The Wonder Springs Chronicle

The Growth Illusion: Gifts That Keep on Taking

15 December 2010

Volume 12, Issue 49

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On Monday in “The World’s Coming Grace Infusion” we wrote about a new order that is going to change the way the world works. In this current rendition it was called by its founder, “The Kingdom of God.” Even though this Kingdom is described some sixty-seven times in the New Testament, most of them by Jesus himself, I would say that most regular church attenders have never heard a sermon or a teaching of this Kingdom, except in some context of some future “pie in the sky in the sweet by and by.”

The Biblical context however makes it clear, that the Kingdom of God began in this current form with the finished work, through the sacrifice, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. When from the cross he uttered the words, “It is finished” he meant that all the preliminary work for the establishment of this Kingdom had been accomplished. All that was left to fulfill this reality would take place through the fullness of time.

It could be said that the rise of western culture as the dominate economic and political force in the world was just the indicative, of that Kingdom of God reality. In that in powering energetic light of the Reformation, we see that last major highly visible intervention of the Kingdom in the affairs of people to redux the world into a new model of human independence, freedom and accountability.

Today culture is being molded for another such occurrence, for we truly believe in our hearts that all gifts we now enjoy are just the applied genius of human enlightenment, activism, hard work, political and evolutionary processes for the ascendence of the human community.

Put in the context of what we consider a Biblical myth of ancient Babylon, we are about to succeed where they failed, simply because we have created a mechanism of continual growth that need not be tied to any of the natural laws that have limited other human utopian dreams. We are too proud of our successes, not because they are so grand, but rather they have just engineered Kingdom of God resources to serve our selfish desires. Until recently there has been enough wealth creation within God’s Kingdom to allow us to believe our own press and biased spin.

This idea of unlimited economic growth was a seed planted in the Bretton Woods agreement after World War II. The United States and the dollar, loosely tied to a golden reserve, became the financial liquidity for economic growth around the world. This model is consistent with the natural model that the dollar was the irrigating funds that help national economies grow.

Probably it was when President Nixon closed the gold window August 15, 1972, when the natural basis of economic growth severed from the real world. To continue the Great Society enacted during the 1960s and the continuing need to fund the war efforts in Vietnam, there just wasn’t enough real money to go around, and definitely not enough gold back dollars to finance a world of growing economies and fight a broader Cold War.

By the time that Alan Greenspan took over the FED under President Reagan some seventeen years later, the need for dollars to fund traditional investments and wealth production were beginning to suffer. The stagnation and inflation under President Carter had been controlled to reasonable levels, but the American public and government were reaching their historic debt limits, even though the Reagan tax cuts were beginning to increase Federal revenues.

Shortly thereafter there were created the notion of mortgage backed securities in which the theoretical risk could be sheltered and devalued and everyone could get a cut of the action. Because of these securities, it was then well understood that individual real estate values would continue to exceed inflation forever.

Once that leverage was established and sold to the broader world, we saw similar real estate markets created around the planet. Then it was only a matter of time until these continually increasing property values could be leveraged by consumers to fund a lifestyle they tended to believe they deserved, because all other opportunities of wealth creation had become too complex or to expensive for them to partake.

This model is still being pushed as the way out of this continuing lack of wealth creation. “Once housing prices again start to grow, then the economy will again be on sound footing,” were words I heard earlier this week. What is never answered however, is who is going to be able to buy these homes if they don’t make enough money to qualify for a home loan?

Even though the housing market seems to be in a deflationary mode, the cost of materials and labor to feed a building renaissance is still at prior inflated prices. Where are free markets when the government attempts to make everyone a winner and nobody is supposed to lose. I think I should throw in, everyone gets a medal just for trying.

Of course the medal sandwich is great, but the certificate that came with it, just doesn’t seem to have the same market value it had just a few years ago.

It seems as if the Federal Government will maintain the Bush era tax cuts for another two years. Combined with the recent Debt Commission Report, those years should lead to the most significant tax overhaul since the Income Tax was established almost a century ago.

That would be the first step necessary for the United States to begin to deal with the Growth Illusion. I would personally favor a broad based flat tax with no exclusions or tax credits for anything. That would be the chief step we could take to eliminate the gifts that keep on taking.

My favorite example of that taking gift is the ethanol subsidy that has been a small part of our government bailouts since 1978. “Shucky Darn and slop the chickens!” At least for another year the $6 billion subsidy for ethanol production will be able to make its chicken feed waste, a positive, thereby inferring that American ethanol is a net energy supplier.

In a conversation I had last week, the topic came up, that in barrel of oil terms, we got back 101 barrels of oil for every 100 barrels we invested. I haven’t verified those numbers, but I do know that some of those positive energetics come from residual animal feed credits.

On “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on Monday, Fox Business reporter Chris Cotter gave us some additional benefits of this gift that keeps on taking. Out of this bill 420 jobs will be created which comes out to about $14 million per job, with a cost of ethanol of $10 per gallon in simple math. If you take away the ethanol subsidy about 1200 jobs will be lost, but the price of corn could drop from the current $5.21 to $3.84.

My biggest complaint however is what ethanol does to my fuel economy. American corn based ethanol is not anywhere near a marketable replacement for any fossil, or even other biofuel. It costs about ten percent in mileage. So instead of my old Saturn getting 40 MPG on the highway it used to get with real gasoline it now gets 36. Furthermore someplace in all the increasing fixed market gasoline prices is a $0.45 per gallon ethanol subsidy.

There is a Native American proverb that states: People can only see — what they are willing to find.

It is amazing that ethanol subsidies has been the almost universal slice of excessive government spending singled out by the people, in the tax package now making its way through the American Congress. Considering the proverb, it is truly astonishing that Federal legislators were able to find a compromise piece of tax legislation, once they were finally forced to look for it.

That proverbial context allows people around the world to begin to make changes necessary to continue human civilization. In that reality, as countries continue to struggle with massive debt based upon this global model, that states that finance and economics can be divorced from the real world, solutions to our massive problems will be found and applied.

The difficulty is that most of the American and world leaders are still looking backwards to things that previously worked. Our future will not be found within our totally humanistic dreams. An even better example of looking backwards than ethanol, was late Tuesday’s introduction by the Senate of an Omnibus government spending bill.

My first reaction was to think that the American form of the English language cannot truly express in its most pejorative terms the dull-witted arrogance of current Senate leadership. Then I realized that it was truly possible — only it takes 1924 pages. In the process it spends $1.1 trillion, or as the headline says $575.13 million per page.

Keeping in the tradition of the Native American proverb, this perversion of the will of the American people’s voice expressed in an election, just a little more than a month ago, there is a possibility the people may find it is time to even revisit the progressive passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

There is a distinct difference between being childlike and childish. Likewise there is a difference between simple solutions and the simplistic. The simplistic is childish because it does not demand the intellectual depth that ties it to the real universe.

Virtually all of today’s media provides only childish-simplistic ideas; to fix a complex world essentially created from a planet in which we deny the reality of entropy. I get delivered to my email inbox each morning access to masses of commentary that state unessential themes, from people who make a good living promoting nothing but the notoriously redundant.

When I see them on television, that noise continues. “If you look on my website, suchacooldude.com you will find my short article that changes the world without even trying. Be sure to get my latest book and follow me on Facebook, and check out my Tweets!”

However if you are willing to look beyond what is being said by the show hosts, the commentators, the pundits, and the contributors — on the Internet you would find a pioneer universe of people who can think beyond sound bites, video clips, show segments, and commercial interruptions trying to sell you junk you don’t need, many times fraudulently hyping nonexistent benefits.

“If you order in the next fifteen minutes we will send you two, pieces of junk for the price of one, just pay extra processing.” (Which just so happens to exceed the junk’s cost of production.)

See how easy it is to lose the potential of something that might prove worthwhile in all the noise. The true solutions will come through individuals willing to turn off the TV and begin to make a difference in the real world. Those simple solutions however cannot be expressed in less than 500 words written for someone in middle school.

This all points to the reality that our world is falling apart because it is based upon taking and the receiving of stuff, rather than distinctly human attributes, both the good and the bad. The reality of those human attributes is what the Kingdom of God is all about. That means the warts, wrinkles, short comings and sin, existing simultaneously with beauty, love, and purpose.

We are in the midst of western Christianity’s Advent season. This is a time where Christian’s historically looked forward to the birth of Christ. This year we see, especially in the United States, a continuing “war on Christmas.” If this war succeeds, retailers only profitable season, will disappear. So this war is really not so much a war, but rather an attempt by a few to justify their life, separate from formal religious traditions, to the benefit of their own personal mental illness.

Missing from the historical symbolism of the Christmas side of the equation, is the birth of not only the baby Jesus, but also the simple birth of an event of a Biblical paradigm of the Kingdom of God.

What would happen if even a few Christians this Advent season would begin to look for evidence of that Kingdom, perhaps they will find something that will begin to change the world in ways we thing currently impossible?

Using the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Monday’s Cult Football posting “The World’s Coming Grace Infusion” the Kingdom of God forces us to move beyond the human based Christian Religion, and all religions for that matter, to establish our life in a world ruled by Costly Grace rather than cheap grace. In that move of seeking what we hope to see, then and only, then can we find the true gifts of Christianity, but also eternal blessings of common human life.

Attempting to create a word picture for our more visual lifestyle: In the Kingdom of God success is measured as eternal wealth. At various times and places, consistent with the will of the King, some of that wealth can be transformed into money and other transient material blessings. However those temporal blessings can’t be transferred the other way. Once you can look at the world from that Kingdom perspective, it will be amazing the opportunities for growth and fulfillment that will find you.