the $3,000 bay leaf and other stories

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flying into los angeles the other night, i happened to be waiting outside the rear lavatory at just the precise moment that we hit the only patch of turbulence in an otherwise calm flight—my timing tends to be good that way—resulting in my getting pitched against the bulkhead and ending up with a nice, colorful lump in the middle of my forehead.

all day today, it’s been nothing but “oh my god, what happened?”, with the follow-up question almost always being some variation of, “so what’s the airline gonna give you to make up for it?"

i guess i tend to be of the “shit happens” school of thought when it comes to stuff like this—it never occurred to me to even mention the incident to the airline, much less try to extort money or tickets outta them. this apparently makes me, by current american standards, a sucker.

a co-worker told me her mother's the same way--seems she was having dinner at a restaurant a year or so ago and inadvertently swallowed a bay leaf that was in her soup; it got stuck in her throat and she had to be taken to the emergency room to have it removed.

the restaurant tracked her down and not only paid her medical bills, but insisted that she accept a settlement check of $3,000 as their apology to her. when she refused, saying it was her own damn fault and she shoulda been paying more attention, they hounded her for a year until she finally accepted their check.

i haven't been able to get that story outta my mind all day. think about it--some woman does something stupid, and the business in which she happens to do it falls all over itself thrusting thousands of dollars at her and counting themselves lucky for having gotten off so easy.

these stories, i think, speak volumes about the litigious mentality that’s so pervasive in america today—shit, in fact, doesn’t just happen; it’s gotta be somebody’s fault, and somebody’s gotta pay. it really got me to thinking about how much the fear of even frivolous litigation must drive up the cost of everything in ways we don’t even know.

the funny thing is, i was arguing with an attorney friend just the other day—a good liberal—about tort reform; he, naturally, insisted with a straight face that malpractice lawsuits and defensive medicine were negligible factors in the high cost of healthcare in america.

i wish I’d had the bay leaf story to throw at him.

the guttermorality case for gold

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you know me, folks--i'm no genius; i'm just some guy who gets drunk and transcribes whatever random shit happens to pass through his alcohol-inflamed synapses between mkf cocktails 1 and 3 on any given night.

am i booze-eloquent? yes indeed, i am. am i someone whose drunken pronouncements should in any way be taken seriously? astonishingly (to me, anyway), apparently at least one of you out there thinks so.

so, before the reader in question rushes out to invest his meager savings in gold merely on my say-so (much less any of the rest of you), i feel it necessary to elaborate on my position.

for those of you who couldn't care less, i promise to keep this as short and sweet as possible (and for those of you who wonder, i bought the bulk of my gold back in 2006 when it was half the price it is now and everybody told me i was crazy).

* * * * *

our broken economy is in recovery, we are told; the recession is over. the people who are telling us this point to evidence that (a) the housing market seems to be bottoming out, (b) the dow has recovered 50% of the value it lost since its high two years ago, and (c) leading economic indicators are pointing upwards. cool, huh?

while i would (and easily could) dispute each and every one of the above points, that would make this post longer than i want it to be, so let's just assume for the sake of argument that each is correct.

the thing these economic cheerleaders fail to mention in their pep rallies is that the only reason all this shit is happening is because of something euphemistically called quantitative easing--a fancy name the federal reserve dreamed up for their practice of creating massive amounts of money outta thin air in order to fund all of this foolishness while simultaneously keeping interest rates artificially (and ridiculously) low.

in other words, it's sorta like referring to an intensive-care patient who depends on life-support for his every breath as "recovering."

but damned if all this artificial stimulus hasn't worked, sort of--people are buying houses with government-backed 4.75% 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, and the stock market is suddenly awash in cheap money.

the problem, of course, is that all this inflation of the currency has debased the dollar, shaken the confidence of our creditors like china and japan (upon whom we depend for our lifeblood) to the point that they're hesitant about buying any more of our debt, and driven the price of gold well past $1,000.

the fed has promised the world that it's gonna end quantitative easing at the end of october, and if it actually follows through on this promise, a couple of interesting things will happen very quickly:

first, and most importantly for our purposes, the dollar will strengthen almost overnight, and the price of gold (in dollar terms) will plummet.

second, and most importantly for the politicians, easy money will dry up and interest rates will spike, thus killing not only the artificial housing recovery but the artificial stock-market rally as well. housing prices will collapse, the market will tank, and voters will panic and demand heads on spikes.

so there you have it, my friends--a sophie's choice if ever there was one: will the fed (1) keep printing money in order to maintain the uneasy status quo, even though such a policy ensures certain hyperinflation of our currency at some point down the road; or (2) stop the madness, let the economy finally take its lumps and hit a painful rock-bottom so a true recovery can take place?

with mid-term elections coming up next year, and knowing my politicians as i do, i'm betting they're gonna go with option 1, kick the can down the road and hope they can keep the current bubble inflated for at least as long as they're still in office.

which is why i'm hanging onto my gold.

the thing i've always loved about the post is, they don't fuck around

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take this article, for instance.

while most american news sources tend to pussyfoot around an issue (if they even address it at all), the new york post, once its attention is drawn, can reliably be counted upon to go for the jugular with pithy headlines such as the one they ran yesterday:


and if macro-economics is suddenly pushing celebrity peccadillos off the front page of the post, what should that tell you, my children?

that's right--read the article, cash in whatever useless dollars you have left, buy gold and thank me later.



[or silver--your choice]

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sober update: i hope it goes without saying that, before acting upon this or any other financial advice that drunken bloggers throw at you, you should do your homework and make an informed decision.

i've been waiting for somebody to bring this up

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but i didn't figure it would come from the insurance lobby, because i thought they were bought and paid for. whatever--it's in the public dialogue now, where it needs to be.

have any of you--especially you under-30 types--stopped to think about exactly how obama and congress plan to pay for their universal healthcare utopia--you know, cover everybody, cover pre-existing conditions, pave the streets in gold and all that shit?

they've been saying they were gonna do it by cutting costs and creating greater efficiencies, but as i've pointed out before, that's bullshit--they haven't even come close to addressing the real reasons why healthcare is so expensive in this country.

no, they had another plan--instead of rocking the special-interest boat by actually trying to fix things, they decided it'd be easier just to increase the revenue pool; i.e., force everybody to buy healthcare insurance whether they wanted it or not, and levy substantial fines on anyone who didn't fall into line.

see, they figured, there's this huge pool of young, healthy, largely-uninsured americans out there who they could suck into the system, and use the premiums they extorted outta them for insurance they'll never use to pay for the costs of caring for the old and sick. from each according to their ability, to each according to their need--see how that works?

under this proposed plan, the doctors and hospitals were happy because they'd get to continue playing their same ol' games, the lawyers were happy because the idea of tort reform never even entered into the discussion, and the insurance lobby was happy because it was offered up all these new customers to gouge and screw.

the only people who might not be happy are the millions of young americans out there who--as if struggling to find work, save a little money and pay off their student loans weren't enough in this horrible economy--would suddenly find themselves on the hook for thousands of dollars in health insurance premiums each and every year, courtesy of the man most of 'em voted into office in the naive belief he was gonna make their lives better.

as the potential fallout became clear even to the clueless democrats, max baucus introduced his own version of the healthcare bill, which, among other things, relaxed the requirements on the uninsured to carry coverage only for catastrophic events like accidents or cancer. seems reasonable, right?

well, you'da thought he'd stuck a flaming poker into the eye of the insurance industry, the way they reacted. the conclusions they reached? get ready, because this is deep:

"Several major provisions in the current legislative proposal [i.e., relaxing insurance requirements for millions of uninsured] will cause healthcare costs to increase far faster and higher than they would under the current system," Karen Ignagni, the top industry lobbyist in Washington, wrote in a memo to insurance company chief executives.

well, no shit--you're promising carte blanche coverage to everybody who's old and sick without bringing in young, healthy suckers at the bottom of the pyramid to pay for it all, so whaddya think's gonna happen? thanks for that expert analysis of the obvious, insurance folks.

of course, the white house and senate are shrill in their denouncement of this blindside attack, claiming it has absolutely no merit. and the rhetorical game goes on . . .

it's time to stop this nonsense. far as i'm concerned, it is incumbent upon this congress and this president to prove to the american people that they can undertake and achieve real healthcare reform--i.e., attack and defeat the special-interest sacred cows of medicine, law and insurance--before they suck us all into some ill-conceived nationalized healthcare plan from which there is no return.