Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

New rules would label any activity businesses take regarding their employees as union busting.

TAX AND SPEND:

President Obama retreats on tax hikes on the wealthy.

"“This is about subsidies for oil and gas companies — $40 billion — a loophole that allows for the owners of private corporate jets to benefit enormously in the billions, compared to, say, Delta or American Airlines, and other measures that benefit millionaires and billionaires, or in some way, you know, complicate our tax code in a way that it isn’t helpful,” Carney said."

So people who work in the private jet industry don't matter to Obama. He doesn't care if those people lose their jobs in symbolic attack on the ultra-rich. It's also about raising gas prices. Obama won't give up his goal of collapsing the US economy under the burden of government.

Here's a good reminder that government is not interested in charity.

"Illinois has borrowed more than $1 million this year to help cover its own expenses from money taxpayers give to charity.The state government has borrowed about $1.17 million this fiscal year from money that Illinois taxpayers designate on their tax returns for charitable use, The News-Gazette inChampaign reported."

Borrowed usually means it will be paid back. A better term would be stolen. Twice.

The relative benefits of a consumption tax. All taxes are theft, but some schemes are worse than others, and the income tax is arguably the worst of all, the Root of All Evil.

Michelle Obama's African excursion cost taxpayers over $500,000.

"In a conversation last week with a South African online newspaper, U.S. Embassy Spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau made clear that the trip was partially a personal pilgrimage for the first lady."

I hope she and her mother and her daughters and her nieces and nephews had fun on our money.

Yesterday I predicted the Greek government wouldn't last. Today protests against austerity measures turn violent. These are people protesting for the government steal other people's money and give it to them. They're protesting for more government, not less as in the Middle East. But if the government starts implementing draconian tax collection, the protesters will flip-flop, and it will become similar to the Middle East protests. Hopefully they'll be peaceful unlike these communists.

"But unions in Greece are furious at the new measures that would slap taxes on minimum wage earners and struggling workers.The plans come on top of other spending cuts and tax hikes — which have contributed to the rise in the unemployment rate to more than 16 per cent."

The government is angering both sides. That's why it won't last.

REGULATION:

Study shows the tremendous damage regulations do to our economy.

Contrasting the largely unregulated tech world (the Jetsons) to other heavily regulated industries (the Flintstones).

San Francisco considers banning pet sales. I wonder what a black market in pets would look like.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Bernanke's money is flowing into luxuries for the ultra-rich like Prada.

"Vikram Mansharamani, in his book Boombustology, provides an interesting sidebar with a chart of auctioneer Sotheby's common stock going back to mid-1988, just before the final run-up of the Japanese stock market. The Yale lecturer and global equity investor tracks the ups and downs of Sotheby's common stock as a proxy for booms and busts in the art market.The stock price for the auction house peaked as the Nikkei was peaking at the end of 1989. It ran to higher highs as the Internet bubble was cresting. Sotheby's ran to an all-time high of $61.40 with US house prices in 2007. The shares have run up again since the '08 crash busted the stock down to $6.05 with the China boom and the Federal Reserve's QEs 1 and 2. Earning $2.34 a share in 2010, the stock traded smartly in the $50 range in April, but it has since slumped to $40. "Even the most optimistic among us would not have predicted such results just one year ago," Sotheby's chairman Michael Sovern told Grant's."

Interesting.

"While the view exists that the Chinese economic mousetrap is a better one, Carl Walter and Fraser Howie don't see it that way. "We do not believe in Chinese exceptionalism," write Walter and Howie in Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise. "If there are such things as economic laws, they work just as well in China and for Chinese businesses as they do in other markets."The authors cast a skeptical eye toward China's government-controlled and propped-up banking system. Chinese bankers worry more about pushing the money out the door than the prospects of getting it back. As Jim Grant writes, "In China, the big banks don't formally go broke. Rather, every 10 years or so, the state recapitalizes them." Bad loans are shifted from bad bank balance sheets to worse bank balance sheets, Grant explains. The Ministry of Finance provides its guarantee to the bad loans at par, banking life goes on, and the economic miracle remains alive, backstopped by the lender of last resort, the People's Bank of China, levered at 1,233 to 1."

But the Chinese have a tremendous amount of real savings, and that has to have an impact.

The luxury index graph isn't going to make anybody outside the ruling class happy.

POLICE STATE:

Government uses the law as a weapon against the people, but even rich enemies of the ruling class are often targeted. I think the liberals are right in this case. If the hotel maid was working alone to set up DSK, and the ruling class was on his side, it would never have worked. Supposing DSK is being set up, either this guy is disliked by the American ruling class and the maid was fortunate enough to pick the right victim, which is highly unlikely, or he's being set up by allies of Sarkozy.

POLITICS:

Not content to be a Bilderberger, Rick Perry shows up at Koch event. If this guy gets in the race, he ought to be able to raise money from the ruling class like Romney.

Michelle Bachmann's former chief of staff attacks her in Iowa.

USA Today, the government's paper, reports that the government has been covering up bus accidents and fatalities for a decade or more. You'd be hard pressed to find anybody more cynical about government than me, but even I'm surprised by this. Having an agenda to loot people is one thing, but lying about things that people will obviously discover is another. This shows that the corrupting power of government overwhelms all reason.

"NHTSA's failure to track all the accidents has given Congress and the public a false impression that buses are safer than they are and has thwarted efforts to promote tougher regulation, safety advocates say."

I told you so.

MISC:

As soon as Microsoft buys Skype, the US Congress decides to use it. The two must be related.

Breaking the link between clocks and earth's rotation. At first, this may sound silly because it doesn't make sense for the sun to rise at noon. But the difference is so tiny that it only amounts to a minute or so every century. The change would be imperceptible over a human lifetime.

Praise for Thomas the Tank Engine. At a model train show this weekend, I was looked at as a barbarian because I never heard of Thomas.

Despite Apple CEO Jobs preemptively sucking up to local government officials by designing his white elephant to meet their every political desire, government officials still tried to shake him down for more.