One mechanism was a foreign remittances tax, but Paul Waldman and Donald Trump just leave that out

 Here:

When he ran for president in 2016, few of Donald Trump’s promises thrilled his supporters more than his pledge not just to build a wall on the southern border, but to force Mexico to pick up the tab. “And who’s going to pay for it?” he’d say at his rallies. The crowd would shout back joyfully, “Mexico!” It wasn’t about the money; the point was to conjure a fantasy of America standing tall and dominating our neighbor; their humiliation would be our glory.

A fantasy is just what it was, as Trump now admits. At a speech in Iowa on Sunday, he blurted out the truth. “When you hear these lunatics back there,” he said, pointing at the news media, “say, ‘Trump didn’t get anything from Mexico,’ well, you know, there was no legal mechanism. I said they’re going to help fund this wall, but there was no legal mechanism. How do you go to a country, you say, ‘By the way I’m building a wall, hand us a lot of money.’”

Of course it was about the money. Everything is about the money.

It wasn't a fantasy to neoliberal Bush 43 pal Vicente Fox, who took it seriously enough at the time when Trump first proposed to make Mexico pay that he wouldn't pay.

This is revisionist history by Trump and by Waldman, which pretends there was no Border Wall Funding Act of 2017, nor serious elite opposition to its provision for a foreign remittances tax.

Trump would simply like to erase the history of his phony immigration promises, and Waldman would simply like no one to entertain seriously the particulars, which show there is a giant pot of money easily taxed to pay for border security.

Foreign remittances to the Latin South reached $142 billion in 2022, and Mexico's share was $60 billion.

The government of the United States farts away billions of dollars every minute of every day. Funding a $25 billion wall is a flea on that elephant's back. The fierce opposition to it is the thing of real size.

 

 

The West will eventually need Russia as an ally

Natalia Solzhenitsyn, quoted here.

German Americans still the largest ethnic group in 2013 at 46 million

The Economist reported here in February:

German-Americans are America’s largest single ethnic group (if you divide Hispanics into Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, etc). In 2013, according to the Census bureau, 46m Americans claimed German ancestry: more than the number who traced their roots to Ireland (33m) or England (25m). In whole swathes of the northern United States, German-Americans outnumber any other group (see map). Some 41% of the people in Wisconsin are of Teutonic stock.

That figure is down from 51 million before 2009 and from 50 million in 2009, so evidently the German American population is declining by about 1 million per year. 

America pushes NATO right up to the Russian border, the EU confiscates Cyprus' assets, and the Economist calls Putin paranoid

Proving once again that the West completely disrespects Russia. They could easily be our friends, if America were still a Christian country. That, dear friends, is the root of the problem.

The story "As ye sow, so shall ye reap: The collapse in the rouble is caused by Vladimir Putin’s belligerence, greed and paranoia" is here, in the ever arrogant Economist.

The World Has Learned Nothing Since The Crisis: Global Public Debt Is Up 63% 2008-2013

2008 global public debt $32 trillion

Global public debt, the amount owed by the world's governments, has risen by almost $20 trillion in the five years since the panic of 2008, an increase of nearly 63%.

Note the main offenders, none of whom has been practicing austerity in any sense of the term: America, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, The UK, Europe, India, China, Japan and Australia. Spendthrifts all.

See the data and charts, here.

2013 global public debt $52 trillion

None of this is ever going to be paid back. Chaos awaits.

If QE Is Helping Only The Financial Sector, Maybe It Was Meant To

Robert Skidelsky in The Economist here, referencing John Kay in the Financial Times:

"All of this led John Kay to wonder why so much attention was given to unconventional monetary policies ‘with no clear explanation of how they might be expected to work and little evidence of effectiveness?’ His answer: they are helpful to the financial services and those who work in them."

------------------------------

QE is medicine for sick banks, not sick economies.

Luigi Zingales Fingers George Bush As A Crony Capitalist

There's a great interview with Luigi Zingales in The Economist here:

Companies with a lot of money abroad sponsored a bill in 2004/5 that allowed them to repatriate their profits at a low tax rate. Thus $1 produced $220 of tax savings. The Bush-approved drug and Medicare act was a huge bonanza for the drug industry. Their market value increased by several billion dollars when this was announced. I could continue.

The Euro Area is Walking into Depression

So says The Economist, here:

"The euro area is walking, eyes wide open, into depression. Led by its periphery, which is already there."

Global Public Debt Clock: $44 Trillion and Counting

Message to the post-Christian West:

"Owe no man anything."

Sincerely,

St. Paul, Epistle to the Romans 13:8

Watch it here.

Dodd-Frank is 848 Pages Long, Glass-Steagall was 37 Pages

Robert Lenzner reminds us here that the shorter one worked pretty well for a pretty long time, but the longer one which replaces it is already a disaster.

For The Economist article referred to by Lenzner, see here, including an important cost correction correcting billions to millions. (Oops).

"Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison"

The greedy Marxists who outnumber conservatives on college faculties by three to one figured out long ago how to avoid the draft, subvert the values of America's children and future teachers of the young, and get rich doing it all at the same time.

It's been a veritable trinity of scams milked by the coward and follower classes: military conscription deferments for MA and PhD students, the tenure system which has permanently installed radicals nationwide, and now the most important, federally-backed student loans.

The Economist in September 2010 (link) noted the incredible disparity in the rates of college cost and income increases:

College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

More recently Virginia Postrel thinks the reason costs have escalated is the federal student loan program itself, a veritable gravy train which guarantees rising costs for everything academic (link):


Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions. ...

If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. ...

[T]he number of slots at traditional colleges and universities is relatively fixed. A boost in student aid that increases demand is therefore likely to be reflected in prices rather than expanded enrollments. Over time, enrollments should rise, as they have in fact done. But many private schools in particular keep the size of their student bodies fairly stable to maintain their prestige or institutional character.

Shiller S and P 500 Price to Earnings Ratio Stands at 20.18 as of 09.02.11

Track it here:

Buttonwood provides a defense of it here.