(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20231012-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
A Note to Readers
A few items this week following the U.S. Drought Monitor map.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation forecast for the coming California winter is that it will be wet.
Once again demonstrating the California grows what the nation eats, the annual sales from two counties of the states is in the billions of dollars. If you want almonds or most any crop, it likely was grown in California.
As the parasites attempting to buy Solano County continue their thuggery, they lost another battle this week as the city council of Rio Vista rejected the company’s attempt to corrupt the city’s law firm.
An interesting new study shows that “Rivers may not recover from drought for years.”
The final item before this week’s Feature is, “Navigating the Hope (and Hype) around Solar Canals.”
And the Feature this week takes on the question of the national debt, that most pundits, journalists and political leaders mouth off about a lot, but have no idea of what is important.
The article is by my colleague Robert Ingraham: “Debt or Development?”
Here is an excerpt from the article:
The glaring difficulty in approaching the related topics of the Federal Budget and the “debt ceiling” is that almost none of the political and financial pundits who weigh in on this discussion—on either the “right” and “left”—have any idea of what they are talking about. This ignorance pervades even some of Donald Trump’s biggest boosters, such as Steve Bannon and the Hillsdale College crowd. Their axioms are wrong. Their premises are wrong. And their prescriptions are wrong. Their problem is that they are trapped within the belief-structure of oligarchical Anglo-Dutch finance. For Hillsdale, the problem is obvious. Their collective worship of the British-Austrian school of Hayek and Von Mises disqualifies them from any mastery of the American System of Economics. For others, it might prove useful to investigate whether these “patriots” accumulated their fortunes in the pirate realms of hedge funds, financial speculation, and shadow banking. Certainly, the über-wealthy Republican and Democratic donor classes are dominated by financial sharks.
Today, scare headlines shriek: “U.S. government debt is now $34.1 trillion and will grow to $45 trillion by 2033”; “the debt is now 121 percent of national GDP”; “in 2023 the Federal budget deficit hit $1.5 trillion and is expected to increase to $2.7 trillion by 2033”; “annual interest payments on U.S. Government debt is now $644 billion, up 30 percent from last year.” The oligarchy is counting on these staggering dollar amounts to panic the majority of Americans into supporting policy prescriptions written by the oligarchy itself.
