Fall Down Friday – Cliff Diving Special

I just got my new Mayan calendar delivered and it's good through 7,024.  Turns out when you buy 5,000 years, you get 12 years free and that explains the confusion with the old calendar.  And now the bad news – despite my emphatic call for a revolution yesterday – the Republicans are still in charge of Congress and, once again, they have blown it completely in our hour of crisis and thrown the economy into turmoil.  

Amazingly, stunningly, unbelievably, a supposed veteran politician like John Boehner can't even do something as simple as count the votes in his own base before he attempts to pull a power play and now that his own party has rejected his idiotic grandstanding "Plan B" – the markets have been thrown into turmoil, dropping as much as 2% last night and still down 1.25% in the Futures (7am).  The only good news is Boehner may have just cost himself the speakership for 2013 but the bad news there is there are much stupider people vying to replace him.

Is Paul Ryan stupid enough to be the next Speaker of the House?  He's certainly psychotic enough – he proved that during his campaign last year.  He has demonstrated a willingness to lie, to make up data, to ignore facts, to stick to ridiculous positions no matter how untennable.  He has proven that he cares nothing for the poor, the young, the elderly or the sick and that he is willing to throw them all under the bus to kowtow to his rich constituents – everything the Republicans look for in a leader.  He's also been soundly rejected by the American people as a potential leader – who better to lead the GOP in their last 2 years in power?  

With the chance of making a Fiscal Cliff deal in time to avoid the event slipping away (Congress celebrated their complete failure yesterday by taking a week off), we now have to contemplate how much damage will actually be done when it all hits the fan on January 1st.  

As you can see from the chart below, the net of all the tax increases and spending cuts from the Fiscal Cliff can knock 3.5% off the GDP – pushing the US back into Recession but it's difficult to say how much it will impact overall…

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