For those of you wondering why you've seen so many folks of late wearing sandwich boards emblazoned with something like "Tammy's Tanning--We Buy Gold,"this week brought some clarification in the form of a Los Angeles Times story on people like good old Mike Pitts, a typically forward-thinking member of the South Carolina legislature who introduced a bill in April that would make "gold and silver coins legal tender in the state." Naturally, we here in Georgia ain't about to see ourselves out-did by South Carolina, especially in competitive displays of egregious stupidity, a category where we have always run [red] neck and neck. Hence, one of our esteemed solons has come up with a measure that would "require the state to accept only gold and silver for all payments, including taxes, and to use the metals exclusively to pay all of the state's debts." The Baptists can claim no monopoly on this sort of witlessness. Out in Utah, the Mormons have actually gone and enacted a new law restoring old gold and silver U.S. coins to their former status as legal tender. Indeed, the "money funnies" are currently playing in several other states, "fueled by Tea Party support and antipathy toward the federal government."
According to the scribes (regrettably the Pharisees were unavailable for comment), the ultimate aim of these galoots on the loose is "to return the nation to the gold standard, in which every dollar would be backed by a fixed amount of the precious metal." Naturally, although "economists of all stripes say the plan would be ruinous," that view is of scant concern to the likes of Pitts. and others who "believe that returning America to the gold standard would force the government to live within its means, curtailing runaway spending and inflation."
These are worthy goals to be sure, but the ol' Bloviator thinks that a brief--but not necessarily painless--dose of history would come in mighty handy right about here. There was a big push throughout the late nineteenth century to expand the currency supply by coining silver as well as gold, with the stoutest pushers being perpetually indebted farmers and--as Gomer Pyle would surely say, "SURPRISE ! SURPRISE!" --the silver miners. The matter was temporarily settled in 1900 with the Gold Standard Act, which required that every U.S. dollar in circulation be redeemable in gold. All of the gold-hoarding attendant to the Great Depression, as well the international drain on our gold reserves spurred by European countries who had already abandoned the gold standard, led FDR to follow suit and order Americans to surrender by May 1, 1933, all their gold holdings in excess of roughly $100 in value for purchase by the government at a fixed rate of about $21 an ounce. Needless to say, this move brought a massive outcry from the ideological ancestors of today's gold-drunk Teabaggers. The following year, the Gold Reserve Act pegged the value of an ounce of gold at $35. Coming out of World War II, the Bretton Woods agreement featured a commitment by the United States to buy the gold of participating nations at $35 per ounce. In a sense, then, the new standard for international currency exchange was based not on gold, but on the dollar and a shared faith in its strength and value against gold. This faith had begun to wear fairly thin by 1971, however, as among other factors, the Vietnam War set inflation to soaring in tandem with the rapidly rising U.S. balance of payment and trade deficits. Alarmed to see the U.S. government presses running non-stop, stamping out dollars as if they were Domino's pizza coupons, several nations began to demand that their dollar holdings be redeemed in gold, placing none other than that sly ol' scamp Dick Nixon in something of the same position occupied by FDR in 1933. In response, Nixon announced that the United States was rescinding its commitment to redeem dollars in gold, a move that effectively meant that, untethered from any finite source of valuation, the international exchange rate would thenceforth "float." And so it has from that day forward, subject, of course, to the effects of attempts by individual nations or groups of nations to manipulate the value of their currency for their own economic benefit.
What stands out most prominently in this brief little historical accounting is how vulnerable the dollar's ties to gold have left the United States in times of international economic crisis. It's not hard to see legitimate reasons why anyone would like to see our government conduct itself with more discipline in the future, but even in the unlikely event that should come to pass, there is still the matter of addressing the legacy of the fiscal foolishness of the past. Unless somebody, and the OB means somebody in a hurry, finds a way to turn kudzu into gold, even if we stripped our government down past its underdrawers and put it on the Calista Flockhart diet, there is simply no way to make the gold standard workable. For example, if we figure that our current government gold reserve is about $400 billion, that number amounts to less than 3 percent of the national debt, or as one statistician put it, a mere "rounding error" in the calculation of that GI-NORMOUS sum. Beyond that, let's just say we were on the gold standard again, and as nations have certainly done in the past, one of them, maybe China, for instance, suddenly demands that its holdings in dollars be redeemed in gold. Give or take a Benjamin or two, China has about 1.15 trillion of our bucks, meaning that we would essentially have to triple our current gold reserves just to pay them off, and believe the OB, they ain't the only furriners out there holding our paper.
One of the things that's most intriguing about the government-hatin' Teabaggers' desire to put us back on the goal standard is the fact that it would undoubtedly entail the government taking possession of practically every fleck of gold to be had within our borders. Yet these same people who are hollering for every dollar to be backed by gold are the folks who would be most intent on getting hold of as much gold as they could themselves and hanging on tighter 'n Rush Limbaugh gripping a bottle of OXY. Let it suffice to say that the ruckus that FDR kicked up when he confiscated all that gold in 1933 would be a Sunday school picnic compared to what would happen among these folks if the Feds tried anything like that today. The OB can certainly see why someone who bought at $900 per ounce in 2009 is feeling pretty darn good with it hovering around $1,540 per ounce and ripe for unloading right about now. But truly puzzles him though is why so many folks, including some he knows to be extremely intelligent and rational, believe that gold represents their best guarantee of survival after all those god-awful, gothic, futuristic, planet-ravaging horror movies have been played out in real life and it comes down to just them and Qkeekheg, who is the only person left between them and starvation. Just what is it about your gold, that's going to make the wily ol' Qkeek-dude slice you off some of his precious yak jerky in exchange for it? It is the OB's considered opinion that in this particular circumstance, you'd have been a lot better off to have hoarded Budweiser instead.
If there is relevance in this latter day gold rush to the contemporary political scene, it might well be in the question it poses for those who would really like to see the Republicans reclaim the White House in 2012, namely, "How in the hell do you propose to retain the support of these Goldfinger-wannabe Teabaggers without pledging yourself to support something whose very mention prompts an irrepressible snicker from anyone to the left of people way to the right of Glenn Beck? It is a pity for the Repubs, in a way, for even with their declared and undeclared unelectables taking potshots at what right now seems to be an exceedingly short list of people who stand at least a ghost of a chance, ol 'Barry O's becoming more vulnerable by the day as his post-Osama liquidation cred melts away in the face of new figures suggesting speculation that recovery could well be underway in the employment and housing sectors might have been just a tad premature.
Ol' Oby isn't getting a lot of help from his
supporting cast right now either, as it has become abundantly clear that
"wiener" problems are not exclusively the province of the GOP. We refer
here to liberal New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, who allegedly tweeted a
photo of his noticeably bulging boxers to a female follower. Weiner has finally 'fessed up, after maintaining that he and the lady
in question had both been victimized by a hacker and refusing to deny/confirm whether the skivvies in question (and presumably the contents
thereof) were actually his.
(Ripped off from Gawker.com, who doubtless ripped it off somewhere else)
From where the OB sits, the congressman's best hope of terminating this Weiner roast before someone ultimately comes up with more " s 'mores" on him would be to call himself another humongous press conference, announce that he's switching parties, and explain to the gold-drunk Teabaggers, that he was merely showcasing his own extremely clever strategy for protecting his doomsday investment portfolio by storing both his gold and his family jewels in the same convenient package.
