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UNCLE SAM IS A THIEF |
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Written by Richard Rahn
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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 |
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Written by To The Point News
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Friday, 29 March 2013 |
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HALF-FULL REPORT 03/22/13 |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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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 |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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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 |
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Written by Matt Ridley
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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? |
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Written by Richard Rahn
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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? |
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Written by Henry Manne & Richard Rahn
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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 |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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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? |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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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? |
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Written by To The Point News
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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 |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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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 |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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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 |
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Written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
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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? |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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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 |
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Written by Richard Rahn
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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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