Skinny Dipping

Our great leader, Mr. Obama - henceforth referred to as Mr. Debt, has embraced an old and quite rich man from Omaha, Nebraska – Warren Buffett.  He has embraced him because Warren figured out that a government spending lots of money it did not have was good for business – particularly Warren’s business and Mr. Debt likes people who embrace his propaganda.  This does not make Warren a bad guy, just a self focused guy, but we are not here today to analyze Warren’s motivations as much as we are to analyze one of Warren’s tidbits of wisdom.

Warren said something like this – you don’t know who is swimming without a bathing suit until the water recedes.  Now we think what Warren had in mind was that those who are exposed usually aren’t exposed until something changes or goes bad.

Mr. Debt and his chief propagandist, David Axelrod, missed this message – they didn’t miss Warren’s message about raising taxes on the well to do and spending gobs of money on Warren’s businesses, however.  Selective message acceptance may well turn out to be Mr. Debt’s undoing but we think there will be such a long list of suspects for his undoing that prioritizing the causes as he begins term two is a waste of time.

Back to this bathing suit metaphor and its applicability to Mr. Debt’s government.  Obama’s federal government is swimming without a bathing suit on and has been for some time.  This risqué behavior – let’s just call it “skinny dipping” for the remainder of this lecture, is not a democrat problem – it is a bipartisan problem.  Federal government skinny dipping has been building for a long time and, over this long time, the water may have gone out a bit, but never quite far enough to expose that area north of the knees and south of the navel.  Until a few years ago.  Then some of the swimmers panicked when the water receded a bit – they blew the whistle out of fear.  And forced everyone out of the water.  Those millions of well padded government employees who had been out there naked were suddenly exposed.   We could all see that they were not properly dressed – we really mean trained, managed, disciplined, effective, and productive.  They were inept.

You see, when the water is high and all are covered, no one knows about the bathing suit issue – or, to speak more plainly, when times are good a non functioning government is of little concern because everyone focuses on the positive.  When times are bad, the non functioning government suddenly becomes very visible to all – that area north of the knees and south of the navel is exposed for all to see.  And it is not a pretty sight.

We have previously observed that short of an alchemists dream solution – turning water into oil or platinum trillion dollar coins, our skinny dipping government is going to continue to have its privates on display until one of two things happen – financial disaster and shutdown, or, financial shutdown and disaster.   There is a third possibility but it would involve wearing a bathing suit – getting rid of all the bad and wasteful government spending schemes.   We know one thing for sure – bathing suits are not in vogue for the next four years.