The Fork In The Road

Wanna see the cost of choosing....poorly on November 2nd?  Of letting ourselves get distracted by Donk smear campaigns, independents getting the shakes, and allowing the architects of the Panic of 2008 (historically analogous to the 1929 stock market crash) remain in power to continue their transformational war against the American people, American economy, American culture, and American way of life?

Behold the twenty-first century Smoot-Hawley tariff, my friends.  Consider it an early Halloween present:

[W]hen the U.S. economy comes to 2011, the train’s going to come off the tracks. . . . The tax boundary that will occur on January 1 , 2011 tells me that GDP growth in 2010 will be some 6% to 8% higher than GDP growth in 2011 . A year on year decline from trend of some 6% to 8% in 2011 growth would represent a larger collapse than occurred in 2008 and early 2009.

This isn't the first time that a 2011 depressionary collapse brought about by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts has been predicted.  Now, however, it's been all but set in stone.  Author Peter Ferrara provides a graphical representation of the next contrived crisis and the projected severity therein:

That's roughly a seven percent GDP contraction next year and a five percent contraction in 2012.  Given how many millions of jobs the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb destroyed (analogous to the economy shedding its "fat"), one can draw one's own analogies to such a disaster - bone, muscle, vital organs and tissues.  Call it fiscal cannibalism.  Needless to say, this will be on a par with the Great Depression, if not exceeding it, imperiling even the economy's capability to recover.

Annnnnd providing Godbama another crisis to exploit by tarring the incoming Republican Congress with the blame for it, just like his party did the outgoing Bush Administration.

I know, I know, Red Barry is hardly in a position to do so and successfully put it over.  But by the same token, the current recessed economy hasn't terrified the collective spirit of defiance out of the American electorate, either.  Trigger a bona fide second Great Depression and enough people may just be panicked into surrendering to The One and restoring Donk power two years from now.

That's one of the aspects of the original Great Depression that has always confounded me - why FDR didn't suffer the sort of popularity hemorrhage that B.O. has over the past year-plus after his New Deal clearly failed to revive the U.S. economy.  True, eighty years ago there wasn't the short-attention-span, ADHD-esque, mass communicating, Facebook/Twitter-happy culture there is today; my grandparents' and parents' generations were much less decadent than mine and my kids'.  Yet in a time of real, genuine economic calamity they turned toward Big Government and away from what might be dubbed Americanism - capitalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law - en masse.  So much so that FDR was re-elected in 1936 despite having even slowed down the Depression despite an orgy (for eighty years ago) of spending and debt (Yeah, he was running against Alf F'ing Landon, but still....).  And when, to quote Archie Bunker, Roosevelt decided to set himself up as King Franklin I, they re-elected him again.  And then again in 1944, World War II not withstanding.

It makes me wonder what would have happened if Captain Polio had been Joe Colossus instead and lived to be a hundred - would he have EVER relinquished power?  More to the point, would the voters have EVER stopped re-electing him?  And don't forget all the "progressive" schemes FDR had in the hopper for after the war; you don't have to do much research - just look at the headlines since January 20th, 2009.

This is what Barack Obama seeks to force by clobbering the teetering U.S. economy with this gigantic automatic across-the-board tax increase: the American people's unconditional surrender.  His supreme conceit is that he doesn't just THINK he can do it, and he doesn't just KNOW he can do it, he already considers it an accomplished fact.

Now imagine if Harry Reid is still Senate Majority Chisler next year....and Crazy Nancy is still Speakerette of the House.

You'll never see imperatively commonsensical fiscal prescriptions like this:

Let me rephrase that; you'll never see them if the GOP takes over Congress, either, because the Li'l President will veto every last one of them.  If the Dems hold on in four weeks, such prescriptions will no longer be allowed to be spoken on fear of political imprisonment.

Is Ferrara's worst case scenario above over the top?  I don't think so, but let's just say that ending the Bush tax rate regime "only" results in a "double-dip" recession.  Is that pair of semantical pasties going to make you heave a huge sigh of relief as you sit in your foreclosed house with no job prospects, empty bank account, vanished nest egg, chomping desultorily on your steady diet of ramen, mac & cheese, and beanie-weenies?  Don't you think we should do something about that NOW, when we have the last, best chance?

Judgment Day is coming January 1st.  Donk Judgment Day is coming in four weeks.  Let's take advantage of that fortuitous scheduling.  We won't get another.