Dumb and Dumber Tax Hikes in Italy

Grand Coalition Splintering

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

One of the dumbest things a country can do in a recession is raise taxes. Yet, after pronouncing the end of austerity, Italy's "grand coalition" government, led by Enrico Letta, is going to hike the VAT.

Why? It seems they need to hike the VAT to pay for a decrease in property taxes.

Recall that Silvio Berlusconi was only willing to take part in Letta's grand coalition on condition property tax hikes were rolled back. Letta agreed to do that, but now Letta says Italy needs revenue hikes to make up for it.

Grand Coalition Splintering 

Curiously, the International Business Times reports Enrico Letta's Grand Coalition Could End Italy's 'Lingering Civil War'.

What nonsense. Letta's "grand coalition" is burnt toast already.

Eurointelligence gets it right. 

Il Corriere della Sera and other Italian papers are leading with the news that finance minister Fabrizio Saccomanni and another cabinet ministers said yesterday that Italy cannot simultaneously afford to cut the IMU housing tax and not implement an envisaged rise in VAT, and would thus opt to raise VAT.

In its coverage, La Repubblica writes that Saccomanni is now becoming a controversial within the coalition, as Silvio Berlusconi appears to appear chosen him as a target for his verbal attacks. The VAT increase is threatening to drive a gulf between the two largest parties, the PD and Berlusconi’s PdL.

Lessons of a Greek Tragedy

Past mistakes, committed not just by Greece, but also by its partners, make a difficult short-term future unavoidable

By Barry Eichengreen

A visit to Greece leaves many vivid impressions. There are, of course, the country’s rich history, abundance of archeological sites, azure skies, and crystalline seas. But there is also the intense pressure under which Greek society is now functioning – and the extraordinary courage with which ordinary citizens are coping with economic disaster.

Inevitably, a visit also leaves questions. In particular, what should policymakers have done differently in confronting the country’s financial crisis?

The critical policy mistakes were those committed at the outset of the crisis. It was already clear in the first half of 2010, when Greece lost access to financial markets, that the public debt was unsustainable. The country’s sovereign debt should have been restructured without delay.

Had Greece quickly written down its debt burden by two-thirds, it would have been able to shed its crushing debt overhang. It could have used a portion of the interest savings to recapitalize the banks. It could have cut taxes, rather than raising them. It could have jump-started investment and gotten its economy moving again, if not in a matter of months, then, with luck, in no more than a year.

In its official post-mortem on the crisis, the International Monetary Fund now agrees that debt restructuring should have been undertaken earlier. But this was not its view at the time. Under the leadership of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Fund was in thrall to the French and German governments, which adamantly opposed debt relief.

The Unknown Unknowns and Survivor Bias

Survivorship bias helps us understand why success stories are not what actually help us succeed

by charles smith

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is famous for uttering a koan-like description of the epistomological ambiguity of human experience:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.

There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

(Interestingly, it appears Rumsfeld did not pen the koan himself; correspondent J.S.S. noted that the original source may be Landmark Education of Seattle, Washington.)

I recently read two fascinating accounts of why we have such a difficult time knowing what we don't know: it's called survivor bias, and what that means is we only get information from the survivors, not those who perished and vanished from the records.

A mid-list author recently explained how listening to the handful of authors who make it big financially is completely misleading: Survivorship bias: why 90% of the advice about writing is BS right now.

Here's how this works: big-bucks Author Z says, here are the 10 steps you need to take to become as successful as me. The list always mentions perseverance, being nice to your readers, writing 1,000 words a day and so on.

Adiós Alemania

Many Immigrants Leave Germany within a Year

By Sarah Sommer

Is Germany a dreamland for immigrants? Not entirely. According to a new OECD study, more than half the Greeks and Spaniards who come to Germany leave within a year.

"Bienvenidos! Welcome to Baden-Württemberg!" Several initiatives are currently underway in the southwestern German state, home of the Black Forest, to attract young workers from Spain.

Plagued with a lack of skilled workers, rural southern Germany has focused on attracting Spanish workers looking for jobs as apprentices in the restaurant business, as skilled workers at hospitals or daycare facilities, or as engineers for the kind of small to mid-sized industries that form the backbone of the German economy.

The idea behind the campaign is simple: Southern Europe is faced with dramatically high youth unemployment, and small and mid-sized businesses in southern Germany are in desperate need of personnel. Why not let young and experienced skilled workers from Southern Europe come to Germany, creating a win-win situation?

Honor From Our Fathers

Happy Father’s Day! 

"My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: he believed in me."         - Jim Valvano

Honor is essential to the maintenance of a free society. We learn about honor from our fathers.

When the duties of fatherhood are widely dismissed or rendered poorly, our understanding of honor is diluted… and freedom soon begins to wither.

This is not to belittle the importance of mothers. Many single mothers do a spectacular job of providing their children with an understanding of personal honor. We can respect and celebrate the achievements of extraordinary individuals, without blinding ourselves to the effect of broad trends upon vast populations. Both fathers and mothers are uniquely important. Our society is suffering from a pronounced deficit of fatherhood.

There are many ways to define honor. I suggest viewing it as an expression of faith, in both yourself and others. An honorable man or woman displays honesty and integrity because they believe others deserve such treatment. It is a sign of faith in other people that we deal honorably with them, and presume they will do the same, unless they prove otherwise. Honor is also a gesture of respect we offer to ourselves, because we have faith that we can succeed without deceit and savagery. If you truly respect yourself, you believe you can win without cheating.

The Carefree Life of a Teen in Wartime Berlin

Hairdos and Movies

By Jane Paulick

The diary of Brigitte Eicke, a Berlin teenager in World War II, is an account of cinema visits, first kisses, hairdos and dressmaking, along with a brief, untroubled reference to disappearing Jews. Recently published, it highlights the public indifference that paved the road to Auschwitz.

1 February 1944

"The school had been bombed when we arrived this morning. Waltraud, Melitta and I went back to Gisela's and danced to gramophone records."

Young girls are made of stern stuff. In December 1942, while Allied bombs rained on Berlin and Nazi troops fought for control of Stalingrad, 15-year-old Brigitte Eicke began keeping a diary. For the next three years, the young office apprentice wrote in it every single day.

Now published in German as "Backfisch im Bombenkrieg" -- backfisch being an old-fashioned term for a girl on the cusp of womanhood -- it adds a new perspective to Germany's World War II experience and shows not only how mundane war can become but also how the majority of Germans were able to turn a blind eye to Nazi brutality.

Neocons and Progressives

One Big Family of Aggressors and Central Planners, with Delusions of Grandeur 

by Scott Lazarowitz.

Regarding the traditional left-right scheme and modern uses of the terms “conservative” and “liberal,” the neoconservatives are hardly conservative and the liberals and progressives are hardly liberal or progressive. Rather than viewing “left” as liberal or progressive, and “right” as conservative or neoconservative, I view left as being collectivist and right as individualist.

Because both sides, progressives and neoconservatives (a.k.a. “neocons”) are of collectivism, I view both sides as on the left. Advocates of private property and voluntary exchange are on the right, in my view.

Collectivism includes the sacrificing of the individual to serve the collective, and the conscription of the individual’s labor to serve the interests of the collective via coercive taxation under threats of violence, i.e. involuntary servitude.

Individualism, on the other hand, includes the protection of the rights of the individual to self-ownership, the right to be free from the aggression and intrusion of others, the sanctity of justly acquired private property, and voluntary exchange, voluntary association and voluntary contracts.

Good luck with that ‘exit strategy’!

Roubini attacks the gold bugs

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

Earlier this month, in an article for “Project Syndicate” famous American economist Nouriel Roubini joined the chorus of those who declare that the multi-year run up in the gold price was just an almighty bubble, that that bubble has now popped and that it will continue to deflate. Gold is now in a bear market, a multi-year bear market, and Roubini gives six reasons (he himself helpfully counts them down for us) for why gold is a bad investment. Roubini does not quite go so far as to tell his readers that there is no role whatsoever for the yellow metal. Investors should have a “very modest” share of gold in their portfolios, as a hedge against extreme risks, which, the good professor assures us, are almost so negligibly small that they are “irrational fears”, really, but beyond that there is little reason to bother with gold.

Interestingly, “very modest” is indeed a good description of gold’s share in the global asset mix. According to some studies gold accounts for only around 1 percent of global asset holdings. In terms of asset breakdown we already are where Roubini thinks we should be. So why bother? Those of us – such as yours truly – who hold a more pessimistic outlook as to the efficiency of current policies and the sustainability of the current monetary infrastructure, and who accordingly hold a bigger share of their wealth in gold, are evidently “paranoid”, and as they now reap the deserved reward for their dreadful negativity courtesy of a declining gold price, why not ignore them? It is, after all, a tiny minority. But it is evident from Roubini’s essay that he not only considers the gold bugs to be wrong and foolish, they also annoy him profoundly. They anger him. Why? – Because he thinks they also have a “political agenda”. Gold bugs are destructive. They are misguided and even dangerous people.

Asia's Rise of the Rest

Asia's New Power Brokers

By Robert Kaplan

Significant movements in world affairs often go unnoticed by the media. For what fits inside the strictures of hard news are usually dramatic statements by politicians, dramatic actions by military units or dramatic economic shifts. But what also really changes history are the gradual developments that accrue over time. That's one of the reasons you are liable to learn more by reading serious books or scholarly reports than by reading newspapers. Asia is a case in point.

The news about Asia is relentlessly repetitive and often insignificant, however tragic in human terms sometimes. Indeed, the recent building collapse in Bangladesh was heartrending, but geopolitically it was of marginal importance. The jousting between China and Japan over disputed islands in the East China Sea is important -- but after reading about it for months on end, unrevealing. The same with the islands in the South China Sea. We already know that Japan has a more activist prime minister and for years his country has been shedding its quasi-pacifism, if only the media would finally tell us more.

Syria's Collapse

Can Washington Stop It ?

by Andrew J. Tabler

Syria is melting down. The ruling regime’s attempt to shoot its way out of the largest uprising it has ever faced has killed over 80,000 people and displaced roughly half of Syria’s population of 22 million. If the current monthly death tolls of around 6,000 keep up, Syria will by August hit a grim milestone: 100,000 killed, a number that it took almost twice as long to reach in Bosnia in the early 1990s. This a full two years after U.S. President Barack Obama pronounced that President Bashar al-Assad needed to “step aside.”

Comparisons to the Balkans do not suffice to describe the crisis in Syria, however. The real danger is that the country could soon end up looking more like Somalia, where a bloody two-decade-long civil war has torn apart the state and created a sanctuary for criminals and terrorists. Syria has already effectively fractured into three barely contiguous areas. In each, U.S.-designated terrorist organizations are now ascendant. The regime still holds sway in western Syria, the part of the country dominated by the Alawite minority, to which the Assad family belongs; and fighters from Hezbollah, a Shiite Islamist group backed by Iran, regularly cross the increasingly meaningless Lebanese border to join Assad’s forces there. Meanwhile, a heavily Sunni Arab north-central region has come under the control of a diverse assortment of armed opposition groups.

Is Obama Starting A War With Syria Just A Distraction From All The Scandals?

For now, Obama is saving his own skin, and that is the most important thing. To him.

by Michael Snyder

Well, isn't that convenient?  At the moment when the Obama administration is feeling more heat then ever before, it starts another war.  Suddenly everyone in the mainstream media is talking all about Syria and not about the IRS scandal, Benghazi, NSA snooping or any of the other political scandals that have popped up in recent weeks.

As if on cue, Obama made headlines all over the globe on Thursday by claiming that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the rebels "multiple times", and that the U.S. was now ready to do more to assist the rebels.  That assistance is reportedly going to include "military support" for the rebels and a no-fly zone over at least part of Syria is being discussed.  Without a doubt, these are acts of war, and this conflict is not going to end until Assad has been ousted.  But Assad will not go quietly. 

And all it would take is for Assad to fire a couple of missiles at Tel Aviv for a huge regional war to erupt in the Middle East.  And what happens if Russia or China decides to get involved in the conflict in Syria?  Obama is playing with fire, but he has shown again and again that he is willing to do virtually anything if it will benefit him politically.

Freedom: The Unfolding Revolution

By  Jonah Goldberg

‘Why are there no libertarian countries?”

In a much-discussed essay for Salon, Michael Lind asks: “If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?”

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone. The job of the state is limited to fighting crime, providing for the common defense, and protecting the rights and contracts of citizens. The individual is sovereign; he is the captain of himself.

It’s true, no ideal libertarian state has ever existed outside a table for one. And no such state will ever exist. But here’s an important caveat: No ideal state of any other kind will be created either. America’s great, but it ain’t perfect. Sweden’s social democracy is all right, but if it were perfect, I suspect fewer cars would be on fire over there.

How Does It End?

Today, an economic forecast is more like the analysis of a criminal mind than the evaluation of economic data

By Monty Pelerin

The days of reasonable economic forecasting are over. Today, an economic forecast is more like the analysis of a criminal mind than the evaluation of economic data. The dominating role of government overpowers markets intentionally. In the short-term that will continue. Reactions to Federal Reserve minutes referencing continuation, alteration or cessation of quantitative easing cause stock markets to move by over 100 points. Other markets are affected by government interventions, just not so noticeably.

Long term, markets will overpower government. But, to paraphrase Keynes, in the long term many of us will no longer be around. In the meantime, economic forecasting is more political than economic. Dinosaur government affects everything it touches. Markets remain important although government is currently overpowering them. These deliberate distortions may continue for some time.

Markets left alone would reveal the truth about the sorry condition of our country. Government is doing everything it can to hide this condition from the populace. The nature of any government is to make itself look better in the eyes of the people. Big government has the power and means to do so.

3 Reasons the ‘Nothing to Hide’ Crowd Should Be Worried About Government Surveillance

Most people think the federal government would have no interest in them, but many discover to their horror how wrong they are

By Scott Shackford

Responding to a popular reaction to news of the National Security Agency’s massive data collection program, blogger Daniel Sieradski started a Twitter feed called “Nothing to Hide.” He has retweeted hundreds of people who have declared in one form or another that they are not concerned that the federal government may spy on them. They say they have done nothing wrong, so they have nothing to hide. If it helps the government fight terrorists, go ahead, take their civil liberties away.

In his blog, a frustrated Sieradski listed many of the abuses of power our federal government is known for; he is not happy with the "nothing to hide" crowd.

There are many, many reasons to be concerned about the rise of the surveillance state, even if you have nothing to hide. Or rather, even if you think you have nothing to hide. For those confronted by such simplistic arguments, here are a three counterarguments that perhaps might get these people thinking about what they’re actually giving up.

1. Every American Is Probably a Criminal, Really

That Americans think they have nothing to hide in the first place is a sign of how little attention they're paying to the behavior of our Department of Justice. Many Americans have run afoul of federal laws without even knowing it. Tim Carney noted at the Washington Examiner:

Copy a song to your laptop from a friend's Beyonce CD? You just violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Did you buy some clothes in Delaware because they were tax free? You're probably evading taxes. Did you give your 20-year-old nephew a glass of wine at dinner? Illegal in many states.

Benito would have been very pleased

Great moments in bureaucratic excess: City officials in Hartford shut down barber giving free haircuts in park

by Mark J. Perry

On May 14, I posed the question above on Twitter, and we now know that the answer is: “About 30 days.”

From today’s Associated Press:

An 82-year-old barber who has been giving free haircuts to the homeless in exchange for hugs for 25 years has been kicked out of a park by city health officials. Anthony “Joe the Barber” Cymerys has been a fixture every Wednesday for years at Bushnell Park, where he cuts hair and his friends hand out food to the needy.

But shortly after Cymerys set up shop this week, he said, health officials and police confronted him and his friends and told them they had to leave because they didn’t have permits.

The bozo leviathan sees everything . . . and nothing

Big Politically Correct Brother

By Mark Steyn

Every time I go on his show, my radio pal Hugh Hewitt asks me why congressional Republicans aren’t doing more to insist that the GOP suicide note known as “the immigration deal” include a requirement for a border fence. I don’t like to tell Hugh that, if they ever get around to building the fence, it won’t be to keep the foreigners out but to keep you guys in.

I jest, but only very slightly and only because the government doesn’t build much of anything these days — except for that vast complex five times the size of the Capitol the NSA is throwing up in Utah to house everybody’s data on everything everyone’s ever done with anyone ever.

A few weeks after 9/11, when government was hastily retooling its 1970s hijacking procedures for the new century, I wrote a column for the National Post of Canada and various other publications that, if you’re so interested, is preserved in my anthology The Face of the Tiger. It began by noting the observation of President Bush’s transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, that if “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida” and “a Muslim young man” were in line to board a flight, he hoped there would be no difference in the scrutiny to which each would be subjected. The TSA was then barely a twinkle in Norm’s eye, and in that long-ago primitive era it would have seemed absurd to people that one day in America it would be entirely routine for wheelchair-bound nonagenarians to remove leg braces before boarding a plane or for kindergartners to stand patiently as three middle-aged latex-gloved officials poke around their genitals. Back then, the idea that everybody is a suspect still seemed slightly crazy. As I wrote in my column, “I’d love to see Norm get his own cop show:

“Captain Mineta, the witness says the serial rapist’s about 5′10″ with a thin mustache and a scar down his right cheek.”

“Okay, Sergeant, I want you to pull everyone in.”

“Pardon me?”

“Everyone. Men, women, children. We’ll start in the Bronx and work our way through to Staten Island. What matters here is that we not appear to be looking for people who appear to look like the appearance of the people we’re looking for. There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and I want to hear all of them.”

A decade on, it would be asking too much for the new Norm to be confined to the airport terminal. There are 300 million stories in the Naked Republic, and the NSA hears all of them, 24/7. Even in the wake of a four-figure death toll, with the burial pit still smoking, the formal, visible state could not be honest about the very particular threat it faced, and so in the shadows the unseen state grew remorselessly, the blades of the harvester whirring endlessly but, don’t worry, only for “metadata.” As I wrote in November 2001, “The bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the citizenry’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favorite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.” As the IRS scandal reminds us, you have to have a touchingly naïve view of government to believe that the 99.9999 percent of “metadata” entirely irrelevant to terrorism will not be put to some use, sooner or later.

"It can't happen here" just did.

The Very Real Threat Posed by the NSA

By Gene Healy
As a Senate candidate in 2003, Barack Obama called the PATRIOT Act "shoddy and dangerous." Once safely in power, Obama started demonstrating his remarkable capacity for "growing in office" -- expanding federal powers while piously moralizing about their potential abuse.

As a senator, he voted to reauthorize the surveillance law in 2006; and as president, signed another PATRIOT renewal from Europe via presidential autopen in 2011.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has long warned of a "secret PATRIOT Act" -- a classified interpretation of the law that allows the administration to undertake massive data collection on American citizens.

Last week, we got a glimpse of what he meant, when a National Security Agency contractor revealed that the agency has assembled a database of at least seven years' worth of Verizon customers' call records -- a practice that apparently extends to other carriers.

"Nobody is listening to your calls," the peevish president said last week; they're "sifting through this so-called metadata," trying to identify potential leads.

About that "metadata": It allows the government secretly to track who a target communicates with and where he's physically located. That knowledge can be used to unearth who's leaking to reporters, when and where political opponents are meeting -- even who's sleeping with whom.

The NSA's massive call-records database is thus a potential treasure trove for bad-faith political actors -- it can be used to ferret out the sort of information that governments have historically used to blackmail and control dissenters.

We needn't resort to hyperbolic examples like the East German Stasi to understand the dangers here -- there's a relevant comparison much closer to home. A series of congressional investigations in the 1970s taught Americans shocking lessons about Cold War-era surveillance abuses.

In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee tasked Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman with reviewing former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's secret files.

H.L. Mencken and Thinking Independently

Mencken was a champion of the individual, of rationality, of the human mind in a century of collectivism of many sorts

“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”

By Bill Bonner.

The writings of H.L. Mencken — the Sage of Baltimore — have been a constant companion for me since the start of my writing life. The brilliance, the language, the insight, the derring-do opinionating, the history, the astounding literacy — it’s all here, and it all flows seemingly without limit. All these features are combined in one mind and life, yet none of these features is the reason why it is important to read Mencken. The most important reason is that Mencken assists in the great struggle to free yourself from intellectual conventions and become a mature observer of the world.

To mature means to gradually let go of dependence on others and to depend on your own resources. It also means to accept responsibility for the judgments you make, and not slough them off on other people. It is the same with thinking. To mature means to break loose from canned forms of thought that you once accepted without question, and instead see the world for what it is. It is the essential step toward living a free life.

Modern American democracy seems to war against this kind of maturation. Take a look at the best-selling political and financial books on the conventional lists. Their goal is to play to your biases, to bring you the comfort of having something you already think reinforced. In politics, it means cheering for party X over party Y on grounds that you accept ideology X over ideology Y. There simply is no large market for people who accept some of each or reject both.

In finance, it means believing that the world is either progressively coming together or falling apart. The evidence to support this either/or proposition is assembled in order to confirm as true what you would otherwise think.

This is the easy path. But it is not obtaining maturity. It is not thinking for yourself. It is dependence. It consists in shaping your thinking to a model forged by others. People who read only this way imagine that they are educating themselves. Actually, they are only gorging themselves on settled conventions.

If we really want to think hard and maturely, we need to encounter ideas that cause some element of discomfort. We need to leave our comfort zones and imagine that perhaps the mob is not as smart as people say. Maybe we can only find the truth of a situation in an opinion that cuts against the grain, is not represented by political party, and departs radically from settled orthodoxies. When we realize this, we enter on the road to intellectual maturity.

The thinkers and writers who can assist in this process are few. When they do appear, they disappear just as quickly for lack of champions. I fear this might be the fate of H.L. Mencken. For decades, he was there to stir the pot and work against mob opinion. This is why he opposed U.S. entry into World War I. This is why he was a literary progressive in times when most people were stuck in the past. This is why he ridiculed Prohibition when the entire Northeast religious and government establishment thought it was a brilliant idea. This is why he never shrank from flailing orthodoxies that were accepted by nearly everyone.

France Shoots Itself In Foot

Economic rationality has never stopped the French government from shooting the country, in the foot

By Wolf Richter   

On Friday, France vetoed the launch of free-trade negotiations between the EU and the US, though France has been racking up a trade surplus with the US and has much to lose if the US retaliates. The problem: cultural protectionism. It wanted “protection of cultural services and a clear and explicit exclusion of the audio-visual sector,” whined Foreign Trade Minister Nicole Bricq at a Friday meeting of the EU trade ministers. Catch phrases for American movies and TV shows!

Her speech and the veto were hushed up in Europe, and I couldn’t find any reference to it in the major media outlets. But an unnamed “EU diplomat” leaked the text of her speech to the Chinese media group Xinhua, which wasn’t shy about spreading the word.

It was the day that the European Council was supposed to approve a mandate to start haggling over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US. All along, France had vociferously threatened to shut down the process before it even got started unless the European Commission included in advance a non-negotiable, iron-clad “cultural exception” to protect the French market from a tsunami of evils, namely American movies – a theme that goes back two decades.

France concocted this “cultural exception” under socialist President François Mitterrand and, with the support of a handful of other countries, forced it on the 1992-93 negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the so-called Uruguay Round – under the pretense that applying GATT principles to movies and other audiovisual products “would undermine their cultural specificity (and unique status), in favour of their commercial aspects.”

Since then, the concept of “cultural exception” has become, according to UNESCO, a “tacit understanding,” without legal value, “that culture is not like any other merchandise because it goes beyond the commercial....” Sounds good. It was propagated by conservative Jacques Chirac when he ascended to the French presidential throne in 1995 and has now become part of the DNA of France’s political class.

It permitted France not only to subsidize its film industry with taxpayer money but also to impose quotas on theaters and TV channels as to the percentage of time that French productions must be shown, even if they’re lousy, and even if no one comes to see them. With the quotas, the government tried to limit access to American movies. On the basis that the State knows best what the people need to watch.

An Unimaginable Figure

The momentum being sucked away from the budget debate

The nation’s most unlikely, yet stalwart, fiscal hero

by Peter Coyne.

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

                                                 – Mark Twain

Enter last Friday’s Washington Post commentary:

“After two years of harrowing confrontations in Washington, the national debt is no longer growing out of control and policymakers from President Obama to House Speaker John A. Boehner have rushed to take credit…”

Did the debt shrink? Have changes been made to the structural deficit built into the nation’s fiscal plan?

Ha! Of course not.

One estimate from Professor Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, takes account of all the projected unfunded liabilities and interest payments and puts the U.S. debt at $222 trillion.

It’s a laughable figure. Unimaginable, even.

“The deficit is getting better,” explains I.O.U.S.A. protagonist Robert Bixby tried to explain to the Post on Friday [our cynical ears can hear him snickering over a can of Tab], “but it’s not a result of any hard choices Congress made. They all want to get on the aircraft carrier, like George Bush with his ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners.”