A Compendium of the Cockamamie

By Grant Davies

A short compilation of what's new on the statist compost heap. These items all appear on just one day's news on a popular internet site and they just happen to be the ones that caught my eye.

Christine Lagarde, the head IMF idiot, recently scolded the Greeks for not paying their taxes. Fair enough it seems, until you learn that she herself, and many other parasites like her at the IMF and the UN, pay no taxes. That's right, her overblown salary is all tax exempt. I'm sure the idiot missed the irony.
NYC Mayor Bloomberg is pushing a new law to ban large sugary soft-drinks in that nanny-state hell hole. With apologies to the many fine people who live in our biggest city, I feel your pain. I live near Chicago, which is more of a criminal enterprise than a city. The imbecilic Mayor Boobberg is going to take care of those of you who might become obese without his iron fisted tough love.
In a recent speech honoring a Polish war hero, President Obama referred to a "Polish death camp", as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland. Oh c-mon, it's just a slip of the tongue! Everyone does it occasionally and it's perfectly excusable... as long as you are a Democrat. But the slip of the tongue was on the teleprompter, so it was a team slip. Oops.
The new French government is putting a cap on "excessive corporate pay." Anything François Hollande - the goof who was just elected to lead the dumbest country in the Euro funny farm - makes over one Euro is excessive in my opinion. The few intelligent people left in that country are making their escape plans, but where to flee?

I try to make my comments about ideas rather than people, but sometimes the bad ideas and the bad people get mixed up in the same rancid stew. I apologize for the name calling. (Well, maybe not, I'm only semi-polite most of time anyway.)

By Grant Davies,
Regular Columnist, THL Articles | Author's Page | Website

Tax Bill Is Beginning of Formal Debt Criminalization

The noose is tightening on liberty. The United States Congress is steadily headed to a place where those who owe money to the US government shall be treated criminally. This phenomenon is advancing domestically and now, increasingly, internationally. The first shot in this latest campaign took place in 2010 when US President Barack Obama signed into law The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. It demanded, basically, that foreign banks withhold up to 30 percent of the income that an American abroad might earn. This bill isn't working so well because overseas banks are not cooperating (a state of affairs that was certainly expected). Thus, there is a need for something else: Senate Bill 1813, recently introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). This bill, in part, states that taxpayers with unpaid taxes over US$50,000 may find their passports confiscated. This isn't criminal per se, but the IRS has recently made noises about "sharing" information with police a...

Thomas Sowell Returns

By: Thomas Winslow Hazlett Reason

How To Cripple The Real Estate Market In Five Easy Steps

If the government and the banks had just allowed real estate prices drop to market equilibrium, we'd be out of this mess and housing would truly be affordable. But the government is determined to artificially prop up housing prices, whatever the cost to the economy. If you were head of Central Planning (howdy, Ben!) and were tasked with crippling the real estate market, here's what you would recommend. Choke the market and banking sector with zombie banks... Have the central bank (the Federal Reserve) buy up $1 trillion in toxic, impaired mortgages... Lower the rate that banks can borrow from the Fed to zero, and then pay the banks interest on all funds deposited at the Fed... Try to prop up the housing market by giving poor credit risk buyers loans with only 3% down... Load young people up with the equivalent of a mortgage in student loans... OK,let's see how our Organs of Central Planning are doing: check, check, check, check, check: a perfect score! they're...

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