03/09/11 Tampa, Florida – I was amused at the title “Cash Drains From Treasury as Republicans and Democrats Dither” by Terence P. Jeffrey, who is the author of the book Control Freaks: 7 Ways Liberals Plan to Ruin Your Life.

The title seems to imply that if the Republicans and the Democrats were not busy dithering (which I assume mostly means idling their time away by acting like corrupt, imperious buffoons) then they could unite, in a glorious burst of powerful mutual cooperation, and heroically “solve the crisis” by doing something, and then everything will be fine.

He does not, however, get into that whole political mess, which is unfortunate since the politics of it all is what got us into this mess in the first place, which is that the electorate learned that they could easily elect government representatives that would dip into the public purse for the benefit of greedy, self-serving voters, and for the benefit of the corrupt, self-serving government representative looking towards the next election.

Instead, he gets right at the meat of the subject and announces that the Treasury Department’s latest statement for its bank accounts is “available online now at http://fms.treas.gov/dts/index.html.”

Apparently, Mr. Jeffrey is also a keen observer of human nature, and he knows that I am not going to go to a website that has a lot of accounting and accounting tricks aplenty, where pretty soon numbers are swirling all around in my head, around and around, and then I get dizzy and bored and end up misunderstanding something important so that I look even more stupid and incompetent than I, unfortunately, am.

Well, it must be important, because he refuses to let me walk away, and tries to tempt me with the tantalizing “The statement is like a fiscal snapshot of a nation rapidly descending into bankruptcy.”

At this point I kind of snickered, “Big deal!” to myself, as any person with a spouse and dependent children sees themselves descending into bankruptcy Every Freaking Day Of Our Lives (EFDOL) all the time.

The speed of our familial “death spiral” is directly correlated with how rude and/or downright hateful the kids get, ranging from their usual low-key hostility (“I hate you!”) to the extremes of throwing chicken bones and miscellaneous cutlery at me from across the table, while all I do is throw empty aluminum beer cans at them, which are so light they hardly even leave a red spot where it hits them!

And this snotty, hateful arrogance of children is, itself, highly correlated with how many times the kids beg me (“Please, daddy! Please!”) for more money which is, itself, highly correlated with me refusing their request (“Go to hell!”), but then having the spouse honor their requests and give them the money behind my back, which explains why they have those irritating smirks on their faces all the time, but not why they are always asking for more money, which is highly correlated with things costing more, which is highly correlated with the Federal Reserve creating more money, which is highly correlated with the federal government deficit-spending so much money.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see Mr. Jeffrey looking at me like I have lost my mind.  Since I get that kind of reaction a lot, I know just what to do! I say, “What are you looking at, moron?”

To my embarrassment, it turns out he was not looking at me with a look of confusion and haughty condescension, but was just politely waiting for me to shut up long enough for him to say, “According to the Daily Treasury Report for Feb. 28, the federal government took in $851.47 billion in revenues in February – which included $63.7 billion in new net debt.”

Curious, I idly thought of getting out the calculator to try and multiply $851.47 billion by 12 to give me the government’s annual tax haul, but my interest was overshadowed by him going on, “On the other side of the ledger, it spent $1.009 trillion over the course of the month, including $585 billion to redeem maturing government securities. That gave the government a deficit for the month of $158.5 billion.”

My brain exploded! Lapsing into a takeoff of the Mexican bandit in the movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre, I note that we don’t need no stinking calculator to multiply a trillion dollars spent in a month times 12 months in a year to get annual federal government expenditures of over $12 trillion a year – Twelve Freaking Trillion Dollars (TFTD)! – which is a fact that becomes terrifying when compared to the $14 trillion, which is the entire GDP of the Whole Freaking Country (WFC).

And if ever there was a time to immediately get into as much gold as possible as soon as possible as a defense against the horrific inflation that the satanic Federal Reserve is causing with this insane over-creation of money, this is it.

And with something that blindingly obvious, then what can you say except, “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”

The Mogambo Guru
for The Daily Reckoning