So off I go to say "How do I feel about not being plugged-in with the Ticker so much?"

Yes, there will be some articles.  I might even approve comments every now and then.  Don't be surprised if yours stays queued for a while -- hours or even a day or two.  Its not that I don't know its there -- well, actually, I might intentionally not know, having shut off the notifications, which I have done.

Will I return to what I was doing before in that regard?

I don't know.

That depends on how I feel.

Feelings before facts, right?  That's how everyone else is.  Why shouldn't I go fishing -- for real?  Or go hike the AT -- for real.

Or just sit and smoke a big fat stogie while sipping whiskey?

After all nobody seems to want to actually do anything to make anything better.  The only questions I get are requests for how to escape this on one's own (by pushing a button on a computer to buy, sell, go long or short this or that), not get off one's ass. Never mind that such a request is in fact a request for a way to screw everyone else, even if only by pennies, so "you get yours."

It is a fact that if you know five neighbors one of them screwed you, on average, over the last three years and that you still consider him or her "neighbor" is also fact.  That roughly two million illegals have streamed over our border and nobody has done a thing to stop it is also fact.  That all this, plus the screaming about this politician or that, while inflation was caused by all on both sides of the aisle and rather than drag them all out of office by their hair for refusing to put a stop to it what you want to know is how you get your next $600/wk check to so you can drink more beer.

Never mind the fiscal condition of the nation.  One side screams "entitlements!" while the other screams "nobody is illegal and everyone deserves whatever they want."

There is not one Senator or Representative who will stand and state, on the floor and repeat it at every opportunity to take their two minutes: "All exponential expansions end either due to a decision or collapse. We cannot spend more than we take in via taxes in perpetuity, yet we are. The issue isn't entitlements it is scams, price-fixing, fraud, knowingly-false promises and even selling positions, goods and services designed only to addict or even directly screw the other party.  The latter is and has been a felony for over 100 years, yet nobody on either side of the aisle will prosecute.  This all must end right here, right now and until it does I will not vote to advance anything - not on the floor and not in committee."

Social Security is not the problem and in fact last fiscal ran a small cash surplus.  Medicare and Medicaid are the problem and they, along with all the other "gimmes" that inevitably wind up being scammed off and made 10x as expensive as they should be, must have the scamming terminated with whatever level of prejudice is required.

No Representative or Senator gives this speech because you not only won't insist at every opportunity and even go after in every lawful and peaceful way those who are deliberately engineering and acting on policies that will destroy both you and the economy you demand the opposite.

Tell me, how many of you have demanded your Representative and two Senators place the military on the border and treat the influx of illegal crossers as an invasion, shutting down all passage of bills and other Congressional activity until the Executive does exactly that and implements 100% E-Verify, ejecting all illegal aliens already here?  Oh yes, the so-called "Conservatives" have, several times, placed 100% E-Verify in a bill but every single time they've pulled it rather than insist it pass to get anything else, yet that IS within their power to do.  How many of you have demanded all the scams and frauds in the medical system, including that ruled illegal under 15 USC Chapter 1 forty years ago, be met with immediate indictment, prosecution and imprisonment?  I have, publicly and repeatedly for over a decade and been raising hell about it for more than two decades.  Have you?  Or is it only a problem when the invading mass of people show up in your city and start taking whatever they want?  Is that not what an invading army does?  Do you only complain when you get hurt and need a physician -- and get personally screwed with a bill ten or even one hundred times that someone else pays, or when you're prescribed a drug that is one hundred times as expensive as the same drug, made in the same factory, sold in Europe.

WELL?

I get it, people go along to get along.

But every now and then I have to look at the record, along with the over 15,500 articles I've written (not counting replies and discussions) since 2007 and ask: What has come of all the put-in effort, other than a bunch of worn-out keyboards?

After all there's only 24 hours in a day, and now matter what I do, and how much money I have (or not) I can't get a single one of the hours I spend doing this -- and its a fairly significant investment in time and effort, for which I expect and earn basically nothing in terms of money -- back.

I'm going to spend some of them doing something else since, at a certain point, you have to wonder if you really are tilting at windmills.

Jerome Puntel, that is.

Market no likey either; clearly Walled-up-yours Street wanted some indication of rate cuts.

Answer: Civilization was nice.....

Seriously folks, they're not coming.  Get over it.  Rates today are at a level commensurate with a 2% inflation rate but actual inflation is, even as measured deliberately inaccurately by the government, at over double that in core.

Never mind compounding which nobody likes to talk about, but you must.  Compounding is a monster and if you don't de-fang it, as I noted in the Ticker the other day, you get screwed because it runs away from you.

Compounding is otherwise known as an exponential function.  Great when its in your favor (e.g. the size of your bank balance.)  Ruinous, when its not (as in the size of your insurance, property tax, groceries or other payments.)

At the core of the issue is the Federal Deficit, which none of the clown-car brigade will honestly take on.  They talk about the "budget" but in fact its less than a third of total spend; the rest is claimed to be "mandatory" but it isn't.  That Congress voted to make it not subject to annual votes doesn't mean it cannot be put back where it belongs -- and where it has to be authorized every year.  It can be.

But of course it won't be and even if you zeroed all 12 Appropriations bills you wouldn't have a balanced budget.

A number of years ago you would -- but not today.

Congress did this, on purpose.

Congress can undo it, on purpose, but of course if they do they'll hear people screaming and ..... they might get fired.

Then again being fired is now pretty-much a certainty, on the path we're on.

The question is in what way will they be fired?  The type of firing you lose your job or in ways that are a lot less-friendly than the two allegedly "famous" words that Trump seemed to forget how to use once he was President?

This much is certain: What cannot continue forever will stop, and you either choose to stop it or the method of it stopping is chosen for you.

We're going to make the wrong one because you, I, and the rest of the citizens of this nation won't demand AND ENFORCE the correct one.

Two two choices are:

• Attempt to muddle through in the current border situation with the roughly 17 million, or somewhat over 5% of the US population here illegally and unable to work and pay taxes, about 20% of those arriving just in the last couple of years and essential none of them forced out, all of whom have few or no skills and are wildly-massive resource sinks, including disease, no capacity or care about others property and lives and more.
  
  
• Attempt to continue to have a Federal Government that literally spends $3 for every $2 it takes in via taxes, much of which goes directly and indirectly to the above bullet point and what isn't covered is forced onto state and local budgets which they have no means to collect in taxes either.  All of this is directly inflationary; the era of being able to coast on the $300-400 billion a year in increased trade sequestration is permanently over as a result of sanctions leveled when the Ukraine-Russian hostilities began (not that this was a permanent situation in the first place; it was destined to eventually end anyway.)  If it isn't clear by now that 20% insurance increases on an annual basis and up to 50% or more in some places as businesses and consumes engage in fraud (aka "Florida") to try to stay above water, never mind the ramp in fuel and transportation costs and similar cannot continue and wildly exceeds that of wages, I don't know what someone is supposed to tell you other than "you're going to continue to get squeezed until you go bankrupt if you don't stop it", even though you don't want to hear it.
  
  
• Attempt to continue to play the game that "housing is expensive because of tight supply."  No, housing is expensive because we set up a huge boom in refinances that were used to goose the economy through rate manipulation that Congress suborned along with President Trump and Biden, and the Fed went along with.  Yellen was personally and directly involved and instead of being hung out to dry she was rewarded with being Treasury Secretary, exactly as Geithner was after he machined up the 2007/08 blowup at the NY Fed desk.  Rather than be pilloried or even executed for the damage they did they got rewarded and you and I let it happen.
  
  
• Attempt to continue to play the "college cost" game.  Same basic problem: Obama was just the last piece of it by federalizing loans but hardly the first piece.  Rather than resolve it we allowed a bunch of screaming children irrespective of their physical age to charge it all up with no capacity or thought of how they were going to pay, and then we went even further and gilded all the colleges on top of it.
  
  
• Attempt to continue to ignore 100+ year old federal anti-trust law in the medical industry which was confirmed to apply at the USSC twice in the late 70s and 80s.  While I generally find "Zero" to be just that the facts are that when you're right, you're right and in this article they're right.  That article clearly documents a wild-eyed repetition of the exact conduct that wound up at the USSC with Royal Drug and which the drug and insurance companies LOST, which should have instantly led to 10 years in federal prison for every single pharma, drug store and insurance company executive involved at the time and for the last 40 years since.  This is not a question of "to be litigated" it was decided FORTY YEARS AGO and is a FELONY.  If you think its just there in the medical system rather than everywhere from your "loved" doctor on to every hospital in the land you're dead wrong and since you won't do a damn thing about it you will soon be just plain dead as it will be unavailable when you can't pay for it and neither can anyone else, including the government with their cost-shifting schemes.

The PPI data makes clear that all the screamers about "inflation is coming down and it will be ok" are full of crap.  They're full of crap because exactly zero of the drivers, which are the above facts and more that all tie into the same thing ("there's a free lunch right over here!") are false.

The other alternative is to:

• Declare an invasion and post the military and State Guards on the border with orders to stop it by whatever means are necessary.  Peacefully demanding said persons immediately cease and return before crossing into the US if you can, by deadly force if you must.  In addition all of the DACA folks (which has just again been declared illegal) and every other illegal immigrant must immediately leave and any employer, landlord or other person employing, renting to or otherwise harboring, aiding and abetting an illegal alien must be indicted, imprisoned and the instrumentality of their illegal aid forfeited.  "Muh that's unfair" cries notwithstanding this has to be done.  This will immediately restore budgetary capacity within states and cities and has to happen right here, right now.
  
  
• The budget must be balanced.  The biggest element of this problem lies in CMS and all collusive practices must be forced out by jailing the guilty parties, no matter who they are.  The purpose of a Congress and specifically in the House is to determine as representatives of the people what to fund and with what to fund it.  If you can't fund it now you can't have it, period, end of conversation.  The fruits of productivity increases belong to the people as a whole, not to a few mavens in Congress who manage to amass tens of millions of dollars over a career while making $170,000 salaries -- quite-obviously they are gaming it and stealing the money, whether in the stock market or otherwise.
  
  
• The housing market must be left alone.  Prices will crash.  Demand will cool as we get rid of all the people who have no right to be here.  Remove five percent of the population and suddenly apartments and similar will become more reasonable, which takes pressure off.  Prices decrease and suddenly people can afford to buy again.  No, rates must not be manipulated lower again under any circumstances; today they actually stand at historically-reasonable levels in a 2% inflation economy.  Borrowing money for three decades should cost about three to five percent more than the rate of actual inflation.  By this standard rates are still too low but as we get rid of the deficit spending they will come into line with reason staying right where they are.  Yes, many people will wind up bankrupt.  That's ok; the purpose of bankruptcy is to promote clearing of markets and it will function exactly as it always has to do precisely that.
  
  
• College lending must be ejected from the Federal Government, returned to entirely-private except for perhaps Pell and Stafford, and dischargeable in bankruptcy.  The price of college will crash.  So be it.  Today the Internet makes college a dubious proposition in the first place other than for personal interaction.  Thus they should have to provide something better than what you can find in a web search so let's see it, colleges!  If you can't then you go broke.  That's how it should be.
  
  
• The entire medical system must be de-monopolized and de-colluded and those who refuse imprisoned across the board.  I've written much on this through the years -- here is the way to do it.  Costs will come down by 80% or more if we do this.  At the same time we must make it illegal for pharmaceutical firms to grade their own homework when it comes to drugs; the data at this point is clear and convincing that a huge percentage of the drugs are outright frauds in that their claimed results are not reproduceable.  The latest is the furor over OTC decongestants which, it is alleged, are worthless despite being peddled to all and sundry for years.

None of that will be easy, of course.  Nor will be the tax structure changes and spending cuts necessary to bring the budget into balance.  But the choice is stark: We can either do all of it or our society and economic system will collapse.  A Ponzi scheme always eventually collapses because it is exponential and yet the number of people and resources of a given place are finite -- always.

This is an exponential graph.  It is not my data; it is official government data from the US Treasury.

If we do not stop this here and now the nation will be economically and you personally, along with your children, destroyed.

No, you will not manage to evade it while your neighbor gets screwed.  You will also get screwed.

Attempting to game this as we have in the past by, for example, letting in millions of unskilled, low-wage workers who then cost more than they produce in an attempt to "drive down" compensation not only won't work it has and will make the problem worse.  Ditto suppressing interest rates for house purchases, allowing the taking of unlimited loans without a care in the world whether the job someone gets as a result of having a degree will cover the cost, allowing medical and pharmaceutical firms to price-fix through collusion that has been illegal for more than a hundred years and more.  Permitting offshoring by putting environmental pollution "over there" and then behaving it doesn't exist, along with enabling literal and functional slavery in said nations must end right now with any firm that does that being subjected to tariffs sufficiently high to render that behavior uneconomic.

We have played this game for the last two decades and I've been reporting on it since 2007.

We either stop it now by whatever means we must use to force the government to do so or this nation will collapse -- including those who think they are "rich and powerful", both within and beyond the government today.

This will be unpopular.

I don't care that she was with someone other than her "sort of" husband (she has filed for divorce.)  I can't be married under the terms of anything called a "Christian Wedding" where I would have to file anything, so all you moralizers can stick your love for the State which apparently is superior to that of your alleged "God" where the sun doesn't shine. Get back to me when you demand the State accept an agreement -- including the terms for dissolution if indeed anything other than death is "good enough" -- the particular faith in question requires to perform the ceremony (as they and the two parties freely choose, within very broad guidelines -- such as "no more than two" if you wish) but until then you're a damned hypocrite to file with the state in the first place, so by the definition you accepted in doing that once you file for divorce any alleged commitment you had is gone, finito, kaput.  You are now negotiating who gets what between material assets and, if there are children, who's going to care for them on what schedule and who will pay the cost of that (imputed, inflated or otherwise), not whether your "commitment" is done.  Once that petition is filed if you want to sleep with other people have at it; you've declared your union kaput and your Church agreed to that definition of same when the officiant, Priest, Pastor or whoever signed the original marriage certificate from the State.  In so-signing said officiant in their capacity was fully aware and confirmed as legally and ecuminically valid that all one of you had to do was declare you no longer wanted to be married, file a sworn document to that effect with the court and it will inevitably be so even if the other party objects!

So save me all the sanctimony about "oh she filed but it isn't final yet."  Go fix the system and until you do live with the monster you bred, fed, nurtured and in fact support yourself.

I do, however, very-much care that she displayed that she will think with her genitals in public, in a wildly-inappropriate manner unbefitting any human -- a display more akin to two dogs going at it in the middle of the street than two people on a date.  This wasn't in the back of a car at the drive-in (reasonably private without someone going to quite a bit of trouble to look) it was in front of everyone in the theater, including the people seated next to her.  Not only was it a public display conducted in a theater it inevitably both distracted other patrons from the performance and attracted said other patrons to their conjugal sexual display irrespective of their age and consent to same, all of whom we can reasonably presume did not buy a ticket to attend a peep show.

We have plenty of "men" who think with their genitals in high office as well.  Weiner anyone?  Some get ejected from office, some not.  All should.

High office is not for those who are incapable -- or unwilling -- to display and use logic and analysis in their actions.  What adults do behind closed doors, or in some other reasonably-private place, I do not care -- but if you cannot display enough logic and analytical firepower to find such a place for your sexual play with another adult (and confine it to adults, obviously) then you have no business in high office, period.

I simply do not accept this because I cannot have any faith that come the time for serious decisions she can make them using analytical brainpower instead of her genitals.  This applies equally to both men and women and it is why I believed Clinton should have been removed from office.  Who he screws in a private place and on a consensual basis is between him and the other adults involved; for all I know Hillary didn't care and they had an "arrangement" in that regard.  That's none of my damn business but getting a blowjob under the desk while on the phone with a foreign head of state most-certainly is my and every other citizen's business and he should have been impeached, convicted and removed instantly for that.

Of course he wasn't.

The apologists will of course say "well she's effective advancing the GOP agenda."  To which I say:  So what?  If that's the criteria you can make the same argument with regard to Mussolini and we know what that led to!

Sorry folks, but nope.

My bet is that she'll keep her seat and thus prove that no matter which side of the aisle you're on you are an absolutely un-serious bunch of people who act without discipline, without principle and fully deserving what is inbound with regard to both political and economic instability in the months to come.