Inflation Took My Medication

The Harper’s Index had the interesting entry, “Percentage by which the $750 billion bailout exceeds the total U.S. GDP of a century ago, adjusted for inflation: 50.”

Naturally, I am confused as to what in the hell this actually means since there are so many variables, including traveling through time, and it looks like it means that the GDP of a century ago was an inflation-adjusted $500 billion, but that involves math, and so I can’t be sure of anything.

The only way to verify that is to do actual work, specifically looking it up myself, since I am now officially “forbidden” to arrogantly commandeer any employees from other departments to do such tasks for me, nor can I ask them to take my car to be washed, fix me a lousy cup of coffee or have that little cutie over in Accounts Payable give me a back rub, either.

And I really want to know the answer, too, since I am trying to find a way to make this all mean that we have a duty (a patriotic duty!) to rise up as an angry, outraged mob, descend upon Washington, D.C. screaming in outrage and drunken incoherence while brandishing official, and laughably overpriced, Mogambo Mindless Mob (MMM) torches, pitchforks, T-shirts and snazzy hats, ruthlessly intent on burning the damned Federal Reserve to ashes and then – our blood-thirst for vengeance yet un-slaked – turn our terrifying gaze upon Congress itself, which allowed and encouraged the banker trash The Whole Freaking Way (TWFW).

Perhaps then we will have a little time for the treacherous Supreme Court, whose crime is to consistently – yet bewilderingly and perplexingly – maintain that money does not have to be gold, as the Constitution of the United States literally requires, thus allowing the abomination of a fiat currency, thus allowing unlimited expansions of money and credit, thus allowing the disgusting inflationary growth of a cancerous, bloated, misshapen, government-centered, debt-based economy and the huge inflations in the prices of stocks, bonds, houses and size of government, all of which must, sooner rather than later, bust, and at a degree that produces a yin-yang, karma-leveling surplus of heartache, misery, bankruptcy, suicide, homicide, deprivation, suffering and collapse, which is such a Bad, Bad Thing (BBT) that the Founding Fathers tried to make sure that it would NOT happen to us, and so they wrote into the Constitution that you CANNOT have a fiat currency because the dollar must be silver and gold! But here we are, thanks to the traitors on the Supreme Court in 1933, and every other then thereafter! Grrrrrr!

We’re idiots!

I suddenly realized that I am circling around in my office, muttering to myself, having given up conscripting other people to do my research work for me, when I realized I didn’t really give a crap anymore after I learned that Harper’s Index reported that the $750 billion stimulus bailout bill exceeds the cost (in inflation-adjusted dollars) of the “entire New Deal” of the commie-bastard Franklin Roosevelt, which has heretofore been considered to be the ultimate in the stupidity of central planning, and it is 300% higher than the “cost of the 1990 savings-and-loan bailout.”

And it may get worse than that, as there is more to an economy than fundamentals of inflation, interest rates and taxes; and instead, we may have merely been whacked out on Prozac, as a guy named Raymond Lesser concludes, “the use of anti-depressants may have helped cause the financial bubbles” after discovering that “237 million prescriptions for anti-depressants were dispensed last year alone – more than for drugs of any other type.”

This seems more plausible than my “invisible thought-control rays from outer space” theory, but perhaps we will never know which one is right. Of course, one thing we DO know is that, as he says, “As the economic downturn worsens, America faces a new and more immediate crisis: Crazy people are going off their meds. Whether they were being treated for psychosis, paranoia, of believing that their dog is the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, millions of patients are no longer able to afford the drugs that helped alleviate their symptoms” and now “dispensed prescriptions for antidepressants have recently dropped by 29 percent.”

If people can’t afford mind-altering drugs, then I wonder what ELSE they can’t afford, and I was going to ask that very question when he said, apparently reading my mind, “A recent NPR poll found that one in four people in Ohio say that they have collection agencies chasing them. The most common reason given for this was unpaid health bills” which would probably make a couple of tranquilizers seem real tasty right about now!

Or they could attain the same peace of mind by owning gold, which has the advantage that you can make a few bucks with it as the price rises over the next decade or so!