The other day, there was a terrorist attack in Woolwich, London. Lee Rigby, a drummer in the army, was attacked and stabbed by two assailants. This has brought up the subjection of the relationship between Islam and terrorism. It has also raised the question of whether or not permitting Muslim immigration leads to terrorism. Today, I’ve decided to weigh in on the whole mess.
Tag: UK
Tomas Young’s Iraq War Letter
So today there’s an open letter going around the internet from a fellow by the name of Tomas Young directed toward George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Young is terminally ill and has chosen to parlay that into an opportunity to vent his anger at Bush and Cheney over the feckless war they waged in Iraq. Having myself been opposed to the Iraq War as early as 2002 (and yes, I was quite young to be in opposition), I agree with some of what Young has to say, but I think he makes a common mistake in conflating two contradictory responses to the war.
How Spending Cuts Make Debt Problems Worse
The IMF has a new paper out that confirms what I have long suspected–when a state with a depressed economy reduces spending, the spending cuts lead to sufficient contraction to result in the cancellation of savings for the state. How does it work? Let’s explore.
Continue reading “How Spending Cuts Make Debt Problems Worse”
The Obama Austerity Package
Even I failed to anticipate that the end of February would approach and the president would make no serious effort at preventing the March 1 budget sequestration from taking effect. At the end of January, we noticed that, with sequester included, the United States was prepared to see an austerity package 1.9% the size of GDP in 2013, more austerity as a share of the economy than was seen in Britain in 2011 or 2012 (though not both combined). What’s important to note is that, despite Obama’s recent token effort to get congress to repeal or further delay sequestration, which accounts for $78 billion of the $304 billion in spending cuts and tax increases planned for this year, all of this is his fault and his fault alone. Continue reading “The Obama Austerity Package”
British Horse Hystericism
In the course of my trip (which I have been on since the 6th and will continue to be on until the 17th–blog posting, in the meantime, is consequently limited and intermittent), I have found myself watching news on television. This is something I do rarely, in no small part because TV news tends to be both repetitive and devoid of intellectual content. Very nearly every time I have turned on the news, whether it be the BBC or Sky, the story invariably has been about the fact that recently, there was some horse meat found in meat that was purported to be from cattle, not horses. The more I hear about this story, the more irrelevant it seems to me to be. Here’s why.
Benjamin Studebaker 