Our national IQ test is being administered again, LOL.

The Republicans can certainly fool some of the people all of the time.

Our press is simply horrible at presenting any semblance of reality to the public.

Not that the public is busy trying to educate themselves anyway.

What’s basically happening is that our $700B+/yr trade deficit is sucking money out of the paycheck economy to China, Japan, Mexico, Germany, and the oil producers.

The middle class used the housing bubble to borrow $7T against our homes to keep our standing of living going, but that’s over now:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=6nh

shows how new borrowing was over $1T/yr during the height of the bubble (!). Thanks to home-equity loans and cash-out refinancing, this money was flowing directly into the economy, funding all sorts of consumption, not just real estate-related jobs.

To replace this lost money flow, the federal gov’t has been borrowing like crazy:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FGSDODNS

Annual deficit / GDP:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=6ni

shows how borrowing is still historically high.

People don’t apparently understand that if this gov’t spending is reduced, the whole system will collapse, since the 99% are completely dependent on this forced redistribution to maintain their standard of living now.

Remove this prop and our private debt system would just collapse upon itself:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=6nj

shows consumer debt / total wages, our leverage.

The core problem is simply there’s too much money collected at the top and not enough among the 99%.

Republicans don’t have any answers to address this since it’s been their policies that have created this situation, and, frankly, this is the direction they want to take the country — your basic low-tax Brazil or Mexico high-Gini — a have vs. have-not society.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/map-us-ranks-near-bottom-on-income-inequality/245315/

has some good diagrams putting things in context.

The stakes here are tremendous — our nation’s wealthy — the top 20% — have well over 90% of the wealth — and they want to defend this position from the bottom 80%’s grubby little hands.

The bills are obvious enough — federal taxes need to be raised ~$1T/yr, and above that we need to hit the top 10% even higher to cover the redemptions from the $2.5T social security trust fund that we need to do over the next 20-odd years to pay for the baby boom’s social security checks.

And things are only going to get more obviously fuxxored this decade and next. Nobody has any answers — few people even understand what’s wrong.

I don’t think any of the Republican debates even mentioned the trade deficit. Consumer debt take-on 2003-2007 is another gap in the discussion.

I could go on. I’m very pessimistic about the US’s prospects. Even if Obama wins there’s not going to be any political consensus to get anything done, like the Democrats had 1989-1993. The electorate taught the Dems in 1994 that no good deed goes unpunished.

I think that they should run that during the convention on the big screen. That’s when people tune in, even the opposition. That would force Romney to acknowledge and put him on the defensive and force him to address it.

Of course, the thing is, his disavowal will only strengthen the notion inside people that he just a plumb liar.