It Seems No One Takes This Seirously

We find things no one takes seriously all the time.

One example: the stock market. How could anyone take this thing seriously. It's as overvalued as its ever been. But despite the recent string of down days, it seems folks keep buying stocks. Indeed, Goldman recently crowed that it's a good time to buy the recent dips. Who coulda predicted that? But even those who don't hang on every unreliable pronouncement of what Matt Taibi famously labeled a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity apparently buy into the idea that stocks are pretty much always a buy. How else to explain buying more in the face of the current valuation of the market?

How does anyone take this market - or those who are buying stocks - seriously?

But there's more.

Now, we could get into the whole bullet point thing and list one item after another, but, frankly, we're in the final two weeks of August. And there's a tradition where these two final weeks are a kind of "relax" time. Anyone still remember this? 

Once upon a time folks never took the last two weeks of August seriously. From the President on down the line, most people either took off for a late summer vacation, or laid back as their bosses, and various other market movers, corporate big-shots, and the entire government bureaucracy either stayed home or zoned out as their bosses weren't around to peck at them to see what they were doing.

Does this tradition still exist? Someone out there might know. If so, please let us all know.

But back to our current discussion. Let's just skip to "the debt." You know, the trillions of our government's debt that sits on top of us all, weighing on our efforts to create a better material life as we work each day to pay our bills and set aside a bit of money for a few extras and for our future security. The thing about "the debt" is that its interest must be paid. And to pay it, our government theoretically does this through taxation (its only real source of revenue, in addition - especially recently - to tariffs). But the government doesn't take in enough to make these payments. They just keep spending more and more as the money flows in. So they need the Fed to pursue a monetary regimen of constant inflation - creation of more more money - to help meet their obligations. 

So this hits our material well-being - and hope for better things in the future - both through current taxes, and then through the devaluing of the money we saved through inflation.

And yet do we take any of this seriously? Really seriously? Somehow the great machine of government keeps spinning its wheels, somehow holding together what really is a rather fragile financial system weighed down by all that debt. And because things seem to go on today as they did yesterday, we just figure they've somehow figured out how to juggle things enough to avoid catastrophe. 

Maybe they can. Then again...

But "the debt" is just part of the picture. It may be the biggest part, but it's not the whole picture. We all have lots of debt too. And it seems many of us lack the understanding of what debt really is. Maybe it's because we see the government piling it on and, well, getting away with it.

Here's something from an article published this past week. It addressed the various debts like auto loans, student loans, personal loans, etc. that so many of us live with:

Here’s the dirty little secret nobody wants to say out loud: if you can’t afford the loan, or if the education isn’t enough of an investment to return what you need to pay it back, you shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. If you chose to, you’re on the hook.

That’s how debt works. When you finance a car, the repo guy doesn’t care that you got laid off or that you thought the payments were “unfair.” He shows up with a tow truck. But somehow, when it’s student loans, we’ve decided that personal responsibility is a cruel and outdated idea.

And not only does government set a bad example, but recently with all sorts of loan forgiveness schemes, they reinforce our belief that there's really no consequences to our loading upon debt: 

Biden’s “freeze now, worry later” policy essentially told borrowers: don’t worry, you’ll never really have to pay these off. So of course, when collections resume, delinquency rates explode. It’s almost as if when you remove accountability, people stop acting responsibly. Shocker.

This was par for the course during Biden’s broader economic fairy tale. Inflation? Just “transitory.” Gas prices? Nothing to see here. Student loans? They’re optional.

Continuing with the example of student loans, the author understands what this does to those who try to behave responsibly:

Meanwhile, those who did the right thing—who sacrificed, budgeted, drove old cars, skipped trips, and chipped away at their balances—are left wondering: what was the point? Why be responsible if the government will swoop in to erase the balance sheets of those who weren’t?

This is the fundamental injustice of it all: rewarding irresponsibility while punishing prudence. And people wonder why nobody saves anymore. Forgiving debt, or even just suspending the consequences indefinitely, teaches people that debt is basically fake money. Borrow as much as you want, because someone else—your neighbor, your taxpayer, your future self—will foot the bill.

What happens when you normalize that mindset? Well, you get more reckless borrowing. More Advanced Studies in Interpretive Screaming degrees financed on the assumption of free forgiveness. More people shrugging off repayment because “surely they’ll cancel it eventually.” 

(Source: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/america-shocked-after-learning-debt-must-be-paid-back)

Will current efforts to reverse the debt mentality that plagues us change things? Only time will tell. But if it does, it won't happen overnight. Meanwhile the damage done is, frankly, incalculable. 

So folks, whether it's that overvalued stock market, or the whole conglomerate of massive debt, let's take what's serious seriously.

Seriously.