Economy
The wall of death for western economies
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
This is an easy fix – you just have to demand it
When I drove 20,000 miles through rural America a few years back, I was struck by the dilapidated nature of, well, just about everything. The towns were rundown, there were thousands of abandoned farms and ranches and family houses.Ā Sidewalks broken, every other shop was abandoned. Fields ran untended, forests filled with brush and fire ladders, hangers-on in trailers with a junkyard dog and rifle racks on trucks. Hunting was a necessity, not a sport.
In sharp contrast I grew up in a country village of 500 surrounded by tidy productive prosperous farms, and we were a going concern with stone and brick buildings, and beautifulĀ craftedĀ family houses, lawns and weirs, a village pond with ducks, mature trees.Ā Some estates, but not vulgar monstrosities like today. Everyone adult chipped in. It was vivid, active, close-connected, multi-generational and I never wanted to leave.
What the hell happened?
I didnāt fully understand until a hydrologist in Denver, retired from a career at the Department of Interior, told me at lunch in an Olive Garden, that in the mid-70ās, the blanket instructions coming down from DC switched from enabling business and development to preventing it. He, in his retirement, had a small ranch and on his wells, four meters from four different federal and state bureaucracies, indicating just how closely he was being surveilled. Over the years, regulations had come down so thick and punitive, near everyone operated in a catch-22 situation. You might hurdle one set of regs, only to discover that your success meant another set of regs cancelled you. It was so irrational it was fiendish, I thought to myself. Now of course, I see it as actually fiendish, the work of evil. The government was deliberately ruining peoplesā lives, drawing them down, impoverishing them, with malice.
The only prosperity to be seen was in the rather splendid buildings of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the palatial āfarmhousesā owned by what I came to recognize as government farmers, the ones who had lobbied hard and got all the subsidies. Oh yes, and ethanol plants, one of the first green scams. They ate money.
Last week I was in the provincial capital near me, picking up something in Oak Bay Village, ultra-posh in a villagy Englishy way, half-timbered buildings, human-scaled, friendly. And found it to be in the same state, everything covered in a wash of grey, empty shops, abandoned stores, people shriveled and tired. I used to take my mother shopping there, and since she died, hadnāt had the heart to go back. Therefore I was disturbed, even shocked at the change. If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dyingā¦.Iām sorry, Leading Indicator.
If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dyingā¦.Iām sorry, Leading Indicator.
In fact, in Canada, even the food banks are running out of food. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries because people canāt afford to bury their dead. Chronically injured soldiers are offered Medically Assisted Dying in lieu of treatment. MAID has saved the āfreeā health system $90 million in end-of-life care, since it began. So we have to expect more of that.
A recent report showed the MAID drugs mean you drown to death, but are paralyzed so canāt communicate your distress. That means you can drown for 45 minutes before you actually dieĀ ā autopsies have proved it. That is how careless our health bureaucracy is. I cannot watch another single mother weeping on TikTok because she cannot feed her children and is always sick. Another once athletic mountain climber sit in a wheelchair detailing her story of neurological pain so intense after vaccine, her husband had to sit with her so she wouldnāt kill herself. Every bureaucracy is killing us.
The U.S. still has the healthiest economy in the world. The thirteen other less rich countries are in per capita recession, which means GDP per person is shrinking: Canada, France, Germany, UK, Australia. Japan just registered a -2% growth rate, but it is already a zombie economy with families living paycheck to paycheck. Like addicts.
It may be that all I have is a hammer but, to me, this is due to impossible green mandates, the choking of energy supplies, the insane expense of green energy infrastructure which doesnāt produce and doesnāt āsave moneyā and above all regulation that means that every job in a small cap public company labors under $50,000 of government ESG mandates. For every $1 you pay your average employee, you pay the government $1.50. Thatās before taxes. Not that you have any income to tax. Government is literally eating us alive.
The U.S., according to Bloomberg, is facing a Wall of Death. Or Debt. Bloomberg says 42% of small public companies are losing money; not only that they face a $832 billion wall of debt, $600 billion of which comes due at much much higher interest rates in the next two years.
Letās be really clear about where that debt came from. It came from people like our Fed Chair who asset stripped all these companies, loaded them with debt, mis-stated their value and sold them on. This is how Jerome Powell made his $50,000,000. He ruined a widget manufacturer. That debt is his dirty-but-not illegal play; his fortune, his I got mine and now Iām in āpublic serviceā.Ā Suffer you peons, suffer more. And the dirty profoundly unethical play of all his associates. When Warren Buffet says he has $180 billion in cash because the market is over-valued, that is down to him and his pals loading up every small and medium manufacturer in the U.S. with debt, selling them on, whereupon another pirate buys the company, mis-states its value, borrows a bunch of money against it,Ā raises the price, and sells it on. ALL small cap street profits in the fifteen years come from that criminal activity by our financial elites. Of course the market is over-valued. They over-valued it to steal from it.
The big companies only carry 50% of the debt of small caps. For small caps, the absolute heroes in this story, in the first quarter of 2024, their sales rose .3%, but inflation for that quarter was 1.1%. Bank of America says that small cap earnings will drop by one-third in the next year. Thanks to the miracle of Bidenomics, sales are dead other than the doom spending of hopeless millennials.
In contrast, big companies have gained 14% and big tech stocks earn 90% of all the gains. Where do you think the next play might be? Thatās right, tech.
Median priced houses are now worth 7.8 times median income, twice the normal level, that ratio even above the housing bubble of 08.Ā Housing prices are slated to rise 20% in the next year. One in five renters are either skipping meals or selling personal belongings to make rent.Ā Rents will rise double digits in the coming year according to the New York Fed. Millennials have given up, reverting to a nihilistic hand-to-mouth existence.
According to economist Peter St. Onge, who aggregated many of the above states,Ā the first twenty rungs of the ladder have been knocked out.
This is due entirely to the gutting of the heartland, the shipping of manufacturing to the CCP slave state, and the subsequent financialization of the economy. Value is now calculated on the future labor of people whose jobs are being killed off.Ā They are financializing something that is dying. They know it, you know it, the government knows it.
The core reason for the invasion at the border is for immigrants they can pay dirt wages to keep the whole thing going for a few more years. Your kids, your future? Forget about it.
Of course the bankers have a solution. You know they do. Itās not a sensible, compassionate, creative and exciting solution whereby your life and mine is going to get much much better. It is a solution that means your kids and grandkids are going to live in a world wrought with poverty-driven crime, and dying cities and towns. But never mind! The market will make out like a bandit.Ā The secret lies in the fact that 90% of all gains are currently being made by the digital aristocracy.
That will continue and this is how. To make up for destroying production,Ā the government and markets will list you, your house, yard, cars, boats etc., as a federal asset. As well as national parks, conservation areas, wildlife areas, all ecological study zones, and so on. Then they will borrow against it. Everything you own, because of our federal debt, will be theirs.
The secret, obviously lies in the fact that currently 90% of all gains being made by the digital aristocracy,
Itās the only way. We are de-developing; correction, we are being forced to de-develop. We are de-industrializing, and our hard assets, our water, land and mineral resources are being sequestered from use. We cannot use anything to build anything. We wonāt even own our houses, our gardens. We will have a senior partner in our financial lives who tells us what we may do and how much oxygen and water and power we may use. We are finished. We are future peasants.
The Play
Earlier this year, AmericanĀ Stewards, a few state governors and a handful of Congress people managed to stop the SEC from installing a rule allowing for theĀ financializationĀ of Americaās national parks. But under the radar, because no media does any work whatsoever on this file, the Biden administration has reworked the proposal. Herewith is what is happening in the U.S.
The 2030 Agenda means that 30% of Americaās lands have to be turned into a nature preserve by 2030. All those withdrawals from use hold incredible natural wealth and beauty never to be used or seen by Americans. TheĀ April 22, 2024, Fact SheetĀ notes some of the significant land and mineral withdrawals made to help reach 30Ć30. That wealth could be used by Americans to build cities and companies and full-on effulgent family and community lives. But it is to be locked away. How much is being locked away? The Biden administration estimates that land held privately, one-third of the U.S. to be worth $32 Trillion. So 2030 lands are worth $32 trillion.
So the idea is to lock away at least $32 trillion worth of resources. While people canāt make their rent. While single mothers weep and beg on socials. While people are electing to die because it is too expensive to live. While an entire generation has no hope and is descending into nihilism.
American StewardsĀ reportedĀ the two significant Earth Day announcements released from the White House
āThe Administration has already protected more than 41 million acres of lands and waters, and President Biden is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any President in history. This includes establishingĀ five new national monumentsĀ andĀ restoring protections for three more; creatingĀ four new national wildlife refugesĀ andĀ expanding five more; protecting theĀ Boundary Waters of Minnesota, the nationās most visited wilderness area; safeguardingĀ Bristol BayĀ in southwest Alaska; and withdrawingĀ Chaco CanyonĀ in New Mexico andĀ Thompson DivideĀ in Colorado from further oil and gas leasing to protect thousands of sacred sites and pristine lands.ā
Next, they unveiled a new website,Ā conservation.govĀ that houses the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas mapping tool. The Atlas was created to track the progress of 30Ć30 including the protected status of the landsĀ as well as quantifying natural processes such as photosynthesis and pollination used to manufacture an arbitrary ecosystem service value.ā
This is where the digital comes in. All those lands have to be surveilled. All those assets, including you and your house and your car, have to be surveilled. The money that will require installing these surveillance tools will be made by the digital titans, because thatās where the money is, now that lands, resources, labor have been destroyed.
As American Stewards reports: in January of 2023, the White House announced the āNational Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental ā Economic Statistics.ā Since then, they have been working to establish a methodology to value the ecosystem services.
There are four accounts: Land, Water, Air Emissions and Economic Activity.
The Pilot Land Account measures the economic activity and total market value for all the land in the United States, 2.3 billion acres. They estimate that at around $100 trillion, which includes the 30% owned by humans.
In essence, the administration is conscripting private citizensā land to secure the national debt, unbeknown to the American people and Congress. And using common land as well. Common land is owned by the people of the country, not the government and not the Nature Conservancy. It is yours. But, they are developing mechanisms to make it theirs. This is the first step.
The Pilot National Air Emissions Account āmeasures greenhouse gas emissions associated with specific industries on a national scale.ā And you. Your CO2 emissions will be tracked and your allowance measured.
Ten years ago I sat in a rancherās house deep in Wyoming and he told me that his land would be used as collateral for the National Debt that China holds. I felt dread in the pit of my stomach because I felt instinctively he was right. Subsequently, I donāt know how many people told me that was impossible, I was wrong, he was wrong, crazy.
No baby, we werenāt wrong. They are monetizing all public and private land to pay or support the national debt. And the way they are doing it, is by shutting down economic activity, across the board. We will be a resource to be played, monetized, surveilled and restricted for the profits of the market, and the destructive machinations of the bureaucracy.
And all the money to be made from it is digital. And that money, those resources they are stealing? They belong to us.
In my next article, I will describe in detail the players in this game, how the National Security State, Mossad, the PayPal Mafia, Drexel Burnam heirs, President Trumpās economic advisers, are working to destroy the hope of South and Central America. It is complex, fiendish and fascinating. This series starting today, points out that the Green takeover, mostly surreptitious, is driving the worldās economy into the dirt. It is based on falsified science, and convoluted financial ideas that fail repeatedly. Fix this, and we will be living in a Golden Age.
Elizabeth NicksonĀ is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Her studies and commentaries at the Frontier Centre can be accessedĀ here.Ā Ā Follow her on SubstackĀ here.Ā Her best-selling book Eco-Fascists can be purchasedĀ here.
Alberta
Federal budget: Itās not easy being green
From Resource Works
Canadaās climate rethink signals shift from green idealism to pragmatic prosperity.
Bill Gates raised some eyebrows last week ā and probably the blood pressure of climate activists ā when he published a memo calling for a āstrategic pivotā on climate change.
In hisĀ memo, the Microsoft founder, whose philanthropy and impact investments have focused heavily on fighting climate change, argues that, while global warming is still a long-term threat to humanity, itās not the only one.
There are other, more urgent challenges, like poverty and disease, that also need attention, he argues, and that the solution to climate change is technology and innovation, not unaffordable and unachievable near-term net zero policies.
āUnfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and itās diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,ā he writes.
Gatesā memo is timely, given that world leaders are currently gathered in Brazil for the COP30 climate summit. Canada may not be the only country reconsidering things like energy policy and near-term net zero targets, if only because they are unrealistic and unaffordable.
It could give some cover for Canadian COP30 delegates, who will be at Brazil summit at a time when Prime Minister Mark Carney is renegotiating his predecessorās platinum climate action plan for a silver one ā a plan that contains fewer carbon taxes and more fossil fuels.
It is telling that Carney is not at COP30 this week, but rather holding a summit with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
The federal budget handed down last week contains kernels of the Carney governmentās new Climate Competitiveness Strategy. It places greater emphasis on industrial strategy, investment, energy and resource development, including critical minerals mining and LNG.
Despite his Davos credentials, Carney is clearly alive to the fact itās a different ballgame now. Canada cannot afford a hyper-focus on net zero and the green economy. Itās going to need some high octane fuel ā oil, natural gas and mining ā to prime Canadaās stuttering economic engine.
The prosperity promised from the green economy has not quite lived up to its billing, as a recent Fraser InstituteĀ study reveals.
Spending and tax incentives totaling $150 billion over a decade by Ottawa, B.C, Ontario, Alberta and Quebec created a meagre 68,000 jobs, the report found.
āItās simply not big enough to make a huge difference to the overall performance of the economy,ā said Jock Finlayson, chief economist for the Independent Contractors and Business Association and co-author of the report.
āIf they want to turn around what I would describe as a moribund Canadian economyā¦theyāre not going to be successful if they focus on these clean, green industries because theyāre just not big enough.ā
There are tentative moves in the federal budget and Climate Competitiveness Strategy to recalibrate Canadaās climate action policies, though the strategy is still very much in draft form.
Carneyās budget acknowledges that the world has changed, thanks to deglobalization and trade strife with the U.S.
āIndustrial policy, once seen as secondary to market forces, is returning to the forefront,ā the budget states.
Last weekās budget signals a shift from regulations towards more investment-based measures.
These measures aim to ācatalyseā $500 billion in investment over five years through āstrengthened industrial carbon pricing, a streamlined regulatory environment and aggressive tax incentives.ā
There is, as-yet, no commitment to improve the investment landscape for Albertaās oil industry with the three reforms that Alberta has called for: scrapping Bill C-69, a looming oil and gas emissions cap and a West Coast oil tanker moratorium, which is needed if Alberta is to get a new oil pipeline to the West Coast.
āI do think, if the Carney government is serious about Canadaās role, potentially, as an global energy superpower, and trying to increase our exports of all types of energy to offshore markets, theyāre going to have to revisit those three policy files,ā Finlayson said.
Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said she thinks the emissions cap at least will be scrapped.
āThe markets donāt lie,ā she said, pointing to a post-budget boost to major Canadian energy stocks. āThe energy index got a boost. The markets liked it. I donāt think the markets think there is going to be an emissions cap.ā
Some key measures in the budget for unlocking investments in energy, mining and decarbonization include:
- incentives to leverage $1 trillion in investment over the next five years in nuclear and wind power, energy storage and grid infrastructure;
- an expansion of critical minerals eligible for a 30% clean technology manufacturing investment tax credit;
- $2 billion over five years to accelerate critical mineral production;
- tax credits for turquoise hydrogen (i.e. hydrogen made from natural gas through methane pyrolysis); and
- an extension of an investment tax credit for carbon capture utilization and storage through to 2035.
As for carbon taxes, the budget promises āstrengthened industrial carbon pricing.ā
This might suggest the governmentās plan is to simply simply shift the burden for carbon pricing from the consumer entirely onto industry. If thatās the case, it could put Canadian resource industries at a disadvantage.
āHow do we keep pushing up the carbon price ā which means the price of energy ā for these industries at a time when the United States has no carbon pricing at all?ā Finlayson wonders.
Overall, Carney does seem to be moving in the right direction in terms of realigning Canadaās energy and climate policies.
āI think this version of a Liberal government is going to be more focused on investment and competitiveness and less focused around the virtue-signaling on climate change, even though Carney personally has a reputation as somebody who cares a lot about climate change,ā Finlayson said.
āItās an awkward dance for them. I think they are trying to set out a different direction relative to the Trudeau years, but theyāre still trying to hold on to the Trudeau climate narrative.ā
Pictured is Mark Carney at COP26 as UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He is not at COP30 this week. UNRIC/Miranda Alexander-Webber
Resource Works News
Business
Carney government needs stronger ‘fiscal anchors’ and greater accountability
From the Fraser Institute
By Tegan Hill and Grady Munro
Following the recent release of the Carney governmentās firstĀ budget, Fitch Ratings (one of the big three global credit rating agencies) issued aĀ warningĀ that the āpersistent fiscal expansionā outlined in the budgetācharacterizedĀ by high levels of spending, borrowing and debt accumulationāwill erode the health of Canadaās finances and could lead to a downgrade in Canadaās credit rating.
Hereās why this matters. Canadaās credit rating impacts the federal governmentās cost of borrowing money. If the governmentās rating gets downgradedāmeaning Canadian federal debt is viewed as an increasingly risky investment due to fiscal mismanagementāit will likely become more expensive for the government to borrow money, which ultimately costs taxpayers.
The cost of borrowing (i.e. the interest paid on government debt) is a significant part of the overall budget. This year, the federal government will spend a projectedĀ $55.6 billionĀ on debt interest, which is more than one in every 10 dollars of federal revenue, and more than the government will spend on health-care transfers to the provinces. By 2029/30, interest costs will rise to a projectedĀ $76.1 billionĀ or more than one in every eight dollars of revenue. Thatās taxpayer money unavailable for programs and services.
Again, if Canadaās credit rating gets downgraded, these costs will grow even larger.
To maintain a good credit rating, the government must prevent the deterioration of its finances. To do this, governments establish and follow āfiscal anchors,ā which are fiscal guardrails meant to guide decisions regarding spending, taxes and borrowing.
EffectiveĀ fiscal anchors ensure governments manage their finances so the debt burden remains sustainable for future generations. Anchors should be easily understood and broadly applied so that government cannot get creative with its accounting to only technically abide by the rule, but still give the government the flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. For example, aĀ commonly-usedĀ rule by many countries (including Canada in the past) is a ceiling/target for debt as a share of the economy.
The Carney governmentāsĀ budgetĀ establishes two new fiscal anchors: balancing the federal operating budget (which includes spending on day-to-day operations such as government employee compensation) by 2028/29, and maintaining a declining deficit-to-GDP ratio over the years to come, which means gradually reducing the size of the deficit relative to the economy. Unfortunately, these anchors willĀ failĀ to keep federal finances from deteriorating.
For instance, the governmentās plan to balance the āoperating budgetā is an example ofĀ creative accountingĀ that wonāt stop the government from borrowing money each year. Simply put, the government plans to split spending into two categories: āoperating spendingā and ācapital investmentā āwhich includes any spending or tax expenditures (e.g. credits and deductions) that relates to the production of an asset (e.g. machinery and equipment)āand will only balance operating spending against revenues. As a result, when the government balances its operating budget in 2028/29, it will still incur a projected deficit ofĀ $57.9 billionĀ when spending on capital is included.
Similarly, the governmentās plan to reduce the size of the annual deficit relative to the economy each year does little to prevent debt accumulation. This yearās deficit is expected to equal 2.5 per cent of the overall economyāwhich,Ā since 2000, is the largest deficit (as a share of the economy) outside of those run during the 2008/09 financial crisis and the pandemic. By measuring its progress off of this inflated baseline, the government will technically abide by its anchor even as it runs relatively large deficits each and every year.
Moreover, according to theĀ budget, total federal debt will grow faster than the economy, rising from a projected 73.9 per cent of GDP in 2025/26 to 79.0 per cent by 2029/30, reaching a staggering $2.9 trillion that year. Simply put, even the governmentās own fiscal plan shows that its fiscal anchors are unable to prevent an unsustainable rise in government debt. And thatās assuming the government can even stick to these anchorsāwhich, according to a newĀ reportĀ by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, is highly unlikely.
Unfortunately, a federal government that canāt stick to its own fiscal anchors is nothing new. The Trudeau government made aĀ habitĀ of abandoning its fiscal anchors whenever the going got tough. Indeed, Fitch RatingsĀ highlightedĀ this poor track record as yet another reason to expect federal finances to continue deteriorating, and why a credit downgrade may be on the horizon. Again, should that happen, Canadian taxpayers will pay the price.
Much is riding on the Carney governmentās ability to restore Canadaās credibility as a responsible fiscal manager. To do this, it must implement stronger fiscal rules than those presented in the budget, and remain accountable to those rules even when itās challenging.
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