Canada Stats

 

Canada Stats

Every so often the statisticians can stun you.

Canada's GDP grew by 1.1% between the 4th quarter of 2022 and 2023, while its population grew by 3.2%. That means GDP per capita is now falling at 2% annually (roughly the difference). They have had Zero economic growth in more than 6 years.

9:18 AM

Monsieur Spade

 

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resign, calling him an obstacle to a two-state solution. 

Like a neighbor wandering into your house and rearranging your furniture.



Monsieur Spade

From a review of Monsieur Spade, a series on Prime:

It starts with a great premise, twenty years after the events of “The Maltese Falcon,” Sam Spade has retired in a small town in southern France still riven by World War II and Algeria. Clive Owen is excellent as Spade and there are some good noir lines:


Henri Thibaut: You were in the army, Mr. Spade?

Sam Spade: No, I was a conscientious objector.

Henri Thibaut: You don’t believe in killing your fellow man?

Sam Spade: Oh, I think there’s plenty of men worth killing, as well as plenty of wars worth fighting, I’d just rather choose myself.

Yet for all the promise, I didn’t finish the series. In addition to being set in France, Monsieur Spade has a French cinema atmosphere, boring, long, vaguely pretentious. There is also a weird fascination with smoking, does it pay off with anything? I don’t know. Didn’t finish it.

Deviation

 

Deviation

The Biden administration’s strange, costly, and coercive crusade to replace internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) with electric vehicles (EVs) is disproportionate to its minuscule climate impact. 

The American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher says the EPA’s own assumptions project that the new regulations will mitigate global warming by 0.023 degrees Celsius by 2100. Because the standard deviation of the Earth’s surface temperature record is 0.11 degrees Celsius, “that effect would not be detectable.”

Not detectable.

The debatable casual conclusions of difficult and complex measurements nonetheless have become gospel. And the political response is so out of proportion that one suspects other influences. (One is not understanding the math.)

But apparently, there arises a moment when we stop following the science.

Creating Shortages

The U.S. publishing industry is driven by celebrity authors and repeat bestsellers, according to testimony from a blocked merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Only 50 authors sell over 500,000 copies annually, with 96% of books selling under 1,000 copies. Publishing houses spend most of their advance money on celebrity books, which along with backlist titles like The Bible, account for the bulk of their revenue and fund less commercially successful books.

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Creating Shortages

President Biden has formally proposed the highest capital gains tax in over 100 years.

Here is a direct quote from the Biden 2025 budget proposal: “Together, the proposals would increase the top marginal rate on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends to 44.6 percent.”

A Biden capital gains and dividends tax rate of 44.6%.

Under the Biden proposal, the combined federal-state capital gains tax would exceed 50% in many states. California will face a combined federal-state rate of 59%, New Jersey 55.3%, Oregon at 54.5%, Minnesota at 54.4%, and New York state at 53.4%.

And the capital gains tax is not indexed to inflation. So Americans get stuck paying tax on some “gains” that are not real. Of course, the government apparently does not have a good understanding of inflation so this point may be lost on them.

What is not lost on anybody is the nature of capital gains. It is the ultimate barometer of risk and reward, the summary, in yield terms, of the chances of success of an investment. Pharmaceuticals, for example, are so expensive to develop, so risky an approval process, and so difficult to bring to market, that many large firms have stopped doing it, shunting the process to smaller, focused companies created and supported by people who understand risk. And reward. That tension makes profits, loses savings, succeeds and fails--and develops pharmaceuticals.

Of course, without those investments, without small, struggling companies there will be pharmaceuticals--just not as many of them.

This is the shortsighted world of those who drain productive capital to create their contracting legacy.

The Biden tax rate is more than twice as high as China’s rate. China’s capital gains tax rate is 20%. Even China understands the consequences of punishing investment.

Frankenstein

So, will we taxpayers be paying the student loans of the pro-terrorist demonstrators?

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Frankenstein

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled last year that President Biden had no authority to unilaterally write off $430 billion in student loans, he and his aides have been crowing that they intended to do it anyway.

Biden declared he would “stop at nothing to find other ways” to get what he wanted. Soon the administration began generating fresh schemes to cancel student debt — or, more accurately, to transfer that debt to taxpayers. In February, announcing his intention to relieve an additional 153,000 borrowers of the obligation to pay back what they owe, Biden again stressed that he would not comply with the court’s mandate.

“The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me,” he boasted on Feb. 21.

Recently the White House moved to wipe out more student loans — this time absolving some 30 million individuals of their liabilities. Once more there was an explicit assertion of resistance to the court’s decision. “When the Supreme Court struck down the president’s boldest student debt relief plan,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona proclaimed, “within hours we said: ‘We won’t be deterred.'”

So the government opposes itself. Somehow the administration sees itself as rebellious, like a street demonstrator, asserting its position against a structure specifically designed as the national foundation, created to protect its citizens from the government by defining and channeling it.  

Anyone concerned by the rise of lawlessness might well start here for a cause as the executive proudly defies its creator.

Barr's Vision for Democracy

 

In an interview Friday, the BBC called the White House 'cowardly.'

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Barr's Vision for Democracy

The Trump candidacy--indeed his entire public nature--has suffered from the intense criticism he has received from his prior cabinet members who not only hate his policies but hold him personally in low regard.

Kelly, his longest serving Chief of Staff: "A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.There is nothing more that can be said,.God help us.”

Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: "It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against."

Mark Esper, Trump's former secretary of defense, “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

And, most damaging, Trump’s well-regarded former attorney general, Bill Barr, “He is a consummate narcissist. And he constantly engages in reckless conduct. … He will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests. Our country can’t, you know, can’t be a therapy session for you know, a troubled man like this.”

But there has been a shocking change. Barr has changed his mind and will vote for Trump. Why? Because, while Trump is playing 'Russian Roulette,' Biden's pathway is certainly 'suicidal,' and, with Trump, at least society has a chance.

The great and successful democracy has been reduced to the position where a personality disorder playing Russian Roulette is America's best chance.

Not the greatest compliment but...

Notes and Noted 2

Notes and Noted 2

The Gospel today is disturbing, with Christ contemplating man and his failures.

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The Obama administration in 2016 paid some $1.7 billion to Iran in a combination of foreign currencies – most of which was the settlement of a decades-old financial dispute – to secure the release of four detained Americans with no restrictions on how the money would be spent. Photographs of the first installment of $400 million in cash, packed on a wooden palette for transport, were famously leaked and fueled the outrage of GOP critics.

The nuclear deal is believed to have resulted in a roughly $50 billion influx of cash for Iran from its implementation in 2016 to 2018, when President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement – a significant amount but a far cry from the $150 billion that Trump estimated had reached Iran.

While the Biden administration renewed talks with Iran to reenter the pact, the discussions have led nowhere and U.S. negotiators publicly walked away. Though not believed to be directly connected, some analysts have speculated that the Biden administration's move to free up the $6 billion could have been an incentive to continue talking even as Tehran slowed the pace of development of a nuclear weapon.

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The Atlantic article, "Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls
The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election"
by Richard Stengel, is behind a paywall

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More from the unreal mendacity universe. Soaking the rich, while appealing in its simplicity, misses the scale of the problem. Brian Riedl, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, noted that if we were to confiscate 100 percent of the income of everyone making over $500,000 per year, it would fund the government for less than a year. This puts into perspective the enormity of the $34 trillion national debt versus the income of the rich.

Taxing the rich is a convenient distraction hiding the reality that if spending isn’t cut, taxes will have to be raised on everyone, a lot. 

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The ‘whistleblower’ who sparked Donald Trump’s first impeachment was deeply involved in the political maneuverings behind Biden-family business schemes in Ukraine that Trump wanted probed, newly obtained emails from former Vice President Joe Biden’s office reveal.

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Alphabet Inc.’s Google has fired 28 employees after they were involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon.com Inc. to provide the Israeli government with AI and cloud services.