Bill Gross, PIMCO’s storied bond manager, recently began shorting U.S. government paper in the firm’s $236 billion Total Return Fund, because he believes the Treasury “will default on its debt; not in conventional ways… but [via] inflation, currency devaluation and low to negative real interest rates.”  Like a magisterial tuning fork picking up the resonance of a watchtower’s clanging tocsin, Standard & Poor’s reflexively echoed Bill’s dire vaticination by downgrading the credit outlook for the United States to negative, observing that “More than two years after the beginning of the recent crisis, U.S. policymakers have still not agreed on how to reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures.”   Fortunately, for those investors without the bravado or wherewithal to sell short, there remains a formula to alchemize Uncle Sam’s monetary plight into some manner of personal remuneration: namely, the Barbell Strategy.

Fixed income experts would advise you, in applying this tactic, to build a portfolio of bonds clustered around two disparate nodes; of short and long duration (for simplicity, think maturity).  The bonds farther out on the yield curve will providesome income, while the cash equivalents afford flexibility to invest when rates do spike.  The middle, it goes without saying, is to be left untouched.

The barbell strategy is also being employed by Republicans in their effort to reduce the budget deficit as well as the overall level of federal indebtedness.  The plan proffered by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) relies on killing off children and the elderly as the means to reducing those pesky government entitlement programs.  Medicare will be refashioned as a voucher program whereby procedure- and claims-denying private insurance companies (that have, not surprisingly, donated $672,203 to Ryan’s campaigns) become subsidized by your tax dollars.  Huge cuts are proposed for K-12 education, low-income housing, and food stamps, along with AIDS testing, treatment and prevention.  Six million homebound seniors will be deprived of meals while the Head Start program will all but vanish.  Large chunks of Medicaid will be fobbed off to states where Republican governors can ply a more tailored form of euthanasia.  Mississippi’s Hayley Barbour:

If they would give us a block grant, we would be willing to limit the amount of our Medicaid payments from the federal government because, if we had total flexibility to run the program, we would save a lot of money.

Yeah, by letting a lot of folks die.  And other, corroboratory efforts are under way at the state level as well.  Gov. Paul LePage (R-ME) announced a 63-point plan to cut environmental regulations, highlighted by suspending a law meant to monitor poisonous chemicals that could be found in children’s products (e.g. sippy cups).  Not to be outdone, Chris Christie (R-NJ) is seeking to increase the toxicity of his state’s drinking water, most notably by promoting natural gas drilling (fracking) along the banks of the Delaware River.

Yet the real beauty of the Ryan budget is that Social Security becomes solvent without any of the requisite structural changes that could snuff out a political career faster than Craigslist; it simply liquidates a large portion of those stubbornly extant retirees leeching off America’s workforce.  And while middle-aged folks are nottotally left alone, their tax burden is reduced to a niggling 25% marginal rate.  It is this proviso, according to the Brookings Institute, that neuters the plan in terms of deficit reduction – saving a paltry $155 billion over 10 years – while engendering a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich (think: Ryan as Sheriff of Nottingham).

That Douglas Fairbanks’ 1922 film Robin Hood has been remade more times than Joan Rivers’ face can nothing to diminish the impact of the original.  It is this manner of unfettered adoration that greets the cinematic debut of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  My libertarian friends would aver that Rand’s Objectivist tome best encapsulates the polity’s zeitgeist; government (taxation, regulation, venality) is the problem while personal gratification represents morality in its highest form  (see: Tea Party, Charlie Sheen).  These very devotees, however, also underwrite class action lawsuits (Accutane, Phillip Morris, Tyco), which is tantamount to conceding the evils of industry.  Detractors could argue, therefore, that the more apt film is Augustus Thomas’ 1914 adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  

 Sinclair’s expose of the meatpacking establishment led to the formation of the FDA, an agency, given the recent recalls of spinach and hamburger meat, requisite to this day.  In fact, a new study suggests that HALF of the meat and poultry sold in our nation’s supermarkets may be tainted with staphylococcus and one quarter contains drug-resistant MRSA.  No doubt, then, that public health is an appropriate government concern: Only last week did officials confirm that over 100 party goers contracted Legionnaire’s disease in the Playboy Mansion hot tub.  Even at Hef’s, one could reasonably gamble that the chlorine would likely kill gonorrhea and dissolve any genital warts, but who has the foresight to consider Legionnaire’s?

Perhaps the most telling sign of the times is that we are debating the gravitas of movies, rather than books in setting our social compass.  It goes beyond the demise of Barnes and Noble and the advent of electronic publishing; we have become so lazy that we would eschew the act of reading for passively watching a message delivered on screen.  In that case, if you really want to get a handle on the Republican agenda, you may want to watch Soylent Green.