Leaf Season. Not quite peak yet, but getting there

 

Raising the Federal Debt Limit.

The Feds have two ways to pay for their many many expenditures.  One is taxes, the other is borrowing.  Right now taxes are high enough to pay for about 60 odd percent of the federal budget, and the other 40 percent comes from borrowing. 

The Feds borrow money by selling Treasury bonds (T-bills).  The bonds are a promise to repay the money borrowed within a fixed period, so many years.  The United States has an excellent credit rating.  We have never defaulted on our bonds, and the US dollars are good money all over the world, mostly because the Americans will sell nearly everything that exists for US dollars.  We have product on the shelf, ready to ship, or we will make it to order.  This is far better than the Russians ever did, all the Russians have to sell is crude oil, and most of their manufactured goods are so shoddy that nobody will touch them for any money.  We have stuff like jet airliners that you cannot get just anywhere.  We have top notch pop performers; we have best selling movies, best selling books, unbeatable tourist attractions, and stylish clothes, everything you can imagine. 

   My old economics text called T-bills “near money”.  They are almost as good as money, there is a 5 day a week, 8 hours a day market in which you can sell your T-bills for real cash.  An investor can buy T-bills and not feel he is any poorer, he thinks of T-bills as nearly as good as cash, and convertible to cash in a couple of business days.

   And so, to keep some limits on things, there is a federal law, the debt limit, that puts a hard limit on the amount of T-bills the federal government can sell.  Every so often as the feds borrow more and more, we raise the debt limit.  Such a time is upon us, the US treasury is saying they will hit the debt limit this month.  The Democrats don’t have the votes to pass a debt limit hike; they need some Republican votes to go along.  The Republicans, looking at the Democrats plans to pass $3.5 TRILLION (or maybe more, depends on how you count it) worth of pork and welfare, are saying “We won’t vote to hike the debt limit”. 

   The Democrats are crying that without a debt limit hike the US will default on its bonds.  This is malarkey.  Federal debt service (mostly paying off T-bills as they come due) is like 10 percent of the federal budget.  Taxes are enough the pay 60 percent of the federal budget, so paying the debt service is no real problem.  What will be a problem is deciding what to cut once the Treasury can no longer raise money by selling T-bills.  We are talking about 40 percent of the federal budget, a handsome chunk of change.  We can furlough most of the federal bureaucrats, stopping their pay.  We can stop paying for a lot of welfare and school lunches and other freebies.  We could stop federal highway subsidies, farm program price supports.  We will have to keep paying social security benefits because of the political outcry that would occur if social security went away.  We probably need to keep paying the armed forces, we may need them badly. 

Uninstalled AVG antivirus. Computer runs faster.

I was trouble shooting another problem.  An Internet posting suggested turning off antivirus might fix the problem.  Not knowing how to turn off AVG, I uninstalled it.  That did not fix my problem (cannot send email) but it did speed up my computer a lot.  Particularly noticeable was faster internet speeds with DISH.

The TV ads mostly sell health

 Just keeping score this evening I counted 13 ads for health stuff, pills, copperfit, lawyers to call to sue companies for health damaging stuff.  Health was the biggie.  They are selling health.  This probably has something to do with the US spending 19% of GNP on healthcare, twice what any other country in the world spends on healthcare.

There were 15 other ads for realtors, pans, mypillow, air freshener, Angi, vacation spots, watches, computer stuff, food, and foreign cars.  All of these other ads were onesies and twosies, nothing like the 13 ads for various health products. 

Justice Kavanaugh tests positive for Covid according to Legal Insurection

 And just how reliable is that test?  The justice has been vaccinated and is asymptomatic.  Sounds like a false positive due to poor quality control on the test.  In my book, you don't have covid until you show some symptoms. 

Nancy and the Democrats throw in the towel

 This morning the TV news announced that ONE of the TWO big spending bills will not be brought to a vote.  Presumably this means that Nancy counted votes and found that the bill would loose.  So, better not to have a losing vote, just don't have a vote at all.  I think the bill that got withdrawn today was the smaller $1.5 TRILLION bill that had a fair amount of real infrastructure spending in it,  Infrastructure is stuff like roads, airports, stuff you can see and touch.  There is a second $3.5 TRILLION spending bill kicking around which is just hand outs, freebies and pure pork.  With luck, that one will die quietly in a corner somewhere, and soon.

Fox News shows off their totally remodeled DC studio

 It looks cool.  Lots and lots of TV sets everywhere.  Painted a light shade of Landlord White.  The Fox people talked about all the fancy electronic stuff built in to their nice new studio.  I wondered if they had done anything about all the emergency vehicle sirens, gunshots, and other loud noises that kept interrupting the programming on their old studio.  Nobody said anything about that.