Pain and Horror of Utter Ruination
"I was just working myself in to a fit of exasperation about the "pain and horror of utter ruination", when pleading reader asks "Please do a piece on the plight of the retired people in America. Most people I personally know realize this current scenario will not go on indefinitely. They just don't know what to do about it."I think to myself "Perfect! Now I can illustrate the 'pain and horror of utter ruination' and act surly at the same time! And against people who are smaller and weaker than me!"
Emboldened, I enthusiastically start off by saying "Old people? What a bunch of whiners! It reminds me of my own kids. They know they are reaching the age when I can legally kick them out, and they know that their allowance will stop. Thus they, too, realize that the 'current scenario will not go on indefinitely.' So for both of these groups I am supposed to, I guess, get up off my fat, lazy butt and, oh, I dunno, wave my Magic Mogambo Wand (MMW) around in the air a few times, thus solving their problem of how to keep getting a free lunch? Hahaha! Thanks for the compliment that the stupid Mogambo could fashion a remedy that has evaded the greatest minds of economic history! Hahaha!"
Anyway, there is no need to wave magic wands, which is so old-fashioned. Let's, instead, rely on that infallible source of good advice, the Chinese fortune cookie. After making goo-goo eyes at the pretty waitress at the Chinese restaurant and flirting with her while ordering ("Everything with pork in it, my little Chinese won ton cutie!"), I finally get my food, which I notice she has spit on again, although I don't remember actually ordering "spit sauce." I figure it must be how ethnic Chinese girls flirt with men who are old enough to be their grandfathers.
Anyway, after eating, along with the bill and a lot of burping, we get the fortune cookie. With trembling fingers we crack it open to retrieve that little scrap of paper inside. It says "Get a job, scrimp along for a few years so that you can buy as much gold and silver as you can afford. Then you will take an ocean voyage and gain ten pounds eating like a pig." Sounds about right to me!
The real problem with these old people is that 1) they stupidly believe that Social Security is a retirement fund and they are supposed to be able to live on it, when it is not and never was, and 2) they stupidly believe that inflation nowadays actually measures all of the increases in prices that they pay, and 3) that they stupidly believe that their Social Security checks are going to go up as fast as inflation. (As a caveat to that last point, Social Security checks are actually going up as fast as the "official, government-declared" rate of inflation. It's just that the rate of inflation they use to administer the Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) to Social Security checks happens to be a lie which was cooked up by the horrid Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and aided by the equally detestable Michael Boskin, economics professor at Stanford, who got his degrees at Berkeley, which probably explains a lot).
And old people (although they are supposed to be the ones with all the smarts and all, and who proudly call themselves "The Greatest Generation") stupidly believe that a central bank (the Federal Reserve) is not a horror that will destroy their money, a fiat currency is not a horror that will be destroyed, and that fractional-reserve banking is not a horror that combines them into economic Armageddon, contrary to the lessons learned during the entire history of all the countries in all the world ever since cavemen were selling mastodon steaks over the Internet.
In short, old people are the very ones who continuously voted into office the Congressional creeps who perpetuated this disaster (and who picked the members of the Supreme Court who let them get away with it, contrary as it was to the clear strictures of the Constitution), and then stood around with their hands out, joining the growing crowds of people gobbling up more and more cash and benefits. And now that the inevitable inflation in prices, caused by the monstrous increase in the amount of money created by the Federal Reserve to finance all of this largesse is wiping them out, they cry out, piteously, "Help us! We cannot live a comfortable life at public expense anymore!"
And the biggest mistake the old people made is thinking that the government they elected is looking out for them.
Read the full article here
posted by G @ 11:25 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home