This week, if you’ve turned on a TV, you’ve likely seen lots of hand-wringing about the Sequester, a huge and really awful way of saying Austerity without sounding as classy as the Brits. In essence, people were fed the huge lie that we need to make big budget cuts RIGHT NOW or everything will dissolve into dust and ashes and filth, etc. The reality is that ratings agencies connected to big Corporations willfully lied about the value of assets and people who knew they were lying because they likely told them to lie, then invested huge amounts of money betting that the assets were overvalued. Those people, the investors, are now demanding to be paid. Problem is, they bet using tainted info and the second reality is, the property on which the assets were based have not dissolved. There are actual houses. And land. They may not be worth all that the ratings agencies said they were, but they aren’t worthless either.  What should happen is the investors should wait for the foreclosures to work through the system, but because they are greedy and impatient, they’ve all taken all that lovely bailout money and moved it into the accounts against the losses. Oh, and paid the bonuses of the guys who made the deals. Ever notice they never claw back the bonuses from the Sales guys?  Why is that?  When government gives bailout money, generally they are borrowing against someone Social Security accounts, Medicare Accounts, and some underpaid Goverment worker’s pension.

Here’s another problem; (just a basket full of them), the elderly are aging out and since they paid into that fund with the guarantee that they’d get money back when they reached the agreed-upon age, they expect to receive their money. If you want the most reliable voting sector of the population to lose their shit at you, start messing with their money, especially when they are on fixed incomes.

So here we sit, waiting for axes to fall, all of which could easily be averted by removing a few of those pesky tax loopholes that allow companies like Exxon Mobil to make kabillions in revenue and not pay a single cent in tax. Or we could remove the cap on Social Security for the wealthy and make it funded until 2047. Or we could take a serious look at those cost-plus contracts negotiated under Bush that are still eating our economy. Or we could remove the carried interest exemption which makes paying executives in stock so much more attractive. Or we could take away the allowance of executive salaries as deductions to corporations, which would then take away the incentive to overpay the folks at the top.

There’s a lot of options out there other than the Sequester, which we aren’t really feeling the brunt of now, but like any well-oiled machine, if you pour enough sand into the gears over enough time, the machine eventually stops.

And when the machine stops, it stops for all of us. Even for those with enough money for guns, ammo, gold, and a safe room. Somehow, even though the Trump has Mad Maxx hair, I can’t see him riding around dystopia in a modified limousine with gun turrets. He’d be toasty-fried in less than a week if the shit actually hit the proverbial fan in this country.

So lets hope the boys can push away from the tables at Charlie Parker’s downtown for 5 minutes and go get a little work done, eh?