The Balance Is Due

Sadly for the hairless monkeys, there is only one thing left to believe in: Reason. No church, no congregation, and no ideological bullshit. Forty years of Ponzinomics does not go in reverse...

I almost shit a brick today when Larry Kudlow endorsed a $15 minimum wage at Amazon. It only took 25 years of retail decimation. Because what a wise man does at the beginning, the fool does at the end. That is, when they see the pitchforks in the distance...

"We're all socialists now"

White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow told CNBC, "Good for them. I'm in favor of higher wages."

As of today.

The real "losers" in all of this are the Ayn Rand libertarians who still insist that free trade is free and that higher minimum wages axiomatically lead to higher unemployment. A static economic assumption if there ever was one. In other words, it's just fine if (real) minimum wages go down for fifty years straight as the labor participation rate collapses due to mass layoffs, but (minimum) wages must never go up, lest the Banana Republicanization process be unduly hindered. These libertarians evince the conscience of a 12 year-old crack addict, and have now been duly cleaved from their own political party. Imagine voting for a president who repudiates everything you've stood for your entire life. As long as he keeps throwing tax cuts at them - like bimbos at a strip club - they'll keep dancing. Right, Rand Paul? Proof that an overriding belief in self-interest is a overriding belief in absolutely nothing.  

The speed with which the political right has 180 degree abandoned conventional ideologies that stood for decades, is staggering. This is the Bannonization of the Republican Party, which is now fully under the deathgrip of the populist base. I said recently, the base doesn't have a problem with government assistance, they just hate "Socialism". Clearly the Democrats are marketing challenged, had they only called Obamacare - Medicare 2.0:  "Keep your damn government hands off of it". I It would have been unassailable.

I never thought I would be the guy to rain on the minimum wage parade coming too little too late, nevertheless, there is one problem with this latent fantasy of rebalancing the 'Conomy back to where it would have been had it not been sold for stock buybacks: the casino. 

The reason the casino is pegged to the permanent plateau of delusion, is because earnings per share relative to revenue has never been higher. Which means that profit extraction has never been greater relative to wages, incomes, and most importantly societal well-being.   

Sadly this Ponzi fraud does not go in reverse. Which is why Amazon had a key reversal of fortune today, opening higher and closing at the lows of the today.

This old age home thinks that they found their way out of this Hotel Californication of their own making. By reversing forty years of uncontrolled greed, on a mere whim.  

But there IS no way out. 

2008 was the down payment. The balance is due.