Why Bonn Is Not Athens

By Victor Davis Hanson

Rudesheim, Germany — This week I am leading a military-history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe’s current economic crises by ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead just watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.
Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European Union.

Obama Campaign May Be Fooling Itself. By Michael Barone

"Axelrod is endeavoring not to panic." So reads a sentence in John Heilemann's exhaustive article on Barack Obama's campaign in this week's New York magazine.
Heilemann is a fine reporter and was co-author with Time's Mark Halperin of a best-selling book on the 2008 presidential campaign. While his sympathies are undoubtedly with Obama, he does a fine job of summarizing the arguments and tactics of both sides.

Are the Recent Cries About Misogyny Warranted?

By Cathy Young

Dueling charges of misogyny from the left and the right have become a depressingly regular media circus -- one that, regardless of the real issues, is mostly about moral posturing and political point-scoring. Worse, both sides are feeding a toxic obsession with women-as-victims and promoting a sexism of special treatment rather than equality.
Conservatives accuse liberals of ignoring and condoning sexist slurs against right-wing women. Liberals accuse conservatives of ignoring and condoning sexism except when it's directed at conservative women and can be used as a weapon against the left.

Is the Obama Recovery Over? Or Has it Not Really Started Yet?

Nick Gillespie |

The indispensable John Merline at Investors Business Daily plots the details of "The Recovery That Wasn't" in the graphic to the right:

Employment: By this point, the average job growth in the past 10 recoveries was 6.9%. Under Obama, jobs have grown by just 1.9%, according to data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve....

Europe in limbo

Home and dry

Europe’s weaker economies are in the grip of a worsening credit crunch

| London, Madrid and Rome

THE joke recounted by the boss of a large Italian bank is an old one, but it captures the moment. Two hikers are picnicking when a bear appears. When one laces up his boots to run, his friend scoffs that he can’t outrun a bear. The shod hiker retorts that it is not the bear he needs to outrun, merely his fellow hiker. “We’re sitting at the picnic with our boots still on,” says the bank boss.

The war over class war

Economic misunderstanding, not overblown rhetoric, is the real problem with the president

IT DOES not take much to be accused of waging class warfare in America. The charge was levelled last year at Mitt Romney, of all the unlikely leftist agitators, when he suggested that certain tax breaks should be available only to those who earned less than $200,000. Rick Santorum, one of Mr Romney’s rivals for the Republican nomination, though he had promised never to use the word “class”, earned a similar rebuke for pointing out that he came from humble origins, supposedly an implicit contrast with Mr Romney, whose father was a governor and cabinet secretary.

The economy

Upswing

Many states key to November’s election are doing better; whether the president can exploit that is another matter

ON MAY 24th Barack Obama launched a blistering attack on Mitt Romney’s business background from the state fairgrounds in Iowa. A week later Mr Romney returned the favour from a furniture warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. The choice of venues was hardly random. Both are in “swing” states that will help determine the outcome of this November’s election. With the economy at the top of voters’ concerns, how the recovery is seen to be faring in such states could have an outsize influence on the result.

Bloodshed in Syria

Houla's horror

COULD the massacre on Friday of over 100 people in Houla, an area of several villages close to Syria's third city of Homs, mark a turning point in Syria's bloody uprising? Politicians around the world expressed outrage after the UN confirmed that 49 children, many under the age of 10, were among the dead, their bodies shown in pictures and video footage. The UN Security Council met on Sunday evening to condemn the killings while the American secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, called for an end to president Bashar Assad's "rule by murder".

The future of the European Union

The choice

A limited version of federalism is a less miserable solution than the break-up of the euro

WHAT will become of the European Union? One road leads to the full break-up of the euro, with all its economic and political repercussions. The other involves an unprecedented transfer of wealth across Europe’s borders and, in return, a corresponding surrender of sovereignty. Separate or superstate: those seem to be the alternatives now.
For two crisis-plagued years Europe’s leaders have run away from this choice. They say that they want to keep the euro intact—except, perhaps, for Greece. But northern European creditors, led by Germany, will not pay out enough to assure the euro’s survival, and southern European debtors increasingly resent foreigners telling them how to run their lives.

India's economy

A Bric hits the wall

by P.F. | PUNE

INDIA’S economy has had some bad economic ideas inflicted on it over the past century, from imperial neglect to the cult of the village and big-ticket socialism. Maybe the concept of BRICs—a handful of emerging economies including India that were destined for fast growth—should be added to the list. It led to a bubble of complacency that is now being popped rather brutally. Growth in India was 5.3% in the three months to March—worse than the 6% expected, below the prior quarter and way below the close-to-double digit rates that were meant to be preordained and propel India to economic super-power status.

Arizona Governor Signs Groundbreaking School Choice Plan

PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law yesterday the expansion of an Arizona school choice program, explicitly making children of active military members eligible to participate — a first nationwide. The expansion of the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program also makes students in failing public schools or school districts and those adopted out of the state foster care system eligible starting in the 2013-14 school year.

US: The Fiscal Effects of School Choice Programs on Public School Districts – by Benjamin Scafidi

The public education establishment routinely argues that school choice programs, where “the money follows the child,” harm students who remain in public schools. They suggest that students who remain in public schools are worse off because there will be fewer resources available for their education once some children depart public school districts via school choice. That is, there will be fewer students and, consequently, fewer taxpayer dollars to cover the substantial fixed costs of running a school.

US: President Obama’s Frenzied Spending Caused A Feeble Recovery – by Ralph Benko

Grover Norquist, head of the Americans for Tax Reform advocacy group.

Would you happily sign an IOU for $126,000 to allow Barack Obama to keep his Big Spender status going? In some ways, that’s the bottom line on how people are going to vote on November 6^th. That’s what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates Obama’s proposed deficits, from 2011 through 2020, will add to a family of four’s share of America’s liabilities.

US: Election 2012: Why Ethnicity is Destiny for the GOP – by Bruce Barlett

Last week, the Census Bureau made nationwide headlines when it announced that for the first time since Native Americans were the dominant race, minorities make up more than 50 percent of births in the U.S. It defines a minority as anyone who is not single-race white and is not Hispanic.

Jim Cramer Is Predicting Bank Runs In Spain And Italy And Financial Anarchy Throughout Europe

During an appearance on Meet The Press on Sunday, Jim Cramer of CNBC boldly predicted that "financial anarchy" is coming to Europe and that there will be "bank runs" in Spain and Italy in the next few weeks. This is very strong language for the most famous personality on the most watched financial news channel in the United States to be using. In fact, if Cramer is not careful, people will start accusing him of sounding just like The Economic Collapse Blog. It may not happen in "the next few weeks", but the truth is that the European banking system is in a massive amount of trouble and if Greece does leave the euro it is going to cause a tremendous loss of confidence in banks in countries such as Spain, Italy and Portugal. There are already rumors that the "smart money" is pulling out of Spanish and Italian banks. So could we see some of these banks collapse? Would they get bailed out if they do collapse? It is so hard to predict exactly how "financial anarchy" will play out, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the European financial system is heading for a massive amount of pain.

Obama's Five Trillion Dollar Lie

Why isn't the U.S. economy in a depression right now? The number one reason is because the federal government has stolen more than five trillion dollars from future generations since Barack Obama was elected and has used that money to pump up our grossly inflated standard of living. Whether the federal government spends money wisely or foolishly, the truth is that the vast majority of it still ends up in the pockets of the American people who then use it to buy the things they need for their daily lives. If the U.S. government had not borrowed and spent an extra five trillion dollars that we did not have over the past several years, we would be in the middle of a rip-roaring economic depression right now. So any talk that Barack Obama is "improving the economy" is a total farce. It is a five trillion dollar lie. The reality is that Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress have been stealing trillions of dollars from future generations in order to make things tolerable in the present. If the federal government adopted a balanced budget next year, the debt-fueled prosperity that we are currently enjoying would start disappearing very rapidly and all hell would break loose in America.

When The Derivatives Market Crashes (And It Will) U.S. Taxpayers Will Be On The Hook

Warren Buffett once said that derivatives are "financial weapons of mass destruction", and that statement is more true today than it ever has been before. Recently, JP Morgan made national headlines when it announced that it was going to take a 2 billion dollar loss from derivatives trades gone bad. Well, it turns out that JP Morgan did not tell us the whole truth. As you will see later in this article, most analysts are estimating that the losses will eventually be far larger than 2 billion dollars. But no matter how bad things get for JP Morgan, it will not be allowed to fail. JP Morgan is the largest bank in the United States, so it is essentially the "granddaddy" of the too big to fail banks. If JP Morgan gets to the point where it is about to collapse, the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve will rush in to save it.

How The Super Rich Avoid Taxes Even As They Demand That The Rest Of Us Pay More

The way that we tax people in the United States is fundamentally broken and should be completely discarded. The U.S. tax code is absolutely riddled with loopholes that allow the super rich to legally avoid taxes while many of the rest of us are being taxed into oblivion. In our system of taxation, middle class families that work hard and try to play by the rules are deeply penalized while those that are willing to abuse the system make out like bandits. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that enables wealthy politicians such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to pay a smaller percentage of their incomes in taxes than millions of middle class families. Mitt Romney has millions of dollars parked down in the Cayman Islands and in other tax havens. He does this to avoid taxes. Unfortunately, most Americans do not have the resources to funnel money through offshore tax havens.

jueves, 31 de mayo de 2012