Catallaxy Files

One of the best op-eds I read in a long time.

Discussion of the so-called fiscal cliff—the combination of tax increases and spending cuts that will come in 2013 if Congress and the president don’t act—confuses a number of different issues. The evidence suggests that we should fear the tax hikes, but not necessarily the spending cuts.

Anyone who uses the term “fiscal cliff” accepts a Keynesian view of the economy, knowingly or not. Both tax increases and constrained spending are assumed to be bad for the economy.

But there are two other views: that of the budget balancer and that of the supply-sider. Rather than term the impending changes that will occur in 2013 a “fiscal cliff,” the budget balancer thinks of this as “fiscal consolidation.” Tax increases reduce the deficit, as do cuts in government spending. Both are austerity measures that make the government more responsible and, therefore, both are conducive to long-run economic growth.
…
The supply-sider has a different view from both the Keynesian and the budget balancer. Fundamentally, supply-side advocates focus on the harmful effects of tax increases. Raising tax rates hurts the economy directly because tax hikes reduce incentives to invest and because they punish hard work. As such, tax increases slow growth. But budget cuts work in the right direction by making lower tax revenues sustainable. If spending exceeds revenues, then the government must borrow and this commits future governments to raising taxes in order to service the debt.

Consequently, the supply-sider thinks of 2013 primarily as a tax increase and fears what that will do to the economy. The spending cuts are a positive. Unlike the Keynesians who view the fiscal cliff as being bad on two counts, or the budget balancer who views it as being good on two counts, the supply-sider scores it one-and-one. The tax increases have negative effects on the economy; the controls on spending are a positive side effect of the 2013 sunsets.

Read the whole thing.

Why do you persecute me? I am an honest man. I have been betrayed. My lovely family has been hounded by an evil media led by Andrew Bolt and David Penberthy. I have been judged by you all here at Catallaxy

Yet I am an honest man and an innocent man. I could never tell a lie.

I feel angry and betrayed. But I will prevail.

You see, my former friend, Michael Williamson, said to me in 2007

Craig, you will be the first HSU prime minister

Now even Williamson has betrayed me.

I have never procured services from a prostitution agency. I am shocked and outraged by such scurrilous accusations.

I have worked 24/7 in the interests of HSU members and now represent those members and my electorate of Dobell in Parliament. Ever cent of their money has been scrupulously managed and deployed in their interests.

While I have been betrayed, I will never betray my beloved HSU members.

I will prevail, and reach my destiny as prime minister! But I will not cut down those who have betrayed me; in my benevolence I shall forgive them one and all.

Yes, my HSU family, I will soon be representing your interests as prime minister! What a glorious day that will be, when I take the Oath of office of prime minister of Australia and my enemies come begging forgiveness. I will let them squirm for a while, and then my munificence will be seen by all.

I am an honest man.

And I will be a great prime minister! One who will bring this country together and lead the people to utopia.

That is my destiny, and I accept my present trials. For great men must rise above the petty squabbles and show compassion, benevolence and mercy.

I will be prefect of the morals and father of the fatherland.

A recording on the Oakeshott-style rambling speech can be heard here.

Update: Spot polls are unconvinced.
The Age

Daily Telegraph

Update II: The closing paragraphs of Craig Thomson’s speech need to be preserved for prosperity.

This should never again happen. We should never be in this situation again where the rule of law is trashed completely by a parliament. What do you think you are doing here? Are we going to have parliament ruled by the mob? Are we setting ourselves up as some sort of junta, where a majority decision of a parliament can suddenly override anyone’s rights? Is that the kind of Australia that you want? I was reminded by someone of a quote from To Kill a Mockingbird:

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court … Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal.

That applies in this country, and you have trashed that. What you have done is not just damage to an individual or their family. You have damaged democracy and you continue to damage democracy, and you should hang your head in shame for that. What it shows of the Leader of the Opposition, that man, is that not only is he unfit to be a prime minister; in my view, he is unfit to be an MP.

Love the line, “where a majority decision of a parliament can suddenly override anyone’s rights?” Gee when did that happen?

While warmists are always looking for and inferring vast sums of business funding devoted to the sceptics, the annual total is a matter of mere millions, a tiny percentage of that lavished on the promoters of global warming and emission reduction policies.

Jo Nova has a blog on the US government budget expenditure on promoting the issue and subsidising low emission alternatives.  For the five years ending the sum total was $68 billion. Much of this was under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.  US spending other than ARRA amounts to about $8 billion a year.

In yet another example of plucky Australia “punching above its weight”, in an economy less than 10 per cent the size of the US, the Australian Government is this year budgetted to spend $2.7 billion.  As a share of GDP that is 3-4 times what the miserly Obama Administration spends!

In the good old days when the Rudd/Gillard Government was was keen to triumphantly parade its intended wasteful spending in pursuit of measures to ameliorate global warming and its associated floods, diseases and famines, the Climate Change Department used to add up and publish the expenditure numbers – albeit even then it understated expenditures by not including deaprtmental overheads or ad hoc spending by Departments like Treasury.

Nowadays this has to be retrieved from examinations of Budget documents.  For 2012/13 the breakdown of the numbers is:

And the Australian numbers exclude the $20 billion of taxpayer’s money to be spent, borrowed or provided in guarrentees for non-fossil, non-nuclear energy  under the Clean Energy Fund.

In today’s The Australian (subscription required):
“Last Tuesday, Martin Parkinson, the Treasury Secretary, used the annual post-budget address to examine the uncertainties in the economic outlook. While his speech was wide-ranging, one component stuck out: the suggestion that the rapid growth of mining was “dampening tax receipts as a share of the economy”, with “the accelerated write-offs provided for many mining assets” being “of particular importance”. “

UPDATE 21/5

Now Craig Thomson wants the Victorian Police to release video footage from the brothels he is alleged to have visited.

Hang on a minute: is this the same Craig Thomson who has so far refused to speak with the Police despite repeated requests from the Police?

Bill Shorten claims that the behaviour evident in the HSU is not typical of the Union movement generally. He would say that, wouldn’t he? But the fact that disgraced HSU general secretary, Michael Williamson, was President of the ALP suggests that the HSU influence has spread wide.

Do we really believe that Williamson and Thomson are the only bad apples in the Union nest? Personally I don’t find that credible. It seems to me that the behaviour evident by Williamson and Thomson was expected: people generally behave according to an organisation’s norms. It comes back to the culture of entitlement: people such as Slipper, Thomson and Williamson think they are worth more than their salary and justify in their own minds the scrounging of extra resources to ‘top up’ their salaries. We can observe this elsewhere when (say) politicians and public servants abuse the travel allowance system. And other people who sign off on these claims (or don’t investigate them properly) turn a blind eye – the behaviour becomes entrenched and not considered illegal or immoral.

The best outcome would be total transparency. The books of all Unions should be laid bare for members and the public to see what happens behind closed doors. If a Union leader has nothing to hide, he or she should not object to increased transparency.

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Anton Lang in a guest post at Jo Nova’s place  explains that even when all the good children are asleep the Base Load is still 60% of the Peaking Load.

I didn’t realize our electricity needs were so high at night. The lowest power use each day is still as much as 60% of the peak. That’s the base load at 3am, and solar panels and wind farms just can’t provide it. We can burn the odd $500 billion building hundreds of solar plants, but even then, we would have to go “medieval” for about 8 hours each night. Candles anyone?

The logistics of solar and wind don’t add up

Base load is 18,000MW, so we  need at least 360 best case CS plants. They cost around $1.45 billion each, so around $520 billion for construction — and still you have an average of 8 hours in every day without incoming power to run Australia.

Wind power can provide some power throughout the day, but their average 8 hours a day of maximum delivery is usually not the right 8 hours. In eastern Australia, the total power delivered by the 23 wind plants with 965 huge towers is still only 600MW, or around 3.3% of Base Load.

While there are people who will tell you that concentrated solar and wind power can power eastern Australia, it looks impossible once you dig down to the details.

Ahead of the much anticipated speech by Craig Thomson to the House of Representatives, I was reminded of this passage in I Claudius by Robert Graves, referring to Sejanus

Sejanus was a liar but so fine a general of lies that he knew how to marshal them into an alert and disciplined formation.

Here are some other excellent quotes about lying

Frederich Nietzsche

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.

George Washington

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

Napoleon Bonaparte

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Jarod Kintz

She says he says, but she could be lying to me, and he could be lying to her, so I can’t believe her, even if I could believe her.

Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

Anything is better than lies and deceit!

Adrienne Rich

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

Winston Churchill

Are you insinuating that I am a purveyor of terminological inexactitudes?

Richard Armour

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

You would think that the American economy was a shining light on the hill, an example to the rest of us, given the way that its President sees himself fit to tell others how to go about managing their economic affairs.

U.S. President Barack Obama will press European leaders to ease up on fiscal austerity and focus on economic growth at a summit on Saturday that will discuss ways to stem turmoil in the euro zone and head off the risk of global contagion.

How can they bear listening to him? How can anyone? One can easily see that the slowdown that will follow a proper restructuring of expenditure and genuine retraint cannot do much to improve his own re-election chances. Things are apt to get worse before they get better and it’s only six months till November. But if the Europeans are finally prepared to bite the bullet, there would be no worse advice imaginable than to have them postpone the inevitable.

‘Hopefully we’ll get some stuff done,’ Obama told Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti as he and other summit participants arrived for Friday evening dinner at a lodge at the secluded presidential retreat.

Obama earlier in the day aligned himself with Monti and new French President Francois Hollande by urging a solution to the euro zone crisis that combines fiscal belt-tightening measures with a ‘strong growth agenda.’

On the other side of the debate is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has pushed fiscal austerity as a means of bringing down huge debt levels that are burdening European economies.

I especially like Obama’s embrace of “fiscal belt tightening” just as the US is heading into yet another debate over raising its debt limit. The belt tightening, odd as it may sound to all those mis-educated economists, is the growth agenda.

The following cartoon, via Powerline, picks up some of the irony, but really there are no depths sufficiently deep on these matters.

It is quite an astonishing business that what it means to be part of the left is to wish to be left in willful ignorance rather than to confront the news. It’s not that they make every effort to know all that’s going on, but they seem to choose media which will specifically keep them in the dark. We who are surrounded by the ancestral media, even if we wanted to block out the unpleasant news couldn’t do it. If we watch, read or listen to the news at all, we find out pretty well everything that is being reported. But we also find out more. We also find out those other stories that the media of the left never report on and their constituency tends not to discover but which is covered by Fox say, or on the web.

Let me start with this example which will be a surprise to no one:

No sooner did the literary agency brochure in which Barack Obama was said to be Kenyan-born surface than the media went to work to deep-six it.

‘This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me – an agency assistant at the time,’ Miriam Goderich, now a named partner in the literary agency, Dystel & Goderich, wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News, which was then picked up ABC News. ‘There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.’

So the only time someone on the left finds out that Obama had self-reported himself for fifteen years as Kenyan born it is softened for them by being part of a story in which someone else takes the blame. You have to be an idiot – someone who might believe Craig Thomson, for example – to believe this woman. But for someone coming across the story for the first time, it is not as a news report about how Obama had stated that he was born in Kenya but is in a story in which the point is already being denied.

And then having read that I came across these in short order:

Politico Covers Up Obama Campaign’s Alleged Attempt to Bribe Rev. Wright

The Crucial Trayvon Martin Evidence the Media Won’t Repeat

People who read such newspapers or listen to such media presentations are not looking for the news, they are evading it. They just do not want to know. The world is uncomfortable enough, it seems, without having their space invaded by facts that might disturb the peace. They wish to be left alone.

And it’s not as if those who work for such media organisations are unaware of the same news the rest of us here see and read. They know it; they just won’t report it, and those who depend on them for the news are happy to leave things that way. So there is a kind of dependency relationship that builds. We will read your papers and watch your news programs but only if you provide the kind of perspective we are comfortable with.

It is almost incomprehensible. These are not generally stupid people. They are often people who pride themselves on their engagement and breadth of knowledge. But if it should happen that, for example, Barack Obama had once described himself as a Kenyan in a publication he had put his name to, then they would just rather not be told thank you very much.