Category: nannystate

A Nice Parting Gift

entitlement generation Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 20 Comments

Most wage earners would not be surprised to see a recession in the near future; for many, it’s already begun as prices have outstripped wage growth for many months.

Over 20.5% accumulated inflation over the past four years, government deficit spending has reached nearly $2 trillion annually despite record tax receipts and a growing economy, public debt has reached almost $36 trillion, and the monthly job figure includes an astonishing 43,000 new government jobs each month. In 2023, nearly 25% of all job gains were government ones, and the entirety of the growth of the labor force in the past four years came from foreign workers.

The Biden-Harris administration has left a massive time bomb for Trump and Elon Musk’s government efficiency office…

Unicorn Economics

entitlement generation Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 24 Comments

There’s no magic formula that’s going to make a ponzi scheme sound, but that doesn’t stop a lot of academics from trying to find one. I also have to wonder how the author comes to the conclusion that Canadians pay less taxes than they used to.

The income taxes paid by Canadian millennials are being squeezed by population aging. The typical 35-year-old now pays approximately 20-per-cent to 40-per-cent more for boomers’ healthy retirements than boomers paid as young people to support the smaller number of seniors in their day.

This extra tax burden will only get heavier in the years ahead as Ottawa enacts planned increases for Old Age Security (OAS) and the Canada Health Transfer, and provinces increase medical spending for their aging populations.

Pipeline Of Losses

Climate Cult Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 14 Comments

It’s somewhat ironic that the NDP are criticizing a government agency for losing money, but maybe that’s just a bug in their code, not a feature. I’m sure they’ll correct the error soon.

Trans Mountain Corporation CEO Mark Maki said the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion was “worth the cost” in a Monday appearance in Ottawa, even with the inflated price tag of $34 billion.

NDP MP Charlie Angus said he couldn’t square the pipeline’s high purported resale value with the fact that it’s currently selling product at a loss to attract customers.

Angus speculated that the federal government was using a subsidiary “shell company”, TMP Finance Ltd., to hide the project’s losses.

Wise Words

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 10 Comments

One of the less well-known economists of the Austrian School was Professor Antal Fekete who died in 2020. Fekete arguably had a much better grasp of monetary issues than many of his contemporaries. His works are still available on his website, and one in particular details why debt must necessarily grow exponentially in a fiat currency system.

Every year monetary authorities must create at least as much new money as needed to service outstanding debt, in order to keep the game of musical chairs going.

Governments have lost not only their option to reduce indebtedness but, more ominously, the option to balance their budgets. There is a new item in the budget that is never named, that is well-hidden, but that is increasing by leaps and bounds year after year: that part of government borrowing that is needed to provide cover for the increase of the monetary base.

The utterances of politicians about their resolve to eliminate the budget deficit is disingenuous – it cannot be done under the prevailing monetary regime on a net basis.

Your Home Is Not Your Castle

Canada’s Bolsheviks Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 36 Comments

When a society accepts the premise that those with wealth deserve to have it strip mined, nothing is off limits.

Governments’ extraction of value from our homes has accelerated in recent years as they have became more desperate, both to raise revenue and to find scapegoats to deflect blame for their own starring role Canada’s housing shortage. As the byzantine extractions multiplied, our homes, once considered our main assets, have morphed for many into our main liabilities. Once upon a time, “safe as houses” was a no-brainer investment strategy. Anyone who now sees a house as a safe investment needs his head examined.

Tax Me Harder!

Canada’s Bolsheviks Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 20 Comments

It’s too bad that the Conservatives continue to remain largely silent on the critical issue of repealing Justin’s capital gains tax hikes. The impact is far from trivial.

Based on conventional assumptions that an increase in the tax-inclusive cost of capital by 10 percent causes the capital stock to fall by 7 percent, I estimate that Canada’s capital stock would fall by $127 billion. Employment would permanently decline by 414,000. To put this in terms of its impact on unemployment, the capital gains tax hike would increase unemployment from 1.5 to 1.9 million Canadian workers as of August 2024. GDP will fall by almost $90 billion and real per capita GDP by 3 percent.

 

Closing The Exits

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 38 Comments

The Israeli finance ministry has been musing recently about limiting cash transactions and possibly criminalizing the holding of gold and silver. As heavily indebted governments like Israel begin to fear a loss of confidence in their ability to service those debts, they will look at measures to prevent citizens from finding a way not to be their creditor. Historically, this would not be the first time that a government barred the financial exit doors in a monetary system.

And The Police Were Completely Irrelevant As Well

Drain The Swamp nannystate 9 Comments

David Henderson- An Opening for Private Liquor Stores in Manitoba

The above is a picture I took last night of people lining up at a Manitoba government liquor store in Winnipeg. For about 2 years now, the government has had a system in place to allow people in the stores one by one. The reason is that a few years ago, there were a number of gang attacks on the liquor stores. People, typically youths, would enter all at once and steal liquor. Some employees were injured.

Bailouts In A Flood

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 3 Comments

In addition to bailing out the Treasury, it’s likely that the Fed lowered interest rates in order to stem the losses on its own bond portfolio as well. Whichever aspect you focus on, none of it is good news.

The “higher for longer” policy only lasted eighteen months.

The U.S. budget deficit reached $1.897 trillion in the first eleven months of the 2024 fiscal year, and annual interest costs on the public debt topped $1 trillion for the first time….Furthermore, in its own projections, the Treasury expected an increase of $16 trillion in government debt between 2024 and 2034. The Congress Budget Office estimates that the implementation of the Harris economic plan will result in a further $2.25 trillion increase in debt.

Lockdown Hangovers

Let Them Eat Taser nannystate Safe and Effective 16 Comments

The economic damage caused by the lockdowns was bad enough and obvious to most, but there’s another side to that travesty that is less talked about.

The lockdown babies are now starting school, and the impact of their extraordinary early days is stark. “There’s a school in Birmingham where more than half the children entering [Reception] were still wearing nappies,” says Paskins. “Before the pandemic there might have been one or two. Now more than half have that developmental delay, and what that means in terms of how children are able to learn and function.”

The other thing that was really bad about Covid and the lockdown was that we were threatened with the idea that if we passed it on to somebody, we’d almost be responsible for their death. It just made life so miserable.”

She adds: “A lot of people have never really quite recovered. I would say it took me at least two years, and even now lots of my friendships are impacted.”

Fly The Expensive Skies

entitlement generation Gradually Then Suddenly nannystate 17 Comments

If you think air fares are already high in Canada’s centrally planned airline market, just wait.

The airline has offered to increase the aviators’ pay by 4% annually over three years, plus an upfront 26% pay boost as well as other benefits, according to a source who asked not to be named to discuss confidential details of the agreement.

The 42% compensation increase over the four-year contract is expected to cost the carrier C$1.9 billion.

 

Racial Profiles

Khmer Noir nannystate The Tolerant Left 8 Comments

After the end of South Africa’s policy of Apartheid, one would have thought that laws sorting people by race would be a thing of the past, right? Well, think again. As the Institute for Race Relations points out, from 1910 to the present 314 racial acts have been passed by their parliament. However, 117 of those acts have been adopted since 1994, and 141 racial acts are operative today.

Almost immediately [after 1994], however, the government began (re)enacting race law and pursuing racial policy. The two most notable instances of this are the 1998 Employment Equity Act and the 2003 Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act. Various other pieces of legislation exist among dozens of charters, plans, regulations, directives, notices, and policies that attempt to regulate aspects of society along racial lines and racialise commerce.

 

The Totalitarian Mindset

Freespeechers nannystate Surveillance State 11 Comments

If the Green Party ever gets ahold of the levers of government, western civilization will be done like dinner.

“We must stop the spread of anti-human and anti-constitutional content on the internet,” demanded Hofreiter, who serves as the chairman of the European Affairs Committee in the Bundestag. Violations of applicable law must be punished consistently. With regard to social networks, this means that they “will be blocked if necessary,” said the Green politician. This would also include the X platform owned by Elon Musk, which the left views as an imminent threat due to its emphasis on free speech, according to Frankfurter Rundschau.

Average Nonsense

Insufferable Twits nannystate Surveillance State 12 Comments

Economist Frank Shostak delves into the perplexing issue of governments attempting to discern an “average” price level for the economy or calculating GDP “growth”. In a nutshell, the whole idea is nuts.

Suppose two transactions were conducted: In the first transaction, one TV set is exchanged for $1,000; in the second transaction, one shirt is exchanged for $40. The price or in the first transaction is $1000/1 TV set. The price in the second transaction is $40/1 shirt. In order to calculate the “average price,” we must add these two ratios together and divide them by two. But $1000/1 TV set cannot be added to $40/1 shirt, implying that it is not possible to establish the “average price.”

The employment of various sophisticated methods to calculate the “average price” cannot bypass the essential issue that it is not possible to establish an average price of various goods and services. Accordingly, various price indices that government statisticians compute are simply arbitrary numbers. If price deflators are meaningless, so is the real GDP statistic.

 

Made-up Numbers

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 5 Comments

It’s not unreasonable to assume that government statisticians routinely “massage” unemployment numbers in order to allow their political bosses to claim that the economy is in better shape than it actually is. Economist Ryan McMaken delves into the mechanics of this smoke and mirrors game.

The establishment survey report shows that total jobs—a total that includes both part-time and full-time jobs—increased, month over month, in August by 142,000. The establishment survey measures only total jobs, however, and does not measure the number of employed persons. That means that even when job growth comes mostly from people working multiple part-time jobs, the establishment survey shows increases while the total number of employed persons does not. In fact, total employed persons can fall while total jobs increases. For instance, the total number of employed persons has fallen by 66,000 since August of 2023. This is in contrast to a gain of 2.3 million “jobs” in the establishment survey over the same period.

Broken Landing Gear

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 18 Comments

Economist Frank Shostak offers these insights as to how an economy comes to be saddled with massive malinvestments (EV plants come to mind) which must eventually be liquidated in a painful recession.

Whenever a central bank tampers with financial markets and manipulates the market interest rates this falsifies individuals’ “instructions” to businesses. As a result, businesses invest in the wrong infrastructure (i.e., not in line with individuals’ priorities). This ultimately undermines the process of wealth generation.

For instance, the central bank lowers the market interest rates while individuals have not lowered their time preferences. This means that people have not increased the supply of real savings. Businesses, however, attempt to increase investments in response to the central bank artificially lowering the interest rates. This will fail since there are not enough real savings to fund the buildup of the capital structure at that time.

Wrongthink

nannystate Safe and Effective Science Unsettled Science 14 Comments

I can think of a couple of issues besides plate tectonics where scientists have not lived up to the ideals mentioned. Can you?

One aspect of science, however, is a good model for our behavior, especially in times like these, when so many people seem to be sure that they are right and their opponents are wrong. It is the ability to say, “Wait—hold on. I might have been wrong.”

Not all scientists live up to this ideal, of course. But history offers admirable examples of scientists admitting they were wrong and changing their views in the face of new evidence and arguments. My favorite comes from the history of plate tectonics.

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