Saturday, May 14, 2016

America’s Going out of Business Sale

There’s a furniture company in Southern Maine called “Chapter 11 Furniture.” The name and the entire concept of the company is to invoke the feeling of a fire sale.

They have 4 or 5 stores that they only sign short leases on, so at any given time they can advertise, “Chapter 11 Furniture is losing its lease in (enter town or street name here) and EVERYTHING MUST GO!”

It’s a brilliant tactic for a company who will probably never resort to its name because it understands how to build from American greed at its very core. Someone is going out of business or declaring bankruptcy? It’s a free for all!

That’s the American mentality surrounding bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is there to help people in severe financial situations put their debt behind them and move on. It’s also a way for shysters to get a bunch of free stuff, make a bunch of money and work the system.

Donald Trump qualifies as the second type; working the system — and openly admitting it — 4 times now. Trump’s idea to “fix America” has taken a turn toward this mentality and the very thought of it is frightening,

The New York Times reported that in an interview, Donald Trump talked about how he would approach the national debt.

Thinking like a failed businessman, he insisted we should simply go to our creditors and ask them to take less.

Yes, in one idiotic statement, Donald Trump exposed just how little he knows about the economy or how the debt works.


As The Times points out, there is no credible evidence suggesting that our debtors would reduce we owe them by a nickel.

Trump thinks he’s dealing in people with real estate they can’t move selling bad debt for more bad debt until one day so much of the debt is paper — bad paper — that there’s nothing left to do but fail.

Sound familiar? It should; it’s what Wall Street and the Dubya administration did to us in 2008.

Let’s assume for a moment that our creditors would take less. The bulk of the national debt is money we owe to ourselves.

Is Trump going to ask the Social Security trust fund to take pennies on the dollar because we had a couple of wars that were too expensive and some handouts to fix the mess?

How much less should those people who won’t be able to retire when the fund is wiped out take? They’ve been putting 6.2 percent of their paycheck into that fund since they started working.

How much less should they settle for?

As for our other creditors, we’re not defaulting on rented furniture. We owe other countries a great deal of money, plus interest, that they provided to us in cash.

We use that money to fund the government. If creditors start seeing those kinds of tactics we’ll have our credit rating lowered and lose credibility as a country.

There’s also a good chance the dollar would be removed as the world standard currency. Ask Donald Trump what he’ll do when we can’t just print more money.

The bottom line is, Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. The national debt is one of the most misunderstood components of the federal government.

For someone to seek the office that holds much influence over how that debt shrinks or grows without understanding it is preposterous, but then again — we are talking about Donald Trump.

Author Charles Topher is a lifetime lefty liberal from Lowell who has managed to migrate (legally) to the backwoods of Maine. He writes from a 1 acre progressive bubble where Nobama stickers on pickemup truck bumpers are common.