Utopia, you are standing in it!

People generally credit National as being a better economic manager but unfortunately don’t always join the dots between that and better social services.

However, David Farrar shows the impact of  Labour’s increased spending for worse outcomes is showing up in Curia’s polls:

. . . A year after the last election, Labour had a huge 36% lead over National as the party which had the right approach to the health system. Only 14% of respondents picked National, and 50% Labour.

In my latest poll in June 2023, Labour were down 16% to 34% and National up 16% to 30%. The 36% gap is now only 4%.

Based purely on spending, you would expect Labour to remain way ahead of National. In the 2017 Budget, Steven Joyce announced $16.7 billion for the public health service. In the 2023 Budget Grant Robertson announced $26.5 billion. That is a massive 60% increase…

You’re probably seeing headlines like this one from The Hill Insurers pull back as US climate catastrophes intensify.   H/T Mark Krebs.  As usual, the Climate Card is a coverup for others who really are to blame for losses.  The linked article starts to look under the carpet, and I will dig deeper in this post.

Firstly, they label weather events as climate castastrophes in order to blame them on everyone else.  

From The Hill:

This month Farmers Insurance announced that it will no longer write new property insurance policies in Florida, citing “catastrophe costs … at historically high levels.” AIG also recently stopped issuing policies along the Sunshine State’s hurricane-vulnerable coastline.

State Farm, meanwhile, said in May, that it would impose a moratorium on new policies in California due to “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.”

Mark Friedlander, director of corporate communications at the Insurance Information Institute, said that…

Earth’s atmosphere [image credit – learnweather.com]
Our headline differs slightly from the article below, which glosses over the actual research findings to some extent. Speculation about possible future unwanted climate scenarios is a favourite hobby of climate alarmists, but this one at least has been largely discarded. As a co-author put it “we were able to show that many climate model projections of very large stratospheric water vapour changes are now inconsistent with observational evidence.”
– – –
New research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) reduces uncertainty in future climate change linked to the stratosphere, with important implications for life on Earth, says Science Daily.

Man-made climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing us today [Talkshop comment – unsupported assertion], but uncertainty in the exact magnitude of global change hampers effective policy responses.

A significant source of uncertainty relates to future changes to…

There’s a reason that windmills were abandoned in the 19^th century: it’s called “the wind”. And it’s why anyone serious about power generation, never takes wind power seriously.

Sailors and kite flyers know everything there is to know about long bursts of calm weather. However, naturally occurring meteorological phenomenon comes as news to the wind industry, which now curses these events as “wind droughts” – as if there was some kind of grand conspiracy afoot.

This time the weather is doing its dastardly worst across the American and Canadian Prairies, Cosmin Dzsurdzsa report.

Collapse of wind power across prairies and central U.S. on Wednesday morning
True North
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa
7 June 2023

Wind power generation dwindled to a near standstill across Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and even deep into the central United States on Wednesday morning.

According to the outlet Pipeline Online, major wind farms ranging across Alberta to Saskatchewan…

From the Emperor’s Desk: I was going to post this yesterday but I needed a day off. Today, tomorrow and Saturday I will post on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este and the outbreak of World War I.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este (December 18, 1863 – June 28, 1914) was the heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary.

Early life

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este was born in Graz, Austria, the eldest son of Archduke Charles Ludwig of Austria (the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary and Emperor Maximilian of Mexico) and of his second wife, Princess Maria Annunciata of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, a daughter of King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies and his wife, Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria, eldest daughter of Archduke Charles of Austria-Hungary, Duke of Teschen (the third son of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II) and Princess Henrietta of Nassau-Weilburg.

In modern Britain, the death of a monarch has little political impact; the work of government continues uninterrupted, apart from a period of official mourning. But four centuries ago, when the king or queen actually ran the government, the situation was more complicated, as Dr Ben Coates of our Lords 1558-1603 section explains…

When the succession of Charles III to the throne was formally proclaimed on 10 September 2022, it marked the first appearance on television of an accession council. This body dates back to 24 March 1603, when a meeting of the lord mayor of London, assorted English peers and bishops, and those commoners who had served as privy councillors to the recently deceased monarch, Elizabeth I, proclaimed the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. Forty-four years earlier Elizabeth had issued the proclamation of her accession in her own name, but a new procedure…

As Frederic Bastiat sagely observed nearly 200 years ago, a good economist considers the indirect or secondary effects of any action.

For instance, a politician might claim we can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates, but a sensible economist will warn that higher tax rates will discourage work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

And those changes in behavior (along with increases in evasion and avoidance) will result in less economic activity, which means lower taxable income. So tax revenues will not double. In some cases, they might even fall.

This analysis also applies to regulatory policy.

In an article for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, James Broughel explains how red tape actually causes needless death because of less economic growth.

Regulations can contribute to an increased death toll by imposing costs that eat into disposable income. As spending power dwindles, so too does the potential for spending on risk management…

Late yesterday afternoon the Minister of Finance issued a new Remit to the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee (his statement is here, the new Remit itself is here). The Minister’s statement tends to minimise the entire thing (and nothing really about the inflation target changes), but – no doubt consciously and deliberately – gives not a mention to the most material addition to the Remit.

The lead-in to the more-specific targets section of the Remit is now as follows:

This was the backdrop to the additional words I’ve highlighted

$10 billion of so of losses of taxpayers’ money as a result of Reserve Bank MPC choices around the LSAP programme, choices that had the imprimatur of the Minister of Finance (and apparently no objection from the Treasury). As the bonds are being sold back to The Treasury, the realised component of the losses is mounting significantly each month…