Amazing Letter from a US Citizen 2016

November 8 and its aftermath revealed to me that I am just so tired of these democrats and their candlelight vigils against the evil Trump Administration, harassing our electoral college voters and their undisguised contempt for tens of millions of Americans, with no effort to temper their response to the election with humility or empathy.

I can’t be like them, and I don’t want my kids turning into them.

I am tired of their unexamined snobbery and condescension.

I am tired of their name-calling and virtue-signalling as signs of supposedly high intelligence.

I am tired of their trendiness, jumping on every left-liberal bandwagon that comes along (transgender activism, anyone?) and then acting like anyone, not on board is an idiot/hater.

I am tired of their shallowness. It’s hard to have a deep conversation with people who are obsessed with moving their kids’ pawns across the board (grades, sports, college, grad school, career) and, in their spare time, entertaining themselves and taking great vacations.

I am tired of their acceptance of vulgarity and sarcastic irreverence as the cultural ocean in which their kids swim. I like pop culture as much as the next person, but people who would never raise their kids on junk food seem to think nothing of letting then wallow in cultural junk, exposed to nothing ennobling, aspirational, or even earnest.

I am tired of watching them raise clueless kids (see above) who go off to college and within months are convinced they live in  rapey, racist patriarchy; “Make America Great Again” is hate speech; and Black Lives Matter agitators are their brothers-in-arms against White Privilege. If my kids are like that at nineteen, I’ll feel I’ve seriously failed them as a parent. Yet the general sentiment seems to be these are good, liberal kids who may have gotten a bit carried away.

I am tired of their lack of interest in any form of serious morality or self-betterment. These are decent, responsible people, many compassionate by temperament. Yet they seem two-dimensional as if they believe that being a nice, well-socialized person who holds liberal political views is all there is, and there is nothing else to talk about. But there is!

I am tired of being bored and exasperated by everybody. I feel like I have read this book a thousand times, and there are no surprises in it. Down with Trump! Trans Lives Matter! Climate deniers are destroying the planet! No cake, we’re gluten-free!

These are good people in a lot of ways. But there has got to be a better way.

Last Sunday’s sermon mentioned 1 Peter:18-19, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors.” 

This may be obvious to you, but secular liberalism does seem empty in some way, despite all the things my educated, middle-class liberals should be grateful for.

If that’s what’s been handed down to me, I want more, especially for my precious kids. I’m trying.

Author Unknown

Collapse of EU Monetary Union Unavoidable

The Euro is simply a house of cards waiting to collapse, IMHO along with that of Professor Otmar Issing, the ECB's first chief economist as stated in the following article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

The European Central Bank is becoming dangerously over-extended and the whole euro project is unworkable in its current form, the founding architect of the monetary union has warned.

"One day, the house of cards will collapse,” said Professor Otmar Issing, the ECB's first chief economist and a towering figure in the construction of the single currency.

Prof Issing said the euro has been betrayed by politics, lamenting that the experiment went wrong from the beginning and has since degenerated into a fiscal free-for-all that once again masks the festering pathologies. And he is factually correct.

“Realistically, it will be a case of muddling through, struggling from one crisis to the next. It is difficult to forecast how long this will continue for, but it cannot go on endlessly," he told the journal Central Banking in a remarkable deconstruction of the project.

The comments are a reminder that the Eurozone has not overcome its structural incoherence. A beguiling combination of cheap oil, a cheap euro, quantitative easing and less fiscal austerity have disguised this, but the short-term effects are already fading.

The regime is almost certain to be tested again in the next global downturn, this time starting with higher levels of debt and unemployment, and greater political fatigue.

Prof Issing lambasted the European Commission as a creature of political forces that have given up trying to enforce the rules in any meaningful way. "The moral hazard is overwhelming," he said.  

The European Central Bank is on a "slippery slope" and has in his view fatally compromised the system by bailing out bankrupt states in palpable violation of the treaties.

"The Stability and Growth Pact has more or less failed. Market discipline is done away with by ECB interventions. So there is no fiscal control mechanism from markets or politics. This has all the elements to bring disaster for monetary union.

"The no-bailout clause is violated every day," he said, dismissing the European Court's approval for bailout measures as simple-minded and ideological.

The ECB has "crossed the Rubicon" and is now in an untenable position, trying to reconcile conflicting roles as banking regulator, Troika enforcer in rescue missions and agent of monetary policy. Its own financial integrity is increasingly in jeopardy.

The central bank already holds over €1 trillion of bonds bought at "artificially low" or negative yields, implying huge paper losses once interest rates rise again. "An exit from the QE policy is more and more difficult, as the consequences potentially could be disastrous," he said.

"The decline in the quality of eligible collateral is a grave problem. The ECB is now buying corporate bonds that are close to junk, and the haircuts can barely deal with a one-notch credit downgrade. The reputational risk of such actions by a central bank would have been unthinkable in the past," he said.

Cloaking it all is obfuscation, political mendacity and endemic denial.  Leaders of the heavily indebted states have misled their voters with soothing bromides, falsely suggesting that some form of fiscal union or debt mutualisation is just around the corner.

Yet there is no chance of political union or the creation of an EU treasury in the foreseeable future, which would, in any case, require a sweeping change to the German constitution - an impossible proposition in the current political climate. 

The European project must, therefore, function as a union of sovereign states, or fail.

Prof Issing slammed the first Greek rescue in 2010 as little more than a bailout for German and French banks, insisting that it would have been far better to eject Greece from the euro as a salutary lesson for all. The Greeks should have been offered generous support, but only after it had restored exchange rate viability by returning to the drachma.

His critique will exasperate those at the ECB and the International Monetary Fund who inherited the crisis and had to deal with a fast-moving and terrifying situation.

The fear was a chain-reaction reaching Spain and Italy, detonating an uncontrollable financial collapse. This nearly happened on two occasions and remained a risk until Berlin switched tack and agreed to let the ECB shore up the Spanish and Italian debt markets in 2012.

Many would say the crisis mushroomed precisely because the ECB was unable to act as a lender-of-last-resort. Prof Issing and others from the Bundesbank were chiefly responsible for this design flaw.

Jacques Delors, the euro's "political" founding father, issued his own candid post-mortem last month on the failings of EMU but disagrees starkly with Prof Issing about the nature of the problem.

His foundation calls for a supranational economic government with debt pooling and an EU treasury, as well as expansionary policies to break out of the "vicious circle" and prevent a second Lost Decade.

"It is essential and urgent: at some point in the future, Europe will be hit by a new economic crisis. We do not know whether this will be in six weeks, six months or six years. But in its current set-up the euro is unlikely to survive that coming crisis," said the Delors report.

Prof Issing is not a German nationalist. He is open to the idea of a genuine United States of Europe built on proper foundations, but has warned repeatedly against trying to force the pace of integration, or to achieve federalism "by the back door".

He decries the latest EU plan for a "fiscal entity" in the Five Presidents' Report, fearing that such move would lead to a rogue plenipotentiary with unbridled powers over sensitive issues of national life, beyond democratic accountability.

Such a system would erode the budgetary sovereignty of the member states and violate the principle of no taxation without representation, forgetting the lessons of the English Civil War and the American Revolution.

Prof Issing said the venture began to go off the rails immediately, though the structural damage was disguised by the financial boom. "There was no speed-up of convergence after 1999 – rather, the opposite. From day one, quite a number of countries started working in the wrong direction."

A string of states let rip with wage rises, brushing aside warnings that this would prove fatal in an irrevocable currency union. "During the first eight years, unit labour costs in Portugal rose by 30pc versus Germany. In the past, the escudo would have devalued by 30pc, and things more or less would be back to where they were."

"Quite a few countries – including Ireland, Italy and Greece – behaved as though they could still devalue their currencies," he said.

The elemental problem is that once a high-debt state has lost 30pc in competitiveness within a fixed exchange system, it is almost impossible to claw back the ground in the sort of deflationary world we face today.

It has become a trap. The whole Eurozone structure has acquired a contractionary bias. The deflation is now self-fulling. 

Prof Issing's purist German ideology has no compelling answer to this.

Source @http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/10/16/euro-house-of-cards-to-collapse-warns-ecb-prophet/

Should Christians Vote for Trump?

Trump’s behaviour is odious, but Clinton has a deplorable basketful of deal-breakers, by ERIC METAXAS.   

This question should hardly require an essay, but let’s face it: We’re living in strange times. America is in trouble.

Over this past year, many of Donald Trump’s comments have made me almost literally hopping mad. The hot-mic comments from 2005 are especially horrifying. Can there be any question we should denounce them with flailing arms and screeching volume? I must not hang out in the right locker rooms, because if anyone I know said such things I might assault him physically (and repent later). So yes, many see these comments as a deal-breaker.

But we have a very knotty and larger problem. What if the other candidate also has deal breakers? Even a whole deplorable basketful? Suddenly things become horribly awkward. Would God want me simply not to vote? Is that a serious option?

What if not pulling the lever for Mr. Trump effectively means electing someone who has actively enabled sexual predation in her husband before—and while—he was president? Won’t God hold me responsible for that? What if she defended a man who raped a 12-year-old and in recalling the case laughed about getting away with it? Will I be excused from letting this person become president? What if she used her position as secretary of state to funnel hundreds of millions into her own foundation, much of it from nations that treat women and gay people worse than dogs? Since these things are true, can I escape responsibility for them by simply not voting?

Many say they won’t vote because choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. But this is sophistry. Neither candidate is pure evil. They are human beings. We cannot escape the uncomfortable obligation to soberly choose between them. Not voting—or voting for a third candidate who cannot win—is a rationalization designed more than anything to assuage our consciences. Yet people in America and abroad depend on voters to make this very difficult choice.

Children in the Middle East are forced to watch their fathers drowned in cages by ISIS. Kids in inner-city America are condemned to lives of poverty, hopelessness and increasing violence. Shall we sit on our hands and simply trust “the least of these” to God, as though that were our only option? Don’t we have an obligation to them?

Two heroes about whom I’ve written faced similar difficulties. William Wilberforce, who ended the slave trade in the British Empire, often worked with other parliamentarians he knew to be vile and immoral in their personal lives.

Why did he? First, because as a sincere Christian he knew he must extend grace and forgiveness to others since he desperately needed them himself. Second, because he knew the main issue was not his moral purity, nor the moral impurity of his colleagues, but rather the injustices and horrors suffered by the African slaves whose cause he championed. He knew that before God his first obligation was to them, and he must do what he could to help them.

The anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer also did things most Christians of his day were disgusted by. He most infamously joined a plot to kill the head of his government. He was horrified by it, but he did it nonetheless because he knew that to stay “morally pure” would allow the murder of millions to continue. Doing nothing or merely “praying” was not an option. He understood that God was merciful and that even if his actions were wrong, God saw his heart and could forgive him. But he knew he must act.

Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer knew it was an audience of One to whom they would ultimately answer. And He asks, “What did you do to the least of these?”

It’s a fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, the country’s chance to have a Supreme Court that values the Constitution—and the genuine liberty and self-government for which millions have died—is gone. Not for four years, or eight, but forever. Many say Mr. Trump can’t be trusted to deliver on this score, but Mrs. Clinton certainly can be trusted in the opposite direction. For our kids and grandkids, are we not obliged to take our best shot at this? Shall we sit on our hands and refuse to choose?                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

If imperiously flouting the rules by having a private server endangered American lives and secrets and may lead to more deaths if she cynically deleted thousands of emails, and if her foreign-policy judgment led to the rise of Islamic State, won’t refuse to vote to make me responsible for those suffering as a result of these things? How do I squirm out of this horrific conundrum? It’s unavoidable: We who can vote must answer to God for these people, whom He loves. We are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

We would be responsible for passively electing someone who champions the abomination of partial-birth abortion, someone who is celebrated by an organization that sells baby parts. We already live in a country where judges force bakers, florists and photographers to violate their consciences and faith—and Mrs. Clinton has zealously ratified this. If we believe this ends with bakers and photographers, we are horribly mistaken. No matter your faith or lack of faith, this statist view of America will dramatically affect you and your children.

For many of us, this is very painful, pulling the lever for someone many think odious. But please consider this: A vote for Donald Trump is not necessarily a vote for Donald Trump himself. It is a vote for those who will be affected by the results of this election. Not to vote is to vote. God will not hold us guiltless.

Mr. Metaxas, host of the nationally syndicated “Eric Metaxas Show,” is the author of “If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty” (Viking, 2016).

Decentralization Is Key to Canada's Health Care Reform

Despite high levels of public spending, Canada’s health-care system consistently perform more poorly than a number of peer jurisdictions with universal health-care systems. 

Governments across the country must address this policy challenge in a context of constrained resources, as the federal government and a number of provinces currently face increasing debt loads and other significant fiscal challenges. 

During the 1990s, the federal government transformed its approach to providing financial assistance to the provinces to support their welfare and social assistance programs. Specifically, the federal government reduced transfers to the provinces but, in exchange, removed a number of “strings” previously attached to federal funding that prohibited certain types of policy reform. 

For example, the provinces were permitted to create work requirements for receipt of welfare payments, which previously would have triggered the withholding of federal transfers. The reform of federal transfers to the provinces led immediately to a wave of policy innovation and reform at the provincial level, as governments across the country pursued various policy paths designed to improve their welfare programs, create solutions that actually addressed local problems, and reduce program costs. 

Many of these reforms had the intended effects, as there was a marked decline in welfare dependency and government spending on public assistance in subsequent years. However, no similar wave of policy innovation occurred following the 1990's transfer reforms in Canadian health care. This is largely because the government maintained the various “strings” that were attached to health spending transfers and, specifically, the terms and conditions of the Canada Health Act. 

As a result, health-care policy in the Canadian provinces has since the 1990's generally been largely characterized by policy inertia while spending on health care has increased considerably. 

Canada’s experience with welfare reform provides a model with important implications for how to begin reforming and improving Canadian health care. By reducing transfers in real terms while amending specific provisions of the Canada Health Act that inhibit reform, the federal government can partially address the fiscal challenges it faces today while providing provinces with the freedom to innovate and pursue policy reforms to improve their health-care systems. 

Such changes would allow for greater experimentation by each province as they seek out what policy arrangements have the best possibility of improving health-care performance. 

For instance, provinces would be well served to examine the introduction of cost-sharing arrangements (co-insurance, deductibles, and co-payments) used in most other universal health-care countries to ensure more efficient use of the health-care system by patients. 

Provinces might also look at removing regulations that currently prevent a greater supply of needed health-care professionals and investment within the health-care sector. 

It is uncertain exactly what reforms different provinces would choose and the paper does not weigh the advantages and risks of specific reform options in detail. Instead, based on Canada’s experience with welfare reform, this paper recommends a crucial change, the devolvement of decision-making powers to the provinces, with the federal government permitting each province maximum flexibility (within a portable and universal system) to provide and regulate health-care provision as they see fit.

Read full article by Ben Eisen, Bacchus Barua, Jason Clemens, and Steve Lafleur  @ https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/devolvement-initiative-post.pdf