Monday, September 18, 2017

The end of the world and the gold standard 1709

I saw today in the Washington Post that a preacher claimed that the world would end on September 23 of this year. His basis was that Jesus had lived for 33 years and several things in the Bible were 33 years and it will be 33 days since the total eclipse of the sun in August. It all made sense to me, so I went to the bank and closed all of my accounts and then went to the grocery store to buy food that I could not ordinarily buy, just so I could eat well before the 23rd. I feel a lot better now and I will have a juicy steak on the 22nd. Just before the end.
Now about the gold standard, it was established in 1834 and it set the gold value of our dollar at $20.67. That set and limited our currency so every greenback dollar could be exchanged for a $20 gold piece. In 1933 the value of the dollar was set at $35 an ounce, devaluing the dollar by 60%. In 1971 the U.S. ended the gold standard all together. If you remember that far back, that is when inflation began and is with us today. You can no longer turn in dollars for gold from the treasury, and that eliminated the gold standard.
In 1971 the U.S. national debt was $398 billion. Today as of September 8, 2017 it is $20 trillion, far beyond the entire U.S. economy. That seems sad to me that the dollar is nothing more than a promise and has little value at all. What concerns me even more is the feeling, the impression that the $20 trillion is nowhere even close to the real number. I know the real books, if there are any, would show that the U.S. government is actually in hock for at least two times that amount with all of the covert operations that never show up on the published debt. The U.S. is currently involved in at least 75 wars and mini-wars around the globe. That means billions of dollars a day spent on military operations. The actual debt clock spins so fast you cannot read the numbers and as I said much if not most never even shows up on the books.
So with that said, I think I will have another beer and a nice juicy steak tonight!

No comments:

Post a Comment