WHAT DO YOU THINK OF RAND PAUL'S CALCULATED POLITICAL COMPROMISES?

What Do You Think About Rand Paul’s Calculated Political Compromises?
February 28, 2014 by Ben Bullard I

No one can be elected President of the United States without compromising his ideals at various points along the pathway leading to the White House. To murmur to oneself that a President is even capable of harboring any secret idealism is, in a way, to admit a profound misunderstanding of the office. All politicians swim in dirty water.

We love and long remember leaders whose vestigial idealism lies near the surface of their public personae: John F. Kennedy. Martin Luther King Jr. Ronald Reagan. Ron Paul. Maybe even Ted Cruz — we’ll see.

What about Rand Paul (R-Ky.)? His idealism lurks very near the surface. As a Senator on the periphery of the narrowing spotlight that will soon shine brightly on the field of 2016 Presidential primary contenders, he has so far been able to persuasively come off as a guileless politician whose Congressional work hasn’t been muddled by any mixed signals sent through dissonant acts — the sort of head-scratching about-faces so often borne of political necessity.

The Tea Party is filled with moral absolutists at the grass-roots level. Many other independent-minded conservatives and libertarians, who scoff at the Tea Party appellation, nonetheless share with the Tea Party a seething anger at nominal conservative leaders who, time and again, demonstrate a congenital lack of backbone. But no candidate aspiring to national office will survive a bumpy gauntlet of fundraising, base-bolstering, margin-courting and endorsement-dealing without spilling a fair amount of idealism — however pure — from the full cup with which he started.

So the question is: how much compromise? What is necessary to succeed, to get your man in office? And where is the line that, once crossed, places principled candidates inside the alarming realm of familiar crony politics? That’s a hard boundary for any politician who’s lost the good will of his supporters to ever reconquer.

National Journal ran an interesting articleTuesday that dealt largely with how great a menace Paul is to the GOP establishment, the old party hands who are jockeying to place yokes on compliant beasts of burden to field in the 2016 Presidential primary. It’s a good read, and it suggests there’s a spot of hope for conservatives who long for a principled candidate whose ideals can’t be completely flattened by the GOP stamping machine.

Then there’s this outlier paragraph near the end:

Paul’s mutually beneficial alliance with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who faces reelection this year, is a prime example of his political foresight. McConnell has helped him build chits with the establishment, including donors skeptical of his national viability. McConnell, meanwhile, has gotten tea-party validation to get him through a contested primary against businessman Matt Bevin. He’s also benefited from Paul’s swipes at former President Clinton, who is emerging as an important surrogate for McConnell’s Democratic challenger, Alison Lundergan Grimes. McConnell, if he survives the general election, could become the next majority leader. But Paul, in taming the establishment skepticism toward him, could end up with the bigger prize.

A lot of us did a double take last month when we learned that Paul had freely allowed his sterling reputation for maverick conservative idealism to be waved around by a GOP wet blanket like McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell is in a fight to retain his Senate seat, and he’s been trying to shore up the conservative base after angering them with his voting record, his history of standing aside for Democrats, and his outright hostility toward Tea Party “bullies.”

National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar calls the Paul-McConnell alliance an example of political foresight on Paul’s part. It’s the first of what may be a great many necessary political compromises to keep Paul on track to a nomination. He may spill a little water, but a smart candidate can make the right compromises, minimize his risks and grow a diverse support network — all while keeping his most ardent supporters loyally at his side.

What do you think? Was the Paul-McConnell deal a harbinger of Paul’s ultimate cave-in, or was it an acceptable display of acumen from a leader who understands how to play politics while holding his principles dear?

If Paul or another conservative sets out to navigate a Presidential electoral season with good will from his base, how patient will his base be with him when he starts shaking a dirty hand or speaking before a tainted crowd?

For principled dark horses who rise from the conservative ranks, asking “how much compromise?” is, as always, to ask how close one can fly to the sun.

Are 9 Dead Bankers A Sign Of Pending Economic Collapse?

Hello, I’m Wayne Allyn Root for Personal Liberty. Something very big and very bad is happening. Prominent bankers are dying in droves. Have you ever heard of eight bankerscommitting suicide in a matter of just a few weeks?

A ninth banker was found dead only days ago. What is driving successful bankers with families to kill themselves in droves?

Here’s the tip-off that this is a very big story: The mainstream media are not covering it. There are nine dead bankers (and counting), and the story isn’t even mentioned in the national news. That itself is a major news story.

Bankers are dying so fast, you’d think they were all dentists. You get the joke, right? Dentists have the highest suicide rate of any profession. Sometimes, you need a little humor to brighten up a very dark story. But keep in mind, at no time in history have nine dentists all died under mysterious circumstances in a matter of a few weeks.

Why are so many bankers dying? Are the media asleep at the switch? Afraid to dig deeper? Ordered not to investigate? By whom? The government? Or are the media perhaps afraid for their own lives if they dig deeper? You think that sounds a bit absurd? Well not really. A Wall Street Journal reporter named David Bird, who covers the commodities market, is missing. As in gone. As in never seen again. He left his home on Jan. 11 and never returned. Was he working on this story?

Something smells rotten in Denmark, because nine dead bankers and a missing reporter should be a huge headline story.

And if anyone has been watching closely, five other major bankers died in either suicides or mysterious circumstances in 2013. That’s 14 dead bankers.

Someone is going to win a major journalist prize for investigating a high-profile story like this. But for some mysterious reason, no one in the mainstream media seems interested. Doesn’t that alone make you nervous?

This story is real. The dead are:

• William Broeksmit, 58-year-old former senior executive at Deutsche Bank AG.
• Karl Slym, 51-year-old Tata Motors managing director.
• Gabriel Magee, 39-year-old JPMorgan banker.
• Mike Dueker, 50-year-old chief economist of a U.S. investment bank.
• Richard Talley, the 57-year-old founder of American Title Services in Centennial, Colo.
• Tim Dickenson, U.K.-based communications director at Swiss Re AG.
• Ryan Henry Crane, 37-year-old executive at JPMorgan.
• Li Junjie, 33-year-old Hong Kong banker.
• James Stewart Jr., former CEO of the National Bank of Commerce.

James Stewart? You know something very bad is going on when a bank CEO named Jimmy Stewart is found dead. I guess it’s not such “a wonderful life” after all.

How they died is strange and mysterious, too. Two of these successful bankers jumped off the roofs of their high-rise office buildings. Just like that, bankers decide to take a stroll off the top of their office buildings? One of the bankers was ruled a “suicide” after being shot eight timesfrom head to toe with a nail gun.

Am I the only one who finds this creepy and worrisome? Do you know anyone brave or insane enough to commit suicide by nail gun?

So what’s going on? I’ll give you two theories.

My first educated guess is we are headed for an epic economic collapse. The mainstream media has fed the public lies about a non-existent “recovery” and dutifully reported the government’s manipulated economic reports (filled with fraud). But these bankers are smart guys who know the truth. What’s coming is very, very bad. As I argued in my national bestseller, The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide, we are entering the greatest depression of all time.

What caused this economic Armageddon? Spending, entitlements and debt. Who caused it? Government, led by corrupt, ignorant and reckless politicians. If I were the lead detective on this case, I’d be investigating who had the most to gain from a cover-up. My investigation would start and end with government collusion, corruption, bailouts and bribery.

Governments all over the world have taxed, spent and printed us into oblivion. America’s debt crisis will make Greece look like a walk in the park. This is too big to paper over. When America collapses, the entire rest of the world crumbles with us. Even creative and corrupt government bureaucrats making up fraudulent economic statistics can’t cover this one up. There is no way out from the coming crash. I’m guessing that knowledge might cause a banker who sees the writing on the wall to take a walk off the roof of his high-rise.

But that still doesn’t explain shooting yourself with a nail gun eight times from head to toe. No one wants to die that slowly and painfully. That sounds more like torture to me. And torture is what leads to murder. Perhaps some or all of these bankers were murdered. Perhaps they didn’t walk off their high-rise buildings. Perhaps they were pushed.

Perhaps the Colorado bank CEO was being “questioned” when the nail gun went off… eight times. I guess the interrogators didn’t like his answers.

But why would someone murder bankers? My educated guess is these are smart guys who knew too much. Perhaps they knew about government manipulation and fraud. Perhaps they knew their banks were not in the wonderful shape their manipulated balance sheets showed. Perhaps they had information about government collusion and corruption in the banking system. Perhaps they were threatening to expose government’s lies and fraud. Perhaps they knew about the trillions of dollars in derivatives held by banks and Wall Street firms about to implode and take world economy with it.

I’m just making educated guesses. But something is very wrong. Something bad is coming. Nine dead bankers is a very messy start of a very big story the mainstream media don’t want you to know about.

I’m Wayne Allyn Root for Personal Liberty. See you next week. Same time, same place. God bless America. And thank God I’m not a banker.

 103 

Democrats' Obsession With Hillary Clinton

Democrats’ Obsession With A Hillary Clinton White House Signals Upside-Down Priorities

February 26, 2014 by Ben Bullard 

 33 16

 

 2 143

What is with Democrats’ far-gone fascination with Hillary Clinton? Is there some underlying compulsion to realize yet another “first” superlative in the linear pageant of progressive American statecraft? In a time when Americans have already demonstrated an electoral will to put a black man in the White House, is it really so revolutionary to put a woman there simply on the merit that she’s a “she”?

Another political poll out today seems to indicate Democrats’ appetite for meaningless paper milestones remains insatiable. A full 80 percent of Democrats indicate they want Hillary to run for President in 2016, while only 13 percent do not.

The New York Times/CBS poll shows that interest in a Clinton campaign far exceeds Democrats’ interest in other early-days candidates. Only about 40 percent say they want Vice President Joe Biden in the race. Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) is a distant third place at 22 percent.

Clinton’s record is shakier than Barack Obama’s was when he was a little-known Senator warming Oprah Winfrey’s guest couch. “She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train,” Camille Paglia, a true 1960s liberal and one of the Nation’s few remaining intellectual nonconformists with a public voice, wrote last summer:

And what exactly has she ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the move — with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out uncomfortable private thoughts. I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi. In saying ‘I take responsibility’ for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have resigned immediately. …As far as I’m concerned, Hillary disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a congressional hearing when she said, ‘What difference does it make what we knew and when we knew it, Senator?’ Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood.

Where are the rank-and-file Democrats who would heed that message? Right now, they’re too busy confusing exceptionalism and enfranchisement with merit.

HOW FREEDOM DIES

By: Patrick J. Buchanan
2/25/2014 06:00 AM

RESIZE:AAA

PRINT

49

“Religious Right Cheers a Bill Allowing Refusal to Serve Gays.”

Thus did the New York Times‘ headline, leaving no doubt as to who the black hats are, describe the proposed Arizona law to permit businesses, on religious grounds, to deny service to same-sex couples.

Examples of intolerance provided by the Times:

“In New Mexico, a photographer declined to take pictures of a lesbian couple’s commitment ceremony. In Washington State, a florist would not provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. And in Colorado, a baker refused to make a cake for a party celebrating the wedding of two men.”

The question Gov. Jan Brewer faces?

Should Christians, Muslims, Mormons who refuse, on religious grounds, to serve same-sex couples — that photographer, that florist, that baker, for example — be treated as criminals?

Or should Arizona leave them alone?

“Religious freedom,” said Daniel Mach of the ACLU to the Times, is “not a blank check to … impose our faith on our neighbors.”

True. But who is imposing whose beliefs here?

The baker who says he’s not making your wedding cake? Or those who want Arizona law to declare that either he provides that wedding cake and those flowers for that same-sex ceremony, or we see to it that he is arrested, prosecuted and put out of business?

Who is imposing his views and values here?

What we are seeing in Arizona in microcosm is what we have witnessed in America for half a century: the growing intolerance of those who preach tolerance and the corruption of the concept of civil rights.

We have seen the progression before.

In 1954, the Supreme Court declared that segregation in public schools was wrong and every black child must be allowed to attend his or her neighborhood school. By 1968, the court was demanding that white children be forcibly bussed across entire cities to insure an arbitrary racial balance.

Under the civil rights acts of the 1960s, businesses were told that in hiring, promotion, pay, and benefits, black and white, men and women must be treated alike. Equality of opportunity.

But, soon, that was no longer enough. We needed equality of result.

Corporations were ordered to maintain extensive records of the race, gender, ethnicity and sexual preferences of their entire work force to prove they were not guilty of discrimination.

And if your work force is insufficiently diverse today, you are a citizen under suspicion in a country we used to call the Land of the Free.

Consider how far we have come.

Virtually all decisions to hire, fire, promote or punish employees, to oversee the sale and rental of housing, to ensure that all minorities have access to all restaurants, hotels and motels, are under the jurisdiction of these minions who are right out of Orwell’s “1984.”

Scores of thousands of bureaucrats — academic, corporate, government — are on watch, overseeing our economy, patrolling our society, monitoring our behavior.

A radical idea: Suppose we repealed the civil rights laws and fired all the bureaucrats enforcing these laws.

Does anyone think hotels, motels and restaurants across Dixie, from D.C. to Texas, would stop serving black customers? Does anyone think there would again be signs sprouting up reading “whites” and “colored” on drinking foundations and restrooms?

Does anyone think restrictive covenants against Jews would be rewritten into contracts on houses? Does anything think that bars and hotels would stop serving blacks and Hispanics?

In his indictment of George III, Jefferson wrote of the king: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Is that not what we have today in spades?

Why do we need this vast army of bureaucrats?

They exist to validate the slander that America is a racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic country which would revert to massive discrimination were it not for heroic progressives standing guard.

And, indeed, some bigots might revert to type. But so what?

Cannot a free people deal with social misconduct with social sanctions?

And isn’t this what freedom is all about? The freedom of others to say things we disagree with, to publish ideas we disbelieve in, even to engage in behavior we dislike?

As for the Christians of Arizona and same-sex unions in Arizona, if they don’t like each other, can they not just avoid each other? After all, it’s a big state.

Why will we not see the lapsing or repeal of civil rights laws whose work is done? That would mean cracking the rice bowls of hundreds of thousands of diversicrats who would then have to apply for jobs from folks they have spent their lives harassing.

Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet, somehow, Mississippi still has more black elected officials than any other state.

If the conditions that called for the laws of the 1960s have ceased to exist, why do those laws still exist?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” 

The Fox is in the Henhouse

Look who's new in the White House!

Arif Alikhan - Assistant Secretary for Policy Development

for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Mohammed Elibiary - Homeland Security Adviser

Rashad Hussain - Special Envoy to the

Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)

Salam al-Marayati - Obama Adviser and

founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council

and is its current executive director

Imam Mohamed Magid - Obama's Sharia Czar from

the Islamic Society of North America

Eboo Patel - Advisory Council on Faith-Based

Neighborhood Partnerships

This is flat-out scary!!!

The foxes are now officially living in the hen house...

Now ask me why I am very concerned!!!

Do you feel OK with this??? 

How can this happen, and when will we wake up???

We are quiet while our Country is being drastically changed!!!

If you’re not CONCERNED, DELETE this.
Go to bed tonight...sleep well!

Otherwise, pass it on—get the word out!

We’ve got to have some relief starting with the 2014 Elections!

Paul Harvey's IF I WERE THE DEVIL

If I were the devil . . . 

I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world; 

I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man's effort, instead of God's blessings; 

I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around; 

I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue; 

I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership; 

I would make it legal to take the life of unborn babies; 

I would make it socially acceptable to take one's own life, and invent machines to make it convenient; 

I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals are valued more than human beings; 

I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of His name was grounds for a lawsuit; 

I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young, and I would get sports heroes to advertise them; 

I would get control of the media, so that every night I could pollute the mind of every family member for my agenda; 

I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation. 

I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation; 

I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie screens, and I would call it art; 

I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted and marveled; 

I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agenda as politically correct; 

I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, and the Bible is for the naive; 

I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional; 

I guess I would leave things pretty much the way they are. 

Herman Cain

Herman Cain

Herman Cain grew up in Atlanta with loving parents and little else. His father worked three jobs as a janitor, a barber and a chauffeur and his mother was a domestic worker. Thanks to the lessons his parents instilled in him, Herman went on to earn a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from Morehouse College and a Master's in computer science from Purdue University.
Herman has more than 40 years' experience in the private sector, where he balanced budgets, created jobs and rescued failing companies. He served as an analyst for Coca-Cola, an executive at Pillsbury, a regional Vice President with Burger King and CEO of Godfather's Pizza. During his time at Godfather's, he brought the company from near bankruptcy to profitability in just 14 months. Herman's record as "turnaround artist" led to his rise as President and CEO of the National Restaurant Association, which employs more than 14 million people. Additionally, he's been on the boards of directors for several multi-national corporations, including Nabisco, AGCO, Hallmark Cards, Whirlpool, SuperValu, Acquila and Reader's Digest.
Herman also served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and as a supervisory mathematician for the Department of the Navy, where he developed ballistics and fire control systems for the armed forces.
Herman has been married to his wife, Gloria, for 44 years, and they have two children and four grandchildren. He also serves as an Associate Minister at Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta.

SUNBURY CRAB COMPANY

On Feb.22,1862, the 110 ton brigantine Standard sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia with a crew of 10 and  cargo that included boots, medicine, barrels of fish, fish oil, gun powder, and other various articles.  Their papers cleared them for Mexico but they were really headed for the Georgia coast in an attempt to run the Union blockade.  Two days out they encountered gale force winds in the North Atlantic that lasted for two weeks, blowing them off course 1,000 miles east.  They then enjoyed 10 days of smooth sailing while they patched the ship before 5 days of hurricane force winds came out of the East.  The sails were lowered again, the pilot was tied with rope to the wheel, and everyone held tight to a 100 ft surfboard in 15 ft waves.  All the clothes and bedding were soaking wet and provisions had washed overboard. Drinking water was kept under lock and key with every man issued a half pint a day.  By late March they crossed the Gulf Stream and discovered their position as slightly south of Fernandina Florida.  They crept up the coast with an eye out for gun boats looking for a place to race in to safety.  The navigator on board, a river pilot from Savannah, mistook their position for Darien, but they were actually off the North end of Blackbeard Island where the boat ran aground.  Suddenly exposed, the crew loaded cargo in the lifeboat and made as many trips to the island as possible.  The next day, April 1, the ship came free and most of the cargo was reloaded.  Still thinking they were in Doboy sound, the life boat explored the river to Darien.  It was actually Todd Creek that ran dry after several miles of rowing.  Serious intervention was required to keep some crew members from killing the navigator.  Winding through the marsh on high tide, they came into Johnson Creek and found a house on the South end of St. Catherine’s Island.  It was occupied by slaves escaped from the mainland who fed them and gave them their bearings.  Now it was back to the ship which had also pulled in behind St. Catherine’s to hide.  It was decided to come up the North Newport to try and find a place to unload.  Melon Bluff (so named because of all the melons shipped from there) was far enough inland to be out of sight of the blockaders (Melon Bluff is visible looking east from I-95).  The cargo was driven by oxcart 12 miles to McIntosh (station #3 on the Savannah- Gulf Railroad) where it was loaded on a train to an auction house in Savannah.  The morning paper of April 14 had a listing of the Standard’s cargo that was to be auctioned off at a commission house on Bay Street.  A possible reason the ship was able to slip the Blockade was the concentration of Union assets that attacked Fort Pulaski on April 10.  Makes me wonder what they would think of us for keeping our boat in the garage all winter.

 

Brett Barnard and his ‘HitMan Blues Band’ covers Sunday Music this week….

March2, Midway All-Stars…..March9, Ambrosious.

Sunbury Crab will open Monday, March 17 at 5pm

 

When you find yourself furious at the injustice of the ice dancing judges or your emotions on edge over who’s going to win the Westminster Dog Show…it’s time for Spring Training and the Daytona 500.

Education and Freedom

What's wrong with people 
New textbook trashes Reagan and conservatives




A new textbook being used at the University of South Carolina has come under fire for claims it is anti-conservative.

“Introduction to Social Work & Social Welfare: Critical Thinking Perspectives” absolutely eviscerates Reagan and isn’t too kind to conservatives.

The text nonchalantly makes President Reagan appear anti-minority, insensitive to social problems and a man who has ultimately turned conservatives into pessimists.

The book also states that Reagan never appointed any women to prominent positions in his government. Something tells me that the first female Supreme Court judge, Sandra Day O’Connor, would disagree.

Beyond conservatives having a pessimistic view, the book also states that they oppose ”change and prefer tradition due to the fact that “They believe change usually produces more negative than positive consequence.”

While this is certainly correct for some conservatives, it is hardly appropriate or accurate to categorize an entire body of political thinkers into such a formless definition.

Officials for the University of South Carolina did not immediately return a request for comment.

The book offers a much kinder assessment of President Clinton, saying whatever failures the two-term Democrat suffered were due to the GOP opposition.

“Liberals had high hopes for Bill Clinton, but he had a House and Senate dominated by Republicans as early as 1994, so most of his proposals were squelched,” the book states.








Douglas Barclay is an associate content editor at Rare. Follow him on Twitter @douglabarclay17

'Eerie Parallels' Between Current Dow Chart and That of 1929

Hulbert: 'Eerie Parallels' Between 

Current Dow Chart and That of 1929

Tuesday, 11 Feb 2014 11:30 AM

By Dan Weil

A chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average going back to July 2012 closely matches one from 1928-29, signaling a crash may be coming later this month or in March, if the correlation continues, says Mark Hulbert, editor of Hulbert Financial Digest.

"There are eerie parallels between the stock market’s recent behavior and how it behaved right before the 1929 crash," he writes in an article for MarketWatch.

He first wrote about the chart on MarketWatch in early December, questioning its validity. But now that the pattern has continued to repeat, he's turning into a believer.

"One of the biggest objections I heard two months ago was that the chart is a shameless exercise in after-the-fact retrofitting of the recent data to some past price pattern," Hulbert notes.

"But that objection has lost much of its force. The chart was first publicized in late November of last year, and the correlation since then certainly appears to be just as close as it was before."

Another objection Hulbert heard was that the Dow soared more than 100 percent in 1928-29, compared with a gain of less than 50 percent in 2012-13.

"But there’s less to this objection than you might think," he notes. "You can still have a high correlation coefficient between two data series even when their gyrations are of different magnitudes.

"You may still be inclined to dismiss this. But there were many more were laughing last November when this scary chart began circulating. Not as many are laughing now."

One market expert who thinks a stock crash is coming is Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. He believes the Federal Reserve's stimulus has led to an overvalued market.

"I think the market is way overdue for a 20 to 30 percent correction," he tells CNBC. "In fact, I'm hoping for the market to drop 40 percent so stocks will again become — from a value point of view — attractive."

OPINION

Aging America heading for disaster

By Kyle Smith

February 8, 2014 | 9:48pm

Modal Trigger

Photo: Superstock

To really understand what’s going on with the American economy, don’t look at the headlines. Don’t look at the unemployment rate or the trade balance or the deficit. Don’t even look at what’s happening today at all: Look at what happened 46 years ago.

And what happened then? Fewer Americas were being born, points out Harry S. Dent Jr. in “The Demographic Cliff: How to Survive and Prosper During the Great Deflation of 2014-2019” (Portfolio).

Modal Trigger

Following the Baby Boom, which peaked in 1961, came the Baby Bust, a long slow decline in the birthrate. Those babies grew up and began spending in accordance with highly predictable patterns.

People tend, for instance, to buy houses at about the same age — age 31 or so. Around age 53 is when people tend to buy their luxury cars — after the kids have finished college, before old age sets in. Demographics can even tell us when your household spending on potato chips is likely to peak — when the head of it is about 42.

Ultimately the size of the US economy is simply the total of what we’re all spending. Overall household spending hits a high when we’re about 46. So the peak of the Baby Boom (1961) plus 46 suggests that a high point in the US economy should be about 2007, with a long, slow decline to follow for years to come.

Anyone find that convincing?

Dent, a business consultant, stock-market prognosticator and author who says now is the time to sell stocks, has plucked an old argument off the dusty shelves of 1980s political rhetoric (“We’re nothing like Japan! And that’s horrible!”) and given it a new coat of paint: We’re exactly like Japan! And that’s horrible!

Japan’s stock market is still 65% below its 1989 peak. Their spending problem (currently being given a boost by a gigantic stimulus) is really, says Dent, an aging problem.

As the Japanese have hit their 60s and 70s, they became stingier. Artificial, forced spending like government stimulus is not going to spark real voluntary spending because that isn’t what old people do. They’ve already paid for their houses, cars and their children’s schooling. Merchants try to goose lackluster sales by cutting prices, which increases the incentive for people to save their money, expecting things will be cheaper in the future than they are today.

That’s a deflationary spiral, and Dent sees it coming here next, and soon.

Post-crash, the US economy has been limping along for nearly five years despite a series of massive fiscal and monetary stimuli. A principal reason for what growth we have had is the spending pattern of rich people, who tend to put off their big purchases years later in life than the average. Their peak spending year should be, according to Dent, 2014.

And, no, immigration isn’t going to save us; even adjusted for immigration, the overall US population is aging. (Moreover, an anemic economy attracts fewer foreigners: Net new immigration from Mexico dropped to zero between 2005 and 2010).

Lost in the discussion of this week’s Congressional Budget Office report (which said 2.5 million fewer Americans would be working because of Obamacare) was its prediction that aging will be a major drag on growth: “Beyond 2017,” said the report, “CBO expects that economic growth will diminish to a pace that is well below the average seen over the past several decades [due in large part to] slower growth in the labor force because of the aging of the population.”

Economically speaking, winter is nowhere near an end. Spring isn’t due until about 2019, which is when the economy will receive a boost from the spending power of the Echo Baby Boom of the 1980s (which peaked in 1990) and the concurrent wave of immigration. In 2019, these second Baby Boomers will buying their first houses.

Dent’s book is, for all its charts and graphs, startling in its simplicity. Single answers to complex systems aren’t generally very convincing. And statistical models that successfully predict the past may be enticing, but how useful are they? The past never perfectly anticipates the future.

And yet the demographic numbers are so large that they’re bound to play a central economic role.

Implicitly, Dent is saying: Don’t blame politicians, the decline of manufacturing, education or cheap foreign imports for the economic stagnation that has already begun and will continue for many years. Blame your parents and grandparents for losing interest in having children back in the Sixties.

FILED UNDERBABY BOOMERS, ECONOMY, SPENDING

READ NEXT:

We vote with our feet

• Twitter
• Facebook