Category Archives: Economy

A Corrective On Canada

Fellow Canadian Kathy Shaidle gave one of her American readers a reality check about Canada, one you’ve also received from me more than once:

I’m afraid I can’t agree. Our corporate tax rate is lower than yours, we have a simpler tax code and fewer weird regulations — I hear it can take even wealthy movie stars years to get “permission” to put a swimming pool in their own L.A. backyard.
Our Mexican migrant workers live in all male, booze free barracks and are shipped back home at season’s end. We ingeniously decided to pick our own cotton — that is, we have none of the fallout from slavery that hobble the U.S.
We also cleverly declined to hand mortgages to welfare bums. Our personal debt levels are lower and [we] have more disposable income.
Last year we deported more criminal aliens than we had in the previous twenty years combined.
The “Canuckistan” stereotype really doesn’t hold true anymore. We’re just hoping Justin won’t get elected and undo it all.

The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie

Ann Coulter, Celebrity, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Free Markets, IMMIGRATION, Morality, Pop-Culture, Private Property, Republicans

“The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie” is the current column, now on WND. Here is an excerpt:

“Chris Christie’s problem is not his weight, but his character. New Jersey’s popular Republican governor is the consummate backstabbing, slimy, opportunistic politician, who, for good measure, also preaches and practices the dirigiste economics of an Obama (and a “W”).

Gov. Christie is in the news a lot lately, which is just the way he likes it—and the way he has planned it. To say that Mr. Christie hungers for the plum post of US president is a redundancy on par with, “Is the Pope Catholic?”

The governor is no boob, but he knows how to handle boobs, a requirement of public office. And one crucial question Booboos Americanus asks himself when electing a president is whether he’d like to knock back a Guinness with the candidate. A doughnut is as good as a beer.

So on the “Late Night Show” went Christie for a cameo. There he squeezed into a studio seat too small for his girth and humored the hubris sitting opposite him, while scarfing down a doughnut.

Befitting a nation that considers wisdom and intellect as liabilities—cretin celebrities will carry the day in the 2016 presidential run, as they do today. Visibility on late night TV is a requirement of the highest office.

Launched by the Queen of Kitsch, day-time talker Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama has normalized the cultural carnival that sees a president cavorting with dummies like Dave Letterman and the ladies of “The View.” He now sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Chris Christie would dearly like to plunk his keister.

Like his predecessor, the next president will need the imprimatur of entertainers with canonical status. “The road to the White House goes through this chair,” a semi-serious David Letterman warned Republican presidential pick Mitt Romney. Romney had flouted the Letterman commandment. Where is he today? On the ash-heap of history.

Another chrysalis within which the American presidency takes shape is the liberal media. And it loves Chris Christie, holding him up as a paragon of the rudderless Republican the GOP ought to be running.

This wasn’t always the case…”

Read the complete column, “The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie,” now on WND.

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A Confetti Of Funny-Money & Confidence In Confidence Men

Business, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

Big media (BM) is making a big noise about the stock-market rally, which the same BM attribute to King Tut’s animal spirits. Reports Bloomberg.com: “U.S. stocks rallied, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 14,000 for the first time in five years, as data on the labor market and manufacturing boosted confidence in the world’s biggest economy.”

The “market’s” confidence in confidence men, notwithstanding, how are these “Big Gains” possible in “a debt-fueled economy”?

Easily: The consequence of Ben Bernanke’s non-stop monetary stimulus is a rise in prices, stocks included. Homes too. But an increase in the price of an item is not the same as an appreciation in it value.

“Markets are now driven by stimulus, not fundamentals,” notes investor Peter Schiff, who also expects “deficits to approach $2 trillion annually before Obama leaves office.” (His is a reasonable assumption based in evidence.)

“Monetary and fiscal stimulus [are] pushing up stock and bond prices.”

…it is important to look at the nature of the rally. Most significantly we would bring investors’ attention to the increase in gold and oil and other assets that are expected to outperform in an inflationary economy.

UPDATED: Fiscal Cliff Cadenza* Simplified (‘Cuts’ In Spending-Rate Increases)

Conflict, Debt, Democrats, Economy, Law, Republicans

Cuts to designated increases in federal spending: that’s all the “spending cuts” or “budget sequestration” portion of the fiscal cliff cadenza amount to.

These cuts were mandated by a law, The Budget Control Act of 2011, enacted by our miserable legislators. They now refuse to abide by this meager law.

The media, lying simpletons that they are, are framing the government-cutting component of the fiscal free-fall as a catastrophe.

Whoever believes that cuts to the rate of government growth would be catastrophic should fry.

For good measure, the same mind-fucking media are using phrases such as “Congressional stubbornness” as proxies for Republican recalcitrance.

The next component in the fiscal-cliff equation, or The Budget Control Act of 2011, are tax hikes. The Bush tax cuts will sunset, as will the temporary payroll tax cuts and certain tax breaks for businesses. Also to take effect are taxes tied to President Obama’s health-care behemoth.

As I understand it, in addition to their refusal to consider any cuts in spending rates, Democrats are insisting on replacing the tax raising provisions of the law with tax hikes on The Rich.

The mindless masses (and the pea brains of Hollywood), however, are already against Congress, which, for all its timidity also stands accused, preemptively, of failing to raise “the national borrowing limit.”

What are the Democrats doing? Put in Charlie Sheen speak, they are “Winning.”

* Cadenza: South African informal for a fit or convulsion

UPDATE (12/29/012): ‘Cuts’ In Spending-Rate Increases.

Finally, Republicans and a couple of Democrats and their anointed experts are framing all budget proposals out there as they should: “cuts to designated increases in spending.”

Via Bret Baier:

With the government spending roughly $10 billion a day, the cuts that are being proposed wouldn’t even cover the interest on the debt.
Spending is not projected to go down. At best, the rate of growth in spending would slow.
“The word ‘cut’ is what government statisticians and budget officials call it — but in fact it’s just really a slowing of growth, and sometimes the growth is still quite high even after it’s slowed down,” said John Taylor, a Stanford University economist.
“They assume that if this year we spend 5 percent, next year we’re gonna spend 8 percent, and the year after that we’re gonna spend 10 percent. And they say ‘well I’ll tell you what, why don’t we cut a percentage point off each one of those rates of growth?’ … Well, that’s not a cut.”
Former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh noted that “no family, no business, no philanthropy” would operate that way.
“I think there are some passages in Alice in Wonderland that must have dealt with this, because in Washington less of an increase is considered a cut, even though it’s more money…”