Tag: economy

Furry fury at government wasting $250,000 on creepy mascots… as families face bankruptcy amid brutal shutdown

Costumed government mascots that have cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars would be sent packing under one GOP senator’s plan to slash spending amid the government shutdown.

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst is taking aim at characters including Franklin the Fair Market Fox, from the Department of Housing, and Puddles the Blue Goose, from the Fish and Wildlife Service, as she appeals to Trump’s budget chief to cut costs.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a memo issued before the shutdown that ‘Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees’ working in programs that are ‘not consistent with the President’s priorities’ should be sent by individual agencies.

Ernst, who chairman of the Senate DOGE caucus, plans to ask during a floor speech on Friday that riff-raff like government mascots and other ‘do-nothing bureaucrats’ be fired immediately.

A single outfit for a mascot at the US Embassy in Singapore cost taxpayers a whopping $22,000 in February, and the government spent a jaw-dropping $250,000 at a costume company in Ohio in 2019, according to Ernst’s office.

Ernst told the Daily Mail last week that keeping 750,00 non-essential workers on the government payroll costs $400 million every working day. 

The total cost of keeping these workers has crossed $2.8 billion since the government shutdown began, she said.

Ernst’s other potential cost-cutting measures include eliminating the positions of federal employees and contractors who were not even working before the shutdown, and others who have said that they get paid to take naps and watch Netflix.

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Trump’s base (apart from the Zionists) is increasingly restive. Venezuela, Iran, Israel, Ukraine policies are deeply unpopular. The economy is becoming toast. How will he move to regain popularity?

Does President Trump think a new war or two can save him? Nope—his BS maneuvers bombing Iran were a joke, a fake show of strength that bought him absolutely nothing except loss of respect.

UKRAINE

His claim of concern for the waste of life in Ukraine led to no reasonable offers to end that conflict. Here is what the West did to Russia (and the US still leads the West) to provoke this war:

  1. Trashed the 2014 Maidan agreement
  2. Built up a large Ukraine army and transferred many arms to Ukraine subsequently
  3. Applied very strict sanctions on Russia
  4. Encouraged neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine to continually terrorize the Russian-speaking eastern regions, killing about 15,000 citizens
  5. Placed criminal, compromised Zelinsky (a comedian) in as President to do the West’s bidding
  6. Attempted to blow up all 4 Nordstrom pipelines that brought Russian gas to Europe, and managed to blow up 3 with 2 charges placed on one line

Well, the West, its NATO and the US have expended a huge amount of money and lives in hopes of grabbing Russia’s resources after chewing up most of the fat in their own countries. And look where it has gotten them. The crazed European leaders with open immigration, Net Zero, 15 minute cities, etc., in addition to election thefts and now sending troops to Ukraine, have destroyed their countries’ economies. And lost all shred of dignity and morality. They are desperate, cornered, and we fear where they will go from here. Will the US go with them?

ISRAEL

Meanwhile, the West encouraged Netanyahu to impose the final solution on Gaza—putting his country’s future at grave risk, encouraging antisemitism everywhere, and murdering and terrorizing millions of innocent civilians. Using the excuse of Hamas’ terrorism. But we can never forget that Israel funded Hamas or allowed Qatar to fund Hamas—it is one or the other, the facts are very clear—supposedly to keep Gaza from allying with the West Bank. But what if it was also to lay the groundwork for an October 7 excuse to empty Gaza of its 2 million inhabitants?

Why is Trump handing Israel the weapons to continue its “war” in Gaza? This is no war, it is a massacre. Simply look at the casualty figures if you disagree with me.

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Democrats Are Playing Chicken With Americans’ Livelihood Because Illegal Aliens Dominate Their Policy Priorities

As the federal government shutdown stretches into its fourth day, the impasse between Republicans and Democrats shows no immediate signs of breaking. With funding lapsed since October 1, non-essential services hang in the balance, and political finger-pointing intensifies. Democrats have been receiving an unprecedented volume of blame for the “Schumer Shutdown” as some in legacy media have uncharacteristically reported some of the truth.

Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, points to two specific pay dates that could shift the dynamics: October 10 for essential federal workers and October 15 for military personnel.

Stern explains that these deadlines carry real weight because “at the end of the day, I think they’re going to get the blame that I think they deserve,” referring to Democrats who rejected a Republican-backed temporary funding bill.

This bill aimed to keep government operations running for seven weeks while negotiations continued, but Democrats held firm on demands to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies to illegal aliens. Elaborating on this standoff, Stern describes the Democratic approach as one where they “stomp [their] feet and make a dramatic situation out of it.”

Such tactics, he argues, prioritize controversial spending items like foreign aid for transgender surgeries and abortions, increased funding for NPR and PBS, and a massive $1.5 trillion welfare program extension that would strip away anti-fraud measures and broaden eligibility to legal aliens. This perspective aligns with broader Republican criticisms that Democrats are leveraging the shutdown to push unrelated policy goals, as echoed in statements from the White House, which has launched a “shutdown clock” to track the disruption and attribute it to Democratic intransigence.

One Democratic voice capturing this resolve comes from Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., who declared, “We got to make sure Americans have the healthcare that they need, and if that means we’ve got to shut the government down, so be it.”

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The U.S. Government Doesn’t Want You To Read This Report on Israel’s Business Deals

The U.S. government doesn’t want you to read what Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has to say. In July 2025, the State Department announced that it was going to freeze her assets for her “lawfare that targets U.S. and Israeli persons.”

Albanese, the State Department press release noted, had “directly engaged with the International Criminal Court (ICC)” at The Hague “in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries.” And she had “recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations.”

A few weeks earlier, Albanese had submitted her report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.” It accuses several global companies of profiting “from the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide,” including Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir, Caterpillar, and even Booking.com. (The report also mentions that companies have been asked for comment, which appears to be the “threatening letters” referred to by the State Department.)

Whether or not one accepts Albanese’s characterization of Israel’s actions, the report itself is an interesting read on the economics of war. The report details how some firms profit directly from providing the state with the tools to inflict violence while others take advantage of the state’s monopoly on violence to grab a monopoly on resources. Albanese calls for international sanctions, legal action, and consumer boycotts aimed at changing these companies’ behavior.

The U.S. government’s attempts to stop the report from being published in the 
first place make it especially worth reading.
Politicians have long wanted to erode Americans’ right to vote with their wallets, and they’ve used boycotts of Israel as a test case to introduce wide-ranging anti-boycott laws. By accusing the United Nations of “lawfare” for simply printing a report, the government is attacking the right of consumers and investors to hear information that lets them make politically conscious decisions.

The Palestinian rights movement has made boycotts a central pillar of its activism, but the actual choice of targets has often been sloppy and incoherent. Activists have gone after Coca-Cola and Pepsi as vague symbols of America and Starbucks over a union dispute that tangentially involved Palestinian symbolism. The infamous protests at Columbia University focused on cutting
indirect ties to weapons companies.

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Economic Freedom Begins Recovery From COVID-Era Government Meddling

The good news is that the first 20 years of the millennium saw overall increases in economic freedom around the world—with continuous improvement through the second decade. The bad news is that not just the United States but most of the world lost ground during the massive government interventions of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s unfortunate for individual liberty, but also for prosperity since the economic freedom of a country strongly correlates with higher incomes and lower poverty. The world appears to be recovering freedom and wealth, but it lost years of progress to government meddling.

The latest edition of the Economic Freedom of the World report, published by Canada’s Fraser Institute, the Cato Institute, “and more than 70 think tanks around the world” is out, and it finds the world digging itself out of a hole that started in 2020.

“Overall, the index shows that economic freedom has increased since 2000, but fell precipitously following the coronavirus pandemic, erasing nearly a decade of progress,” the authors note. “We take no position on the efficacy of the various public-health policies designed to deal with the coronavirus pandemic; they very well may have saved millions of lives, or they may have been completely ineffectual….Our concern is economic freedom, and on that margin, there is no question that government policies responding to the coronavirus pandemic have reduced economic freedom.”

While global economic freedom has started to improve again as the pandemic and its interventions fade into memory, the average across nations is back to where it was in 2012. Weighted for population, which accounts for large countries with statist governments including China, the world’s economic freedom is just a hair better than it was in 2013 and has yet to start recovery from the COVID-era dip.

The index shows North America experiencing the largest decline over the measured period, with Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and North Africa following. “The latter region’s decline is especially tragic given its low starting point,” comment the authors.

“In 2023—the latest year for which data are available—the 10 highest scoring nations were Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United States, Ireland, Australia and Taiwan (tied for 7th), Denmark, and the Netherlands.”

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‘Big losses’: Study confirms Newsom’s $20-an-hour minimum wage decimated industry

Gavin Newsom, California’s far-left Democrat governor, is known to have presidential aspirations.

If he chooses that path, one of issues on which he will face a grilling will be economics.

And a new study has revealed it won’t look good.

It’s because since he imposed a $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast food workers in his state, California has lost close to 20,000 such jobs.

“That’s nearly 25% of the country’s fast-food job losses during that same period, according to an analysis of quarterly data released this month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” charged a report in the Washington Examiner.

“These grim statistics should be a wake-up call for Newsom and other policymakers pushing for drastic wage hikes that will cause unintended consequences,” said Rebekah Paxton, if the Employment Policies Institute.

The Examiner report noted Newsom “was all smiles two years ago when he signed the FAST Recovery Act, creating a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers in his state. He called the legislation a win-win-win that would benefit restaurant owners, their employees, and customers alike.”

But it’s actually left behind “big losses.”

Besides job losses, there have been staff cuts, huge menu price increases and a turn to automation, the report said.

“California made national headlines when two large Pizza Hut franchises laid off more than 1,200 in-house delivery drivers to cut costs, while others, such as Mod Pizza and Foster’s Freeze, decided to close up shop entirely,” the report noted.

Paxton said, “Newsom’s $20 wage has turned out to be nothing more than a boost to his own ego at the expense of fast food workers. His consistent claim that the law is a ‘win’ is out of touch with reality, and lawmakers looking to mirror his job-crushing policies should think twice.”

Further, the analysis found even workers who kept working lost.

“The law has cost nontipped restaurant workers 250 hours of work annually, according to the EPI analysis, which represents $4,000 in lost income under the state’s previous minimum wage for fast-food workers.”

And, according to the American Cornerstone Institute, it’s hit small businesses hardest.

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European Neo-Feudalism: How Exit Taxes Chain Citizens To A Failing System

More and more people are turning their backs on the European Union. With them, the states are also losing economic substance. Exit taxes are being used in an attempt to counter this.

The states of the European Union are experiencing a veritable exodus. About 1.4 million EU citizens left their home countries in 2023, among them 265,000 Germans. Among the favored destinations are, alongside Switzerland and the United States, booming regions such as Qatar or Dubai.

Good Reasons

The list of destination countries carries political dynamite, because it says much about the background of this flight movement. A growing number of high performers are trying to escape what is in many places almost predatory levels of taxation. In addition, academics, researchers, freelancers such as the so-called “digital nomads,” and entrepreneurs simply find better economic prospects elsewhere than in economically sedated Europe.

EU citizens are not infrequently being drained by a tax burden of 45 percent. We know this from Germany: it is not even necessary to count among the absolute top earners in order to have to surrender nearly half of one’s income to the tax authorities. Basically, it is a scandal—one about which there is no longer any open discussion.

In Dubai, for example, there is no income tax at all. In the United States, the state burdens its citizens with around 27 percent. Anyone who can calculate, who is well educated and mobile, draws the consequences. Alongside the tax burden, social crises increasingly come into play: uncontrolled migration, the decay of major cities, and the visibly hostile climate of ever-expanding bureaucracies. For many ambitious people, life in the EU’s Europe is simply too expensive, and the essence of bureaucracy too overbearing.

Expensive Emigration

Every emigrant leaves behind an economic gap in his homeland. When a German with a high income leaves the country, the state does not only lose a taxpayer—it loses his capital and know-how. Over the lifetime of an academic, around €1.5 million in taxes and social contributions escape the treasury. In addition, there is the enormous loss of capital. Estimates assume that the median wealth of Germans per person is €106,000. With the emigration of 265,000 Germans and the return of 191,000 persons—where for simplicity we assume the same level of wealth—about €7.8 billion in capital flows abroad.

The economist Bernd Raffelhüschen calculates the annual fiscal loss through emigration by discounting the difference between future tax and social contribution payments and state transfers of an average academic to its present value. He arrives at a loss of about €30,000 for each emigrated academic.

The flight of high performers works like economic erosion in real time. Highly qualified people leave the country. People who, with higher probability, would have moved venture capital and founded companies are tearing open a fiscal gap. About 56 percent of income tax revenue is provided by the top ten percent of taxpayers—the political class would be well advised to roll out the red carpet for these people instead of harnessing them to the cart of their ambitious social projects.

Feudalism as the Answer

The answer of EU Europe to the flight of the economically ambitious and wealthy is neo-feudal in character. Through punitive taxes, the costs of fleeing the tax collector and the increasingly invasive state are to be raised so high that the impulse to emigrate is suffocated. Somewhat exaggeratedly formulated, this policy recalls the old feudal European conditions which once led to the mass migration of Europeans to North America.

Alongside France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany has also deployed an exit tax.

Anyone who, as an entrepreneur, holds at least 1 percent of a corporation (this includes stock capital) and turns his back on Germany triggers exit taxation—even if no sales proceeds have been realized. In this case, the state assumes a fictitious sale of the shares and taxes the theoretical capital gain. What is decisive is the difference between the original purchase price and the current market value. Sixty percent of this gain is added to taxable income and taxed at up to 45 percent, depending on the income tax rate. In addition comes the solidarity surcharge and a possible church tax levy.

This regulation applies if the person concerned was subject to unlimited taxation in Germany for at least seven of the past twelve years—and it applies equally in the case of emigration to third countries or relocation within the EU. Since 2022, moves within the EU are no longer automatically privileged for tax purposes: whoever wants to leave must pay—unless he applies for a deferral over seven years and provides collateral. The frequently mentioned €150,000 threshold is not a tax-free allowance, but only a guideline for assessment.

In sum, this amounts to state access to future gains, binding entrepreneurs to their homeland and making departure more difficult through a fiscal hurdle.

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Trump’s Tariffs Have Already Hurt the Economy—and the Pain Is Only Beginning

The U.S. economy is already feeling the effects of Trump’s tariffs, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) projects that things could get worse.

The OECD’s biannual interim economic outlook, published on Tuesday, forecasts U.S. growth will fall by a full percentage point from its 2024 rate. While this might not sound like much, this will translate to Americans missing out on trillions of dollars of goods and services by 2035 if this decrease in growth persists.

From 2010 to 2019, American gross domestic product (GDP) grew by an average of 2.4 percent per year. In 2024, it grew by 2.8 percent. Now, the OECD projects that the economy will grow by only 1.8 percent in 2025 and 1.5 percent in 2026, “owing to higher tariff rates [and] moderating net immigration,” among other factors. Assuming that yearly GDP growth neither rebounds nor falls further but persists at 1.8 percent, the U.S. economy will be $2.2 trillion smaller in 2035 than it would be had President Donald Trump not adopted his protectionist policies and growth remained at 2.4 percent.

Even though the OECD’s growth projections show the long-run macroeconomic damage of Trump’s tariffs, the American economy has remained relatively strong since he took office. The stock market is at an all-time high while inflation has been about the same as that experienced during the last year of the Biden administration: The average monthly inflation from January 2024 to August 2024, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), was 0.2 percent. From January 2025 to August 2025, monthly CPI growth was not much higher: 0.225 percent. Meanwhile, the average monthly increase in the producer price index (PPI), which measures changes in expenses borne by American businesses, was 36 percent lower compared to the same time last year.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) explains that “imports are excluded from PPI.” The experimental BLS index, which incorporates imports, tells a story similar to regular PPI: this index experienced 38 percent lower inflation from January 2025 to July 2025 than it did during the same period a year ago.

Relatively stable consumer price inflation and lower producer price inflation—excluding and including imports—under Trump are surprising. After all, the president has more than tripled the average effective tariff rate to 11.6 percent on approximately $2.2 trillion worth of imports, according to the Tax Foundation. Therefore, all things being equal, CPI and PPI should be elevated. So, why aren’t they? The answer lies in the delayed implementation of Trump’s tariffs: Although “Liberation Day” was April 2, the “reciprocal tariffs” announced then were postponed for months, finally taking effect on August 7, meaning “the full effects of tariff increases have yet to be felt,” as the OECD explains.

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Milei Raises Government Spending While Pledging Zero Deficit

Argentine President Javier Milei has built his presidency around a single rule: zero deficit. Yet even as he vows to keep the budget balanced, his new 2026 plan raises pensions, health, and education spending. The shift comes just a month before midterm elections, testing whether his austerity brand can survive political reality. 

Since taking office in December 2023, Milei slashed billions in spending, froze public works, and cut federal funding to provinces, among other austerity measures. University and health budgets were hit especially hard, leading to layoffs and reduced services. Retirees saw their benefits shrink as inflation eroded payments, while tighter rules limited access to pensions. As a result, Argentina reached its first primary surplus in more than a decade and its first full-year surplus in 123 years. But the cost was steep: Consumption plunged and poverty spiked above 50 percent before easing in recent months.

The political backlash hit hardest in the province of Buenos Aires—home to nearly 40 percent of voters—where Milei’s coalition suffered a defeat earlier this month. In response, Milei rolled out a 2026 budget that expands spending in areas he once vowed to shrink.

The plan increases pensions and disability payments by 5 percent, boosts health spending by 17 percent, and lifts education spending by 8 percent—all above projected inflation. As Martín Rodríguez Yebra of La Nación put it, the package amounts to “a white flag in the three battles that eroded his popularity this election year.”

Milei insists fiscal balance remains “set in stone.” The numbers partly back him up: total revenues for FY 2026 are projected at 15.6 percent of gross domestic product, up 0.2 percentage points from 2025. On paper, the budget still balances.

The biggest challenge is political. Without a congressional majority, Milei has relied on vetoes to block deficit-boosting bills. By conceding targeted increases, he hopes to blunt those challenges while courting centrists who dislike Peronist populism but remain wary of his radical cures. The October 26 legislative elections will decide whether he grows his foothold in Congress or stays boxed in.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) earlier this year, Milei handed Elon Musk a chainsaw—a symbol of his vow to slash the state. Now, with midterms looming, he is testing whether that brand of austerity can withstand political reality. Voters will decide whether the chainsaw keeps buzzing or runs out of fuel.

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Trump Is Embracing ‘Daddy State’ Economics

The question of whether President Donald Trump has turned the United States toward a new “state capitalism”—one in which the government is not just economic referee but active player—has been answered. His second term brings policies that go well beyond traditional Republican pro-market orthodoxies, such as tax cuts and deregulation, and into direct involvement with production and capital. Yet this doctrine is less a coherent grand strategy than a set of ad hoc deals, sometimes pro-market and sometimes interventionist.

Some Trump policies—tax cuts, deregulating, talk of budget-deficit reductions—retain a traditional Republican tone. On the other hand, this administration’s protectionism and tariffs would have been inconceivable a decade ago. Republicans would also traditionally label the government’s acquisition of a 10 percent stake in Intel as socialism if proposed by anyone other than Trump. And other policies have the feel of mafia tactics made possible by the exercise of leverage, like letting Nvidia and AMD sell their chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent cut back to the U.S. government.

Trump also departs markedly from the past GOP playbook in his lack of recognition that the market allocates resources much better than politicians and bureaucrats do. He treats the market as a stage for negotiation to reorganize the world’s economies. Old-guard Republicans were globalists, whereas Trump built his appeal on “America First” nationalism and protectionism.

Earlier Republicans valued predictable rules, but as Cambridge legal scholar Antara Haldar noted in a Project Syndicate symposium this month assessing the direction of “Trumponomics,” the president “is willing to break any rule, norm, or promise…in the name of striking ad hoc corporate-style ‘deals.'” Where conservative-minded leaders of the past obscured the state’s role, Trump “flaunts it.”

Yet Haldar correctly argues that Trump’s approach differs from other forms of heavy-handed state control. It is neither the Chinese model nor that of the developmental state. It is “erratic, transactional, and short-sighted” and a rejection of the “quietly overbearing ‘Nanny State’…in favor of a commanding, patriarchal ‘Daddy State.'”

Princeton University historian Harold James, another participant in the symposium, sees Trump as a break from the past due to his revival of state-directed “industrial policy.” This started under former President Joe Biden’s administration, but there is no doubt that Trump’s pursuit of a manufacturing revival and reshoring of global supply chains, along with his tariffs and equity stakes in private companies and his overall aim to rebuild U.S. strategic capacity, fall well into that category.

Unfortunately, as James argues, Trump’s brand of industrial policy encourages “hyper-activist corporate lobbying, with large and well-connected enterprises getting the best ‘deals.'” In my opinion, all industrial policies end up this way, not just Trump’s.

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