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“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” “Lenin was certainly right,” John Maynard Keynes continued in his 1919 classic, “The Economic [...]
Warren Buffet caused a stir last week when he argued that he and other wealthy individuals should pay a higher tax rate. Now, as a libertarian, I prefer to balance the budget exclusively through spending cuts. However, if that’s not politically feasible, I support higher taxes today over deficit spending and the interest it entails. But before [...]
Filed under: Economics
An unprecedented police presence of 16,000 officers in London last Wednesday night, with many more stationed throughout England, has manged to quell the most extensive and vicious rioting in the UK in living memory. The violence may have hatched itself from a protest on the previous Saturday over the police shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan [...]
The decision by Standard & Poor’s to strip the United States of its AAA credit rating, for the first time, has triggered a barrage of catcalls against the umpire from the press box and Obamaites. S&P, we are reminded, was giving A ratings to banks like Lehman Brothers, whose books were stuffed with suspect subprime [...]
Filed under: Economics
Thanks to Tea Party fanatics, we are told, America just lost an historic opportunity to deal with her national debt. Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama’s “grand bargain,” the “big deal” of $3 trillion in budget cuts for $1 trillion in “revenue [...]
They were called “terrorists,” “fanatics” and “unpatriotic.” Yet the principled resistance of the Tea Party Caucus in the House has put their leader right across the table from Barack Obama to negotiate the final terms of armistice in the debt-ceiling battle of 2011. Today is July 22. On this day, it was said, either Congress [...]
Although I don’t think any of the so-called “serious” politicians will allow the federal government to default on its debts at this juncture, our current fiscal policy is unsustainable. At some point, the government will have to stick it to one or more of the major interest groups in play: bondholders, seniors and others who depend [...]
Filed under: Economics, Foreign policy, Politics
Will the East dominate the West by the end of this century? Absolutely, says Stanford professor of classics and history Ian Morris; and there is little the West can hope to do about it. In a talk hosted by the New America Foundation and the Atlantic Council in Washington – “Will the East dominate the [...]
I have not paid much attention to the rancorous debt ceiling debate. That’s not because I don’t care about federal spending. There are few aspects of government policy that don’t interest me at least somewhat, and, as a relatively young man, I’m constantly horrified by our government’s spendthrift ways because it’s my future income they [...]
Filed under: Congress, Economics, Foreign policy, Politics
Departing for New Hampshire in November 2010, Sen. Judd Gregg, the fiscal conservative President Obama wanted in his Cabinet, blurted an inconvenient truth: “This nation is on a course where if we don’t do something about it, get … fiscal policy (under control), we’re Greece.” The remark was regarded as hyperbole. But Gregg had a [...]