Archive for March, 2011

By Les Dunaway

With our non-royalty political structure, the term sovereign is not a household word. It is one with which we need to become familiar. The term refers to governments, as in sovereign debt, sovereign default, sovereign bankruptcy and (less frequently) sovereign fiscal responsibility. The following press release tells of an important scholarly work on understanding this critical set of issues:

WASHINGTON, March 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the Comeback America Initiative (CAI), a non-partisan organization dedicated to fostering a national discussion around fiscal challenges and solutions, in partnership with Master’s students from Stanford University’s Public Policy and International Studies Programs, announced the findings of its Sovereign Fiscal Responsibility Index (SFRI), a new fiscal indicator that incorporates a wide range of fiscal, economic and political factors into ranking a country’s fiscal responsibility and sustainability. According to the indicator, out of the 34 sovereign countries studied, Australia ranks number one while America sits near the bottom at number 28. [emphasis mine] Read the rest of this entry »

Observations©
By Donald S. Conkey

Recently, while watching the political process (democracy) play out in Wisconsin, my mind recalled the words of an ancient king who was in the process of turning his kingdom over to a government ruled ‘by the voice of the people.’

This king’s words pertinent to what is happening in Wisconsin, and to a lesser extent here in Georgia and even here in Cherokee County read: “Therefore, choose you, by the voice of the people, judges, that ye may be judged according to the laws which have been given you by our fathers, which are correct, and which were given them by the hand of the Lord. Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right, but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law – to do your business by the voice of the people.” Read the rest of this entry »

By J. Randolph Evans

What is this all about – really? That has to be the question that many Americans are asking after the United States led military strikes into Libya in a civil war. No one, especially those in the Obama Administration, seems to have a credible answer to that question. Here is the scorecard so far.

Is it about weapons of mass destruction? Nope. There is not even a pretense that the current military strikes are preemptive attacks aimed at preventing the development and use of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, after the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, Libya went so far as to make a public announcement on December 19, 2003 that it was abandoning its WMD program. Read the rest of this entry »

By Les Dunaway

In “The States – America’s PIIGS? ” we talked about the debt / spending problems that various US states and cities face. An insightful look at the underlying cause is found in “What’s Your State’s Deadweight Ratio?” by William Baldwin in the Mar 16, 2011 Forbes.

Mr Baldwin writes

“The structural problem is that government has too many mouths to feed. It’s possible to quantify that problem. The result is a metric that I call the Deadweight Ratio. It tells you how many beneficiaries of government spending there are for every private sector job.” Read the rest of this entry »

By John Douglas

Surveying the world situation at this writing, the attacks on Libya are continuing while Japan lurches from telling us that its nuclear power plants are being brought under control to telling us there are new or growing problems. In the Middle East, neighboring countries have sent troops into Bahrain (home of the US 5th Fleet) to save that government from its own people, the US budget deficit in February was more than the entire deficit for 2007 and the price of gasoline continues to rise. No doubt this is time for decisive leadership from the United States, a crucial factor in regaining the equilibrium we need for stability and what passes for peace these days. Read the rest of this entry »