In one of those sleepless nights (GERD is back) I stumbled across this phrase: The Republicans are the party of fiscal irresponsibility, the Democrats are the party of fiscal insanity. I wish I had said it first.
Spain went through a time of tremendous inflation after the Conquistadores came to the Americas – back in those days, they didn’t need deficit spending – they cabbaged gold and silver from South America and cut down their own industrial growth.
As I look at the 40 billion dollar national debt (maybe I should call it a shortfall?) I can’t help looking at a century of inflationary policies. During my father’s youth, a twenty dollar gold piece was basically an ounce of gold. FDR changed the price of gold to $35 an ounce. Nixon removed the gold standard. Today, gold sells for something on the close order of $4,500 an ounce. The value of gold hasn’t changed. The value of the dollar has.
In the fifties, I had a pocket full of yen – and that Japanese currency stood at 360 yen to the dollar. Now the exchange is something like 159 yen to the dollar – but that just shows that inflation has hit the US dollar harder than the Japanese yen. During those years, thirty-five US dollars bought an ounce of gold – and those yen were proportional. Fiscal irresponsibility is not unique to our Republicans – Japan, France, England, Iran, Italy – just about every country out there has elected regimes that devalue their currency.
I still think that in terms of the Second Amendment and fiscal responsibility, Trump has been a better choice than his opponents – but here we have a national experiment sandwiching Biden between two Trump terms. Biden was worse – but Trump has been bad. Fiscal conservatism doesn’t seem to win elections.
The cost of gold has moved it from being a hedge against inflation (and currency becoming valueless) to a spot where it is priced out of the market. Inflation is an international sport, with all the governments printing more and more money. In my youth, the Canadian dollar was worth 90 cents on the (US) dollar. Canadian coins were 80% silver, while the US coins were 90%.
The Republicans are the party of fiscal irresponsibility, the Democrats are the party of fiscal insanity. Our politicians have been more responsible than Zimbabwe’s. That’s definitely a low bar. And we’re seeing our electoral process changed to make it harder to vote the bastards out.
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