by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner
Published on the Doomstead Diner on 11 February 2016
Discuss this Rant at the Economics Table inside the Diner.
…Besides the major problem of WTF you do when the lights go out and/or the 4G network goes out on your cell phone are all those little transactions done each day, like for instance your kid buying a Hershey bar at the convenience store on the bike ride to school. Is every kid going to have her own plastic and cell phone to do these transactions also? Are you going to use plastic to buy some breathmints or condoms on the way to the local cathouse? Are you going to pay the hooker with plastic so your wife can see the charge on the bill? That’s an even bigger problem for the Banksters and Politicians who are promoting this idea than the average J6P too.
What would Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) do when Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) asks him to SHOW ME THE MONEY! ? Is Rod really going to believe Jerry has the money when he holds his smart phone up to him with a 1 and lots of zeros behind it on the new super OLED touchscreen?
Transcript:
Greetings Doomfans, and welcome to another edition of the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant, here on the Doomstead Diner.
In last weeks edition of the Daily Rant, I covered the latest in insane plans by TPTB to resolve ongoing economic collapse through such novel inventions as negative interest rates and eliminating cash from the monetary system in favor of an all electronic digibit currency. Before I further rant on this topic, I want no complaints that my Daily Rants come out weekly, not daily. lol. They may be weekly for you, but they are daily for me because to put together one of these shows I gotta script it, record it, audio edit it, select pics for a slide show and then combine the whole bizness together in a Jambalaya of Doom to drop on Diner YouTube. The only time these rants were even close to daily on a publication level was back in the Jurassic period when I was sparring with Jimbo Quinn on The Burning Platform with all text and some googled pics to spruce up the layout, and even then they only came out every other day or so. The Frostbite Falls Weekly Rant just doesn’t have the same ring to it, and besides I keep the name for nostalgic purposes. lol.
OK, disclaimer done, let’s get further into the meat of this topic, the wet dream of banksters, a Cashless society. I covered numerous of the problems with this idea in Part 1, and here in part 2 we’re going to see if there is anything J6P can do to combat this problem? Before we do that though, there are a few issues I did not cover, so I wanna clean up on this to be thorough.
Besides the major problem of WTF you do when the lights go out and/or the 4G network goes out on your cell phone are all those little transactions done each day, like for instance your kid buying a Hershey bar at the convenience store on the bike ride to school. Is every kid going to have her own plastic and cell phone to do these transactions also? Are you going to use plastic to buy some breathmints or condoms on the way to the local cathouse? Are you going to pay the hooker with plastic so your wife can see the charge on the bill? That’s an even bigger problem for the Banksters and Politicians who are promoting this idea than the average J6P too.
What would Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) do when Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) asks him to SHOW ME THE MONEY! ? Is Rod really going to believe Jerry has the money when he holds his smart phone up to him with a 1 and lots of zeros behind it on the new super OLED touchscreen?
For all these reasons and more, complete removal of cash from the economy seems unlikely, but the more likely scenario is to try to make all transactions over a certain threshhold limit illegal to do in cash. They’re already trying this stunt in Krautland, putting a €5000 cap on cash transactions and making the max size cash note €500. The largest size denomination of FSoA FRNs is already only $100, which is why drug dealers need suitcases full of the toilet paper to do a deal just fo a few lousy kilos of coke. The fact they do such transactions quite regularly demonstrates that just providing small bills doesn’t do a whole lot to stop illegal trade in anything.
For the average J6P, these days your local bank makes it quite difficult to withdraw cash over around $1000 or so on a given day, and debit cards usually have a limit on them of around $500 a day here in normal circumstances. Over in Greece when Syriza was in the midst of its abortive attempt to bluff the Troika into cutting them some slack, I believe they dropped the daily limit there to around €60, which isn’t even enough to pay most people’s rent, much less also buy food.
So even without the complete elimination of cash, the average J6P is generally at the mercy of the Banksters unless you are very assiduous about it, withdrawing only a few $100 in cash at a time each week and then storing this cash in the Bank of Sealy. Forget trying to withdraw $10K in a banking crisis, even in the good times they’re going to make you wait minimum 3 days for this and also try to convince you to take a Cashier’s Check instead.
As you can see, your money is not really your money, and it never was. Your money is really the property of the Banksters who printed it, they just rent it to you and they can raise the rent on it anytime they like if they make some bad bets in the casino and need to cover them so they don’t get kneecapped by Guido or so the KGB doesn’t show up at their Penthouse to help them off the balcony for a Flying Bankster lesson. lol.
So, you can’t really safely keep your savings in the bank, which leads a lot of Gold Bugs to drop their savings into Amerikan Eagles, Hoser Maple Leafs and South African Kruggerands as their store of wealth, backed up by some Junk Silver coins for small transactions. Problem with this methodology of course is if they’re going to make cash transactions illegal, they’re also going to make transactions done with PMs illegal. That’s just substituting one form of cash for another. You’re not going to be able to go into Walmart with a Kruggerand and buy a basket of groceries with it. You’re also not going to be able to go over to the coin dealer to exchange it for cash because…there is no cash! Or at least not much besides some chump change. In fact also these days coin dealers are required like all financial institutions including banks and casinos (one in the same thing really) to report all transactions over $10,000. This number could easily be lowered of course.
From Gold Seek on the The Continuing Demonization of Cash
Financial institutions, which includes coin dealers, jewelers, and casinos, are required to report cash transactions above $10,000 as well as any activity the government might deem “suspicious.” Cash becomes such a hassle that it is almost radioactive, and many businesses would rather not deal with the burden. Using cash to buy a house is becoming impossible and it is probably only a matter of time before purchasing a car with cash will become incredibly difficult also.
So it seems like you are running out of options to save outside the Bankstering system and still stay inside the Law of the Day, as handed down on Stone Tablets from Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon and Nathan Rothschild. This is pretty hard to circumvent with large quantities of money, but if you are a typical J6P who these days has no more than 2 or 3 months of savings in the bank to tide him over a crisis like his car needs a new tranny or his son broke his arm skateboarding, there are ways to put away savings that can’t be touched.
Let’s say your monthly budget is $2000, $1000 for rent, $200 for food, $800 for everything else. You actually take home after taxes though around $2200. So you could be saving $200/mo every month you are in surplus.
If you put this $200 in the bank and it is getting -1% interest, at the end of the year you’re going to have $198 (not compounded). That’s not a huge loss, but it’s still a loss of course.
If instead of putting it in the bank though, you take that $200 and buy $200 worth of long lasting foods, by the end of the year you have $2400 in food savings. This will actually accrue in value, since by the end of the year the bag of rice you bought for $20 in January will likely go up in price and cost $25.
So now, in any given month an emergency occurs, you have $200 extra to spend on that emergency, because instead of buying food that month, you eat your stored food. Together with your normal $200 savings, you have $400 to put toward an emergency like buying a new tire for your car after a blowout, etc without having to start running up your credit card.
What do you do if that emergency bill is >$400, say it is a toothache and the Dentista wants $1200 to relieve your pain and fix the tooth? In this case, you pay the Marathon Man $400 up front, and eat your saved food with your now pain free tooth for 3 months while you pay him off. Most Dentistas no matter how sadistic will give you payment plans for their services. lol.
Another option assuming there is still at least some cash floating around for small transactions would be to sell a month’s worth of your saved food to a friend or relative, so now instead of $400 for that month extra you now have $600. In a real pinch, you could use a credit card to pay the immediate bill, then eat your saved food for 6 months until you get the bill paid off.
Obviously this has limitations, since generally speaking you can only save upwards of 2 years worth of food, so in this example that is a maximum of $4800 in savings, which is not a lot but way more than 50% of the current population has in the bank!
You can add to this with other types of savings, gasoline for your car for instance. If you have a couple of 55 gallon drums, that’s $110 in savings @ $2/gallon. Now when the emergency comes you don’t buy gas that month and use your saved gas to run the SUV so you can still make it to work.
For saving larger amounts of money you are in something of a pickle though, since as mentioned the PMs paradigm doesn’t work too well if Da Goobermint either makes transactions in PMs illegal and/or records those transactions and drops a 10% tax on them. Then you are better off taking the 1% hit in the bank account from the negative interest rate. Land doesn’t make too much sense other than the land you actually live on, since you’ll have property taxes to pay each year that are also probably higher than the 1% negative interest rate on your savings account.
The bottom line on all of this is that the ability to save large amounts of money is in the process of disappearing, and that only makes sense really, since the resources that money buys are also disappearing. Like the Hunter-Gatherers of old, we are going to have to become accustomed to maybe having enough savings of the basics to carry through a lean year or two at best, and to living a pay as you go lifestyle.
For the impoverished population of the world which makes up the vast majority of Homo Saps, this is not a big adjustment to make, they already live this way. It will be a much bigger adjustment for upper middle class, wealthy and filthy rich people with large sums of money currently in the bank, soon to either be taxed out from under them or used to bail in suffering banksters.
And that’s all the doom, this time until next time, here on the doomstead diner.