Gold can get confiscated when times get tough. Can't wait for the next chapter Chris, a fantastic and well documented global insight to the coming storm.

Big tax increases will just allow the government to piss away the money in more stupid ways. All the money that you've sent to it for Social Security, for Medicaid, for education, all that - has been blown on god knows what but it's not for Social Security, Medicaid, or education. The government has no accountability, just accept it. We did elect a bunch of Democrats in 2006 to end the war in Iraq - has it ended? We elected a president to stop nation building, to reduce the federal government, and to get the federal budget under control in 2000 - did that happen? The solution is to let the damned government go bankrupt. They're going bankrupt anyhow, it's just a question of how much more good money you want to throw after bad. You're never going to get a return on your investment from them. They're a mafia now, not a representative government.

I'm sorry but I'm getting so tired of the "human ingenuity" and "technology will save us" arguments. Name one source of energy (that could be implemented on a massive scale in the next 20-30 years) that can even come close to replacing oil. Renewables like wind, solar, tidal, etc. will be invaluable sources of energy in the future, but because of the storage problem they won't address transportation in the near term. 61% of oil in 2006 was used for transportation needs. Right now we have no viable alternative to replace that with. Coal-to-liquids (CTL) is an ecological disaster, and if we go that route it's likely we'll accelerate climate change at such a rate that resource depletion will be the least of our problems. We'll be much too occupied with cataclysmic weather events, water shortages, crop failures, etc. to worry about $10 prices at the pumps. Not to mention the fact that recent reports on global coal reserves generally point to the likelihood of supply limits appearing relatively soon—within the next two decades. So even if we foolishly embraced CTL for powering the transportation fleet that "relief" would be very short-lived. Natural gas isn't practical for transportation because of storage and safety issues. Peak Oil is more accurately Peak Oil-Coal-Gas, and it's here. Surely technology will play a strong role in whatever solutions we adopt, but it isn't going to save us from the impact of resource depletion. The almost religious faith that technology will save us, along with almost complete psychological denial, are the two primary obstacles towards making the changes we need to make RIGHT NOW.