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UNCLE SAM IS A THIEF Print E-mail
Written by Richard Rahn   
Tuesday, 26 March 2013

There has been global outrage about the proposal from the Cyprus government to have a significant one-time tax on those who have deposits in Cypriot banks. It has been correctly called a theft of private capital. What many fail to realize is that from the beginning, governments have been engaged in this type of theft, including the U.S. government.

As the debt crisis deepens, governments are likely to increasingly engage in various forms of capital expropriation despite the fact that such activities are economically destructive and morally offensive. The U.S. government is now doing precisely what the Cypriot government is proposing, but only with a lighter and more subtle touch.

There are a number of actions governments take to expropriate capital without explicitly saying so.  For example, if you have a savings account, a CD or money market fund, there is a good chance that you are receiving less than 1 percent interest on the money, thanks to the Federal Reserve, while government-caused inflation is running at roughly 2 percent.

Thus, you are, in effect, suffering a 1 percent expropriation of your savings each year -- without Congress ever having voted for such expropriation. It gets worse.
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A LOW-INFORMATION VOTER'S GUIDE TO POLITICS Print E-mail
Written by To The Point News   
Friday, 29 March 2013
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HALF-FULL REPORT 03/22/13 Print E-mail
Written by Jack Kelly   
Friday, 22 March 2013

President Barack Obama visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority this week. Israelis “can’t figure out what he’s doing here” said Carolyn Glick. Apparently, it was to pretend he was George W. Bush. “Second-Term Obama just gave First-Term Obama a whack on the tush,” said John Podhoretz

* * * *
The Russians think Zero is wrecking the world on purpose, notes Spengler.

* * * *
If you thought Dingy Harry Reid couldn’t possibly be more despicable, you were mistaken.  Liberals are mad at him too, for wimping out on gun control.

* * * *
Ten years ago Wednesday, the war with Iraq began.  It cost 4,487 American lives, and about a trillion dollars. Was it worth it? 

* * * *
More attention was focused on the GOP’s shortcomings this week, but Stanley Kurtz says its Democrats who are more likely to crack up.
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THE WORLD’S MOST PATRIOTIC PEOPLE Print E-mail
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler   
Thursday, 21 March 2013

Stanley, Falkland Islands.  I was enjoying a pint of the local microbrewery's Peat Cutter Stout at the Globe Tavern when a Falklander on an adjacent bar stool engaged me in conversation.

"Where are you from, mate?" he asked.

"America," I replied.

"You're an American, are you?  Well, I have to tell you, Yank, I think your President Obama is disgusting."

This did not elicit the response he was expecting.  I raised my glass and with a huge smile across my face exclaimed, "I'll drink to that!"

Taken aback, he queried, "You Americans are supposed to believe in freedom. Why do you have a president who won't stand up for ours?"

"Because he won't stand up for our own freedom, much less anyone else's.  His goal in life is to destroy our freedom, not protect it.  He's a fascist interested only in expanding his power, just like the Falklands' enemy Christina Kirchner.  That's why he will side with her and not with you."

He looked at me quizzically, blinked a few times, then asked, "Can I buy you a beer?"
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WE ARE ENTERING THE GAS AGE Print E-mail
Written by Matt Ridley   
Wednesday, 20 March 2013

Move over shale gas, here comes methane hydrate.  Last week (3/12) the Japanese government's drilling ship Chikyu started flaring off gas from a hole drilled into a solid deposit of methane and ice, 1,000 feet beneath the seabed under 3,300 feet of water, 30 miles off the Japanese coast.

The real significance of this gas flare probably lies decades in the future, though the Japanese are talking about commercial production by 2018. The technology for getting fuel out of hydrated methane, also known as clathrate, is in its infancy. After many attempts to turn this "fire ice" into gas by heating it proved uneconomic, the technology used in Japan - depressurizing the stuff - was first tested five years ago in Northern Canada. It looks much more promising.

Methane hydrate is found all around the world beneath the seabed near continental margins as well as in the Arctic under land. Any combination of low temperature and high pressure causes methane and water to crystallize together in a sort of molecular lattice. Nobody knows exactly how much there is, but probably more than twice all the other fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, put together.

The proof that hydrate can be extracted should finally bury the stubborn myth that the world will run out of fossil fuels in any meaningful sense in the next few centuries, let alone decades.
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WHICH COUNTRY WILL TRIGGER THE COMING GLOBAL TAILSPIN? Print E-mail
Written by Richard Rahn   
Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Which country will serve as the trigger for the next financial crisis? Given the continuing rise in debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratios in many countries, it is apparent that a new financial crisis will occur. Most of the speculation has been about when, rather than where. The most likely candidates are heavily indebted countries with a large growth deficit.

The growth deficit is the difference between expected GDP growth and the expected government spending deficit as a percentage of GDP.  The way to eliminate the growth deficit is by either increasing economic growth or reducing government spending.

Almost all economists understand that economic growth can be increased by (1) reducing taxes on labor and capital, (2) eliminating counterproductive regulations, and (3) putting an end to monetary uncertainty.

But what government understands this?  Massive deficit spending has not worked as advertised, for a number of years in the countries listed in the accompanying table. All of them are at risk of even more financial shocks and stresses, and none of them seems politically able to make the degree of necessary change to solve the mess.
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WHAT’S THE FED’S PLAN B FOR THE COMING FISCAL CATASTROPHE? Print E-mail
Written by Henry Manne & Richard Rahn   
Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Perhaps the most troublesome question that investors and business decision makers confront today is, "When will significant inflation and interest rate increases show up?"

The next quarter, the next year, the next decade? Everyone fears these, but no one can predict exactly when they will appear. Investment is severely hampered by this uncertainty. The potential inflationary/interest rate pressures exist largely as a result of Fed's massive purchase of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

But much of this increase in money is locked up in the banks because the Fed now pays interest on the bank reserves held at the Fed (and therefore it is not lent or spent), because of increased regulatory restrictions that discourage banks from making loans to small businesses and consumers, and because of the lack of demand for new loans. In addition, many individuals and businesses are holding unusually high sums to weather regulatory and economic uncertainties.

Yet, there are many factors that could trigger inflationary/interest rate increases that are largely out of the Fed's ability to forecast and control.
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PERCEPTION IS REALITY FOR REPUBLICANS Print E-mail
Written by Jack Kelly   
Thursday, 21 March 2013

Any lingering doubt Republicans have a big time image problem was removed by a poll conducted for The Hill newspaper this week.

By nearly a 2-1 margin (55 percent to 28 percent), respondents preferred the budget proposed by House Republicans over that proposed by Senate Democrats. 

Even 40 percent of the Democrats among the 1,000 likely voters surveyed think deficits should be trimmed mostly by cutting spending rather than by raising taxes.

But support for the Republican budget collapsed when respondents were told it was Republicans who proposed it.  A plurality (35 percent) said they trusted Democrats more on budget issues.  Only 30 percent said they trusted Republicans more. 
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WHO IS MORE DIVORCED FROM REALITY -- REPUBLICANS OR DEMOCRATS? Print E-mail
Written by Jack Kelly   
Wednesday, 20 March 2013

The farthest known galaxy is about 13.3 billion light years from here.  But MACS0647-JD may be closer to earth than Democrats and Republicans are to each other on taxes, spending and debt -- and either is to reality.

Last week, House Republicans presented their proposed budget for the 2014 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.  Senate Democrats (for the first time in four years) offered a budget, too.

The Congressional Budget Act requires the Congressional Budget Office to project federal spending and tax revenues ten years into the future.  This lets lawmakers and staff try their hand at writing fiction.  So who's writing more fiction here, the Pubs or the Dems?
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WHAT IF THERE IS A GOD AND IT'S NOT BARACK OBAMA? Print E-mail
Written by To The Point News   
Friday, 22 March 2013

Credentialed specialists in political cosmology and government-approved astrophysics are grappling with a mind-bending possibility: what if there is some force other than government power that is responsible for the world in which we live?

This unexpected schism is caused by recent experiments at the Large Handout Deficit Collider, in which generated sequester particles did not cause the universe to implode as predicted.

The original plan called for shooting highly charged irresistible Keynesian public stimulus forces at immovable wealthy private capital objects, in the hope of creating enough monetary fusion products to keep the economy's momentum from decelerating for another summer.

Theoreticians believed if the deficit could not reach sanity escape velocity, huge numbers of sequester particles would be released, which would generate financial black holes and quickly envelop all observable too-big-to-fail banks, eventually compressing the entire world economy into a space smaller than Joe Biden's brain. However....
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HALF-FULL REPORT 03/15/13 Print E-mail
Written by Jack Kelly   
Friday, 15 March 2013

There is a new pope.  To the surprise and dismay of most in the MSM, he's Catholic.
* * * *
Anti-American statements by Afghan President Hamid Karzai have put our troops at greater risk, said our commander there.
* * * *
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis) has released his budget plan for FY 2014, which begins Oct. 1.  It would lead to a balanced budget in 10 years without raising taxes, because it would reduce currently projected spending over the decade by $5.7 trillion. The national debt as a proportion of GDP would decline to 62.3 percent. But if would actually reduce federal spending.

Senate Democrats will offer a budget for the first time in four years.  Under it, federal spending would rise 62 percent over the decade. Deficits would be more than $400 billion every year. 

Ryan assumes the economy will grow at a rate of a little more than 3 percent a year, which has been described as "rosy," since growth was much lower than that in Zero's first term. The GDP growth assumptions in the Democrat budget (an average of 4.9 percent a year) are positively surreal.
* * * * 
Cancelling White House tours has backfired big time.  A judge tossed out Nanny Bloomberg's "arbitrary and capricious" ban on large sodas.  The Inspector General for the Justice Department slapped around the Civil Rights division.
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EMBALMING FREEDOM Print E-mail
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler   
Tuesday, 12 March 2013

 "He's one of these narcissistic, charismatic sociopaths history has been bedeviled with for millennia.  These folks are pathological liars, they care nothing for ‘the people' whom they pretend to love, their lives are devoted to ruling over others and controlling their lives, they bring misery to those they rule yet are worshipped nonetheless.  Obama-worship is like some kind of religious cult, whose high priests are the media elite.  Obama feeds off it, so his desire for more power and creating more misery increases.  The human capacity to worship such sociopaths is one of life's mysteries."

Asunción, Paraguay.  The Congressman who told me that during the dinner conversation I described in The Traitor in the White House (2/20/13) voiced what I have never understood:  the human capacity to worship evil.

The Congressman was talking about Zero, but his words apply even more so here in South America to the man the whole continent is fixated on right now, Hugo Chavez.  On every TV news show, in every newspaper and magazine, it's Chavez 24/7.  And most all of it is lies.

Let's start with what every spook agency in the world knows - from Langley to Whitehall to the KGB/FSB and China's MSS - but no major media outlet is reporting:  Chavez didn't die on March 5th in Venezuela, he died January 3rd in Cuba.
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THE GLOBAL SLUMP AND THE US STOCK BOOM ILLUSION Print E-mail
Written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard   
Tuesday, 12 March 2013

Asia's economic recovery is losing momentum and Europe's slump is proving deeper than expected, raising concerns that soaring stock markets globally have jumped ahead of economic reality.

Japan's closely-watched index for machinery orders fell 13% in January, nearing levels last seen after the Lehman Brothers crisis. "It is a shockingly poor number and illustrates the divergence between the improvement in sentiment in financial markets and what is actually happening on the ground," said Julian Jessop from Capital Economics.

China's industrial output rose 0.6% in January and 0.8% in February, the slowest pace since early last year. Retail sales growth dropped to 12.3%, the weakest since early 2004. "The goal of consumer-led growth remains a pipe dream for now," said the group's China economist, Qinwei Wang. "The economic rebound may already be stalling."

The US economy is holding up, as cheap shale gas drives a manufacturing revival, but Charles Dumas from Lombard Street Research said America still has to navigate the most drastic fiscal squeeze since the Second World War. "We think tightening will be 2.5% of GDP this year and that will hit profits," he said. "We expect a 10-20% correction in the S&P 500."
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WHY DO WE STAND FOR FEDERALIES LIVING LARGE WHILE MILLIONS OF US HAVE NO JOBS? Print E-mail
Written by Jack Kelly   
Thursday, 14 March 2013

For the first time in more than half a century, "the average American is both earning less and worth less than four years earlier," the New York Times reported last June.

Total household net worth is nearly 7 percent below what it had been in 2007, the Federal Reserve estimated then.

Per capita income in the U.S. in 2008 was $40,947.  It rose to $41,560 in 2011, an increase of just 1.5 percent.  But because inflation rose more than that, purchasing power declined.

What have been hard times for most Americans have been boom times for the federal government and for federal employees.  They, including the president, work for us.  Why do we stand for them, including the president, to live large at our expense, when tens of millions of us have no jobs?
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TO CLAIM CUTTING FEDERAL SPENDING WILL COST JOBS IS NONSENSE Print E-mail
Written by Richard Rahn   
Wednesday, 13 March 2013

The head of the Obama White House National Economic Council, Gene Sperling, who is a lawyer, has been claiming that "all economists" agree that sequestration will cost 750,000 jobs. I am an economist with a doctorate from Columbia University, and I don't agree.

The fact is that most classical and Austrian school economists also don't agree (including many Nobel laureates), because they understand that U.S. government spending is well above the optimum for economic growth and job creation, which means that less government spending will create more jobs, not fewer.

The Republicans should use the Continuing Resolution and the budget cap to force a further slowdown in the growth of government, and thus, less federal spending as a share of GDP. This should result in even more private-sector job creation, provided that there is restraint by the administration on all the new job-killing regulations.
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