Mr. Disproportionate Response

The silver lining: thousands of Americans took out new lines of credit and other loans that will add to the increasing monthly bill, while their wages (if they are lucky to be employed) decline in real (and nominal) terms, or have less and less emergency unemployment benefits left. Thus money which could have been spent more efficiently to pay down consumer debt, ended up propping bank balance sheets, with the blessing of the President, whose primary agenda purposes are to i) recreate the credit/housing bubble and ii) to transfer any and all residual middle class wealth into the coffers of Wall Street, not necessarily in that order.

Excerpt from ZeroHedge. For the full article and a great graph, click here.

This excerpt really says it better than I ever could. The Cash for Clunkers program has come and gone, and left the average joe with (who could have guessed?!) some problems. Instead of a lasting, valuable means of getting credit and commerce flowing in general, our government created a program that promoted going out and adding big ticket items to a lot of already full plates. Full plates, I might add, that could end up unemployed, and contributing to any number of unpleasant financial scenarios…. Imagine the housing crisis, but with some thirteen million new cars.

In the short term, bank books look good. In the mid-term, a lot of people end up without their cars and the financing companies take a hit as people default on their new auto loans when people lose jobs, find that their new car and/or insurance is too expensive, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And in the long-term? We have a few million people who had perfectly reliable (or at least sort-of reliable) transportation who’ve given that up, gotten a new car, lost that new car, and now have no means to continue to work as they did.

More idle hands and idle mouths. More people tired, fed up, desperate. More people willing to sell themselves out, to be taken care of by Big Government. And in the end? More people willing to submit to control. Really, I used to point and laugh at the people like Alex Jones and his various listeners and whatnot. Being a part of a doomer community kinda leads to bumping into their sort more often than not, but… With this crazy shit that I’m seeing, I have to give them a little bit of a nod. While the powers that be might NOT be tuning the populace for control, there certainly are a lot of things in place that could easily turn to that end.