Will The Parasites Begin to Feed on Themselves?

I am, as always quite bemused by the "tax the rich" crowd. It’s kind of like watching a burned out hippie sitting cross legged on the sidewalk, hands on his knees palms up, rocking back and forth and chanting "tax the rich, tax the rich” over and over like it were some Tibetan mantra. They have no concept of the actual numbers we are dealing with. All they know is that their would-be political idols are saying it and its emotionally satisfying to be sticking it to someone else.

Fact is, if the government could take 100% of the income of that top 5% of earners they so loath, it still would not be enough to balance the bloated federal budget. And then what? Come the next tax year that 5% is nowhere to be found to be taxed. They have packed their bags, closed their factories and shops and are gone. Be it to Switzerland or New Zealand or Gault’s Gulch, where ever, it won't matter. Yes maybe they will have to pay high taxes those places as well, but they won't be faced with an insane government capable of neither rational thought or honest decision. Then what will the "tax the rich" crowd do? That top 5% and their 50% of the tax revenue will be gone forever and government spending won't have dropped a dime. So instead of "borrowing" (printing from thin air) 40% of the budget, government will be printing up 80% or 90% of the budget. Ask your "tax the rich" friends just how well they think that will work out. 

Unless you have one of these in your basement you might be in trouble.

What these people don't understand is that the issue is not how much tax the top 5% pays or does not pay, but HOW that top 1/10 of 1%, the super rich, the banking and financial elite, accumulate wealth. As long as they are allowed to continue to accumulate through manipulation of markets rather than generating wealth through production, they will remain being nothing more than a engorged and massive leach attached to the jugular vein of the economy, sapping it’s life blood to pay their outrageous salaries and yearend bonuses. What matters is how Congress has succumbed to the pressure from the Treasury and the banks to grant “most favored nation” status to nations like China and Russia and others not because they have any intention of trading fairly, but because the banks and trading houses take a cut out of each and every currency exchange. Tthis particular bit of detritus is sold to us under the premise that it doesn’t matter that our trading “partners” are putting their self-interest first, the United States must be seen as being “fair” in our dealings with other nation regardless of any detriment to our economy, security and well being as a sovereign state. Excuse me while I roll up my pant legs. It has nothing to do with trade or with fairness; it has everything to do with how much the elites can suck out of each and every transaction. 

And just like with any other parasitic infection as the host grows weaker and less able to sustain the parasites, they begin to feed on each other as well. In the last crisis we had the sacrificing of Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, this time it looks like the formerly “all powerful” Bank of America is about to be splayed across the already bloody stone alter. While their banking brothers hold its limbs in anticipation of tearing them off, the High Priest of JP Morgan is set to plunge in the ragged obsidian dagger, cut out its still beating heart. Holding it up before the gasping crowd B of A will be condemned as having been not quite quick enough to hide their fraud in the mortgage mess. The High Priest and his minions will then devour what is left of the corpse, kick a few millions or a billion or two to the government in penance for B of A’s “crimes.” With their own culpability at least for the moment deflected upon B of A, they will then be left, not so surprisingly, even “Too Bigger and Too Fatter To Fail.”

Brian Moynihan and Bank of America meet their demise.

Unless and until we break the power of the banks to create the nation's currency as an instrument of debt owed to them, unless and until we stop their interdiction into every conceivable transaction, unless and until the politicians are broken of their addiction to financing their campaigns with these gangsters pocket change, things will not improve, they will only get worse, no matter who gets "elected."  Things are on the decending trend line, get used to it.