Wednesday, November 7, 2012

The Party of War Gets Monkey Hammered

Full disclosure: Since I can't vote, I make bets instead.  I lost a lot of money betting against the incumbent last night, because historically, the incumbent loses U.S. elections in a bad economy.  Not so last night.  Meanwhile, I told my American wife she needs to write in Ron Paul or I am moving back to Canada.  So she voted for Obama.  Women...

Here is why in my non-political view I lost money last night or otherwise why the Republican Party just threw away what should have been a cake walk election.

First the economy.  We can either assume that the economy became a secondary issue last night or the electorate looked at two bad plans and picked the lesser of two ludicrously hopeless strategies.  Either way, it was finally a major repudiation of the 30+ year Republican Supply Side Voodoo Economic agenda.  Game over man.  Which, I have to admit is a step in the right direction.

Secondly demographics.  The Republican Party has become the party of old angry people who want to maintain the status quo at all costs.  The problem with that strategy is that unfortunately old people have a bad habit of dying.  Young people lean Democratic by a 2:1 margin.  People over 60 lean Republican by a 2:1 margin.  Therefore, the Republican Party is the party of ossification.  Not a good long-term strategy.  

The Party of War
Third and most importantly, tacitly last night was a repudiation of unlimited military adventurism.  Granted Obama has not fully wound down Iraq and has only barely started winding down Afghanistan, however, clearly there is a war fatigue that has set in with the U.S. electorate.  The key point is that over the last decade it was older people who were the major proponents of going to war and younger people who were the ones going to war.  Therefore, again the nascent trend of the far right towards demographic irrelevance, does not bode well for the U.S. Military Industrial Complex.

Outsourcerer in Chief
Lastly, the issue that should have been the main factor in the election, barely even registered i.e. outsourcing. It's staggering at this juncture given the abysmal jobs picture that the Republicans would run a multi-millionaire Plutocrat who made his money in vulture capitalism, as their candidate, and still garner a sizable chunk of the vote.  Clearly, most people have yet to make that inevitable connection.  

The Trillion Dollar Re-Election
The real reason Obama got re-elected has been totally overlooked by the media circus clowns.  Historically the U.S. Fed has refrained from policy action in the six months leading up to a U.S. Presidential election, for obvious reasons.  However, in the Idiocracy, the obvious is not obvious and all morality has been inverted.   So when Bernanke implemented "QE Eternity", the largest, unlimited money printing program in world history this past September, two months before the election, he sealed Romney's fate.  Obviously it wasn't a great campaign strategy on Romney's part to announce a week earlier in September that, if elected, he was going to fire Bernanke.  The "QE Eternity" program gave a bid to all risk assets from the day it was announced all the way through the election, without which levitation, Obama's poll ratings would have been collapsing like a cheap tent.  Time will tell how long the post-election euphoria and the QE-sponsored levitation act will last this time around.  One thing we know for sure, they are 100% correlated.