Here, for your edification and entertainment, is a collection of the most unlikely predictions you'll encounter anywhere. Remember you saw it here first:
Phony currencies will proliferate. Bitcoin was just the start. There's still one born every minute, to quote that greatest of economic analysts, P.T. Barnum.
Republicans will actually demonstrate they can govern, not just gripe, by passing the biggest tax reform since the late great Ronald Reagan--the Great Communicator--came into his own and showed that a president can lead, not just tweet.
North Korea will remain the world's greatest threat--to itself as well as to the rest of the world--but will not implode Soviet-style in slow agonizing motion. It's there to stay for another suspenseful year, too.
Some of the most respected figures on the federal bench will resign because of sexual, financial, and/or other scandals. If it could happen to Alex Kozinski, and it did, it could happen to the best--who on occasion will turn out to be the worst. By now the running total of allegations against His Dishonor stands at more than a dozen. And the quaint notion of innocent until proven guilty will go with him.
Despite their signal victories in Virginia and Alabama and a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that shows We the People want a Democratic-controlled Congress next year, Republicans will maintain control of the House and even emerge with an unlikely lead in the U.S. Senate, thanks to the Democrats' internal divisions. The Democrats would need 24 seats now held by Republicans to win the House, and two to seize the whip hand in the Senate. Yet they'll somehow manage to shoot themselves in the foot. Besides, it's the state of the economy next year that will determine who runs Congress. And the economy is going red-hot. So the Republicans can still win the coming congressional election. If they hurry, for everything that goes up must still come down.
Lest it be forgot, the Dems have to hold on to 24 seats next year to keep their grip on the Senate. To quote Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report, on next year's prospects for both major parties: "Republicans could hardly face tougher headwinds, nor could Democrats face a tougher map." But the map ain't the road, and the American two-party system will continue to dominate the country's foreseeable future, which should last maybe five minutes at most. For the one thing sure about the foreseeable future is that it isn't. Take this columnist's shaky word for it, and his long series of (mis)predictions.
It won't be easy at this point, but somehow the Democrats will manage to lose, and come out of this year's congressional elections looking like the Party of No instead of a going enterprise. Lest we all forget, the one thing certain about the future is its uncertainty. All is flux, as an ancient philosopher told us, and even that much cannot be counted on. For out of a world of uncertainties, that strangest of conditions may emerge--certainty.
To anticipate that this year would be free of disasters, man-made and otherwise, would be to hope for too much, but hope, as the poetess told us, is the thing with feathers. To quote a much more gruff statesman who divined the ways of this world and maybe the next, God looks after fools, drunkards, and the United States of America. May it always be so, for there is no other explanation for our continued good fortune.
It's going to be another busy year for tax accountants and all those other ingenious types still figuring out ways and means to shift the profits of American companies overseas to make the profit-and-loss statements look better. May 2018 be a happy year for all, not just Americans but good people everywhere who still look to the USofA as a land of promise. So keep a stiff upper lip, as the Brits would say.
Speaking of which, that special relationship between this former colony and the mother country will endure stronger than ever. And why not? We both speak the same language, or recognizable variant thereof. And language binds as nothing else does. So let's raise our glasses to 2018, see 2017 to as graceful an exit as the old boy can make and muddle through. Happy New Year--let's hope.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 12/24/2017