[ExI] The Republican Party Isn't Really the Anti-Science Party

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Wed Nov 13 20:20:29 UTC 2013


On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 12:43 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> Or not.  Be kind to Republicans John, they may soon run your government.
>

Perhaps this is wishful thinking Spike. Demographics are on the Democrat's
side. While the abject stupidity of Washington is undeniable, you can see
that an otherwise very smart person can end up blaming the wrong party for
the trouble.


> A US default would raise our price of borrowing, but our borrowing should
> be more expensive than it is: it is riskier than it appears.
>

Ok Spike, you've off the rails here a bit. Defaulting on our debt would
increase the rate of interest the Federal Government would have to pay.
While that doesn't sound so horrible, in 2012, payment of interest on the
debt cost $220 billion, or about 6 percent of the budget. If the interest
rate doubled from its current low rate (sorry, I can't make sense of the
numbers to tell you exactly what it is today) then Poof! All of a sudden
this goes from 6% of the budget to 12% and that's mostly going to come out
of discretionary spending on the things we like the most, like basic
science research, NASA and the like. So the Fed keeps printing money to
keep the interest rates low. It is a big problem if we get downgraded.
Every politician, even the dumber Republicans, understand this, and there
is no way a majority of them would ever actually vote to default. However,
it is very difficult to get any kind of leverage over this press protected
president without threatening something extremely dire.


> Our government set up a huge Ponzi scheme; eventually it has to collapse.
> It is doing that now.  Anger and denial are so yesterday.
>

Perhaps not yet, but soon it is possible. Anyone who thinks otherwise risks
being one of those dead optimists Eugen is so eager about.

-Kelly
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