Wassamatta U.

    This is turning into a theater of the absurd. Mulvaney told us the other day, with a straight face, how compassionate it was to literally urinate on the less fortunate among us and tell them it was raining.  Of course, we have to do this for their own good and so we could spend more on the military.  His goal is to go from spending 611 billion to spending 668 billion dollars to make us "great" again.  That's absurd on its face.  There are some who it fills with pride we can easily provide for the least fortunate and even the most despicable among us. Then there are those it just fills with resentment. Not hard to see where this guy comes down.
    Mulvaney is the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.  It's hard to imagine why a guy like that doesn't know if we cut every dime of "welfare" spending from the Federal Budget we couldn't produce 3% of the military budget.  That would make his pronouncements, literally, insane.  He'd probably be less dangerous if he were merely dishonest.  Either way, dangerous, is the only way to describe his behavior.
    You would think a guy like this would discuss our largest outlays on an annual basis and how we might address them.  He didn't. He discussed "entitlements" as though they were some kind of welfare program.  Nah. We pay for that.  As a fact, the average person withdraws less from Social Security or Medicare than they pay in. You'd think the director of the OMB would know that.  He must not.
    Here's something else he doesn't seem to know.  Our second largest annual expenditure is debt service on what's already been borrowed.  It's about 300 billion a year.  That's mostly the penalty and interest on the 13 trillion in hot checks GW wrote and the bills due for crashing the economy through malfeasance.  Put 13 trillion on a credit card and tell me what your balance is 10 years later.  The answer is 19 trillion for those of you slow on the uptake. Don't believe me?  Read a damned newspaper. Not only that; the cost is going to approach 1 trillion annually within the next few years no matter what we do about marginal tax rates and then it really takes off exponentially.  Compound interest is relentless.  In a few years, we are looking at becoming Greece.
    That brings us to someone else who,  at least,  is slow on the uptake. The cost of maintaining the national debt is tied to the Fed Funds Rate.  The Fed Board have apparently decided it'll be good for the economy if the debt service we all pay is increased a couple percent.  Good for who?  In what way?  Just asking that question should illustrate the absurdity of the decision.  The Federal Funds rate is not paid by imaginary people to imaginary people with imaginary money.  It's real money paid by real people to real people.  There can be no decision that says it's good for all of us to increase the cost of using this money that can have the slightest toehold in reality, particularly if you propose to sweeten the pot even further by cutting upper tax rates.
    Some days it looks like the whole thing is being run by Rocky and Bullwinkle and now it looks like Boris and Natasha wanna buy into the game.  Yeah, stop that.
    I would readily believe most conspiracy theories except for one hard fact of life that proves itself over and over again.  Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.