Yes, there is much to do. There is much more to be stopped. How can this not be obvious to anyone who funds, rather than milks, the government? As a former corporate type now painting houses under the table for ten dollars an hour, I do neither so offer a disinterested viewpoint.

The other day the President employed a domestic metaphor, saying that anyone who was married could understand the state of negotiations on the budget, the continuing resolutions underwhich the gub has run for months and the emergency funding proposals. Negotiating, we are informed, requires compromise and we Democrats, says Steny Hoyer, Charlie Rangel and O, have already conceded seventy-five percent from our opening position and so they have. Unsaid is that their opening position, was for an increase of spending of some $41b. So what we have here, by analogy, is not a couple squabbling over who brownbags their lunch and who gets to go to McDonald’s. Rather it is between one spouse who wants to take out a third mortgage for their own trip to Vegas and another who wants a divorce. Yes, Mr President, that does bring it home to us.

Harry Reid also offers a peroration on his fifty year marriage and the ladies in his family, how these daughters of Mormon gentry may one day rely on a free clinic for blood tests or cholesterol screening. He pre-mourns his own death to make his hypothetical. The provider of these services is also entirely hypothetical as he does not ever say the name of Planned Parenthood whose paltry $.3b subsidy appears to be the bone in everyone’s throat. Reid will not eject it and Boehner cannot digest it. The question seems to hinge on why we would ever take it out? Unasked is the far more important, why did we ever stick it in?

It is gauche at best, we are told, to concern ourselves with the “small potatoes” and there’s no doubt that these potatoes are small. The 300 million is one percent of the already agreed cuts so on either side the deciding issue is fiscally tiny. But truly the whole enterprise is fiscally tiny. Yes there have been cuts of a billion here and a billion there but they amount to a tiny part of the daily haemorrhage just on interest payments. The problem, largely, is that the spenders see so little value in the vast sums they control, that the total incomes of three thousand six-figure earners is as a tip to a valet. Spending is whimsical while collection is meticulous. And brutal.

There has been some worthwhile talk using numbers that start with a T. It should have been obvious to everyone long ago that if you are counting your debts in trillion dollars you had  best calculate your cuts in trillions as well. But it seems to have occured only to Paul Ryan. And this will no doubt be GOOD for Ryan. He gets to be the most responsible man in Washington but that is something like being the most innocent whore in Charleston. For many reasons it is nothing you want to write home about. The charming and affable lad plays well on TV but Reality is ahead of even this most hard-headed of the heartless Republicans. Here is why.

The Ryan Plan like every other thing called a Plan is based on a series of presumptions. These are that the long term American rate for growth is near 4%, unemployment under 6% and T-bills 3% while nominal inflation is 4%. I know these numbers look paradisical but it is true, they are the averages for the last couple decades or more. Some fools call this the Age of Reagan but everyone, fool or not,  certainly calls them better days than we have now. But all the promises, as much by Ryan as by Obama , rest on something I (and possibly you) see as a perverse joke: that in the space of six months or so, we will not just be AT these Numbers from Heaven, but BETTER than average because hey, it’s an average, right? That means we should be at, say 7% growth, unemployment at 3%.

So this is the sad, sorry state of affairs. No proposal on offer, including Ryan’s, really has any hope of addressing the true, mammoth debt. There once was an ability to rely on inflation as a strategic lever but with the invention of TIPS and the indexing of entitlement payouts to inflation, this is no longer possible. Inflation spirals up, the payouts spiral up while the hard times makes the entitlement roll spiral up while everything that SUPPLIES the taxes to keep that going spirals down. Even Ryan’s plan, adopted in toto only slows this eventuality.

We have been months hovering, ignorantly, above a rocky cactus patch like Wile E. Coyote. We defy gravity only because the rest of the world is standing agape; they are tethered to us and they know it damn good and well. The Chinese and other investors in our bonds have continued lending at 3% because they know they have a wolf  by the ears. If they slip and spook the investing world in any way, then they will have the wolf by one ear. It is my view that this has already happened. Fiscal life goes on as before because they hope to see one vaporous chance to avert the massive calamity that the collapse of the US dollar will be for everyone on the globe but what do they see? They see patently token austerity being resisted at the penny level by entrenched interests. If these mostly symbolic cuts can be defeated, what prospect will they see for the future? None. So what is the value of US bonds? Well, if it is even 2% less after Boehner’s defeat than it is now, all projections go out the window. Any chance there might simultaneously be inflation? Nah, of course not. And unemployment? Oh, that’s getting better. It’s been getting better for months! Yeah but unless the average touches close to 6% or really 4% there is no genuine improvement. We might get another instant of levitation out of it, as Wile E. reaches down a toe to find the ground, but it doesn’t matter. Absent a serious and painful restructuring of entitlements that cuts EVERYONE to a significant extent, the dollar is done.

That’s why, purely as an amused observer, I council my fellow Americans to embrace the shutdown. Things have gone on too damn loosely for too damn long. Our betters are fond of homespun analogies so maybe they will understand this: It is high time for a time out. Do you want me to turn this car around?  Because I will turn this car around and there will be no ice cream for anyone, and maybe a paddling. This is what the world, especially the financial world longs to hear from America speaking to the squirming infants allegedly running things. We need to stop this crazy car NOW, get to the side of the road and see what the hell is going on in the back seat. Unlike the smoothies on the talking box, I will abandon my metaphors and get to some straight talk. SHUT THAT FREAK SHOW DOWN! no matter what transpires between the resident genii today. Yes, that means closing nearly every damn thing the goverment is doing. Boehner’s got a resolution that keeps the military paid. Strip that of everything else and pass it. Everyone else on the gub payroll is presumptively non-essential. As the need arrives we will restaff the passport offices and the courts and the Congressional cloak room attendants. While doing this it must be made plain that these non-essential workers are laid off on the same terms as a normal human; which is with no guarantee of return or compensation for the time off. Let us have a few weeks of office closures, a shuttering of the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian and everything else that isn’t demonstrably more important than the life of a young Marine in some distant, dusty outhouse of an outpost.

The foreign financers of our bloated existence mutter amongst themselves wondering who will tell us to sit down before we FALL down. I say it, you drunken, stumbling American goliath. Because you are one bad day on the bond market away from the cascading failure of EVERYTHING that traffics in greenbacks. Neither Planned Parenthood nor the windmill industry will enjoy that but it will bring an abrupt end, no matter what else you do, to every program, subsidy, endowment, council, courthouse, office, janitor and lunch lady in the entire apparatus which, as everyone knows, is what I want anyhow but let’s call this Plan B.

Plan A is sit the fuck down.

And Barry? I hear Tripoli is beautiful this time of year.

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