Graphic of the Day: The Religion Of Consumerism

Source (Zero Hedge)

More Signs of Canadian Debt Bubble (in Pictures)

Courtesy of the Fraser Institute... 

Read the essay of Ontario's debt burden here.

Read the essay of Quebec's debt dilemma here

I previously pointed to Canada’s ballooning debt bubble here and here.

Graphic of the Day: Fish Politics

Source/hat tip AEI’s Mark Perry

Graphic of the Day: The Miracle Cure?

Via the Zero Hedge/Acting Man Blog

Graphic: The Globalization of Boeing’s Dreamliner

Assembled in the US, much of what makes up the Boeing’s Dreamliner has been sourced overseas

Source Reuters; hat tip Businessinsider

Note: Since the following graphic has been dated in January 2011. There may be changes on them

Graphic: I therefore Intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt burden

How things change when one is on the top... 

(hat tip Zero Hedge)

Graphics: Here Comes Super-Abenomics!

From this week’s cover of the Economist magazine.

The worship of inflationists and the religion of inflationism has reached new heights. Yes we are at the pinnacle of the central banking-inflationism bubble.

As the great Ludwig von Mises once wrote, “The favor of the masses and of the writers and politicians eager for applause goes to inflation.”

Yet all such optimism looks nothing new. The following article from the New York Times in March 1999 showcases an almost similar level of optimism where interventionism has been seen as an elixir to Japan’s economy.

Fourteen years after, yet still the hope for political magic to work.

Graphic of the Day: Fatalities Count from the Iraq War

This is from Reuter’s chart of the Day

According to a study released last week, the U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans. The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number. When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war’s death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000

On the other hand, Agora Publishing founder Bill Bonner at the LFB writes of the cost of Iraq war which have been far more than such mainstream estimates.

Mehdi Hasan, writing in the New Statesman:

“Between 2003-06, according to a peer-reviewed study in The Lancet medical journal, 601,000 more people died in Iraq as a result of violence — that is, bombed, burned, stabbed, shot, and tortured to death — than would have died had the invasion not happened. Proportionately, that is the equivalent of 1.2 million Britons, or 6 million Americans, being killed over the same period.

“…31% of the excess deaths in Iraq can be attributed to coalition forces — about 186,000 people between 2003-06. Second, most studies show that only a minority of Iraqi insurgents were card-carrying members of AQI [al-Qaeda Iraq]. The insurgency kicked off in Fallujah on April 28, 2003, as a nationalist campaign, long before the arrival of foreign jihadists, but only after U.S. troops opened fire on, and killed, 17 unarmed Iraqi protesters.

“Third, there were no jihadists operating in Iraq before our Mesopotamian misadventure; Iraq had no history of suicide bombings. Between 2003-08, however, 1,100 suicide bombers blew themselves up inside the country. The war made Iraq, in the approving words of the U.S. general Ricardo Sanchez, ‘a terrorist magnet… a target of opportunity.’

“‘Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts,’ wrote the Iraqi blogger known by the pseudonym Riverbend on her blog Baghdad Burning in February 2007. ‘It’s worse. It’s over. You lost…You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out…You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power…’

“In September 2011, a Zogby poll found that 42% of Iraqis thought they were ‘worse off’ as a result of the Anglo-American invasion of their country, compared with only 30% of Iraqis who said ‘better off.’ An earlier poll conducted for the BBC in November 2005 found a slim majority of Iraqis (50.3%) saying the Iraq war was ‘somewhat’ or ‘absolutely’ wrong.”

In terms of the financial cost, we estimated that the war in Iraq would cost $1 trillion when it was launched. Dear readers wrote to say we were crazy. It was a cakewalk, they said. They said it could be accomplished for pennies.

But even $1 trillion was far too low. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz may be an idiot, but he can add. And he puts the cost at over $5 trillion, perhaps $6 trillion, when the final bill for missing limbs and lifelong psychological care is tallied.

Graphic: How the US Government Identifies Terrorists

Sourced from Politifake.org (hat tip Lew Rockwell Blog)

Graphic of the Day: A Weapon Guide for the Uninformed

This is from Michael Ramirez of the Investor’s Business Daily (hat tip Lew Rockwell Blog)

By applying selective attention based on the media’s account (which serves as stimulus), supposedly intelligent people fall for the sensational.

Graphic: Anatomy of the Socialist Brain of a Liberal Democrat

Source Libertarian Girl at Facebook

Graphic: America’s Demographics: Racial and Ethnic Trends

America’s population will increasingly be dominated by non-whites

That’s according to an estimate by the US government as reported by Reuters

By 2060, non-whites will make up 57% of the U.S. population, more than doubling from 116.2 million in 2012 to 241.3 million, according to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau. A surge in Hispanics and Asians is set to dramatically change the face of the United States over the next 50 years, with no one ethnic group the majority. Today’s graphic looks at this projected demographic change in more detail.

Projecting long term trends by looking at current events is a dicey proposition. There could be many changes that may occur in between (2012-2060) to upset any balance captured by such study.

America’s future will ultimately depend on the ever dynamic interactive loop between social policies and the average American’s response on them.

Nonetheless should projected trends become anywhere close to reality, then this might spell doom for the electoral chances of the Republican party or the GOP, whose constituents are said to be mainly from whites.

As author and editor of the American Conservative Patrick J. Buchanan predicts,

If your racial and ethnic voter base is aging, shrinking and dying, your moral code is being rejected, and the tax-consuming class has been allowed to grow to equal or to dwarf the taxpaying class, the Grand Old Party has a problem. But then so, too, does the country.

Picture of the Day: Thanks to Capitalism, These Gadgets Now Fit in your Pocket

(Hat tip AEI’s Prof Mark Perry)

Capitalism has brought about dematerialization, which has converged the benefits of manifold technologies to fit in a single devise.

Graphic of the Day: Price Ceiling Means Shortages

Laissez Faire Books publisher and executive editor Jeffrey A. Tucker lambasts price anti-price gouging laws

There is no real distinction between responding to economic conditions and so-called gouging. A law against gouging is a law against economic behavior. Merchants need to raise prices — not to reflect higher costs (though costs could rise), but to reflect changing conditions of supply and demand. A higher price would signal consumers to conserve. A higher price would also call forth greater supply — without having to have the government intervene with special shipments. A higher price would also settle the crowds down a bit and stop the insane attempt to stockpile as much as possible at the low price.

Price controls are causing human suffering — yet again. And this time, the toll is very high, even if it will always remain somewhat invisible.

Politicians barely have comprehended that despite four centuries of repeated attempts to subvert the law of economics, price controls have always failed. Yet such blatant failures has never been an obstacle for politicians aspiring to acquire or expand more power and control over society. Pretentious moralism results to economic decay.

Graphic of the Day: EUSSR

British author, journalist and politician Daniel Hannan at the Telegraph writes,

Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.

For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people's courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various  former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.

Wonder why the euro, with its current thrust towards centralization (fiscal union, banking union, bank supervision), seems headed for perdition?

Graphic of the Day: Voting Doesn’t Make You Free

While this graphic is targeted to American audience, amidst the coming US presidential elections,this message is relevant to all.

(source Lew Rockwell Blog)

Graphic of the Day: Unelected Dictators

Below are the four unelected “Lords of the Rings” whom has wielded more power than the elected counterparts.

And speaking of currency, market manipulators and insider trading…

From Zero Hedge/Goldman Sachs

Graphic of the Day: Quantitative Easing

From the Wall Street Journal Blog

Graphic of the Day: Red Tape and Small Business

In the mainstream, hardly has there been any meaningful discussions about how red tape, costs of regulatory compliance and the costs of leviathan bureaucracy contributes to unemployment or how politicization of the economy via the bureaucracy and arbitrary rules (regime uncertainty) takes its toll on the economy, particularly on small business, which have been the major source of the employment in the US (and elsewhere).

The chart from the Joint Economic Committee Republicans exhibits the astounding maze of regulations.

So when the politicians deceivingly assert that the success of entrepreneurs has been due to the government, in truth this relationship has been in reverse: many business failures, stillborn and or unrealized businesses have been products of government interference in various forms.

Cato’s Dan Mitchell (where the chart above has been sourced) gives us some numbers on the onus of the bureaucracy to the US economy:

Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms.

The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion.

For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, one study estimated that100 jobs are destroyed in the economy’s productive sector.

As the great Ludwig von Mises pointed out,

The trend toward bureaucratic rigidity is not inherent in the evolution of business. It is an outcome of government meddling with business. It is a result of the policies designed to eliminate the profit motive from its role in the framework of society’s economic organization.

Elimination of the profit motive means a declining trend in a society’s standard of living.

The Economist has an article about “The parable of the four-engined planes” which nicely demonstrates of the failure of bureaucratic rigidity.

Updated to add:

Another worthwhile example is this article about a 13 year old aspiring entrepreneur whose business got shut down by local regulators. (pointer to Professor Gary North)

Graphic: Made Everywhere, Even the Apparel Industry has been Globalized

“Made in China” has been a politically colored phrase not only in the US (US Olympic Uniform controversy), but also in the Philippines –the other day while on a cab, I heard a similar balderdash coming from a local radio announcer, who in ranting against China over territorial disputes included such false claims.

In reality, even the apparel or clothing industry has been about globalization, particularly the supply chain network. (hat tip Scott Lincicome)

To add, the apparel industry’s value added comes from design and post production facilities (marketing and distribution), an article from the Businessweek/Bloomberg.com points this out,

Garment manufacturing is a low-cost commodity business. Most of the value in the apparel industry comes from design, technology, sales, marketing, and distribution—not manufacturing. The successful players in apparel, such as Ralph Lauren and Nike, figured this out long ago.

Because the economics are bad, most U.S. apparel manufacturing operations folded decades ago. Only 97,000 Americans still have jobs in apparel production, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and most of them are making highly specialized products like DuPont Kevlar uniforms that cannot be made elsewhere.

But just because America doesn’t manufacture apparel anymore doesn’t mean we can’t lead the industry. In fact, the world’s largest apparel companies are almost all U.S.-based, including Nike, VF, PVH, and Ralph Lauren, to name a few. These companies have grown a combined 146 percent during the past 10 years, adding more than $27 billion in revenue. Nike has created more than 15,000 new jobs in the U.S. during this time, Ralph Lauren almost 10,000. And unlike the low-paying production jobs next to sewing machines, these are well-paying jobs in marketing, accounting, design, and management.

These companies are winning globally by out-designing, out-innovating, and out-marketing the competition. Nike, for example, is unveiling a new TurboSpeed running suit at the London Olympic Games that it claims can reduce 100-meter sprint times by .023 seconds. Nike’s gear will be used by teams from many countries, including Russia, China, and of course, the U.S.

What Nike and Ralph Lauren don’t do is make their own products, in the U.S. or elsewhere—and this has become their competitive advantage.

Both companies source products from hundreds of independent manufacturers in more than 30 countries (less than 3 percent coming from the U.S.). The flexibility allows them to be cost-competitive globally. It also allows their design teams to focus on creating the most exciting new products possible without having to worry whether they can be made on a legacy production line.

Remember Fruit of the Loom? Brown Shoe Co.? Cannon Mills? Levi Strauss? In 1970 these were the largest U.S. apparel and fabric companies. They all owned their own U.S. manufacturing plants. They all struggled to innovate and grow, and they either went bankrupt or were bypassed by more nimble competitors who had no factories. If only they had outsourced …

Not only is outsourcing good for business, but the future of the American economy is dependent upon it.

So let’s stop whining about a few “Made in China” tags and start cheering for all of the great athletic performances made possible by superior U.S. innovation.

So when you hear someone rail about “Made in China” you can be assured that the person regurgitating such absurdities have either been ignorant of the real developments or have been deliberately employing deception as part of political propaganda to invoke nationalist (us against them) sentiment.