Seemed Like a Good Time

to haul this one from 2008 out of the archives...

Bush Administration Unveils The Large Badloan Collider

Your mother may have warned you against throwing good money after bad, but your mother never met the Bush Administration’s Large Badloan Collider.

Based on a long-forgotten formula found doodled into the margins of Arthur Laffer’s minor, 1971 work “Money and Tits”, the “Special Theory of Illiquid Relativity” (STIR) posits the provocative idea that the high-speed collision of bad paper and taxpayer money will create conditions very similar to the early “Big Con” state of Primordial Reaganism, when the political universe was a hot plasma of ferociously ridiculous ideology and had not yet cooled and congealed into Tom DeLay, Iran/Contra, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, Jerry Falwell, Tim McVeigh, the Plame scandal, Terri Schiavo, Katrina, Iraq, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, the US Attorney scandal, the elimination of habeas corpus, or any of the other constellations of epic Republican failures that have marked the last 20 years.

The world’s previous largest Surplus Smasher -- the so-called “S&L Circular Masturbatory Accelerator” – used the same basic elements (taxpayer cash fired into deregulated and looted institutions) to create an almost perfect cloud of supercharged accountability-avoidance matter around the GOP. But even that powerful tool of advanced 20th century fiscal irresponsibility was not up to the challenges of 21st century, global Disaster Capitalism.

The problem with measuring the true size and shape of the current Monetary Universe has always been observing the effects of capitalism’s “dark matter” (or, in as it is known in the technical argot of subprime fiscalists, “that unholy shit-load of bad mortgages”). So when building models of the Universe, fiscalists are inevitably stymied by the fact that, buried deep inside the nucleus of seemingly identical “securitized investment vehicles”, you may find the profitable mortgage on a mall in Peoria arbitrarily bound at the subatomic level to ridiculously risky 3nd mortgages on children’s tree houses in Metarie, Louisiana and trailer parks in Tornado Alley.

And so the Large Badloan Collider was constructed.

In particle economics, a “badloan” is a set of reckless decisions held together by deregulation and fraud, similar to how crack houses are held together by the presence of drugs and the absence law enforcement.

Badloans have excited states known as “financial markets”, so while existing in one state at rest (i.e. sack of worthless paper) they also simultaneously have several excited states, such as “your pensions”, “CEO bonuses” and the “Entire economy of Iceland”.

In other phases, badloans may disappear altogether. For example, under very high regulatory pressure, the theory of Dirty Fucking Liberal Fiduciary Dynamics predicts that a property known as “prudence” can emerge from a previously recessive state. Institutional “prudence” would then prevent dupes and hucksters from interacting with the core of the financial system in sufficient quantities to form enough badloans to crash the system.

Of course, while there has been some experimental confirmation of the existence of “prudence” within the Fiscal Universe, most of the Supply-Side fiscalists who now dominate the field dismiss it as “crazy Socialist delusion”, favoring instead the construction of the Large Badloan Collider.

In principle, the Collider’s operations are quite simple: a series of confiscatory measures would extract thousands and thousands of dollars from every man, woman and child in the United States. These dollars would then be accelerated through a tube of highly refined BOHICA,

230 miles in diameter.

Using a series of increasingly hysterical and absurd statements by White House officials, the dollars are gradually accelerated to very nearly the theoretical upper limit at which bullshit can fly -- the so-called “Speed of Lie” – at which point they will be slammed into the global financial system.

“In addition to stabilizing the markets with this massive cash/anti-cash implosion,” newly-appointed Supreme Overlord of the Department of Every-Dime-You-Will-Ever-Earn Paulson said today, “one of the more promising side-effects of this endeavor is that, under the enormous energies unleashed by the collision, newer and even more exotic financial instruments than we have ever seen before may spontaneously pop into existence. For example, it is possible that derivative instruments from the 22nd dimension may materialize for several seconds which could yield a return on investment of up to 1,000,000%!"

Of course, the tolerances are very exacting -- variances of as little as 1/100th of a picogreenspan could ruin the entire experiment and, potentially, destroy the entire space/cash continuum and kill every living thing in existence -- but the Bush Administration believes its absolutely fucking exemplary record of precision in both anticipating and coping with catastrophes over the last seven years makes risking a trillion dollars of other people’s money worth the gamble.

Overlord Paulson also held out hope that the Collider may also finally isolate the elusive “Higgs Teflon”; a material that theory predicts would be able to efficiently convert gross incompetence, criminal mismanagement and treason into pure electoral popularity.

Some creaks and rust spots, but I must say it still holds up pretty well.