Today (5/220, Fitch Ratings has downgraded Japan two notches to A+ -- just above Spain and Italy -- citing a surge in public debt since the Lehman crisis and the lack of any plan to restore fiscal probity.

Key indicators are deteriorating on almost every front, raising concerns that the world's third largest economy is running aground after two "Lost Decades".

Japan's debt has jumped by 61 percentage points of GDP since 2008, compared to eight points for the AAA bloc. Public debt is expected to reach 239% of GDP this year, uncharted levels for a major economy in peace-time. `Net debt' - subtracting Japan's vast holdings of foreign bonds - is nearer 137% but this is rising at an even steeper trajectory.

"Japan's addiction to public sector spending is way beyond the boundaries or remedial `austerity'," said Dylan Grice from Societe Generale. "Political pressure on the Bank of Japan to crank the printing presses into top gear will become irresistible. We see no alternative."

The next GOP presidential candidate debate is four days from now, Tuesday, October 18, in Vegas on CNN.  It will focus primarily albeit not exclusively on foreign policy.

I've been asked by friends of a particular candidate to provide him with a private briefing on the most critical foreign policy issues America faces.  What follows is not the usual HFR but a condensed summary of that briefing, which contains much of my Map of the Future talk at Rendezvous XI last weekend.

Russia.  Putin is an ersatz macho-man, all hat and no karovi.  Russia's navy is made of rust.  Russia's ill-trained army of drunkards couldn't conquer Romania.  Russian male life expectancy is lower than that of Bangladesh.  Russia is a mafiacracy with a doomed economy dependent on oil & gas exports that fracking in Europe & the US will make uncompetitive.  Do svidanya.

China.  No wives, no water, no banks - and a hyper-dangerous military.  Much of China is uninhabited - deserts, mountains, and wastelands.  Habitable China is about the size of the US east of the Mississippi, with over a billion people squeezed into it. Northern China is turning into a waterless dust bowl.  Scores of millions of Chinese men will never get married due to the Chicom's idiotic one-child policy and resultant mass female infanticide.

Would you think it is smart to create regulations that make it all but impossible for Americans living abroad to get a bank account in the country where they live?

Do you think it makes sense to impose regulations and costs on U.S. financial institutions that would drive needed foreign investment out of the United States for the sole purpose of helping foreign governments collect taxes from their own citizens?

Last week, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and U.S. Treasury held a hearing on a proposed regulation that is so dumb and destructive that people had assumed it was buried for good a decade ago, when it originally was proposed. The Treasury/IRS is embarked on a program that can only be called national economic suicide.

If they did not put our troops, our citizens and our country at risk, the Left's fantastic lies about terror and terrorists would be hilarious. 

The problem, of course, is that many of our national leaders have been brainwashed with the same slogans.  The Left has mastered another technique dictators forged long ago: Repeat a lie often enough and it will be taken as truth.    And, of course, our media play along.

So let's give the slogan-hucksters a brief time-out and dissect just seven of their favorite lines:

One:  Killing terrorists only turns them into martyrs.  Nope.  Killing terrorists turns them into dead terrorists. 

So we're down to three this week.  Christie out to no one's dismay - except for his die-hard fans known as "girthers" - and so is Palin to the serious dismay of many.  It's too late for late entries - say goodnight Donald and Rudy - while the other candidates are there just for stubbornness or ego.  Rick, Mitt, or Herman, those are the only choices now.

The next debate is this coming Tuesday, 10/11.  It could be make or break for Perry.  The Forum's resident Perryista, Ella - she's a Texas gal - assures us that, while he wasn't prepared for the first three debates due to his laser focus on raising $17 million in 49 days, he's primed and pumped for this one.  Let's hope so.  I for one am rootin' for Rick to come out with guns blazing.  It's show time.

Will it be show time for Cain?  Will one of his competitors ask him about the fatal flaw in his 9-9-9 tax reform plan?

Financial fraud is one or more intentional acts designed to deceive other people and cause them financial loss. Who is the world's greatest financial fraudster? Bernie Madoff? Not even close.

The unemployment rate just went up again to 9 percent, and the proportion of the adult population at work continues to fall. These dismal numbers are a result of slow economic growth, which is caused mainly by the world's biggest financial fraudster, who robs businesses and individuals of what is rightfully theirs.

The world's biggest financial fraudster is not one person; it is a group composed of those politicians and government bureaucrats who, on a daily basis, ignore the consequences of their actions as they misuse hard-earned taxpayer funds to further their own political or personal agendas. We will call this fraudster the TPHP (for Thoughtless Power-Hungry Politicos). 

Yesterday in Jerusalem (5/09), a new unity Israeli government was created by a deal between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party, and Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz.  Together they have 94 out of 120 seats in the Knesset.

Bibi has made a very smart move.  Netanyahu was presented with an offer he'd be an idiot to refuse. In return for essentially nothing, he built himself the strongest and largest coalition Israel has ever seen.

Here's how it works.

The evidence that the presidential ship, the USS Zero, is sinking like that boat Leo DiCaprio was on continued to pile up this week. 

When Euroweenies publicly call the President of the United States pitiful, sad, arrogant, and absurd, plus stupid; when he can't even beat Ron Paul in a national poll; when predictions mount that he will pull a 1968 LBJ and not run; when libtards like Newsweek Editor Tina Brown abandon him, it's pretty clear his presidency will end up sleeping with the fishes.

He totally clinched it yesterday (9/29) with a pathetic replay of Jimmy Carter's 1979 Malaise Speech, blaming the disaster of his presidency on Americans being "soft." Like Carter, Zero does not possess the moral intelligence to grasp the irony of his claim.

Americans were sunk into a deep malaise after the debacle of Watergate and defeat in Vietnam - and Carter was elected as an expression of it.  If it weren't for the "crisis of confidence" he complained about, Americans would never have placed a nebbishy schlemiel like him in the White House.

And if Americans hadn't gone soft accepting liberal welfare and liberal guilt for decades, they never ever would have elected an affirmative action president, a Marxist Alinskyite attending a Hate America church whose only qualification for office was the color of his skin.

President Obama and many other Democrats - and even a few Republicans - claim that the huge deficits the United States is experiencing result from the George W. Bush-era tax rate cuts.

Is this true, and must we have a tax rate increase? The short answer is no.  First, a little budget history.

In the 40 years prior to the 2007-09 Great Recession, tax revenues as percentage of gross domestic product were remarkably constant, never varying more than 2.3 percent above or below 18.3 percent of GDP.  This fact is all the more remarkable given that the maximum individual income tax rate during this period varied from a low of 28 percent to a high of 70 percent.

Federal government expenditures also were remarkably constant during this same 40-year period, never lower than 18.2 percent or higher than 23.5 percent of GDP, and deficits averaged about 2.5 percent. The debt-to-GDP ratio rose and fell during this period and was a manageable 36 percent as late as 2007. Yet, in the past four years, the debt-to-GDP ratio has almost doubled.