Archive - Mar 10, 2013

If you really want to know why Beppe Grillo is causing Central Planners throughout the European continent to wet themselves, this video will show you.  There’s a real revolution happening in Italy.  This guy is the real deal and he understands the heart of the whole issue plaguing the world.

It is not Keynes or Kuznets to whom should be looking, much less the ineffable Krugman, but the shining example of Sir John Cowperthwaite whose enlightened strategy of what he called ‘positive non-interventionism’ in 1960s Hong Kong— coupled with a near blanket ban on the collation of official statistics for fear their provision would tempt men into meddling (“If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.’’)—allowed the entrepôt to more than quadruple its GDP per capita (it really is a hard habit to break, isn’t it?) in comparison with its colonial masters in Britain, in the space of single generation. A man who eschewed tariffs in an era of protection; who abstained from government borrowing at a time when his peers were fast becoming ’all Keynesians now’; who capped income taxes at a modest 15% in an age when the rich were being ‘squeezed until their pips squeaked’; and who refused all acts of corporate welfare, Cowperthwaite’s assessment of his own role was characteristically modest, once declaring that, as regards his contribution to Hong Kong’s success, "I did very little. All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it."

Sequesters; continuing resolutions; "spending brakes"; government shutdowns; fiscal restraint..... austerity.  For all the ceaseless talk about the "prudent", "responsible" action out of Congress, even if it is a result of the president-proposed, and Congress endorsed automatic spending cuts enacted as a result of the August 2011 debt ceiling fiasco, we have a minor problem identifying just where this so-called spending restraint is manifesting itself. Perhaps that is because we look at the facts, not the propaganda, or the empty rhetoric. Here as the facts: in the year to date period of the past four fiscal years, starting October 1 and going through the current day in March, the current year has seen the issuance of exactly $635 billion in Federal Debt, which as of Friday crossed the "psychological barrier" of $16.7 trillion. This is the second highest cumulative debt issuance in one fiscal year, surpassing both 2010 and 2011, and lower only compared to the $726.7 billion raked up in Fiscal 2012... just after President and Congress swore to cut back on spending following the US downgrade by S&P.