Free Republic

The Democrat playbook for 2014, we are told, intends to focus on U.S. inequality and to suggest that only redistributive taxation will solve or even alleviate it. Certainly it's possible to reduce inequality through punitive levels of taxation—at the cost of making everybody poorer. I thus thought it worthwhile to disentangle the current causes of U.S. inequality to see how we might alleviate it by raising the incomes of the poor rather than simply depressing those of the rich. With good policies, this could even provide general economic uplift rather than depression, which would happen with redistributive tax. The policy...

On April 28, 2013 Paul Krugman clearly said that 2013 was a test of market monetarism:But as Mike Konczal points out, we are in effect getting a test of the market monetarist view right now, with the Fed having adopted more expansionary policies even as fiscal policy tightens.Yesterday (Jan 4, 2014) however, Paul Krugman, said:…I don’t take seriously the claims of market monetarists that the failure of growth to collapse in 2013 somehow showed that fiscal policy doesn’t matter. …

EU officials are off sick three times more than the average British worker, it was revealed last night. According to official figures, European Commission officials took an average of 14.6 days off sick last year—triple the amount taken by British workers in the private sector. One in seven staff were absent from more than 20 days. In contrast, a survey by the Confederation of British Industry found British staff working in the private sector took around five sick days a year. The figures also showed European officials even outstripped Britain’s civil servants and public sector staff—who took half as many...

The European Union spends more on advertising than the drinks giant Coca-Cola, according to a new analysis of how Brussels uses our money. Its budget for promoting itself and all its works comes to £2.4 billion a year. That compares to the £2.13 billion spent in the same year by the soft drinks company on promoting its brand around the world. The vast scale of the EU’s self-promotion was set down in a new “fiscal factbook” designed to shed light on how Brussels spends the billions it receives from Britain and other member countries. … And on a larger scale,...

This from the ECB's monthly bulletin today: The youth jobless rate in Greece has just reached 64.9pc. Little to add. This is pure policy error. Europe has needlessly pushed the whole EMU bloc into a deep double-dip recession, and the longest unbroken contraction since World War Two.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia cannot afford to keep raising state spending, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, but it must find the money to fulfill the social commitments he made on his return to the Kremlin last year. Putin, in an annual presentation of the government's three-year budget plan, said that "the possibility of constantly and quickly raising state spending has been exhausted." The 60-year-old leader won a third presidential term last year with the help of aggressive pre-election spending hikes. But a slowing economy and falling prices for oil - Russia's main export earner - are now squeezing the...

Employees defied the government shutdown and continued to broadcast live coverage of the protests online after over-the-air transmissions were blocked. The Greek government's decision to pull the plug on its national public broadcaster has sparked major protests with media workers, politicians and members of the public gathering outside offices of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, the ERT, in Athens. Greece's conservative government shut off ERT's signal Tuesday night, hours after announcing that the public broadcaster, which costs Greek taxpayers around $400 million (€300 million) a year would be closed as part of national austerity programs. Greece has already drastically slashed public...

Police in Germany’s financial capital, Frankfurt, have ringed the European Central Bank with metal barricades a day ahead of anti-capitalist protests expected to draw several thousand people. Members of the Blockupy group say they will try to prevent employees from reaching the ECB building for several hours Friday to highlight what they say is the bank’s role in enforcing the harsh spending cuts introduced to tackle the euro area’s three-year debt crisis. A second demonstration is planned at Deutsche Bank’s headquarters nearby. … Blockupy includes people who participated in the Occupy movement, which protested the role of global capitalism by...

The gilded lifestyle of MEPs has been compared to the uncontrolled excesses of ancient Rome after research showed their perks have not been dented despite biting austerity measures. From Italian MEPs who enjoy free haircuts to Maltese ones who get 52 free gallons of petrol a month, the perks—and expenses—continue unabated for the representatives of European Union nations. MEPs from the 27 EU nations are paid salaries of £137 million ($207 million) a year, according to research by German pricing watchdog Preisvergleich.de, and some earn 740 percent more than the average citizen. …

<p>The International Monetary Fund on Monday said the United States was getting carried away with a government austerity drive, offering some of the institution's bluntest criticism yet of Washington's rush to cut its budget deficit.</p> <p>Despite high unemployment, Washington is on track to slash its budget shortfall this year by the most in nearly a half century.</p>

In the aftermath of 9/11, many young, strong Americans enlisted, willingly agreeing to sacrifice their lives if necessary to protect our countryÂ’s interests. TodayÂ’s wealthiest Americans have the same opportunity to put their countryÂ’s interests before their own. Politicians should not shy away from asking them to put forth not their lives but what are, for them, their modest Social Security checks. The philosophy of the investment management firm I founded 15 years ago focuses first on a companyÂ’s balance sheet and second on its income statement. This approach has served our clients well. The current debate over entitlement reform...

Israelis marched late Saturday in an echo of mass cost of living protests in 2011, but this time their ire focused on finance minister Yair Lapid who came to power in January on the coattails of that protest movement. 2,000 people gathered in central Tel Aviv, an AFP journalist said, to protest against an austerity budget due for cabinet debate on Monday. The budget is expected to raise income tax and VAT while slashing government spending, including social benefits. Rallies were also scheduled for Jerusalem, Haifa and elsewhere on Saturday, but local media reported just 150 taking part in Haifa...

Goodbye To Economic Austerity Economics / Global EconomyApril 29, 2013 - 12:30 PM GMT By: Alasdair Macleod There is a new campaign to end austerity. First, the IMF lets it be known it has second thoughts about it; then we are told the threshold of 90% government debt to GDP which must not be crossed, set by Professors Reinhart & Rogoff, is based on an excel spread-sheet error. Lastly, Bill Gross of PIMCO, the largest bond fund in the world, tells us austerity is not working. The new mood is spreading, to the relief of beleaguered countries like Spain and...

The Greek government began its first mass-firing of public-sector workers in more than 100 years this week, part of an effort to lay off 180,000 by 2015 under Europe-imposed austerity. Pushed by its European creditors amid its crippling economic crisis, Greece began this week to do something it hasn't done in more than 100 years: fire public-sector workers en masse. Following weeks of tough negotiations with its lenders – the "troika" of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the European Central Bank – the Greek government started laying off public-sector workers in an effort to implement the austerity...

For the past five years, a fierce war of words and policies has been fought in America and other economically challenged countries around the world. On one side were economists and politicians who wanted to increase government spending to offset weakness in the private sector. This "stimulus" spending, economists like Paul Krugman argued, would help reduce unemployment and prop up economic growth until the private sector healed itself and began to spend again. On the other side were economists and politicians who wanted to cut spending to reduce deficits and "restore confidence." Government stimulus, these folks argued, would only increase...

Though Kenneth Rogoff has written some fairly obtuse op-eds over the years, the book he co-authored with Carmen Reinhart, This Time Is Different, was very much a worthwhile read. If their Keynesian, Phillip's Curve ideology is ignored, they offered some really interesting statistics. Most useful to this reader was their soberly introduced point that Greece has been in default half of its modern existence. About government defaults more broadly, they similarly clarified that defaults are rarely an all or nothing thing, rather they generally involve slight ‘haircuts' for creditors. And while they didn't tie this to modern times, they made...

Austerity has become almost like a four-letter word in some circles. It’s used to describe policies meant to reduce government spending and debt that may be painful in the here and now -- measures such as cuts to social services, or that lead to job losses in the short-term. A key piece of empirical research policymakers have used to justify “austerity measures” has been a 2010 study by two Harvard economists, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, about the downside of high debt. Well now another set of academics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst have replicated the study. They...

Democrats were quick to blame the anemic March jobs number on the "sequester" spending cuts. If that were the case, what explains the previous four years of lousy job growth under Obama? At 88,000, the jobs growth in March was well below expectations. And while the unemployment rate dropped, that was the result of hundreds of thousands dropping out of the labor force who as a result aren't counted as unemployed. Democrats, of course, tried to pin the blame for this on Republicans for allegedly pushing austerity measures. White House economic adviser Alan Krueger complained that "arbitrary and unnecessary cuts...

The global financial convulsion of 2007-2008 was followed by the resounding announcement of new priorities: international finance was to be better regulated and there was to be no mercy in the fight against tax havens. In short, we were to put an end to the black holes in a system that was wide open to abuse—at least if the very virtuous conclusions of the G20 held in London were to be believed. … Revelations of individual cases, no matter how fascinating they are, should not be allowed to distract attention from the underlying problem: tax havens are a threat to...

Rank and file told to conserve as Big Sis buys by the billion At least one branch of the U.S. military is scrimping and saving every bullet it can while the Department of Homeland Security is on a bullet-buying spree. Marine Corps Commandant James F. Amos blames sequester budget cuts for causing the Corps to have to scrimp and save every bullet. In a video to Marines, he says, “I ask you to save every round, every gallon of gas, that you take every single aspect, or opportunity, in training to get the most bang for the buck.” “This is...