Utopia, you are standing in it!

Biden’s spending bill will lavish over half a $1 trillion on projects geared to combating human-caused climate change. In reality, environmentalist groups will be given most of the money to continue their political activities. Two years ago, climate scientist Patrick Michaels was on the Laura Ingraham Show on Fox News to discuss what the program is really all about and doom and gloom predictions.

I regularly cite data about Europe’s sub-par economic outcomes in hopes of driving home the point that the United States should not copy that continent’s approach of onerous fiscal burdens.

Which is now a very relevant topic with Biden pushing for a big expansion of the welfare state.

This is not a good idea. Americans are richer than their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. Even more remarkably, lower-income people in the United States often have living standardsequal to – or even greater than – middle-income Europeans.

Another way of making this point is to compare economic outcomes in American states compared to European countries.

I first did that back in 2015, citing data to show that all be the very-richest European nations would be considered poor if they were part of the United States.

I want to augment that comparison today. I’m motivated by a

A few weeks ago I wrote a fairly discursive post on the losses the Reserve Bank had run up on its Large Scale Asset Purchase programme. I know some readers found the basic point a little hard to grasp (no doubt a reflection on my storytelling), so today I’m going to do a very stylised representation of what has gone on.

But first, as I noted in that post, as market interest rates rise losses mount. The Bank has now released its end-October balance sheet and this is the line item representing their claim on the Crown (the Minister of Finance indemnified the Bank for losses incurred).

So the losses have now reached $5.7 billion (roughly 1.6% of annual GDP). Market interest rates fluctuate each day, but as of yesterday’s rate current losses are likely to be very similar to those as at 31 October. Perhaps Covid has inured us…

In the general election of 1747 Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales again campaigned actively for the opposition but Pelham’s party won easily. Like his father before him, the Prince entertained opposition figures at his house in Leicester Square. When Prince Frederick Louis died unexpectedly in 1751, his eldest son, Prince George, became heir apparent.

The king commiserated with the Dowager Princess of Wales (Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha) and wept with her. As her son would not reach the age of majority until 1756, a new British Regency Act was passed to make her regent, assisted by a council led by Frederick Louis’ brother, Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, in case of George II’s death.

The king also made a new will, which provided for Cumberland to be sole regent in Hanover. After the death of his daughter Louisa at the end of the year, George lamented, “This has been a…

Europe’s great wind drought has focused attention on the unassailable fact that wind power is an utterly meaningless power source.

The demand for electricity is, always and everywhere, a ‘here and now’ kind of thing. Households and businesses couldn’t care less if there’s a roaring gale and plenty of wind power at 2 in the morning. But the absence of electricity at the point when power consumers (of all shapes and sizes) need it, is always noticed rather keenly – the experience of freezing or boiling in the dark during mass blackouts tends to collect in the subconscious.

The response to Europe’s wind power debacle has been a series of backflips that would do a Russian gymnast proud.

Despite lots of bluff and bluster from Boris Johnson about his country’s all wind ‘powered’ future, Johnson is now openly committed to building nuclear power plants, including a fleet of new small…