While a U.S. whistleblower reveals that her government is acting as a middleman in child trafficking, at least one European paper is more interested in the disclosure of the U.S. government’s involvement in reverse-engineering UFOs.
New data suggests an elevated risk for stagflation in Europe. Policymakers beware!
America’s states are supposed to be sovereign jurisdictions. Yet when the federal government is their main source of revenue, how independent are they really?
While Americans are worried about mental health, election fraud, and government debt, Europeans think that the most important things in America are abortion pills and ice hockey.
Financial markets are important to governments that need a lot of tax revenue to pay for their welfare states. The problem with taxes levied on financial markets is that they generate unstable revenue.
The more a tax system relies on financial markets, the more volatile and unpredictable those tax revenues will become. There is no doubt that the U.S. government is experiencing that in real time in 2023.
The culture war will be important in the 2024 election. The dividing lines separate two very different ideologies about the principles of human civilization: on the one hand, God, life, liberty, and tradition; on the other hand, secular hedonism with no boundary between right and wrong.
With a welfare state that dominates their budgets, European governments are exceedingly vulnerable to a recession. When tax revenue declines and entitlements force governments to spend more, the inevitable result is larger budget deficits. What will the ECB do in response to that?
If government size and employment rate had been the same in 2022 as they were in 2000, the cost of today’s government would have been $47,000 per employed person. That is a lot of money—until we do the same arithmetic with today’s government size and employment rate. Then the cost comes out to $59,700.
The Trump indictment puts the spotlight on a very disturbing trend in American politics: the slow transition of a constitutional republic into a totalitarian state.
Cities that allow the most destructive of human behavior to take over the public space are cities where civilized life as we know it is being marginalized and forced to give way to social fragmentation. Dignity yields to savagery.
Several news sources have raised the volume about a possible systemwide banking crisis. I am not going to contribute to that. In fact, we should all be careful about determining whether or not such a crisis is at hand.
