Too Little Exponentiality

When the national debt first reached one million million ($1,000,000,000,000), there were no bloggers. The web was still a few decades away. Today it reached fifteen million million. And oh! To hear the conservative punditry! It's all Obama, who raised it four million million just over his term. And! We'ven't even yet hit the coming health care bill in full stride.

I argue here that the national debt is meaningless. $3 trillion meant nothing nothing! to my generation; we easily survived those "unpayable debts foisted upon our children" by our parents in the 1970s. My parents easily survived those "unpayable debts foisted upon our children" by their parents in the 1950s.

And so it will be with our children. $16 trillion is a meaningless number. I'd bet that less than 3% of our youth under 18 can even quantify the debt within +/- $5 trillion. A student in 1987, there was no way I knew what the national debt was; it was as meaningless then as it is today.

We constantly hear we need to grow, too. That if interest on our debt was, say, 3%, we'd better grow our economy by at least 3% just to keep up with the Kardashians. Growth is necessary we're told. But really -- why do we think we need to grow more? Aren't there already sufficient housal units for everyone? Water? Food? Why does my Elk Grove feel that we have to grow more? To the Cosumnes River and beyond? Following three decades of heedless suburban sprawl, can't we survive on what we've already built? My real question is -- at what point will we decide that we've grown enough?

Even 0.2% growth is exponential...yet apparently in our "advanced" Western economy even 2% isn't even close to breaking even with our perpetualized debt based economy. Look at the forecasts for 2012: here's one at 1.4%. Here's another at 3.3%. But really, think about four hundred years from now -- do you really think the next 25 generations can and should expect 3-4% growth? What would this fucking planet look like? Apparently, 0.2% perpetual growth ad infinitium is considered too little exponentiality.

But, grow we will try. We must try, for a reversion would fuck up the entire gambit we're currently playing. Lowe's has to build more tilt-up concrete warehouses filled with Chinese shit for American consumers -- to not do so would squander everything already created. Their shareholders require a rate of return above and beyond inflation. To not grow impacts everything already grown.

To rub salt into the collective wound of the 16% of you who hold no job, I'm up for a 2.3% wage increase in 2012 (after factoring in health care/unemployment insurance/dental/eye/life insurance rate increases)...which according to everything I understand, isn't anywhere close to nearly enough to cover the incremental cost of electricity, water, gasoline, sewer, federal and state taxation, cable, college tuition, garbage and property tax increases. In effect, I'm losing ground with a paltry fucking 2.3% raise. That the majority of the rest of this grand nation isn't even coming close to a 2.3% increase means absolutely nothing to me -- I don't pay their bills. I could care less about them. But me? I'm going to be suffering soon! I'll have to substitute my weekly 2# of sopressata salami with a generic genovese variety? Oh, the humanity!