Europe is now drowning under the cost of welfare bills

When she isn’t shipping in more Syrian refugees, or trying to find new ways to destroy the Greek economy, the German ChancellorAngela Merkel is fond of quoting an alarming statistic: Europe accounts for just 7pc of the world’s population, and 25pc of its GDP, and yet it also accounts for a massive 50pc of its welfare spending.

The point is an important one. Europe’s welfare spending is out of control, and is on a scale that is both lavish and unaffordable compared with the rest of the world. There is a problem, however. Neither she, nor any other political leader in Europe, has the will to do anything about it.

Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, has this week published updated figures on the total welfare bill across Europe. It is rising, and in some countries is getting up to a quarter of national output. Meanwhile, the percentage of spending on stuff like infrastructure or education, which increase an economy’s potential output, is falling.

So long as that is true, it is very hard to see anything other than a bleak future for any of Europe’s economies.

http://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/europe-is-now-drowning-under-the-cost-of-welfare-bills

John Kerry: Let’s Fight ISIS With A Soap Opera

“They’re not an existential threat to us.” That was President Obama, defending his seeming indifference to the latest ISIS terrorist attack in Europe.

“Groups like (ISIS) can’t destroy us, they can’t defeat us. They don’t produce anything,” he said. (Well, they are producing oil and bombs and fresh new terrorists, but never mind.)

So what should the U.S. do to fight this non-existential threat that doesn’t produce anything?

Let’s put on a show!

It’s almost too ridiculous to believe, but the day after the attacks in Brussels, the State Department posted a $1.5 million grant proposal to develop “a television drama series that addresses the issue of countering violent extremism among young people in contemporary Afghan society.”

The rest of the proposal reads as follows:

http://www.investors.com/politics/capital-hill/kerry-lets-fight-isis-with-a-soap-opera/

Hold on America. We are in for a rough ride.

Trump supporter will never condemn or reject anything Donald does or says. Their defense of their candidate is cultish in nature, refusing to ever rebuke him for anything. In fact, the consistent response is to attack the messenger.

Sadly, they forget that a candidate first and foremost should be accountable to the voters. But in this case, Trump is completely unaccountable to anyone. And apparently his supporters naively like it that way. Steven Deace has frequently referred to the "cult of Trump" and sadly I believe he is right. When we get to the point where a man is consistently defended as infallible by people, we have a dangerous scenario. It is not any different than the Obama-syndrome 8 years ago.

I suppose it's why Trump boasted a few weeks ago that he could shoot someone in the middle of 4th Avenue and his supporters would still vote for him. Well, sadly his supporters continue to prove him right. There is nothing he has done or can do that will ever be rejected by them.

Mark West

Congress setting new bar for doing nothing

The biggest achievement in the House last week was a party-line vote to file a brief in a court case. In other action, GOP leaders all but conceded they won’t be able to pass a budget, the party’s first order of business, this year.
Over in the Senate, lawmakers have been busy debating whether it’s good or bad to sit on the president’s Supreme Court nominee for the next nine months.

Call it the Seinfeld Congress — all about nothing. It's gotten so small-ball that one congressman, a chairman of a highly influential committee, introduced legislation last week to recognize the national significance of magic.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all. They are going to need magic to save their party,” joked Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who heads the House Democrats’ messaging arm. “The American people are used to a Republican do-nothing Congress, they are now getting used to a Republican ridiculous Congress.”
All this non-activity comes as the House is set to take a nearly three-week vacation. The Senate skipped town last week.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/congress-supreme-court-budget-do-nothing-221057#ixzz43f6CA1nD

China Buys U.S. Firms at Record Rate

From January 2000 to the end of 2015 China closed 1,200 merger and acquisition deals in the United States worth a combined total of $63.3 billion. Already this year, announcements have been made of Chinese intentions to purchase Hollywood’s Legendary Entertainment Group for $3.5 billion, large construction equipment manufacturer Terex Corporation for $5.4 billion, General Electric’s appliance division Haier for $5.4 billion, Fortune 500 company Ingram Micro for $6.3 billion, and what would be the largest acquisition of a U.S. firm by a Chinese company to date, Starwood Hotels & Resorts for $14.3 billion.

It would seem that the way to overtake a country may not be with planes, guns, and bombs, but rather with the almighty dollar.

Another interesting announcement came earlier this year when China's Chongqing Casin Enterprise Group signed an agreement to purchase the Chicago Stock Exchange, a deal expected to close later this year. While a smaller purchase — one that values the Exchange at slightly less than $100 million — it signifies China's goal of inserting itself into every aspect of American busines, and will give even greater influence to Chinese intentions.  

http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/item/22812-china-buys-us-firms-at-record-rate

Debt Deflation, the Rentier Economy, and the Coming Financial Cold War

The financial sector today is decoupled from industrialization. Its main interface with industry is to provide credit to corporate raiders. Their objective is asset stripping, They use earnings to repay financial backers (usually junk-bond holders), not to increase production. The effect is to suck income from the company and from the economy to pay financial elites.

These elites play the role today that landlords played under feudalism. They levy interest and financial fees that are like a tax, to support what the classical economists called “unproductive activity.” That is what I mean by “parasitic.”

If loans are not used to finance production and increase the economic surplus, then interest has to be paid out of other income. It is what economists call a zero-sum activity. Such interest is a “transfer payment,” because it that does not play a directly productive function. Credit may be a precondition for production to take place, but it is not a factor of production as such.

The situation is most notorious in the international sphere, especially in loans to governments that already are running trade and balance-of-payments deficits. Power tends to pass into the hands of lenders, so they lose control – and become less democratic.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-hudson-on-debt-deflation-the-rentier-economy-and-the-coming-financial-cold-war.html

Black and White, Left and Right

Much is made of the fact that liberals and conservatives see racial issues differently, which they do. But these differences have too often been seen as simply those on the right being racist and those on the left not.

You can cherry-pick the evidence to reach that conclusion. But you can also cherry-pick the evidence to reach the opposite conclusion.

During the heyday of the Progressive movement in the early 20th century, people on the left were in the forefront of those promoting doctrines of innate, genetic inferiority of not only blacks but also of people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, as compared to people from Western Europe.

Liberals today tend to either glide over the undeniable racism of Progressive President Woodrow Wilson or else treat it as an anomaly of some sort. But racism on the left at that time was not an anomaly, either for President Wilson or for numerous other stalwarts of the Progressive movement.

An influential 1916 best-seller, "The Passing of the Great Race" -- celebrating Nordic Europeans -- was written by Madison Grant, a staunch activist for Progressive causes such as endangered species, municipal reform, conservation and the creation of national parks.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2016/03/22/black-and-white-left-and-right-n2137316