed with which wheels come off gets rapid. are we seeing late stage “gato’s postulate” in action?

(a democratic government powerful enough to dictate that which is bought and sold will inevitably devolve into rule by rube.)

it’s literally jaw dropping how uninformed and incompetent these people have become.

many of you have seen this video on MMT (“modern monetary theory” or “magic money tree” depending upon whom one asks) in which jared bernstein, head of biden’s economics council shows that he has no idea how anything at all works.

he does not understand bonds or how selling them is different from printing money. he speaks of “confusing terms” but is obviously terribly confused himself.

by the end, this borders on “monty python skit.”

and it is NOT as isolated event. here’s commerce secretary gina raimondo at the DNC.

the reporter has just asked her about the 818k drop in the BLS employment statistics that just came through as a “revision” to already heavily revised numbers and how it might undermine the “bidenomics” narrative of jobs growth.

trump mentioned it a speech.

her immediate response:

“i don’t believe it. trump lies.”

the reporter tells her it’s bureau of labor data.

gina then says “i’m not famillar with that.”

seriously, watch it. she has no idea what’s going on.

abc news is not trying to play gotcha here, this is meant to be a complete softball.

bonk! right in the face.

this is an astonishing lapse on a huge economic news item. gina does not even seem to know it happened. yet she runs commerce? this is a cabinet level official. and she’s utterly clueless of everyhting apart from politics. this is the biggest news story of the day, was largely telegraphed for a week (and suspected all year). to be middle of the day and not know it happened would be embarrassing for a first year boiler room broker. for the secretary of commerce with a staff of who knows how many? it’s inexcusable and the instant spin to “it’s a trump lie” is just plain astonishing.

the whole world is just a couple big squares. this is rule by rube.

we seem to be having some sort of incompetence excursion and the worse it gets, the more convinced the technocrat classes become that they just need more power to fix things. i’m actually getting worried that power accumulation and outright idiocy are not independent variables but are, in practice, accelerators of one another.

these people are so far past their peter principles that they cannot even tell they are past their peter principles. it’s all unknown unknowns. they literally do not even have a concept of what the basics of their jobs entail or what they are supposed to know or how anything is supposed to work.

they are so lost they do not know they are lost and just need “one more power to put it right.”

it’s institutional theory 101:

A’s hire A’s, B’s hire C’s, and these people were all hired by D’s that got their gigs for being outright illiterate in their areas of alleged focus.

this is probably the lowest power, stupidest, most incapable cabinet in american history.

DEI turned out to be delusion, egotism, and incompetence.

it’s one big conclave of failing upward. blinken, yellen, austin, garland, raimondo, buttigieg, granholm, cardona, it’s just astonishing how little capability any of these people have in their domains.

the secretary of energy is a former AG with zero experience in energy.

the transportation secretary once owned a little red wagon.

the commerce secretary is a “went nowhere” VC who ran an underperforming pension fund for rhode island and parlayed that into being governor with rock bottom approval ratings.

yellen has been failing upward out of academia (and making a godawful mess) her whole career.

blinken may be the most useless empty suit in the whole gang apart from kamala who clearly takes the prize (though was not a cabinet member so escaped the list, but clearly “joe has a type.”)

it’s a band of playschool phonies so bereft that even john kerry, who never met a grift he wouldn’t grab (or marry), left before it all came crashing down.

we have a bureau of labor statistics that can’t measure jobs, and a national bureau of economic research that refuses to declare recessions despite two quarters of GDP contraction because, oh, wait, the labor market was so strong, and then we have a finance media cheer leading for the FED finding a “soft landing” despite having already crashed once and likely being in the middle of doing it again. huh.

“the sahm rule has entered the chat”

over the last 12 months, this whole story of “labor markets are strong” has been an artifact of a cumulative ~1.2 million overstatement combined with losses of full time jobs being “made up for” by part time. it’s been clearly refuted by other data (like the household employment series) dating back to early 2022.

in the last year, 1.6 million full-time jobs have been replaced with 1.8 million part-time jobs. any reasonable group of economic analysts or technocrats would know this was a huge problem. but these folks did not. they were literally out claiming “best economy since reagan” and “morning in america” while real per capita disposable income drops 7.5% under brandonomics and “it’s your fault for believing fake news about a bad economy.”

now, when an economist like krugman says this, you know he’s a liar and knows better, but many of the rest of them likely do not even know that this is lies. that would require something called “a basic grasp of the subject matter” and they ain’t got it. seeing the rule by rube issue yet?

they are literally just making stuff up and bellowing it across echo chambers of reality denial. and it’s getting pretty acute.

i literally thought this was parody when i saw it.

it’s not. instead, it’s a hilarity of reframing to make it seem like kamala just wants to stop “price gouging after hurricanes” and was not trying to use this as a tool to fight inflation. it’s an entirely fabricated argument by straw man wrapped up in seeming academic discussion to mask the slight of hand on fundamental premise. it’s made to fool the fools. and it likely will. (it’s also wrong about gouging post hurricane, that’s when you want high prices to bring supply most of all)

we’ve reached this awful point of the blind and dishonest leading the blind and credulous. it’s leading to appalling ideas like price fixing, taxes on unrealized gains, higher cap gains taxes (this never works btw, above 15% you actually get less revenue), higher corporate taxes, more free stuff. it’s all ridiculous.

we have no adults in the room but have given the children free license to play “command and control economy” while having seemingly no idea that their cartoon grade policies are destroying the pathways to plenty.

it’s a wile e coyote level technocracy.

would you accept “free birdseed” from this man?

if ever in american history there were a time when some sane, sensible candidates who supported free trade and free markets needed to emerge, it is now.

if ever there were a time when “government is the problem, not the answer” needed to resurge, it is now.

if ever the key insight that “government does not create jobs, it gets out of the way and lets private enterprise do it” needed foregrounding, it is now.

alas, that is simply not on the table and while trump talks a big game and had a good economy going until spring of 2020, it’s worth remembering: he’s an economic illiterate as well.

if folks were hoping there was a good option on free markets and free trade, i hate to be the one to tell you, but:

this is a bunch of hand waving and policy pretense from the guy who kicked off the mess that started the inflationary spiral in the first place by locking down the US and then trying to compensate for it by printing money hand over fist to keep people spending.

he wants to have “the cabinet” fix this. they can’t. they can, at best, get out of the way and remove regulation and roadblock, but i don’t think that’s what donnie means. if it were, he’d say so. the fact is that he’s got no real plan just “i’ll put my people on it!”

and the crowd goes wild. which should worry everyone.

this is a tent full of people ready to trade the family cow for some magic beans of dubious provenance.

then he pivots to “tariffs and trade wars” both of which, wait for it, raise consumer and producer prices. is that a part of this “every means at their disposal” plan to stop inflation? because removing tariffs would help on that. adding them will not and cannot.

again, i know people may like the guy, but let’s call a spade a spade: he’s an economic ignoramus with little time for free markets or spending limits and a lot of the inflation that occurred in these last couple years was teed up on his watch and emerged from his “lock down and pay up” choices.

he may have complained about being on that ride later, but he’s one of the ones who set it in motion.

i wonder if he has any idea at all that this is so.

the bulk of the price inflation hit in 2021 and beyond, but the monetary impulse that drove it kicked off under trump, and that’s worth remembering.

the money printers went BRRRRRRR under trump. we can argue if it was him, the FED, the congress, or whatever and point lots of fingers at lots of complicit folks, but trump was among them and cheer leading for them. he owned and loved this plan and was all about playing at riding around on a big white horse saving us “from the virus” and from the effects of lockdown.

the great goodie-room giveaway was bipartisan and el presidente did not push back but happily signed and crowed like a proud dad. sure, biden kept going and made it worse, but most of this was in 2020.

trump did not oppose the massive money printing festival and debt (esp fed reserve balance sheet debt) funded programs to flood money at people whose businesses and jobs were closed.

he was all for paying people who were producing nothing as though they were at work. the whole PPP loan system was structured to do this. businesses applied, they got money to make payroll, and it got forgiven later as long as they did not fire employees and kept them on staff. it was one big money bolus injected into a market that was producing fewer goods.

of course it created inflation. what else could possibly happen when money supply rises over 40% into a tight supply situation?

the inflation came later, but that’s normal. there’s always a lag.

and while it’s easy to mock the atlantic admonishing us to ignore the economics because “it’s obvious” it’s worth remembering that this is the exact same thing team trump would have us do on tariffs, one of the vanishingly few economic policies that pretty much all economist agree upon:

always and everywhere, tariffs cause a net deadweight loss upon the imposing country.

this is not exotic stuff. it’s “price fixing causes supply disruption” level analysis.

reality: not optional.

so here’s how i see it:

kamala’s economic ideas are among the worst since FDR. she’s clearly the fire here and even team bezos has joined in the condemnation: (i’m sure it has nothing to do with owning a supermarket)

but the fact that don’s are less bad does not make them good.

they aren’t good. they stink of vapidity and danger and of simply playing to a different populist peanut gallery. sure, times were better in 2016-19, but that was because DT was mostly doing nothing but keeping the state out of the way and his small scale trade wars were minimal enough to ride over.

his current ambitions feel for more interventionist.

now, instead of remembering reagan and his warnings about folks one ought not trust when they come offering to help you, he’s going to send his cabinet out to “help” with inflation.

he does not seem to have learned anything from the horrible miscarriage of fiscal and monetary policy in 2020.

it seems like he wants to “save us” again.

and that never goes well.

if you want inflation down, it’s easy:

and yet no one speaks of this. no one speaks of the desperate need to reform entitlements before they bury america in even more debt. we’ve made social security and medicare promises than cannot be kept. the funding simply does not and cannot exist. (see HERE and HERE)

this nettle must be grasped at some point if we’re to avoid ongoing, enduring inflation and debt swell that will topple america.

it’s just math and calling it “entitlements” and acting entitled about it is taps for the republic.

indeed, these are VERY serious times.

we ran up insane debt from 2008 onward. it’s been a bomb under the walls.

$10tn to $35tn in 16 years.

interest costs remained low because of absurdist ZIRP policies run by the early vanguard of the utter fools running policy now and these fools fooled themselves into seeing no problem because debt doubled from $9 to $18 tn and interest costs were flat. then they tripled when rates normalized. (and rates are actually still a bit low by historical standards)

and it’s going to get much worse. (chart above only thru q1 2024)

there is an old adage about hard men making for soft times, soft times making for soft men, soft men making for hard times, and hard times once more begetting hard men.

anyone wanna take a stab at where we are?

because this age of unserious people looks seriously poised to bring on some very serious times unless we, in timely fashion, get serious about getting serious about the times.

(take that kamala, mine actually made sense)

tepid pabulum, kicking the can down the road, and hoping the monster goes back in the closet if we just don’t look at it are not real plans and it’s time we stopped this charade of pretending that they are or of rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic as though that might somehow help.

based chef had this comment:

i would like to propose an alternative:

because history is pretty clear on this one:

it’s time we all got serious before the times do it for us.