Monthly Archives: January 2020

Point, Counterpoint

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A minor flickers maker:

Michael Moore
@MMFlint
Just wondering – is there an American General for whom millions of us would turn out for his funeral? Mad Dog? Kelly? Colin Powel? William Westmoreland? Can anyone even name the chair of the Joint Chiefs?We all support those who serve but would we pour into the streets like this?

An author and commentator:

Dinesh D’Souza
@DineshDSouza
In case you haven’t noticed, Trump draws crowds like this. He is the only one in America who can. What this shows is that America is not a society captive to Caesarism, where blood and conquest brings feverish popular acclaim

Population and Income Redistribution

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People are moving from politically blue States to politically red ones, and they’re taking their money with them.

Four states have lost population since 2010 including West Virginia (-3.3%), Illinois (-1.2%), Vermont (-0.3%) and Connecticut (-0.2%), but 10 experienced declines last year. New York was the biggest loser as a net 180,000 people left for better climes. Over the last decade New York has lost more of its population to other states (7.2%) than any other save Alaska (8%), followed by Illinois (6.8%), Connecticut (5.6%) and New Jersey (5.5%).

And

[Illinois] lost $5.6 billion in adjusted gross income last year to other states, about twice as much as in 2012.
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In the last two years New York has lost a net $18 billion in adjusted gross income.
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Last year California lost $8 billion in adjusted gross income to other states, up from about $135 million in 2012.

And

Where are high-tax state exiles going? Zero income tax Florida drew $16.5 billion in adjusted gross income last year. Many have also fled to Arizona ($3.5 billion), Texas ($3.5 billion), North Carolina ($3 billion), Nevada ($2.3 billion), Colorado ($2.1 billion), Washington ($1.7 billion) and Idaho ($1.1 billion).

Just so long as those transplants don’t bring with them the same foolish politics that generated the economic failures of the States they’re leaving.

European Keynesianism

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Europe’s investors are hoping for some Keynesian stimulus—or what passes for Keynesian stimulus—in the coming year to continue 2019 boomlet in stocks.

Getting stocks to propel higher however, may require faster growth. Some see that slug of faster economic activity coming from a possible government ramp up in stimulus spending.
“Whichever way you slice it, there is a much greater burden on governments to do more” said Anik Sen, Global Head of Equities at PineBridge Investments.

That’s not stimulus; that’s investors addicted to government spending.  Not even Keynes (to stimulate this horse once again) said higher spending was stimulative. He held that it was the spike in spending that did that, following which spending needed to go back to its original level and the debt resulting from the spike soon repaid.

Which brings me to the second item in this European Keynesian nonsense.

During the European sovereign-debt crisis in the early part of the last decade, governments in the region adopted austerity budgets to rein in spending and calm bond markets. Many investors now say such frugality has been counterproductive….

Again, no. It’s not austerity to lower government spending and thereby get government to stop competing with private enterprises for resources, which is inflationary, and to get government to stop competing with the private economy for borrowable funds, which applies upward pressure on interest rates (for all that governments fix rates by arbitrary fiat), which is also inflationary.

Some Predictions

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Because the air is fresh out on the end of a limb.

The Wall Street Journal asked a question regarding Iran’s next moves following the successful killing of its head terrorist, Qasim Soleimani:

What do you think are Iran’s next steps?

My predictions—among other things, Iran will do these:

  • hook up with the Taliban
  • strike Saudi oil fields
  • take speedboat shots at our fleet in the Arabian Gulf
  • mine the Strait of Hormuz
  • sink some oil tankers rather than just put minor holes in them, including British and French tankers—not necessarily in the Arabian Gulf
  • hit some Kurdish bases in northeastern Iraq

Preemptive Update: I wrote the above Tuesday morning; I’m writing this Wednesday morning. My predictions already are outdated. In the realization, Iran struck at two Iraqi facilities on which Americans are based–one in Irbil and the other at Ain al-Asad (will the Iraqi government take official notice of this Iranian assault on Iraqi sovereignty?).The air is fresh as the limb falls, too.

Separately:

Of the 15 Iranian missiles fired, 10 missed Ain al-Asad, one missed Irbil, and four failed.  Some are saying the misses were deliberate, but that’s a terrible OR/reliability rate….

Honorable Military Service

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and town mayor Pete Buttigieg has been making a big deal about his heroic service during his five-month tour in Afghanistan.

Greg Kelly and Katie Horgan, both ex-Marines with actual combat duty, had some thoughts about that in their Wall Street Journal op-ed.  So do I.  Kelly and Horgan noted,

He [Buttigieg] entered the military through a little-used shortcut: direct commission in the reserves.

Not even a 90-day wonder—a pomeranian prince.

Especially this:

Mr Buttigieg spent some five months in Afghanistan, where he writes that he remained less busy than he’d been at City Hall, with “more time for reflection and reading than I was used to back home.” He writes that he would take “a laptop and a cigar up to the roof at midnight to pick up a Wi-Fi signal and patch via Skype into a staff meeting at home.”

It’s a mark of the quality of Buttigieg’s “service” that he had less work to do even than that of being a small-town mayor.

Honorable officers, when they’re short of tasks, go looking for more things to do to advance the mission, they don’t head up to the roof top to moonlight on Skype or hide out somewhere recreationally reading.

Oh, and Bob Dole felt no need to lean on his military service, much less his actual wounds, in order to campaign for office. Neither did Phil Hart or Daniel Inouye.  But the unscathed rooftop pomeranian prince does.