How government spending levels hurt real wages and the standard of living

Gerard Jackson

Stephen Koukoulas was expressing a fallacious view shared by the vast majority of economists when he wrote  that

if wage levels remains too low for too long. It holds back or even oppresses growth in consumer spending. The household sector needs steady real income growth if it is to maintain a solid growth rate in consumption spending. While borrowing and a run-down in savings can temporarily underpin higher spending, more fundamentally sound and sustainable increases in spending rely heavily on household income growth.

This is the sort of plausible nonsense that leaves one in despair as to whether sound economics will ever gain ground in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter. Continue reading How government spending levels hurt real wages and the standard of living

Where the Institute of Public Affairs went wrong on renewable energy

Gerard Jackson

Alan Moran has been leading the Institute of Public Affairs charge against renewable energy policies. Now far be it from me to criticise Australia’s leading authority on the economics of renewable energy but, as was the case with Lord Cardigan and the Light Brigade, Dr Moran has mistakenly charged down the wrong valley.

His approach boils down to simply chanting that renewables are too costly, which is just another way of saying that they are less efficient than centralised power generation. It eludes him that the greens’ response is to argue that renewable energy will become more efficient if given enough time to develop. (I have been unable to find a response from any member of the rightwing to this assertion).

Every single member of our rightwing failed to grasp the simple and fundament fact that renewables just do not work. By this I mean that they cannot do the job that greens dishonestly claim for them. Expecting renewables to provide the vast amounts of energy required to drive an advanced economy is like expecting a Ford pickup to do the work of a 300 ton truck. It is a physical impossibility. The bald fact remains that so-called renewable energy faces insurmountable natural and economic obstacles. Yet this unalterable truth has never rated a mention from Alan Moran or anyone else at the Institute of Public Affairs. Continue reading Where the Institute of Public Affairs went wrong on renewable energy

George Soros’s fascist economics part 2

Gerard Jackson

George Soros’s fascist economic thinking, part 1

 In December 2011 Obama addressed the Democrats in Osawatomie where he amused these cultists by savaging trickle-down economics while heaping fulsome praise on Roosevelt’s policies: the same policies that kept the American economy in depression until WWII forced Roosevelt to change course. (Compare Australia’s record during the Great Depression with that of Roovelt’s).

Obama — the man who was praised by a corrupt media and sycophantic leftists masquerading as journalists as an outstanding intellect — didn’t know there is no such thing as trickle-down economics. The so-called trickle-down theory of prosperity is a canard that Samuel Rosenman, a Roosevelt speechwriter, concocted to malign Republicans and free markets.

The ignorance of history and economics that Obama displayed in his Osawatomie speech is truly staggering and exposed him as a thorough-going historical ignoramus with a fifth rate intellect who is totally lacking in intellectual curiosity. But this travesty of history that Obama mindlessly parrots is exactly what George Soros believes. It is this and nothing else that explains why he stands four-square behind the ignorant reactionary that occupies the White House. Continue reading George Soros’s fascist economics part 2

George Soros’s fascist economic thinking, part 1

Gerard Jackson

Soros once used the op-ed pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian to push the same fascistic anti-market line that Democrats are now regurgitating with gusto and which America’s phony media is falsely passing off as informed economic analysis. According to this billionaire currency speculator and profound political thinker it is not Islamic fanatics that threaten democracy but free markets. Continue reading George Soros’s fascist economic thinking, part 1