A 28-year regression in four and steady as she goes.

We are forty-two years into our own experiment in funny money. During that time, even according to comically rosy government statistics, the median male full-time income has stagnated. Median household “real” income has fallen seven percent since 2009, and is now back at a level first reached in 1988.

Had Obama’s SOTU speech not been an exercise in self justification and political posturing but instead been a confession that serious problems exist with the government's approach (long-term and short-term) to the economy, who would have criticized him? But we have a lightweight in the White House, at the very best, with no sense of history and, certainly, no sense of urgency about warning lights blazing at every quarter.

Buster Keaton once did a hilarious sketch of trying to walk down the street with gale force winds forcing him to bend low to the ground and struggle to gain even a foot's progress. All with an utterly deadpan expression. At least, Keaton was aware of the headwind, which the current crew of wreckers is not. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, they are acutely aware of the headwinds but rejoice in their policies that create them.

People intend the natural consequences of their acts.

I understand that politics in the best of times is more about log rolling and back scratching than it is about advancing the common good. However, even the most avaricious, short-sighted seat warmer would at some point have to recognize that the earth has begun to tremble and chunks of plaster are falling from the ceiling.

Is there anything that should cause one concern in the following? The dollar of 1913 has lost 95% of its value and the 100-year period in which that happened is exactly the life span of the Federal Reserve system.

Think about that and the fact that the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee were tasked to, among other things, "promote . . . stable prices . . . ." So we see that the Federal Reserve is not just a teeny bit short of its mark but, rather, that it has presided over a monumental degradation of our currency. Yet, today, the financial and political world waits with baited breath for the latest pronouncement from this useless institution, which even now massively increases the money supply, and lately with but timid reductions in quantity. This is a guarantee of Weimar in our future. But is the central bank in any danger? Are "entitlements," for that matter?

The political Establishment's answers to the above question are, respectively, "nope," "nunh uh," and "no way." So we will continue to rely on the Federal Reserve to play an integral role in our Nation's affairs.

Complete failure. Total reliance.

Given the elites' persistence in destructive and ineffective policies in the face of the large quantity of cautionary data flooding in, it is impossible to believe other than that the course of action imposed on us is willfully and consciously designed to create a crisis. Or it represents a horrific level of moral indifference and political negligence. But it's too late in the day to give much credence to the latter, not with the stink of communism on our man and his closest adviser.

The extreme, besotted left can't have it both ways. It can't say that Obama, the Harvard grad and Honolulu guru, our Nation's Gift from the Land of Lincoln, is possessed of a great love of this land and is touched by genius itself yet can't possibly read the warning signs. There isn't any fair reading of the signs that would allow one to say other than that the the union is in great peril.

Paul Fussell described the English summer on the very eve of WWI as idyllic, warm and dry and with splendid sunsets. In short order England would see the loss of hundreds of thousands of its best men and the devastation of its economy. These are those days here. Now.

Yes, it's deceptive. But things can seem normal until, suddenly, they no longer are.

That nothing Obama proposes addresses major problems can only be a deliberate choice on his part. Without question it's an absurd thought . . . but then everything about this man with his forged "birth certificate" and nonexistent paper trail -- and his constitutional disqualification for the office of president -- is absurd.

"When the Earth Stops Revolving Around the Dollar." By Nathan Lewis, The Daily Reckoning, 1/27/14.

Correction (1/29/14): Thanks to a commenter on my own site, I've corrected "The dollar of 1913 has lost 95% of its value and the 100-year period in which that happened is exactly the life span of the Federal Reserve system." to read as above.