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November 10th, 2011
The Daily Grind: Will the U.S. and China Crush Germany into Submission? and other stories
Anti-democratic dominoes threaten the free peoples of Europe.
Not many presidents with Obama's record have been reelected.
The question is whether this was a battle lost due to the mistaken tactic of including highly popular police and firefighter unions into the reforms or whether it is a lost war.
The cries from people such as the Occupy Wall Street protestors over a wide gap existing between the rich and poor are greatly exaggerated.
Will the U.S. and China Crush Germany into Submission?
By Bill Wilson 
There has been no clearer articulation of the coming tyranny to be imposed on the once-sovereign nations of Europe — and what may be in store for the debt-addled U.S. should it fail to restore order to its fiscal house — than a recent piece from the UK Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "America and China must crush Germany into submission".
In it the columnist advocates that the U.S. and China essentially force Germany to bail out financial institutions that bet poorly on Greek, Italian, and other troubled sovereign debts, writing, "it would not surprise me if U.S. President Barack Obama and China's Hu Jintao start to intervene very soon, in unison and with massive diplomatic force."
"One can imagine joint telephone calls to Chancellor Angela Merkel more or less ordering her country to face up to the implications of the monetary union that Germany itself created and ran (badly)," he writes. He accused the Germans of "lacking in deep understanding of what it has got itself into."
At issue is just who will be bailing out the banks that lent the money to Greece and others in the first place. The consolidated debts of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, the so-called PIIGS, total more than €3 trillion. Evans-Pritchard wants that somebody to be the European Central Bank.
In the way, Germany has vetoed the use of the ECB to leverage the €440 billion European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) upwards to perhaps €1.4 trillion — since such a decision would violate a recent German constitutional court ruling declaring that "the Bundestag, as the legislature, is also prohibited from establishing permanent mechanisms under the law of international agreements which result in an assumption of liability for other states' voluntary decisions, especially if they have consequences whose impact is difficult to calculate."
Moreover, such a move would violate Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty that brought the Eurozone into being, which expressly prohibits the ECB from printing money to buy sovereign debts.
Get full story here.
History's Records
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Kasich's defining moment
By Rick Manning 
Ohio Governor John Kasich faces a moment in history where his major initiative to reform the relationship between public employee unions and the taxpayers who pay for them has been soundly defeated in a state referendum.
The question Kasich must answer is whether this was a battle lost due to the mistaken tactic of including highly popular police and firefighter unions into the reforms or whether it is a lost war, dooming the state of Ohio to spiraling public employee costs that are political suicide to attempt to contain.
Public employee unions spent close to $30 million to defeat Kasich's reform. Ironically, those unions got that money from mandatory dues collected from public employees who are paid by taxpayers. In a nutshell, $30 million of tax dollars that were paid to public employees were then used to convince the voters of Ohio that public employee union reforms should be rejected.
Public employee unions legally used their member's dues to paint a picture of an Ohio where public safety is at risk due to changes in the relationship between police and firefighter unions and their taxpayer employers.
And Ohio voters, by a 61 percent majority bought it.
Now, reality strikes.
Get full story here.
Rising income inequality?
By Adam Bitely 
Numerous reports have come out over the past many days (here, here, and here) disputing the new claim from progressives everywhere that a recent CBO report finally proves that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.
Well, it seems that those who have closely studied the data believe that claims of an ever widening wealth gap seem to be, well, not exactly true.
As Sheldon Richman put it, "Today low-income people have things the middle class didn't dream of 40 years ago — and even some things the rich couldn't have had at any price because they hadn't been invented yet. And this is not primarily due to consumer debt."
Even further, as GMU economics professor Don Boudreaux explained several years back, people that bang the drum loudly that the wealth gap is beginning to widen out of control forget to consider that even though the wealthy get wealthier, the poor get wealthier too:
Get full story here.
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