Old answers to new crisis

Eyeing black clouds, Gerald Celente predicts a storm of cataclysmic ferocity. The monolithic stimulus package passed last week sets the air rising into an atmosphere less stable than a volcano. The winds now will blow toward full roar, their first violent sweep across the landscape taking the form of property tax revolt, or so says Celente, predictor of stark trends.

Before dismissing the Trends Research Institute founder who bills himself as “a pioneer trend strategist” and “the world’s only trends analyst,” check out his press clippings. The Wall Street Journal advises, “Those who take their predictions seriously ... consider the Trends Research Institute.” The New York Post, predictably, is bolder: “If Nostradamus were alive today, he’d have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente.”

The native New Yorker’s record includes correctly predicting the stock market crash of 1987, the fall of the Soviet Union, the current recession (forecast in 2004) and what Celente calls “The Panic of ’08,” climaxed by last fall’s federal bailout.

All of this adds poignancy to Celente’s latest forecast. Rebellion over taxes, he warns, will “be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.” This will lead to a second American revolution that will result in the formation of a third party and, speaking of thirds, send the country spiraling toward Third World status, Celente says.

Whether saws will be needed to cut off the limb on which Celente stands or the bough simply will snap under the weight of his venture is anyone’s guess. A headline on a piece penned by Dallas Morning News columnist and conservative blogger Rod Dreher provides valuable levity: “Gerald Celente: Cannibalism by Christmas!” Dreher advises: “[T]ake his predictions with a big dollop of discernment.”

But Dreher also acknowledges Celente makes points smacking of hard logic. Two strike us as especially salient: America no longer produces anything, with the important and notable exception of technology, which helped pull us from recession at the end of the first Bush presidency, and Americans are mired in debt, hindering their ability to climb back to solvency.

A third point is both direct and implied. Government is spending beyond the capacity of its people to pay. For a look at the deepening ire this is manufacturing among everyday folk and the wearisome refusal of elected officials to recognize as much, ride into Augusta County, where property owners are warring with supervisors over reassessments that increase residential property values by an average of 27.7 percent.

Feuds over how much government ought to spend are as old as humanity itself. But modern officialdom appears stunningly benumbed to the plight faced by modern taxpayers. They owe, but a growing number go off to work no longer. Those who still have jobs are seeing their household bank accounts siphoned by mounting bills as they wade through rising pools of debt for their cars and homes. Many of the small businesses that turn the nation’s economic wheels are caught in similar predicaments as a result of the credit freeze.

President Barack Obama and his party mates in Washington, feelers of pain and givers of it, cite the woes of people from Fort Myers, Fla., to Elkhart, Ind., then proceed with a stimulus plan that spends $900 billion and expands federal government into virtually every corner of American business life.

Naturally, we hope Celente is wrong this time as he has been on other occasions, such as in predicting U.S. defeat in Iraq. But he certainly is right in detecting that taxpayers are riled, and that the deepest levels of outrage are most likely to be evinced at the local level. We have seen as much in Augusta County.

Elected officials here and elsewhere would be wise to take notice and take action to rein in old habits of spending more now and taxing more later. If Celente is right, they might otherwise be forced to take cover as the storm rages.