The Martin Hutchinson Place
Looking at the Monthly Treasury Statement for June, it is clear that the U.S. budget deficit for the year to September 2026 will again be above $2 trillion, once again over 6% of Gross Domestic Product. The fault is mostly on the revenue side, where last July’s Big Beautiful Bill gave away some $150 billion […] The post The Bear’s Lair: Time to get serious about the Budget appeared first on True…
Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of Gross National Product/Gross Domestic Product statistics, worked for the public sector for the greater part of his career. It is therefore not surprising that government output is included in GDP at its full cost, however useless or indeed damaging the activity undertaken by the bureaucrats concerned. Conversely, Kuznets […] The post The Bear’s…
The Trump administration’s policies must run a gauntlet of lunatic left-wing judges before they can be implemented. Infrastructure of every type in the U.S. faces huge additional costs, with its real cost ten times what it was a century ago and three times that of similar infrastructure elsewhere. Mergers can be delayed for years, to […] The post The Bear’s Lair: Lawyers Subtract Economic Value…
President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would impose tolls on the Straits of Hormuz shocked the usual suspects but makes perfect sense (I hope he re-reverses his subsequent reversal). U.S. taxpayers have been billed for three idiotic Middle East wars in the past 25 years, and this one is only prolonged because of the Straits’ […] The post The Bear’s Lair: Global Policing Fees Make Sense…
The election of non-Marxist Presidents in Peru and Colombia (provided they are allowed to take office) reinforces a remarkably upbeat series of election results in Latin America. Cumulatively, those results give the whole continent a new hope of success, alas with the notable exceptions of Mexico and Brazil, still mired in hard-leftism. The question I […] The post The Bear’s Lair: Time for Latin…
The Socialist/Communist advance in last week’s New York primary elections confirms that the U.S. political system is systematically rigged against good policy and sound economics. Two reforms are needed: a property franchise, to ensure that those without a stake in the economy cannot vote themselves handouts, and an end to the tax benefits for charities […] The post The Bear’s Lair: How to…
A new paper by Robert J. Gordon and Kenneth Ryu “The Mysterious Disappearance of Productivity Growth in US Manufacturing: Was It the China Shock?” shows that annual U.S. manufacturing productivity growth collapsed on a price-adjusted basis from an average of 5.1% in 1987-2005 to 1.6% in 2005-23, due to the outsourcing mania, mostly to China, […] The post The Bear’s Lair: The Whig Free Trade Myth…
The Iran peace deal is still a matter of “fingers crossed” that it lasts and is observed, but should it do so, the implications for U.S. politics are profound. The “neocon” faction that has been pushing the United States into Middle East wars for several decades may finally lose influence, and if so, it is […] The post The Bear’s Lair: Nighttime for the Neocons appeared first on True Blue Will…
The debate over the inclusion of the $1.8 trillion SpaceX IPO in the basis for index funds has drawn a split result – the Nasdaq 100 Index will include it after 15 days, whereas the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index has said it must wait for a year, like other new companies. The two indices […] The post The Bear’s Lair: Bubbles Break Index Funds appeared first on True Blue Will Never Stain .
AI is the first truly energy-intensive technological advance in over 50 years, because of the huge number of data centers it requires to succeed (though data centers are not especially water-intensive). However, rejecting AI for this reason, or blocking its expansion through innumerable delays and regulations, would be as foolish as rejecting the steel industry […] The post The Bear’s Lair: U.S.…