Tag: Data Analysis

The death of Israel – Pearls and Irritations

Conflict between Israel and Palestine banner.

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianised fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.

Source: The death of Israel – Pearls and Irritations

Alan Kohler: Prepare for a March election and then a horror budget in May

Alan Kohler election

The sting is not just in the scorpion’s tail but in its nature.

Since the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, the average tax to gross domestic product ratio during three Labor governments was 20.4 per cent while during the three terms of Coalition government it’s been 22.4 per cent. In other words, Australia’s highest-taxing party is the LNP, quite comfortably.

To be clear: The only reason the Coalition is able to say that it’s keeping the taxation to GDP ratio below 23.9 per cent is because it is running huge deficits.

It is budgeting to finance an average of 4 per cent government spending with bonds rather than tax.

That’s why next year’s budget will have to be brought down after the election rather than before it: They’ll have to get started on the spending and welfare cuts early, and such budgets are always best in the first term, just after an election.

Source: Alan Kohler: Prepare for a March election and then a horror budget in May