Happy New Year one and all. I bet you’re all tickled to death that the Mayan Calendar naysayers were proven correct. For now. Plus throw in the year-end bonus that our Congress here in the U.S. voted to take a giant step back from the crumbling edge of the Fiscal Cliff thereby saving the Global Economy and making sure its members could continue to feed at the public trough.

All of this should have put me in the mood to finish up my report to you on the state of the chickens. But no. Once again, circumstances have conspired against me and I must weigh in, along with, it seems, everybody else, and let you know what’s going to happen in the New Year.

We, as a species, seemed to be enamored of making predictions. From the darkest days of prehistory, we have employed various shamans, priestesses, soothsayers, prognosticators, and pundits to crouch around the campfire, roll the bones, and tell us what we should plan for. It has become a major growth industry. Everywhere we turn, somebody is spouting about the end of the world, the demise of Western Civilization, the end of war, the collapse of the global climate, the melting of the ice caps – oops, wait, they got that one right – along with  various and sundry other predictions that by and large are always, to put a word to it, wrong.

I count myself among them.

Even the ice-cap thing might just fall into the same category as “even a broken clock is right twice a day.” We are at the point where there are enough people, making enough predictions, that just from a statistical point of view, some of them have to turn out correct.

It’s the same argument those sentient-life-on-other-planets wackos use to justify the whole space program. Really, have you ever stopped to look at how often the National Weather Service, which costs you three billion dollars a year, is actually right? Not even with that kind of money can you get a prediction that is more reliable than looking out the window.

Regardless, I feel it is my bounden duty to make sure you get one sane, reasoned, and documented forecast. Something you can use to plan your upcoming year. Something you can take to the bank; assuming, of course, that there will be a bank to take it to.

First, the fiscal cliff. Despite the endless column-inches of news devoted to the hair’s breadth avoidance of global financial disaster, if you read between the lines or, better yet, just stop and think about it for say, five seconds, you will see that nothing has changed. 

This is going on both here in the U.S. and in Europe, as well as between both sides of the Atlantic with all parties running hedge-bets that they can stave off the inevitable long enough to make it the other guy’s fault. In Europe, the parliament was praying that the Tea Baggers in the US would kill the legislation and crash the markets of the world. At the same time, the U.S. government is going short on its own debt in a bid to hang on long enough to see the Greece-Portugal-Spain-Iceland-Ireland-Italy-France-Tout-le-monde chain of dominoes start to topple. Both groups of politicians have the same goal. They want to be able to step up to the podium, point at a map, and announce in a clear, caring voice:

“It’s not my fault.”

A good place to look at a snapshot of this process is in the United States. In 2012 the U.S. borrowed (according to the Feds) a bit more than 34% of the total money it spent. In the proposed 2013 budget, while spending remains roughly the same, revenue – AKA: Taxes – is predicted to rise by 400 billion, which ends up reducing the deficit to a more manageable 900 billion dollars, or only 32% of the total budget.

Whew! And to think I was worried.

But then, when you stop and think about it, you’ll ask yourself:

“Hey, where are they getting the 400 billion?”

Then you’ll answer yourself:

“They just passed that bill and now they’re gonna tax the bejeezus out of those rich creeps.”

At which point the third member of your inner dialogue – AKA: me – will weigh in with:

“Uh, not exactly.”

First off, the Democrats, in an ongoing collapse of ideals, raised the cut-off point for the tax increase from $250,000 to $400,000. This means that the “raising the taxes on the richest 2% of Americans” promise changed to “the richest 0.9%”. Second, the tax increase is really just a return to the old maximum marginal tax rate, not a heist of all $400,000. Third, the rich don’t work, so they won’t pay any more in income taxes and the capital gains tax increase, which only affects some income, rose only 5%, instead of the 24.6% that would have prevailed absent a deal.

Couple this with the fact that both the executive and legislative branches took a complete pass on addressing the other side of the equation – AKA: spending – as well as having the ability to go back and change the deal they already made, and you can see why this so-called “deal” is nothing more than hollow posturing.

My prediction for the global financial situation in 2013 is that we will see more fighting and whining and finger-pointing, identical in both form and content to what has gone before. While the rallying cries will remain the same, the actual battles will be more along the lines of who’s going to turn out the lights and who gets to shut the door.

Next up, where’s the money going to come from?

As you’ve noticed, the ongoing collapse of the world economy is racking up some debt. The world’s richest continue to see wealth shift from us to them, and they end up with boatloads of new money. Money they need to invest somewhere. If you look at just the U.S. some 50% of the nation’s wealth resides with the top 1% of the people.

But all that money has to go live somewhere, and even at near-zero interest rates, most of the world’s investors choose the U.S. first. This results in two things, first the U.S. is able to deficit finance itself without a care in the world, and second, everybody else is screwed so badly that even at 17% interest Greece can’t borrow a Euro without Germany guaranteeing it.

This is because the U.S. is still considered the “safest” place to park your money. But “safest” is a relative condition.

Consider for a moment that there are five Rooms of Certain Death, and you have to go into one. Have to. The first room has a family of hungry tigers in it. The second: a fire breathing dragon. Third: a floor covered in scorpions, the air swarming with killer bees. The fourth: chilled to forty-below and packed with polar bears. Lastly, the fifth room contains a single rattlesnake.

Pick one.

Without a doubt you’d pick room number five and dance around dodging the lonesome snake’s venomous fangs. No problem.

Well, there is one. Everybody else would choose it too. You’d end up in a room packed wall-to-wall with other people thinking it was the safest. The slightest cough, the merest nudge will be enough to set the snake off. But still it would be the “safest” room. Because your goal will have switched from “living” to “not dying really quickly.”

My prediction for 2013 is that the U.S. will easily finance its endless expenditures by borrowing money in the global market. Because now investors have a new goal: they are not planning on making any money, but, rather, not losing it for the longest time.

My last prediction concerns the world of technology and comes from yet another group of “expert” predictions for 2013. Most of these concerned the impacts of 4G mobile data networks on intellectual property law, or how 4G is expected to facilitate paying for things or blah, blah, blah, snore…. The one that caught my eye however stated that 2013 is the year of “context.” Context, as you know, refers to the fact that often meaning is derived from the setting – the context – in which something is found. But so far nobody has come right out and stated what that “something” is. Well, that something is you.

The experts tell us that 2013 will bring the integration of your internet presence, your viewing history, and your location to allow your mobile device, now finely tuned and linked to massive Cloud based data servers to badger you to buy something to the point at which somebody is gonna get hurt.

I have been dabbling a bit in contextual research, to wit: those ads just over to the left there. I have watched them morph from week to week depending on the content of the blog and what else I’ve done online and off. It’s interesting how easily I can make ads for marijuana grow-lights show up on your work computer.

My technology prediction derives from these observations. In 2013, some terrorist group will enlist their legions of jihadists and using nothing more than a carefully designed conspiracy of searching and viewing web pages will craftily drive advertising content. This rush of advertising expenditures will not generate any sales, but, instead, exhaust the ad budgets of businesses the world over resulting in the collapse of company after company and the complete disappearance of advertising from the internet.

We can only hope, right?

It’s better I leave off there, unbelievable prediction-wise. None of those three could possibly happen and I, for one, don’t want to risk getting one right.