In Praise of Bob Rae. A Goodbye to a Good Man

On the day that he announces his political retirement, I come not to bury Bob Rae, but to praise him.

Not only did I vote against Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP, I actually enjoyed doing it. But I don't vote for someone as much as I vote against everybody else. Indeed, the proudest ballot I ever cast was for a transvestite to be mayor or Toronto, so convinced was I that he/she would be less embarrassing than Mel Lastman.

Having said that, there's much to respect and even admire about Rae.

He's easily one of the smartest people in Canadian elective office in my lifetime. Even those that disagree with him, as I repeatedly did, acknowledge that he's a heavyweight. And that's something that's profoundly lacking in public life today, where stupidity is too often considered a virtue.

Rae also engaged in the single greatest act of political bravery in my lifetime. For all intents and purposes, he pulled the plug on his time at Queens Park because he thought it was necessary.

Shithead conservative bloggers and dishonest Sun Media hacks, like Brian Lilley, enjoy pummelling Rae for Rae Days, all the while heaping praise on Republicans like Scott Walker for doing essentially the same thing.

Rae Days requires absolutely no courage for conservatives, since that's what their base vocally wants, anyway. However, the public sector unions were Rae's political base, and he knew it. And he still immolated himself doing what was right. If that's not bravery, I have no idea what is. Moreover, it speaks to the bald hypocrisy of his critics.

Speaking of hacks like Lilley,  (who, full disclosure, is apparently a friend of my ex-girlfriend) He joyously posted this retarded and fundamentally dishonest chart from Sun News on his Facebook page this evening.

Did Premier Rae spend a literal shit-ton of money in the face of what was then considered a brutal recession? He sure did. And that's the primary reason I voted against his government in 1995.

What is nicely left out is the fact that there was a worldwide recession during Rae's tenure at Queens Park. What those lying fucks at the Sun neglect to point out are the federal and U.S employment and deficit figures at the time.

Why is that? I suspect that it's because the prime minister of Canada during the worst of it was Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney and the president of the United States was Republican George H.W Bush, who to varying degrees, did pretty much exactly what Rae did as premier of Ontario. All three raised taxes, all three had high unemployment, and all three had massive deficits.

But Rae is studied not only in isolation from the context of the time, the figures also leave out what his conservative peers were doing at the time.

By the way, why does Sun poster boy Stephen Harper get a pass? Unlike Rae, Harper started out with a $13 billion surplus, which he immediately pissed away on electioneering hucksterism. Then, in the guise of his Keynesian "Action Plan," he created tens of billions of dollars in new deficits, which he spends millions more advertising on television, five years after the fact. And none of that happened twenty years ago, when Keynesian economics were the the accepted wisdom, Harper's doing it now.

I point that out not to defend Rae, but to highlight the intellectual dishonesty and gullibility of what passes for the Right these days. Not only can we not win on our merits when we engage in nonsense like this, we don't deserve to.

I made no secret of my opinion that Bob Rae was the Liberal party's last, best chance of surviving, if not actually winning power. He was uniquely qualified to call the Harper government on its own bullshit. Rae was not only smarter than the rest than the rest of the federal leaders, he was more politically experienced and intimately familiar with the pitfalls of having headed a party and a government before.

If Rae compared his record in Toronto to Harper's in Ottawa, I believe it would have been devastating ... for Harper. And I think the Tories knew that, too.

But the Liberals insisted on being the Liberals. They continue to hate one another more than they hate Harper, and they refuse to renounce their addiction to stunt leaders, like Michael Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau. And that's precisely why "Canada's Natural Governing Party" is going to cease to exist by the end of the decade. By forcing Rae out of the permanent leadership race last year, I think they signed their own death warrant.

Although I opposed almost everything that he did in public life, I never doubted Rae's sincerity. I believe him to be someone who actually got into politics to serve what he thought was the greater good, rather than personal enrichment or self-aggrandizement.

Unlike most of the ward-heelers out there, I'm of the opinion that Bob Rae will better off without politics. Sadly, politics will be worse without Bob Rae.

I never voted for him and I never would, but I wish the man well in private life.

Why a Balanced Budget Amendment is Silly

I like the idea of a balanced budget amendment to the U.S Constitution. Columnist George Will certainly outlines the need for one. Unfortunately, no Republican has ever proposed one that wasn't balls-out stupid.

Proponents for an amendment usually fail to point out that debt-ridden basket cases like California and Illinois have balanced budget amendments. They, like most of the states, just use accounting tricks to make their books appear to be balanced, when in fact they're a shocking mess and only likely to get worse.

Conservative proponents of an amendment also display an almost incredible level of dishonesty when they compare deficit numbers from the Bush years to the present day in an attempt to demonstrate that Republicans are more fiscally responsible. A cursory look at the charts they present seem to make their case clear, but they neglect to tell you about the accounting tricks that the GOP employed from 2001 through the beginning of 2007.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are prime examples of the budgetary chicancery they used. The Bush Administration didn't primarily fund the wars through the usual annual budget process. They instead went to Congress several times a year to seek military funding through emergency supplemental bills. Remember the $87 billion that John Kerry voted for before he voted against it? That was an emergency supplemental. And the costs of the wars through 2009 was roughly a trillion dollars.

The beauty of those those bills is that because they aren't part of the budget, they bypass annual deficit reporting numbers. Instead, they are added directly to the debt. So, when you're shown graphs listing deficits from the Bush years, you're only getting half the story. You're being lied to without the people doing it actually lying. But it's really no different from Enron accounting. It's the same kind of math that the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments used to prove that the Too Big To Fail banks were solvent when they weren't.

I mention this because these are the same people who most strongly advocate a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA). You shouldn't take anything these people say on faith, given their demonstrated history of ignorance, duplicity, or both.

For an amendment to be effective, it would have to be clean. The language should have to look something like this: "Congress shall each year enact a budget that is in balance without exception." Another option is to require balance over three or five year periods, but there cannot be exceptions.

The lack of exceptions is key. If there's an emergency, such as a war, natural disaster or financial calamity that requires deficit spending, that money should be subtracted from the following year's budget (or the next three or five.) Or there would have to be an automatic tax increase to pay down the deficit.

I have yet to see a "clean" amendment proposed by anyone. More often than not, they're riddled with exceptions that Republicans like spending money on, or spending that is politically advantageous to them. It's important to note that the biggest deficits in U.S history were created by Republican presidents. Even the current Obama deficit is driven mostly by the wars, the Bush tax cuts, and program spending, such as Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind that the GOP categorically refused to pay for when they controlled the process. The Obama stimulus (to date, his biggest ticket spending item) was a one-time outlay, whereas the Bush programs were structural and almost impossible to repeal.

More importantly, most of the Republican BBA proposals I've seen require a supermajority (usually three-quarters) vote to raise revenue. By 2016, just the cost of servicing the debt will be roughly equal to the Pentagon's budget, making balancing the budget by spending cuts alone almost impossible. New revenue will be absolutely necessary to avoid a catastrophe, and the denial of same demonstrates the singular unseriousness of most Republican proposals.

If a supermajority is necessary anywhere, it would be in passing emergency supplemental spending, which bypasses the budget process entirely and would also presumably get around any proposed amendment. Since most such spending tends to be military in nature, it would also make lawmakers think twice about going to war. At a minimum, it would make them be more forthright about the costs of war.

Before a balanced budget amendment is introduced, Congress is going to have to be serious about its accounting practices, which currently do not factor the single largest threats to the U.S economy: the unfunded liabilities of future Medicare and Social Security spending. Democrats point to the "balanced budgets" of 1998-2000, but if a private business or individual budgeted that way, they would find themselves being indicted. The unfunded liabilities might cost as much as $75 trillion by 2050 and no reasonable person thinks that the American economy is going to grow at anything near the rate necessary to absorb that cost.

An amendment will finally have to recognize that tax cuts actually are spending, and will require other spending costs to offset their cost. The single biggest driver of the deficit today remains the Bush-Obama tax cuts, which cost over $3 trillion over the last decade and produced almost nothing in economic growth.

From 2001-07, the Republican Party proved beyond any doubt that "fiscal responsibility" is nothing more than a rhetorical wedge for them. They say they deserve another chance, but their continued lies about the nature of the Obama deficits undermine that case. For that reason, they shouldn't be trusted about a BBA.

I believe that a balanced budget amendment is going to be necessary, but not before Congress undertakes a number of significant and painful reforms. Otherwise, it's nothing more than a rhetorical stunt and all of the trick accounting in the world isn't going to fool the international markets.

Why Everyone Hates the Record Companies

Nothing delights me more than watching the cocksucker music industry wonder why their business model has been disintegrating under their fucking feet for well over a decade now. It's something I spent my entire life hoping would happen, but was never optimistic enough to think that it would. I rarely get what I want and there's almost nothing I've wanted more than this.

If you want to know why the major labels are such a loathsome construct, look no further than this article on The New Yorker's website. Looked at properly, it tells you everything you need to know. I actually find it remarkable that Bill Wyman (no, not that Bill Wyman) didn't come to the same conclusions that I did.

Michael Jackson's Thriller is famous for a lot of things, but it's famous most of all for being the biggest selling album in the history of ever. But they can't seem to determine with any accuracy just how many copies it's sold. As Wyman and Guillaume Vieira have determined, Thriller has sold 66.2 million copies, but every one else puts the figure at about 100 million, a number I'm not aware of Sony Music ever having discouraged.

In fairness, it's entirely likely that Sony doesn't even know how many units its moved. There was nothing that even resembled accurate accounting until the advent of Soundscan in 1991. Can you think of another industry that waited over 70 years to figure out how its product was selling? I can't.

My point is that if Sony can't be bothered to track sales with any degree of accuracy, it stands to reason that Michael Jackson himself (and now his estate) was never properly paid for his work. And Jackson was something of a big deal, with no shortage of accountants and lawyers at his disposal. If the industry felt that they could fuck him with impunity, can you imagine what they regularly do to everybody else?

But don't think for a second that the major labels are content to fuck over their artists. Ho, ho, don't be silly. They'll you rape you, the consumer, just as hard and dryly as humanly possible, too! We are the tortoise to their scorpion, and this is just what they do.

Since the industry long ago gave up even the pretense of signing something new or original, the sales for new artists are pathetic. But they still have something to sell you - the stuff you already bought months, years or even decades ago.

They have the rights to your favorite musician's catalogue, which they've recently started exploiting as ferociously as they humanly can. You see, they don't just own the masters from the albums you bought way back when, they own all the rehearsals, alternate takes and unreleased material, too. If your avorite musician recorded it, the label owns it. They can remix and remaster that shit endlessly, secure in the knowledge that you'll buy the same thing again and again, mostly because you're stupid.

The record companies stopped being about music almost twenty years ago and devoted themselves almost exclusively to marketing, which is what makes this document so fascinating.

The twentieth anniversary of Nirvana's final studio album, In Utero,  is this coming September and Interscope would very much like you to buy it again. You see, this is only the beginning of January and the market seeding has already started in full force.

Collapse Board doesn't say where this memo comes from, but everything about it reads like it could have only come from Interscope's marketing department. It's so sleazy and selective with the facts that I can't imagine that the Estate of Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic or Dave Grohl had anything to do with it, and Courtney Love couldn't pull it off without dozens of spelling and grammatical errors.

Let's review it together, shall we?

This memo is being sent out to prepare everyone for the major musical event of 2013. I am speaking, of course, about the 20th anniversary reissue of In Utero by Nirvana. Our friends at Pitchfork will produce a news item around May letting people know that the reissue is coming. Details will be scant, but it will nevertheless grease the wheels and allow a suitable amount of excitement to build up before the actual reissue. When the reviews start to appear it is vital that they all hold to a similar pattern. To understand why this is the case we must look once more to The Beatles. The sheer amount of Beatles literature (and its continued market success) should tell us all one very important fact: people not only like to read the same story over and over again, they demand it. Our job is to retell the story, to reinforce the legends, to emphasise the inflexibility of the narrative. So, given these facts I’ve prepared some bulletin points that focus on what each review should highlight:

Loosely translated, what they're saying is: "Lookee, we haven't signed anything worthwhile since Poor Dead Kurt iced himself, so we're going to re-sell his remains as thoroughly as we can. Of course, even pituitary retards, small children and household pets are too savvy to trust us at this point, so we'll market it through bloggers, who are dumb enough to do our unholy bidding for next to nothing. The Beatles re-sell their shit over and over, so why can't Nirvana? Our customers are desperate and dumb, so they'll take whatever we throw at them. Sure, most of them will steal it on BitTorrent, but there are easily 300,000 completest geeks out there who will pay a premium for the shitty new packaging that we'll wrap around the music they bought in 1993."

1. Give some brief background details. This is called SETTING THE SCENE. The Nirvana/Kurt Cobain legend must reinforce again and again the idea of the reluctant star, the uncomfortable voice of a generation. I recommend the use of the term “thrust into the limelight”. It functions beautifully for our purposes. I can’t stress enough that if the tragedy of the story is to emerge it can only do so from the idea of the reluctant star. Nevermind made them famous. What would they do now? (If you must mention Incesticide, be sure to call it a “stopgap” release.)

"Yes, let's SET THE SCENE in exactly the way that Cobain was most uncomfortable with when he was alive. He hated the 'voice of a generation' nonsense as thoroughly as Bob Dylan did. It's too bad that Dylan's still alive because Sony-Columbia could make even more money calling Bob that. Let's also pretend that guys join bands to remain anonymous, otherwise our 'thrust into the limelight' narrative looks completely fucking idiotic. We'll also pretend that Geffen didn't buy the Incesticide tracks from Sub Pop as a means of further monetizing the tidal wave that was Nevermindso shortly after its release, while giving Cobain time to write In Utero.

2. In Utero must be viewed as their attempt to regain punk credibility. Nirvana are on a major label, but you should present Cobain as a punk rocker at heart. Further tragedy can be wrung from the idea of the compromise that Nirvana made when they opted to sweeten two of the Steve Albini-produced tracks and make them more airplay friendly. (Please note: the original Albini-produced album will be available with the reissue. We have several bloggers working on reviews that seek to dismiss the original release and describe the original Albini mix as a ‘revelation’. This should bring the Nevermind haters on board).

"We'd really like you to be diligent about not pointing out that DGC despised the "punk rocker at heart" aspect of Cobain to the point that we initially refused to release In Utero at all. We wanted another "Smells Like Teen Spirit" so bad that we would've sold our grandmas into white slavery to get it. And boy, were we pissed when the dead junkie didn't give it to us! Let's also try to ignore that the "tragic compromise" of the remixes was forced on the band by, uh, us. Okay? We had never heard of Steve Albini before Nirvana hired him, so we knew that we'd hate him. Thankfully, Albini's precious 'indie credibility' dictated that he work for a flat fee instead of a percentage of royalties, which means we can endlessly repackage his work without paying him, twenty years after we threatened to not release it at all. #Winning! (Please note: Only two of the tracks on In Utero, "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies" were remixed by R.E.M's fantastic producer, Scott Litt. Let's not emphasize the fact that we're essentially putting the same CD in one package twice, okay? The fans are shitheads, but let's not rub our wanton robbery in their faces.)"

3.The reissue itself. The best way to get people to buy an album twice is to say it has been remastered. This usually amounts to making it louder, but this is where reviews can be crucial. The reviewer must create an unscratchable itch in the reader that makes them view the original release as an inferior product. Phrases like “went back to the original master tapes” and “working with the band” help, but it must be more than that. Use other phrases like “Cobain’s aching howl sounds even more revelatory” (be careful not to overuse revelation/revelatory), and indicate that the remastering job “breathes new life” into the album. Don’t insinuate that the mix has changed, more that it has been enhanced so that you hear everything with new ears.

"You know as well as we do that we're fucking robbing both the grave and the audience here but we've learned to lie in ways that makes it seem that we aren't. By the way, the modern compressors that make everything sound like shit sure are a good way of tricking stupid people into giving us more money for something they already own and sounds pretty okay. Try to avoid mentioning that the only thing we did with the original masters was feed them into a computer and boosted the levels indiscriminately, which we could've just as easily done with a digital copy."

4.The bonus tracks. The original Albini mix will be a huge draw. Ultimately this will be the thing that convinces the doubters to part with their money. When dealing with the original Albini mix, explore the idea of compromise versus Cobain’s “original vision”, and don’t miss the opportunity to bring tragedy to the surface once again.

"With the 'bonus tracks,' imply that there's more there than "I Hate Myself and Want to Die," which Cobain himself made the decision to leave off of In Utero and was later released on The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience and the With the Lights Out box set. But if we're going to exploit a sad man's suicide to trick people out of their hard-earned money in a shitty economy, I can't think of a better way to do it that putting out a song called "I Hate Myself and Want to Die," can you?"

5. Summing up. Two things are essential when summing up In Utero: It must be touted as the best Nirvana album. A phrase like “though Nevermind was their breakthrough, In Utero is undoubtedly their best” should work fine. You might want to say “may well be their best”. We’ve already sold them Nevermind by making it seem like a special moment in musical history, so let’s sell them In Utero by pointing out that it’s actually their best. This time, it’s all about the music. The second thing to emphasise is that In Utero must be seen as the last will and testament of a soul not long for this world. Stress how dark, disjointed, and angry the album is. Stress its compromised creation. Be sure to include a sentence along the lines of “just over six months after In Utero’s release Cobain would be dead by his own hand”. By all means, mention heroin and suicide attempts but make sure Cobain’s untimely death seems tragic yet inevitable.

"Try not to say that we here at Interscope hated In Utero without actually saying that we hated In Utero, it's producer, the mixes and, increasingly, the guy who wrote it. God, he was a pain in the ass. Punk rock geeks, especially those under 50, are pretty gullible, so if you're a poseur blogger cunt, they'll probably believe you when you say that In Utero is a better collection of songs than Nevermind. Definitely don't ask anyone if they can hum "Milk It" or "tourette's" or remember anything at all about those songs. Also, suicide!"

Kurt Cobain: Reluctant star. Pressure. Compromise. Depression. Heroin. Death. It’s that simple. Don’t feel like you are selling yourself short by sticking to these guidelines. Instead know that you are performing a public service. You are providing comfort and certitude in a world of confusion. You are giving people something to believe in. You are helping to make the art of Kurt Cobain immortal. Expect more high profile media events along the lines of the Nirvana/McCartney collaboration before long and, with any luck, we can anticipate a lucrative last quarter in 2013. One last thing: is 2014 too early for a 15th anniversary of the first White Stripes album, or should we wait for the 20th anniversary? I look forward to your feedback. Let’s make the myths.

"Kurt Cobain: Talented guy who got in over his head. Mentally ill. Junkie. Suicide. Cash cow that we own forever. Don't actually say any of that, even though it's true. It makes us look heartless and god knows the music industry has enough image problems. You are telling half-truths and outright lies so that we can exploit a dead 27 year old for a shit-ton of money, very little of which we'll be sharing with you blogger ghouls. We will beat this drum into the fucking ground all year until people buy the In Utero re-release just to shut us the fuck up. It's too bad that we can't mention the Foo Fighters, but they're signed to RCA and we're afraid of getting sued. Why doesn't Intercope own RCA yet? I know that I haven't mentioned anything crazy, like new music or artists in this wildly deceitful memo but ... White Stripes! We own their masters too, and Jack Black can't do a fucking thing about it! Now let's go out there and lie, people! Daddy needs a new Escalade!"

There. You now know everything you ever needed to about the music industry! Congratulations!


Special thanks to Collapse Board, Buddyhead and Spin for publishing this excrement and bringing it to my attention. 

Praying for the Apocalypse: Dispatches From the GOP's Last Stand

One of the great joys of this past week has been watching the Tea Party-Republican reaction to the fiscal cliff deal reached on Tuesday morning. I wrote about my displeasure with it here and I have many of the same grievances with the bargain that hardcore Teapublicans do. The only difference is that I'm telling the truth and they aren't.

Most of the commentary that I've seen railed against the tax increase and the $4 trillion in new debt. The only problem with this critique is that if the GOP got it's way, the debt would have been much worse.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that almost all of the $4 trillion comes from the expansion of the Bush tax cuts for those making under $400, 000 and the permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax. The "new spending" (and that term requires that you believe that tax cuts that aren't paid for aren't spending, which they are) equals about $300 billion.

But Republicans generally, and the Tea Party in particular, wanted all of the Bush tax cuts made permanent, plus the patch of AMT, which would have made CBO's deficit projections larger still. That's the math, folks. Arguing with it doesn't change it.

That would have been fine if Republicans had a plausible way of paying for it. Luckily for them, Republican dogma dictates that tax cuts aren't spending, so the deficits that result from them, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney, "don't matter."

Of course, that brings us to loophole reductions highlighted in the various Ryan plans and the Romney campaign. These of course were nothing short of blatant lies, which we know because no one ever presented a list of deductions to be eliminated or the math behind them. The only reason to leave that information out is because you know that it would be politically impossible to pass. Romney and Ryan would have gotten their tax cuts, to be sure. But they either wouldn't have been paid for or the burden of doing so would have fallen squarely on the middle class.

And if deductions and loopholes are such a wonderful way of paying for tax cuts, why wasn't the idea explored in 2001 and '03? It had been done rather successfully in 1986 and there was certainly no shortage of economists in the Bush White House. My guess is - and this is only a guess because I'm not aware of anyone else asking the question - is that they either knew that the math didn't work or the optics of having the middle class pay for it would be politically worse than the deficits themselves.

But you can cut spending to pay for tax cuts, right?

Yes, that's theoretically possible. But Republicans have never actually tried it before. Neither Reagan or the second Bush tried cutting spending anywhere close to the costs of their tax cuts. In fact, both dramatically ramped up defense spending, which obliterated the savings from domestic spending cuts. But that too was okay because the GOP doesn't believe that defense spending is "spending," either. Indeed, Mitt Romney promised a third surge in security spending without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it.

Nor has anyone complaining about Obama's budgeting bothered to come up with anything close to $4 trillion in domestic cuts over a decade. They've promised a lot of reforms, but none of those take effect for a decade after enactment and are guaranteed to have monstrous transition costs. President Bush's 2005 Social Security plan was estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first ten years, and I expect that Medicare reform based on personal plans would cost at least that much, and probably much, much more.

If the Grover Norquists and Erick Ericksons of the world had their way and everyone in the U.S government was suddenly a Republican, the projected deficits over the next 10 years would grow faster and larger than those currently on the table. Though they like pretending otherwise, their policies have costs, too. Both history and simple arithmetic teach us that.

As I've said before, I was fine with the sequester with its brutal, wide-ranging and immediate cuts. It was the GOP who objected to it most strongly because half of those cuts came directly from the Pentagon's hide, and the Republican platform calls for a dramatic increase in military spending. Another ideological perversion of the Republican Party is their failure to understand that defense spending, being wholly dependent on foreign policy, is the most discretionary spending of all. And at over $600 billion a year, it's the biggest discretionary program of all.

So when Republicans refuse to pay for their tax cuts or cut spending in a serious or timely way, they're left with one fallback position - shut down the government and possibly default on the debt.

You get a good idea of how unserious these people are when you read something like this;  "Specifically,( Pennsylvania Senator Pat)  Toomey tells Joe Scarborough, “We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean, and insist that we get off the road to Greece because that’s the road we’re on now.”

Excuse me, but what in the fuck is a "temporary partial government shutdown?"

My guess is that it means that the parts of the government (which also happen to be the biggest parts of it) that Republicans like, such as the military and the CIA, continue conducting business as usual. The GOP might be stupid, but it isn't as suicidal as you might think, so Social Security checks will continue to go out and doctors will keep getting paid under Medicare and Medicaid. All "a temporary partial government shutdown" means is that there's no urgency to reach a deal.

Not being a real government shutdown, that allows people like Erickson to think that Republicans have room to maneuver. This is because people like Erickson don't know how life works outside of their silly ideological bubbles.

Friends, this isn't going to be a replay of 2011. Back then, both sides were negotiating before the government hit the debt ceiling and continued as Treasury was juggling existing money to pay the bills. In this case, the ceiling was reached on Tuesday morning, Obama is on the record as saying that he isn't going to negotiate serious spending cuts and Boehner has said that he isn't going to negotiate with Obama at all. In addition to that, I expect the intellectual misfits in the Tea Party to start calling for a default by the end of next week.

The timing of this suggests to me that a default is a serious possibility this time. In fact, I think it's probable.

The markets freaked out in 2011 just because the GOP talked about defaulting and America's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history. Can you imagine what will happen if those crazy bastards actually do cause a default?

Remember the meltdown following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? This will be much worse. At least the government had access to $1.6 trillion for TARP and the Recovery Act then, which it won't this spring because no one will lend America money at anything less than ruinous interest rates. The economy won't "slow down," it'll come to a screeching halt and the United States could start losing a million jobs a month immediately.

By the way, do you know how hard killing terrorists will be when Congress doesn't even have change for the bus? China might also use the opportunity to ramp up its ambitions in the South Pacific, and God only knows what signals Iran will read into a U.S default and Depression.

And all of it will happen at the insistence of alleged "fiscal conservatives."

It's time to finally, finally admit that these people are fiscal conservatives the same way that Lindsay Lohan is sober and chaste. They are to sound economic policy what snake handling is to modern spirituality.

These people are willing to usher in Armageddon based solely on the factually unsupportable belief that Jesus will be waiting at the other side.

If you live outside America, you would be wise to get whatever money you have there out soonest. And if you live in the United States, know that Glenn Beck is probably right and you should start stockpiling gold, canned goods, firearms and explosives forthwith

The Republican Party is going down and they're fixing to take America down with it.

A Fiscal Cliff Deal That Makes Things Worse

At least in financial matters, it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that the United States is governed by emotionally damaged and intellectually challenged children. All things being equal, it is not as different from North Korea as you might have been lead to believe. I'm only sort of kidding when I say that I hope that Pakistan is developing a plan to take control of America's nuclear arsenal because Americans can no longer be trusted with it.

I never had all that much faith in a fiscal cliff deal that accomplished much of anything, but what passed last night made things spectacularly worse. It's actually pretty impressive when you think about it.

You might remember that the fiscal cliff itself was a product of the 2011 debt ceiling clusterfuck. Just off  the top of your head, can you name the other grown-up countries that have a debt ceiling at all? The correct answer is "none." Has the ceiling done anything to control U.S debt? The answer to that is pretty clearly no. It's an archaic and dangerous tool that long ago outlived any usefulness it may have had.

This completely invented crisis began with the Republican Party's singular inability to tell the truth about the debt. Ronald Reagan tripled it and George W. Bush doubled it again, but it's all Barack Obama's fault. That set the stage for the GOP to hold the economy hostage in the summer of '11 and very nearly caused the first default in U.S history.

This week presented the last best opportunity for the United States to right its fiscal ship. Not only was the "sequester" - drastic, automatic spending cuts - set to take effect yesterday, the Bush tax cuts and Obama's payroll tax holiday were set to expire. Oh, and the debt ceiling limit was hit at midnight on New Year's Day. Never again will there be a chance as good as this one to make a serious effort to address the coming catastrophe. America is now guaranteed to hit an economic iceberg and they will do so soon.

The positions of both sides were childish, ineffective and based more on politics than economics. President Obama spent the last five years saying that he wanted to make the Bush tax cuts permanent for everyone making under $250,000 a year and cut almost nothing in spending, whereas House Republicans wanted all the tax cuts made permanent, sought "entitlement reforms" that took over a decade to be enacted and wanted further Pentagon spending. While the Democrats were slightly more serious than the Republicans, that isn't saying much, since it's almost impossible to be less serious than the Republicans.

House Speaker John Boehner is incapable of controlling the Tea Party mongoloids in his caucus, making him less than useless as a negotiating partner. So he insisted that a deal come from the Senate, despite the Constitutional dictate that money bill originate from the House. That left it to Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to hammer out a deal.

Here's what they came up with.

— Tax rates will permanently rise to Clinton-era levels for families with income above $450,000 and individuals above $400,000. All income below the threshold will permanently be taxed at Bush-era rates.
— The tax on capital gains and dividends will be permanently set at 20 percent for those with income above the $450,000/$400,000 threshold. It will remain at 15 percent for everyone else. (Clinton-era rates were 20 percent for capital gains and taxed dividends as ordinary income, with a top rate of 39.6 percent.)
— The estate tax will be set at 40 percent for those at the $450,000/$400,000 threshold, with a $5 million exemption. That threshold will be indexed to inflation, as a concession to Republicans and some Democrats in rural areas like Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt.).
— The sequester will be delayed for two months. Half of the delay will be offset by discretionary cuts, split between defense and non-defense. The other half will be offset by revenue raised by the voluntary transfer of traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs, which would tax retirement savings when they’re moved over.
— The pay freeze on members of Congress, which Obama had lifted this week, will be re-imposed.
— The 2009 expansion of tax breaks for low-income Americans: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Tax Credit will be extended for five years.
— The Alternative Minimum Tax will be permanently patched to avoid raising taxes on the middle-class.
— The deal will not address the debt-ceiling, and the payroll tax holiday will be allowed to expire.
— Two limits on tax exemptions and deductions for higher-income Americans will be reimposed: Personal Exemption Phaseout (PEP) will be set at $250,000 and the itemized deduction limitation (Pease) kicks in at $300,000.
—The full package of temporary business tax breaks — benefiting everything from R&D and wind energy to race-car track owners — will be extended for another year.
— Scheduled cuts to doctors under Medicare would be avoided for a year through spending cuts that haven’t been specified.
— Federal unemployment insurance will be extended for another year, benefiting those unemployed for longer than 26 weeks. This $30 billion provision won’t be offset.
— A nine-month farm bill fix will be attached to the deal, Sen. Debbie Stabenow told reporters, averting the newly dubbed milk cliff.

Congratulations everybody! You just accomplished nothing!

Republicans say that America has a spending problem, while Democrats insist that the problem is with revenue. Anyone with any brains knows that the issue is with spending and revenue. This deal addresses neither.

Obama's insistence on returning to the Clinton tax rates for everyone making over a quarter million dollars raised negligible revenue. And he settled on $450,000 which raises even less.

Guess what this mess costs? Actually, you don't have to. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it'll be a fortune.

The extension of lower tax rates for a bulk of the nation's taxpayers and the addition of a permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax would add roughly $3.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, the CBO said. Other individual, business, and energy tax extenders would add another $76 billion. The extension of unemployment benefits would cost roughly $30 billion, and the so-called "doc fix" would tally another $25 billion through fiscal 2022.

The CBO says the budget agreement will lead to an overall increase in spending of about $330 billion over 10 years.

When all is said and done, all the White House and Congress managed to do was increase the debt by $4 trillion.

Oh, and it was political clusterfuck for everybody involved, too! Liberals and conservatives are both furious with their own representatives. Pretty much everybody's credibility was destroyed yesterday.

And because the debt ceiling wasn't raised and sequestration was delayed for two months, the worst part of this mess is yet to come. More interestingly, neither side has a particularly strong hand to play. President Obama has shot his load on taxes and the GOP is still too rattled and scared from the November elections to be effective at much of anything. Nobody has the juice to make a Grand Batgain at the end of February. The Bush tax cuts are now effectively the Obama tax cuts, taking away the negotiating leverage he had on the revenue side.

As of Monday night, the United States has no authority to borrow. The Treasury Department can juggle around existing money until about the first of March, but that's it. After that, the federal government shuts down. At the same time, the sequester takes effect, automatically making excruciating cuts everywhere.

Since both sides have lost the trust of their respective bases, I can't see how a deal is made. I can't imagine that the GOP will give Obama a debt ceiling increase without drastic, non-defense cuts and the president would be a fool to give a weakened, scared and divided Republican conference anything close to what they want.

What is likely is the trifecta of ugliness: a government shutdown, brutal automatic sequestration cuts and a default on the national debt - all within about a week of each other.

If you think the markets are going to respond well to that, you're out of your friggin' mind. The stock exchange will crash harder than it has since 2008 and the international bond market may start to melt down. Treasury Bills will very probably become worthless overnight and the U.S government will have trouble funding itself when it resumes operation.

Both unemployment and interest rates could skyrocket, which might throw the country into a depression, possibly causing another round of bank failures. The meltdown of the European PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) would seem leisurely compared to a complete political and financial collapse in the United States. It's also important to remember that there's nobody capable of bailing America out.

Oh, and did I mention that the United States added $4 trillion to it's national debt last night? Because the United States added $4 trillion to its national debt last night. And they did that while accomplishing nothing more than delaying the apocalypse by 60 days.

Good work everybody!

Why am I the only one wondering why Americans hate america so much? I rather liked it when it was a serious country.

Who is Rick Santelli and Why is He Saying These Stupid Things?

I knew that the Tea Party movement was doomed to long-term irrelevance, brutal stupidity and almost cosmic hypocrisy the second it was formed around the now infamous "Santelli rant" of February 19, 2009.

Rick Santelli is a former hedge fund cocksucker who later migrated to the equally devious, unethical and wrong profession of financial journalism. He really is the worst of both possible worlds.

For my right-wing friends that love disseminating conspiracy theories about George Soros and his profiteering from the collapse of world currencies, you should know that Soros Fund Management is also a hedge fund. Long-Term Capital Management was also a hedge fund that required a massive Federal Reserve-supervised bailout in 1998, after it put all of it's eggs in the east Asian and Russian currency basket, which subsequently crashed. Because of the nature of their trading, hedge funds are largely unregulated, despite the enormous potential for destruction that they cause.

Even in the wildly overrated journalism, financial reporters are among the very worst, at about the level of gossip columnists and fucking astrologers. That anyone believes anything these assholes have to say tells you everything you need to know about why capitalism is the mess that it is today.

If you want to take a walk down memory lane, I highly recommend that you read back through what those fucking people had to say about the banking and real estate sectors from 2002 through the middle of 2007. You'll look long and hard before you find them saying anything negative. This is because financial reporters are the most cronyistic motherfuckers on God's green earth. Shit, even political reporters are embarrassed by them.

But the Santelli rant of Ought-Nine was unique onto itself for it's balls-out ignorance and hubristic hypocrisy. If you never saw it, here it is. If you haven't seen it in awhile, you should watch it again.



Remember, that was Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, not quite five months after all of those dumb fuckers were bailed out by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP.) There were no populist rants from those people in September of 2008 because they were too scared to fucking speak without shitting themselves to death.

This guy says that Santelli was against TARP, which isn't exactly true if you watch the clip he provides. Santelli acknowledged that the government had to do something, but that it should wait a few days.



And that would have been fucking crazy. Not only was the financial service industry rapidly melting down, it was beginning to take the stock market with it. The consequences of that for the larger public were catastrophic and most people still haven't recovered from them.

Back in the 80's, employers moved from Defined Benefit Packages (which you know as pensions) to investing contributions in 401K plans, which were almost all in stocks. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, the market lost over half of its value in a single day. When the GOP started fucking around with passing TARP - and it failed to pass the House the first time - the market bled out even more.

Those 401K lost over half of their value. Some lost closer to two-thirds. If you were anywhere near retirement in the fall of 2008, you were basically fucked.

Because of the interconnectedness of the debt, most through derivatives like credit default swaps, all of the investment banks would have gone down. The ones that weren't directly taken out by the mortgage meltdown wouldn't have had anyone to borrow from to meet their overnight margin requirements. And because the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act allowed them to become bank holding companies, the commercial banks would have started toppling like dominoes very shortly thereafter.

No one who knows anything about anything has ever suggested otherwise. After four years of my asking, people like Santelli have never told me how you maintain a modern civilization without a banking industry. Like it or not (and I hated it) TARP was the least bad available option out there. No sensible person thought there was a guarantee that the markets would have survived another week.

But when the government rather timidly suggested that the banks (which caused the problem in the first fucking place and had just been given tens of trillions of dollars in loans and guarantees) renegotiate the mortgages of the actual victims of the crisis, shitheads like Santelli and his cocksucker friends with their bailout bonuses burning a hole in their fucking pockets had the incredible temerity to get indignant about it on the CBOT floor.

Fuck them. No wonder the Tea Party is so goddamned dumb. They're based on a fundamentally stupid premise. If Rick Santelli was capable of shame, he would've ended his rant by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

Yet Santelli can't stop bringing the stupid. Just this morning he was bringing it hard.



Jesus God, the stupid just doesn't stop with this guy, does it?

We're not even talking about ancient history here, folks. We're talking about 1990-'93. The first President Bush increased marginal rates and President Clinton moved them slightly further northward. and you know what? The world didn't end. Innovation didn't stop and capital didn't flee the market anymore than it already had because of globalization.

Look, I know that the tech buble was responsible for the economy of the 90's and the balancing of the budgets (to the extent that they were, which was not at all,) but the modestly increased rates certainly helped

But look at what happened subsequently. The second Bush gutted the rates, fought two wars and dramatically expanded entitlement spending without paying for any of it.

From time to time, you'll see incredibly misleading nonsense like this (which you know is partisan horseshit because it labels the 2000-'01 downturn as "The Clinton Recession," while the 2007-'09 near-depression is called "The Mortgage Crisis" instead of "The Bush Calamity."

The main reason those charts are misleading is because they focus only on the deficits and not the consistently growing debt. Bush and the GOP Congress engaged in a really neat accounting trick during much of that administration. Specifically, the funded much of their crap - and the wars almost exclusively - through continuing resolutions, which bypassed the budget process entirely. That spending went directly to the debt and wasn't reflected in the annual deficits.

To the right, you'll see a chart of the gross federal debt, as opposed to the deficits, that you'll see consistently went up throughout the Bush years.

Here's something else you need to know about George W. Bush: He's the only person I'm aware of in human history who actually cut taxes while waging not one, but two land wars in Asia. That was so fucking crazy that even Hitler knew better than to try it.

One of the reasons that the deficit exploded under Obama is because he put all of that spending back on the books. Once you do that, of course the annual numbers will be unskewed against previous years. But dishonest hacks will continue to try to throw that hack trick at you because they think you're retarded.

Even with the massive 2001 and '03 tax cuts, combined with hack accounting tricks that would send you directly to fucking prison of you tried them in the private sector, American GDP only grew by an average of 1.6% during the second Bush administration. Growth under George H.W Bush and Clinton was 2.1% and 3.8% respectively. Even after inheriting a catastrophe, Obama's average growth numbers are likely going to be better than Bush 43's were.

The great Jay Batman said something this week that I've been saying for years and I couldn't be happier that someone finally is joining me in saying it.

Social issues and their alienating power are but one problem the Republican Party must overcome; in order to address the utter lack of credibility it has on fiscal issues, Republicans must realize some very hard truths indeed.

When you have to finance an initiative with the issuance of debt, you are spending money. When you cut taxes and create deficits, the deficit and the tax cut that created it will be financed with the issuance of debt. The tax cut thereby becomes a spending item.

No one seriously argues that financing the purchase of a television or a car with debt in the form of a loan or credit isn't spending; however, Republicans will argue until the sun goes down that a tax cut is not spending no matter how much debt it creates. No tax cut that is unaccompanied by a commensurate cut in spending items should ever be passed into law. You can have whatever you damn well wish to pay for, but as it relates to government spending, it is better to pay as you go than to pay with interest because the government has the unique ability to print money in order to lessen its debt obligations. The net result of such practices is that Americans pay higher prices over time and lose purchasing power in the process.

Santelli knows that you can raise taxes without raising the rates, but he won't tell you that because he and his asshole friends love the virtual welfare that the tax code gives them. And no, I'm not talking about capital gains, dividends, or the corporate rates, which are fine where they are or could even come down some.

The carried interest rate, for example, should be a prime target for raising to regular income rates. Contrary to popular opinion, carried interest isn't capital gains or dividend income. It's essentially a "management fee" paid to the hedge funds and private equity firms by companies that are the targets of leveraged buyouts (LBOs.) It's regular income that was given a cute name that suggests that it's something different by lobbyist bloodsuckers.

If you want to know why Mitt Romney paid only 13% in the years that he released returns from, it's because his income was primarily carried interest from Bain Capital, which he resigned from "retroactively" in either 1999 or 2002, depending on who you believe.

There are other neat tricks in the tax code that can be fixed, too. Did you know that people in Santelli's (presumed) income bracket can claim the home mortgage deduction on second, third and maybe even forth properties?

Pretty much everyone agrees that the real time bombs are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. What you probably don't know is that those programs aren't financed with general revenue from the income tax. That money comes from the payroll tax, which for whatever bonehead reason, is capped at $100,000. Get rid of that artificial cap and you can lower rates, thereby creating more disposable income from the middle class and the working poor, while helping the solvency of the programs.

Granted, you'll still need to raise the retirement age, limit benefits and means test both Medicare and Social Security to guarantee their long-term survival, but eliminating the payroll tax cap gives you some breathing room in how you go about doing that.

Santelli started this morning's rant off with a brutally fucking dumb premise. He said “The only people who bring tax revenues to the party are people who work, and the discussion is mainly about the people that are working, that are way at the top.”

No shit, Rick. People who don't have an income are actually pretty famous for not paying the income tax. Go figure.

While I think that taxing the rich is as good a place as any to start, I also know that the numbers don't work if you end there. Barack Obama is being singularly irresponsible in suggesting that they can, just as the Republicans are being overpoweringly stupid in thinking that you can fix this exclusively with cuts.

The middle class are going to have to take it in the nuts, too. Firstly, that's where the real fucking money is. Secondly, those are the assholes that voted America directly into the hole it's in.

Remember the fake budget wars of the 1990s? Back then, the GOP wasn't fighting for cuts. They just wanted to limit the rate of growth. It's well past time for that now. These days, shit - including and especially defence, which is the largest ticket item in discretionary spending - is going to have to be pared down dramatically. And if that has to go, it becomes harder to justify all the goodies in the tax code for the middle class.

Supposed conservatives, just like liberals, have fallen down on explaining the responsibilities that accompany rights. Just as much as liberals have, conservatives have encouraged people - mostly the middle class - into believing that they can vote themselves stuff without any cost to them.

They always assured you that economic growth would pick up the difference, despite thirty years of evidence to the contrary. But not only did those fucking people vote for tax cuts, they voted for higher program spending, too. Remember, George W. Bush didn't lie to anyone about his plans. He was upfront about doubling federal education spending giving hard-on pills to grandpa. And that spending disproportionately befitted the middle class.

Well, as you now know, there is no fucking free lunch, and the waiter is standing by your table with the bill. I'd suggest that you keep your credit card in your wallet because it's maxed out.

As I've said before many times, the U.S debt bomb is more dire a threat than even World War II was. Propaganda aside, there was never a real threat that the Nazi war machine was ever going to occupy western Pennsylvania. But nothing will destroy the American way of like quite like a national default.

That means shared sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to take a hit. It would be nice if the poor and the working poor could be spared, but I'm not sure that's even possible. $16 trillion is, after all, a shitload of money.

If you parse through the tax code and the budget, you very quickly find that the overwhelming majority of it is geared to the wealthy and, especially, the middle class. It's welfare that has been called anything but for far too long now.

Rick Santelli and his well-heeled asshole friends think that if you can get away with not paying the piper, they won't have to, either. But as a nation, you called the fucking tune and one way or another, that piper's getting paid.

Tim Hudak Finally Has Good Idea, But Figures Out a Way to Fuck You With It

I haven't written about politics here in Ontario in months, and I really should have. In fairness, I've been preoccupied with an utterly predictable presidential election in the United States and the flash and bullshit surrounding the end of Toronto mayor Rob Ford's career. I'm also dating again, which keeps me awfully busy.

But the shenanigans at Queen's Park have been endlessly fascinating. Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, who is among the most unpopular people in the English-speaking world, saw his majority government reduced to a minority in October 2011. Why only a minority? Because the opposition leader, Progressive Conservative Tim Hudak, is the dumbest motherfucker on earth, and managed to antagonize everybody who might have voted for him. That's a pretty impressive accomplishment.

As I've mentioned before, the rest of the world isn't like the United States. When given the choice between evil and stupid, Canadians will usually embrace evil. If nothing else, evil is at least predictable and not infrequently rather clever. Americans, on the other hand, have a fabled history of taking stupidity to their collective bosom, which explains the state of the U.S economy.

That isn't to say that we like evil. We try to punish it to the extent that we can without stupidity winning. In a nutshell, that's how McGuinty was reelected, albeit only with a minority.

However, a minority situation was less than ideal for ol' Dalton. The corruption and politicized, wasteful nonsense that defined his two majority mandates were about to catch up with him. It was only a matter of time before the opposition PCs and NDP combined to drive his government out in a confidence vote and force an election that McGuinty would almost certainly lose, probably to the NDP.

So McGuinty did the only thing left to him: he resigned and prorogued the legislature. Of course, this put Liberals - who howled with self-righteous indignation when Stephen Harper prorogued the federal Parliament - in a position where they found themselves cheering McGuinty's tactical genius and personal grace.

(For the record, I oppose prorogument in all but the most extreme circumstances. Were it up to me, shutting down the government on a political basis would mean exactly that. The government would stop dead. The civil service wouldn't be paid, nor would government benefits to the citizenry. Contracts would immediately be in breach and the government would be liable for it. That way, the government would be too scared to prorogue without accompanying legislation that a minority couldn't pass. A bare minimum, prorogument should be introduced as a confidence motion in the legislature.)

When you get down to it, all McGuinty will have accomplished in the end is his face being out front when the Liberals are finally defeated. As soon as the Liberals have a new sacrificial lamb and the legislature resumes sitting, I expect that the government will be vaporized on the first available confidence vote.

That means that Ontario is already in an unofficial campaign, which puts the Grits at a decided disadvantage, since they don't have a leader who can issue policy proposals. And whoever wins the Liberal leadership (and I expect it will be Gerard Kennedy, if they're smart) will only be premier for about 15 seconds, so he or she won't have time to put together a platform.

Tim Hudak, being Tim Hudak, took an obviously good idea and watered it down with his trademark stupidity.

The sale of beer, wine and spirits in corner stores and supermarkets would give Ontarians more freedom of choice, but not necessarily lower prices, says Tory Leader Tim Hudak.

Hudak told reporters Tuesday a Progressive Conservative government would “end the LCBO and Beer Store monopolies” without forgoing the revenue from hefty provincial taxes.

“Let’s let the private sector into the alcohol business, let’s have some more competition,” he told reporters outside an LCBO outlet in Toronto’s Liberty Village that refused to let him hold his news conference inside.

Hudak said it’s time Ontario opened up its liquor retailing, like Alberta and other jurisdictions.

“A lot of states and provinces have moved out of the public control of alcohol and they actually found they increased choice and increased revenue for the government at the same time,” he said.

There is absolutely no reason for a government monopoly on alcohol sales that isn't statist, stupid, or both.

The "public safety" argument is easily the most specious and the most dangerous.

If a product is as dangerous as statist shitheads suggest it is, government should be banning it instead of profiting from it. What kind of government knowingly finances itself through the ruination of the citizenry? What kind of a fuckheaded moral example is that? And that goes for alcohol, cigarettes, and lotteries and casinos. By the way, why are marijuana, cocaine, heroin and prostitution left out of the mix?

The idea that high taxes will discourage the use of a good or service is economically boneheaded. Government rather rapidly becomes dependent on the revenue and a downturn in sales only hurts government revenues, which will have to be recouped elsewhere. The entire argument for "sin taxes" is idiotic and self-defeating when you think of what happens if those taxes accomplish their objective of eliminating the sin. At some point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

I'm not against taxes and recognize that they are the cost of a somewhat civil society. If it were up to me, we'd be taxing income or consumption, but that's another argument for another day. Having said that, I'm against using the tax code as a means of behaviour modification. After all, we already have the criminal law for that.

It's also singularly ineffective. Look at cigarette taxes as a prime example. When tobacco taxes got to high in the early 90s, everybody bought cigarettes that were smuggled in from the United States. Then the Chretien government cut the taxes by about two-thirds without a dramatic increase in smoking. After the individual American states jacked up taxes and sued the tobacco companies, Canadian smokers started buying untaxed tobacco from Native reservations, which are protected by treaty.

One of the great truths in life is that when you raise taxes beyond a certain point, you essentially incentivize tax avoidance. Liberals and statist social conservatives don't get that and they never fucking will, mostly because neither recognizes economic reality.

Misfits across the ideological spectrum offer three other cases for strict government controls on booze. These are health care, drunk driving and the fucking children. I'll address each now.

I smoke and drink, and I'm taxed disproportionately for both. Not only am I paying for my heath care, I'm paying for yours, too. There's virtually no chance that I'll see my 50th birthday, so I wind up saving the system a shit-ton of money.

People who have fun and die young are always cheaper than those that live clean and take decades to finally die. Just think of all cash you'll save from my not consuming government retirement benefits. Also, I've read that 85% of the health care you consume will be in the last 18 months of your life, assuming you meet ordinary life expectancy.

More likely than not, I'll either drop dead of a coronary or actually explode with cancer over the course of about three weeks. When the taxpayer is providing endless goodies to old people, it only makes economic sense that they should want to limit the number of old people around to collect. I'm doing my part. Are you?

I used to spend a lot of time in California. I was shocked to learn that you could buy beer and wine there, not only in corner and grocery stores, but at fucking gas stations! If anything is going to "encourage" drunk driving, you would think it would be that. But I'm not aware of California having a greater incidence of drunk driving, per-capita than Ontario. This very probably has a lot to do with California putting drunk drivers in jail more often (and for longer) than we do.

It appears then that the criminal law is much more effective at dealing with drunk driving than government monopolies on distribution of alcohol are. And I don't know how to break this to this shitheads at MADD, but driving under the influence is already against the law.

That brings me to the motherfucking children. The argument goes that only the government is clever and responsible enough to prevent kids from getting booze. Sadly, that's belied by the anecdotal evidence.

If you live in Ontario, look around. Are you really seeing a shortage of drunken teenagers out there?

Even if the current system is working ideally, which it isn't. you've created a perfect situation where it's easier for kids to get illegal drugs from a criminal market than it is for them to get a fucking drink. Ever notice how countries with looser alcohol laws, like France, Spain and Italy, have far lower instances of teen drunkenness and all around fuck-uppery than we do in North America? I sure as shit have.

That's because parents are actually interested in their maggot children there. They allow kids to drink, but they monitor it and acclimate them to the experience. We want the goddamned government to do it for us, ignoring entirely how well the government does things like deliver mail, which has your address on it and everything! According to this philosophy, a government that demonstrably can't balance a fucking checkbook is supposed to take care of your kids for you. Good luck with that.

But, as Jan Wong explains,  there is one really good idea for keeping a government monopoly on booze.

Today, the LCBO downplays the control aspect while struggling to satisfy its dual mandate of turning a profit without turning people into drunkards. The subliminal message of Food and Drink, the LCBO’s free magazine, remains paternalistic: don’t drink on an empty stomach. The hypocrisy is astounding. The LCBO goes further than most stores in trying to persuade you to buy its product for every social occasion short of a toddler’s birthday party. What other retailer has dreamed up 300 styles of gift bags, boxes and bottle-friendly containers in the past five years? Chris Layton, an LCBO spokesman, says the gift bags earn $3.5 million a year—although consumer interest is now shifting to gift cards.

According to Layton, Food and Drink is the LCBO’s single most popular marketing initiative. Six times a year, the LCBO prints 500,000 English copies and 20,000 French copies on glossy 60-pound stock. It turns a comfortable annual profit of $350,000 to $400,000 after expenses. Here’s one of the secrets to its success: wineries must submit marketing plans—including how much they will spend on advertising in Food and Drink—before they can obtain coveted shelf space at the LCBO. Food and Drink competes for scarce advertising dollars against private-sector magazines that aren’t bankrolled by government monopolies.

Truth be told, Torontonians would buy alcohol without any encouragement from fancy stores or glossy magazines. If we could save money, I’m fairly certain we’d shop at a no-frills warehouse with fluorescent lights. To get an idea of how monolithic the LCBO is, I checked out another monolithic retailer, but one that offers the warehouse shopping experience: Costco. First, consider that Ontario’s population is a tiny fraction of that of the U.S.—4.1 per cent. Then note that while Costco is one of the biggest wine retailers in the U.S., it must compete with thousands of private liquor stores. Now check out these numbers: last year Costco grossed $1.3 billion (U.S.) in wine sales; the LCBO’s wine sales grossed $1.58 billion, according to its most recent annual report. Despite its much smaller territory and consumer base, the LCBO actually eclipses that other monolith to the south, Costco.

In fiscal 2010–2011, the monopoly paid a dividend of $1.55 billion to the Ontario government. It was the 17th consecutive record annual dividend, and it does not include the various taxes levied (a total of $749 million). The annual report also lays bare the secret behind the LCBO’s profit margins: we’re paying double. At Costco, a bottle of Woodbridge sauvignon blanc costs $6.99; at the LCBO it’s $11.95. Costco sells Veuve Clicquot for $38.99 a bottle; the LCBO charges $66.30. When I asked for pricing examples for table wine, some markups were 137 per cent. For a wine that retails for $10.45 (the LCBO didn’t provide actual product names), it pays wholesalers $3.77 if it’s a U.S. or non-Ontario Canadian wine; $3.72 if it’s another imported wine; and $4.10 if it’s Ontario wine. And these wholesale prices may be inflated.

It isn't so much that Ontarians are in imminent danger of alcoholism as the government of Ontario is already in the throes of it. They're addicted to the money. That's why David Peterson,. Mike Harris and Dalton McGuinty himself all made the promise of privatization, but never followed through.

And Tim Hudak, being Tim Hudak, is doing nothing at all to change that.

Hudak addressed social concerns that some — like MADD Canada — might have with easier accessibility to booze, by noting there aren’t “riots in the streets” in other more liberal jurisdictions.

The Beer Store’s Jeff Newton said while consumers assume such changes would mean lower prices, Ontario’s high tax rates on alcohol prevent that.

“Their assumption is automatically that means prices are going down based on their experience from shopping in the corner store … in Florida or Buffalo,” he said.

But Newton said the Ontario tax on a case of 24 cans of beer in Ontario is $9.80, compared to 32 cents in New York or $1.08 in Florida.

With the existing tax structure, he said the cost of distributing beer to thousands of stores — and markups — mean consumers would pay more.

Sobeys, which operates 112 stores in Ontario and supplies 213 franchises, welcomed the initiative, saying what “Tim Hudak is proposing is of great interest to us.”

“We’re supportive of anything that provides our customers with greater choice and convenience,” said Sobeys’ Andrew Walker.

In a perverse way, the Ontario government's monopoly is actually subsidizing drinking by limiting the distribution costs of the product, while making tons of money in taxes.

Hudak isn't talking about lowering the alcohol tax in Ontario, he's talking about actually expanding it. If you increase the distribution chain to the private sector, the HST and provincial income and business taxes apply each step of the way. One assumes that individual corner stores and groceries would still need to be licensed to sell booze, so there would be fees in that. Plus, a Hudak government could generate billions more in selling off or franchising existing LCBO retail locations, who would also be licensed and taxed.

This is an enormous tax grab from a supposedly "conservative" candidate. It's also retarded if you know anything about economics.

Hudak is essentially proposing to expand on a liberal economic tax model in ways that hurt consumers even more. Business will make out like bandits with increased sales and the tax base on those sales increase dramatically. But because of increased distribution and (presumed) increased compliance costs, prices go up at the retail level.

Everybody wins but you and me. Businesses that sell alcohol aren't going to swallow those taxes, fees and compliance costs. They're going to pass them along to you, which is exactly what happened in Alberta.

Even if Hudak cut the tax down by 90% to match Florida's, the expanded base would more than make up the revenue. The deeper market penetration should expand sales, which should drive the price down. Unless, of course, the hidden hand of government actually drives them up for no reason at all.

If Tim Hudak is going to run on this, conservatives are going to have to pin the stupid cocksucker down on his plans before anyone votes for him. Because my guess is that he's going to follow up this populist (meaning stupid) nugget of an idea with a dramatic cut in corporate taxes. That'll mean that you're further subsidizing, say, the auto companies - and their unions - every time you have wine with dinner.

Forget the nonsense you hear about other Canadian provinces. In one way or another (with the possible exception of Quebec,) they've expanded the market while keeping taxes high and continued monopolized distribution. Alberta, in a particular, doesn't have a provincial sales tax, which tends to drive "sin taxes" higher, so there's no offset in retail price.

Unless Hudak is willing to commit to an American model of lower taxes and greater distribution, conservatives and libertarians should kill the dumb fucker dead on this.

Why Capitalism is Best of All

There's no end to the people who bitch about capitalism. Sure, they're leftie academic assholes mostly, but not exclusively. Hipster jerkoffs and associated fuckheads have also gotten into the game.

It's stunning how little these people know about history, even including the history of their own political movements. Generation Xers and everyone younger should look at their parents, the godawful fucking Boomers, who remain history's greatest monsters.

If you look at your parents and aunts and uncles, there's a better than even chance that at least half of them were hippies. These days? None of them are. In fact, around 1973, they busied themselves going to graduate school, becoming investment bankers, buy homes with two car garages and shitting out little cocksuckers like you. And not only is that what your family did, so did Jerry Rubin.

The fact is capitalism won. The Stalinist Chinese and Godless Vietnamese are hyper-capitalist, while North America and Europe have essentially returned to the Gilded Age. Not only has capitalism triumphed, it managed to defeat a century's worth of constraints on it through globalization and deregulation.

It's even better than that. Capitalism's victory is so overwhelming that it has relieved pretty much everyone of the need to know anything at all about economics. That's true of both the political left and right.

Republicans and Tea Partiers, along with their misfit cadres on the Internet and in the media will tell you that "Marxism is on the march!"

Really? Where? All statements like that tell me is that no one knows what Marxism actually is anymore. I haven't heard anyone anywhere advocating that the workers take control of the means of production in at least a generation. And you know what? Neither have you. Fidel Castro and whichever Kim is currently run North Korea know that to be nonsense. The only people who believe that are Glenn Beck, a few McCarthyite Revolutionary War reenactors deep in the asshole of South Carolina, idiot bloggers and a GOP that has managed to somehow embrace both cynicism and ignorance.

There's nothing funnier to me than an assload of hillbillies cheering some scumbag lobbyist who declares that "Government sucks! And here to prove it are Representative Michele Bachmann, Senator Jim DiMint and Governor Sarah Palin!"

Not only is Barack Obama to the right of all but a very few elected officeholders in the democratic world, he's largely to the right of the GOP of the Reagan era.

The left is just as bad, if not actually worse. Democratic socialism has largely turned out to be neither and the leaders of liberal political parties; such as (but not limited to) Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Michael Ignatieff have repudiated everything their followers used to believe in while their followers celebrated them for winning because of it.

Here's a neat fact. Both the individual health care mandate and cap and trade were revolutionary Republican ideas in the early 1990s that the left came to embrace as the right drifted off into a fantasy world of counter intuitive economic nonsense, religious superstition, foreign adventurism that is alien to historical conservatism and rape-based politics.

In modern electoral politics, there really isn't a left anymore. In large part that's why Tea Party shitheads keep waving the bloody shirt of Saul Alinsky, ... who died in 1972. Were it not for the fact that he would have made Earl Butz so uncomfortable, Barack Obama would have fit in Gerald Ford's Cabinet.

You know what the left has got? Occupy Wall Street: a leaderless and idealess motley crew of unwashed assholes who are against something, but aren't quite sure what. And until they figure it out, they'll shit on a police car. The only people who think Occupy Wall Street is worth anything are idiot celebrities and washed-out, cynical political hacks who govern to the right, but need to sell badly written books from time to time.

If these unwashed fuckheads think that they're going to change a corrupt and oligarchical banking construct by laying around a fucking park until the cops club then about the head and shoulders, all the corrupt and oligarchical banking system need do is wait until those retards choke on their own fucking tongues, which is inevitable!

Occupy is the political version of a 35 year old broad who thinks she's a witch and can only cum by cutting herself. And no reasonable person is ever going to buy into that fucking nonsense. Comparing Occupy to the Tea Party is little more than a demonstration of how stupid some people are. The Teapers are organized and, no matter how retarded their message is, at least they have one. And it took a lot of money to get that many people to dress that oddly in one place at one time.

Even the most perverted version of capitalism is going to snap the necks of those worthless fucks, each and every time.

You know why? Capitalism has something that Occupy is never going to have. Kate Upton's tits.

If there's one thing I've learned from life, it's that cute blonde girls with their huge jugs hanging out always win! And I'm far more partial to brunettes. But facts is facts!


The pictures in this post are from Miss Upton's advertising campaign for Skullcandy headphones. The only thing I've ever heard about the product is that is that it's a worthess piece of plastic shit. But I'm willing to buy three of them on the off chance that one of her fantastic udders falls out during the next commercial. Six, if we find out if she's completely shaved like all the best women are.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much pain and suffering that subprime mortgages and an utterly deregulated derivatives market has demonstrably caused. If you attach a cute young blonde with giant, exposed milkbags to either, nine out of ten Americans will jump on the bandwagon all over again.

Don't believe me? Go to an Occupy encampment next spring and count the Skullcandy headphones.




Pictures and video lovingly stolen from Popoholic