Sleepless Nights
Capital Thinking · Issue #841 · View online
I often wake up in the 3-4:00 AM time frame and lay in bed pondering the condition of the world. It is dark, quiet, and my mind is rested.
Today, I share some of my ponderizations (OK, it’s not really a word, but why not invent one we both understand?)
Thoughts From 3:00 AM Whilst Laying In Bed
Jeff Minch | The Musings of The Big Red Car:
1. Is anybody in the United States looking at the freakin’ credit card?Sometimes I look at the National Debt and other data at one of my favorite websites:United States National Debt
It is interesting and scary to watch the US debt and other financial indicators climbing. We have $28,258,270,000,000 in national debt. That’s 84,000 per citizen and $225,000 per taxpayer.
BTW, US Gross Domestic Product is less than $23,000,000,000,000 (estimated 2021 GDP after 2020 GDP dipped to $19,500,000,000,000).
This chicken is coming home to roost, y’all.
2. Anybody paying attention to inflation?
Have you seen the price of gasoline is up by more than 50% — this is a tax on everything. This was totally unnecessary and was triggered by precipitous actions emanating from the White House.
Have you seen the price of steel has 3X-ed? Lumber up by 5-7X. This is real, y’all.
The Fed does not have to look for inflation. It’s here already here and living in a two bedroom suite with two fireplaces at the Four Seasons hotel.
3. Are we keeping a weather eye on the Chinese from a military perspective?
The Chinese are negotiating to build a naval port — rearming and repair of Chinese Navy warships — on the west side of Africa (putting them in the Atlantic and threatening the US east coast) to complement the construction of a similar facility in the Pacific halfway between mainland China and Hawaii.
4. Can you believe the power of the public teachers’ unions?
They defy the power of the White House and the POTUS and say they will return to school whenever the Hell they want to. Boom.
How did they get all this power and why can’t we exert any reasonable influence on them? Private schools and Texas/Florida are back in school. Get with it.
We have raised a slice of American children whose education has been arrested for two years and who will have a difficult time jumpstarting the rest of their education.
5. Is anybody — talking adults here — looking at the size of the military?
Right now we have slightly more than 400,000 full time soldiers in the Army. To put that into perspective we had 3,000,000 +/- at the height of Vietnam. At the end of World War II, we had 13,000,000 men under arms.
We have abandoned our strategic commitment — fighting two full time, major wars simultaneously, both of which we win — to our global security. This happened during the Obama admin.
We need an active duty Army commitment of 1,000,000 soldiers given the global nature of the threat from China and Russia. We need Reserves/National Guard of the same size.
6. Is anybody thinking about what kind of summer we are going to have?
*Feature post photo credit: Pawel Nolbert on Unsplash