Category: Economics

A Second Industrial Revolution?

Economics, Good News, Manufacturing

Perhaps, just possibly, we may be starting to turn a corner.  From this:

Where did all that creativity come from? Largely from physical suburbs, neighborhoods of the middle and working classes, and nuclear families – all seen as contemptible by globalist/Marxists – where the father had a good job. Who have almost all been reduced to desperation. Why? Because globalism effectively shipped tens of millions of jobs overseas, and the environmental movement, backed by globalists, cleared tens of millions rural dwellers into the mega-cities, where they languish in matchbox apartments beside super highways. A manufacturing job has a multiplier of five and a resource job a multiplier of 7. Where, I ask you, do people think money comes from? Production? The Fed? To globalists the Central Banks print money to pay their mounting liabilities, thank you very much.

To this:

Now both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, who put all their eggs into globalism, are sneering, but this is what is happening in the real world, the physical world, where actual people make actual things.

And what follows is a long list of developments that should make one feel a little more hopeful, in that they are reversing the effects of “off-shoring” our manufacturing capacity and the shuttering of energy development.  Then:

None of these depend on green energy. Why? Because green energy is a boutique operation for rich globalist virtue signalers meant to steal subsidy from the taxpayer.

The investments from the private sector into the physical economy are equally huge, as the big houses diversify away from globalism and carbon capture and alternative energy as profit. Trillions are moving into the marketplace.

Oh, and Trump just CRUSHED the trade deficit, slashing it from $136B to $29.4B, the lowest in 20 years. America has been subsidizing the rest of the world long enough. Time all those broken countries stood on their own two feet.

Time to grow.

I think we can do it.  The rest of the world?  I’m not so sure.

Aaaargh

Economics, Farming, Food & Drink

So much for my BBQ:

America’s ranchers are facing their smallest cattle herd in 75 years, a shortage now rippling from pastures to some of the nation’s largest meatpackers.

USDA data shows the U.S. entered 2026 with about 86.2 million cattle and calves, the smallest herd since the early 1950s. That’s down from roughly 94.7 million cattle and calves in 2019, a decline of more than 8 million animals.

And therefore:

Tyson Foods announced last week that it will close beef facilities in Illinois and Utah and pursue the sale of another in Washington as it reshapes its beef business amid what the company called one of the most historic cattle shortages the country has ever experienced. Tyson said recent USDA data suggest supply constraints are likely to persist.

And the reason:

“The biggest thing has been drought,” Eric Belasco, head of the agricultural economics department at Montana State University, previously told Fox News Digital.

He said years of dry weather have depleted grasslands across the West and Plains, leaving ranchers without enough feed or water to sustain their herds. Many have been forced to sell cattle early, including cows needed to produce the next generation of calves, making the road to recovery even longer.

The effects are reaching beyond ranches and into grocery stores, where consumers are paying more for beef.

Tell me about it.  Beef has long been a staple chez Du Toit, but I think our current consumption of steak, burgers and such has been more than halved over the past year or two.  As for going out for a steak dinner?  Not since B.C. (before Covid).

I can’t even afford to make my own biltong anymore.  No wonder New Wife has been cranky recently.

Worse is that I don’t much care for chicken, unless in toasties… but I guess that will have to change.

As much as I’m reluctant to let Gummint be involved in anything, I do think that cattle farmers could do with some help from that quarter.  (I don’t know where because I’m not a cattle farmer.  But no, it can’t come from tax relief because that just benefits Big Beef Inc., who controls most of our beef production.)

I have to tell y’all, though:  I’m getting kinda cranky myself every time I go into the store and see those beef prices.  Beef shouldn’t be a luxury foodstuff;  but it’s become one, and I don’t like it.

Thank you, Mother Nature, you dried-out old bitch.

Change Agent

Economics, Trumpism

…or, “Why are we continuing to act like the Cold War is still a thing?”

Four score years ago, the United States brought forth a new economic system, dedicated to the proposition that we would rebuild the world from the wreckage of the Second World War and stand athwart communism. For 40 years, that system worked. Germany and Japan, economically devastated, got rebuilt. In return, the United States accepted persistent trade deficits and the gradual hollowing out of our manufacturing base. The logic was coherent: we needed these allies secure and prosperous.

Then the logic expired in 1989, but we never stopped. For the past 30 years, we’ve been running the same policy for no reason at all. That’s the mistake.

See how Trump is undoing the years of economic mismanagement by the U.S. government.

If he (and his successors) can pull this off, it will be one of the most consequential (and beneficial) acts ever to grace this nation.

Food For Thought

Bureaucracy, Economics, Gummint, Marxists

Here are a few A.I. videos that I think are worthy of consideration, so if you care for the thesis — and you might, because it’s all very much focused on the economic scenario in various countries and not so much on politics (although the two are pretty much entangled, as you will see).

The first has to do with Canada;  the second with France; the third with the EU and the fourth with the U.K.

Finally, if you want to see yet another (but shorter and more superficial) article which (because it’s CNN) looks at the actions rather than the motivations behind the actions, there’s New Zealand.  And if you want to really chuckle, note that the fleeing New Zealanders are mostly heading for Australia — as the video calls it, “the new Argentina” (and to be clear, they’re referring to Peronist Argentina, not the Argentina of Milei).

Now the chilling bit.  If you distill all the events in the above, it will become clear that even with MAGA, with DOGE, and with all the Trumpism reorgs, the U.S. is heading down the same path.  The manifestations thereof are well known:  the citizens of ur-European soviets (New York, California and Illinois, etc.) fleeing their failed states for states that aren’t being run into the ground by their respective state governments.

And the spoiler:  all the above — all of it — can be ascribed to Marxism and the mindset it creates.

By The Numbers

Economics, Marxists

We’ve all marveled at the stupidity of Manhattan voters, in voting into power some Marxist asshole who is promising all sorts of free stuff in exchange for higher taxes and malevolent gouging of successful businesses and the individuals who made them or run them.

This might work if Manhattan was truly an island, i.e. well away from any mainland, where the population is in essence imprisoned on the island and can’t move out of the Marxist hellhole.  This, by the way, is how Marxist governments have traditionally been able to bend their citizens over the desk:  by forbidding them to leave or physically restricting their ability to do so.

Fortunately (for the would-be recipients of the looming Marxist economic rape in the Five Boroughs), they have a chance of saving themselves from catastrophe by simply leaving for sunnier climes (in every sense of the word), taking themselves, their businesses and their tax payments with them.

And the scale of said catastrophe?  Here’s the pitiless financial analysis:

Put simply, by any normal accounting, New York State is using federal funds to pay $21 billion to NYC. By the same standard, New York City too is presently bankrupt, in the old-fashioned sense that it cannot pay for its extravagant spending, collecting $86.8 billion in total revenue versus outlays of $119.8 billion. The $31 billion needed annually by New York to survive comes, directly or indirectly, from the federal government. That will not last.

But all this is mere prelude to the Mamdani tax-the-rich onslaught about to hit New York City. The numbers are frightening.

At the individual level, in a city of 8.5 million people and 4 million taxpayers, the top 1%, or some 40,000 individuals, account for an estimated 45% of the city’s total $17.4-billion personal income tax receipts. While the New York Post talks of 1 million potentially exiting New York, it is highly likely that at least half of high-income taxpayers will choose escape over life in Mamdani New York. So goes roughly $4 billion, from a mere 20,000 departing for greener pastures. Others are sure to follow. Seventeen point four billion dollars will be the high-water mark for New York City personal income tax revenue.

It gets markedly worse when businesses choose to exit New York, especially financial firms.

The city collects roughly $13 billion in direct taxes on businesses, but the impact of business exit would be far greater, as associated spending ripples through the economy, conservatively tying $30 billion in city tax revenue to business-driven activities. Ten major financial firms alone could reduce NYC tax revenue by $5 billion. The city is at enormous risk, made all the greater by the well understood impact of technology. At a minimum, no financial firm needs to be in New York any longer, especially when the most needed 1,000 firms are specifically targeted by Mamdani for sharply higher taxes.

Put it all together, and New York City revenues are likely to decline, permanently, by at least $10 billion due directly to Mamdani’s actions, adding to $5.5 billion in structural deficits, on top of an already slapdash concoction of sticks and glue that is New York State, made worse by implementation of devastating, and costly, Democratic Socialist Party principles, with President Trump vowing to restrict federal spending to the “bare minimum required by law.”

Read the whole thing for the full gory details.

I read somewhere that actor John Voigt has implored POTUS to somehow overturn the NYC election results, but of course Trump can’t — and shouldn’t.  Why not?

Because at some point the vacuous dreams and economic stupidity of Marxists need to explode, spectacularly, so that the people who did not learn the lessons of 1990s Detroit can have their noses rubbed in the foul dirt of utter financial bankruptcy.

And then they have to shoulder the burden of rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up, just as the Germans had to rebuild the shattered German state after 1945 — only without the lifeline of any kind of federal Marshall Plan, because New York City doesn’t deserve it.  New Yorkers have always had an unhealthy sense of their own importance and urban grandeur, and this time their collapse through stupidity and cupidity will actually be well deserved.

H.L. Mencken once defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”  Well, New Yorkers exercised their democratic rights… and now the fun begins.

Quote Of The Day

Economics, Journalist Scum, QOTD

Whiny little Commie bitch TV interviewer:  “So just bottom line, Mr. Secretary, do you acknowledge that these tariffs are a tax on American consumers?”

SecTreas Scott Bessent:  “No, I don’t.  You’re quoting Goldman Sachs… I made a good career of trading against Goldman Sachs.”