Washington Needs a Math Teacher

I just landed in Tel Aviv. The last week was spent in Rome, Italy’s capital.

The city draws in so many tourists for a good reason: many of today’s most innate societal habits have originated in this city on the banks of the Tiber River.

We can argue all we want about the brutality and cruelty of the Catholic Church and its armies or the ancient Romans, but we also can’t overlook how their ways and the lessons learned from them impact our very lives.

Look at our most basic features on social media, such as the thumbs up/thumbs down icons, for example. They stem from the emperor’s decisions regarding the gladiators’ fates in the Colosseum.

The downvote (or “dislike”) was a death sentence while the positive thumbs up meant life.

Rome was the center of the ancient world, and I spent the first day in the Vatican Museums. One of my rules is to always take a local guide with me. Fabrizio, the one we were assigned to, was an archeologist by profession and an avid lover of history, and he knew many delicious details, anecdotes, and quotes.

My hotel was situated right next to a massive park in the middle of the city within which lies the villa of a cardinal. Such decadence and flamboyance are hard to fathom since the existence of the residence was for the sake of housing his art collection.

Ceasars ruled the empire of Rome and popes ruled over the Christian empire, so it’s hard for me to imagine that people would still visit the White House in the year 3000 and talk about the United States of America as the most powerful nation of the 20^th century.

Empires do fall from glory, and as unimaginable as it must have seemed in Roman times that one day the city would fall to the hands of an up-and-comer, it did happen.

For me, the height of scarcity for the residents of Rome must have been when they were forced to repurpose the Colosseum in order to build other things.

When you enter it today, it’s a shadow of its glorious structure. To imagine it in full Carrara marble, the most expensive in the world, filled with 80,000 spectators and a canopy that modern stadiums have today creating a bluish light from above and towering to the skies, it must have left those from the villages who had only seen huts and tents in awe.

Today, when we look at Wall Street and its wealth, the military with its power, or the White House and the presidential convoy, we realize how strong the United States is while standing supreme in its wealth and its projection of force.

We must bear in mind that this is financed by excessive debt, and just like the Romans failed to do accounting and assess how running the tab on sheltering the animals of the Colosseum was eroding their army, Washington is epically failing at understanding how tax collection isn’t on par with the deficit accumulated over the decades.

Interest rates as they are today will prove to be the kryptonite of the modern era. No one in their right mind can continue spending this much without getting in deep trouble.

Biden, I suggest you pull out the calculator and crunch those numbers because Bidenomics won’t look so good…

Best Regards,

Lior Gantz
President, WealthResearchGroup.com