by elizabeth nickson
As DOGE goes forward, every single one of us will become aware of just how much bureaucrats have been stealing. From the beginning of Absurdistan, I have been convinced that all of us (not them), should be 2.5 times richer.
with each deregulation we take away a privilege from a politician, a prebendary (think NPR, the Post Office, Black Lives Matter) company or a power group
– Javier Milei
Government and (via permission given to) the banks, have stolen our wealth, captured our labor, leaving us with a measly 10% of our life’s energy to work with, to grow. Unless of course, you sign onto the grift, then you get cashed out. The rest is paid to the government and to the banks, where it seethes in a vicious circle to further immiserate us. Their principal energy is bent towards shutting us up. All that changed on November 5. You can’t have a free America and a locked down world. That’s a recipe for bullets, blood and the guillotine.
Massive fiscal reform will release that money and return it to you. The result will be a boom for the ages. Try to stay with me on this. It will be all anyone will be talking, shouting, complaining about for the next 18 months. And it is the only way to save the culture. No green economy, fancy derivative, debt forgiveness, UN plan or tax will stop a thousand years of misery. Only this.
Let me explain.
DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy and Musk’s program of deregulation, is based, in part, on Javier Milei’s success. Last week, after visiting 47 at Mar a Lago and meeting with Musk and Ramaswamy, he was interviewed by Lex Fridman. In a detailed, theory-moving-to-practice rich interview, Milei asserts that after they took a chainsaw to the Argentine fiscal arrangement (the last word best drawled in an entitled French accent) they immediately 2.5Xed the per capita GDP of Argentinians.
His approval rating is now higher than it was when he took office. Despite their venal press.
In his first month, he did what everyone said he couldn’t. He balanced the budget. He balanced it by cutting 50% of bureaucrats and ministries. Fifty thousand civil servants lost their jobs. Thus in a single stroke he saved hundred of millions. His team then instituted a program of regulatory reform, over-regulation being the principal Marxist/socialist/commie tool for destroying economic health, initiative and creativity.
The Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger, has a deregulation division, a public spending cut division, and government structure reduction division, with an elite corps cleaning up the laws that hinder economic progress. Every day, he removes between one and five economic restrictions.
One of the first things Milei’s team did was eliminate “poverty co-ordinators”, who had been taking 50% of the money allocated for the indigent. That money was returned to the very very poor, while Milei’s government topped up the payment in anticipation of choppy waters brought by reform.
The choppy waters didn’t last long. By April, four months in, they had regularized the economy so that prices, the central bank, and inflation adjustments made the country stable enough to begin to attract investment. It was a short sharp shock that Milei asserts was necessary. And recommends.
In fact, when we took office, for example, there were about 900 roadblocks per year. That is people who made a habit of blocking the streets. They prevented free movement. And besides, they were given social plans and they were given a lot of money. If you remember when I started by explaining the cuts, one of the things I said was that we removed the middlemen of poverty. In other words, the managers of poverty, those who lived by stealing from the poor. Well, that is a huge source of corruption.
In fact, when we did that, two days later, one of the most renowned and influential Piqueteros called for a demonstration. He claimed that 50,000 people would attend because he was actually expecting 100,000. So he wanted to showcase it as a success. And so then let’s say with the decision made in Human Capital [a consolidated ministry] to cut their funding, the anti-blockade protocol was also enacted, where those who blocked the streets wouldn’t receive welfare benefits.
And those who broke the law would go to jail. All of that. And also we were informing this through transportation channels. Well, in that march, they expected to have 100,000 people there. And actually it turned out to be 3,000 people. And from that point on, they didn’t block the streets anymore.
Pretty simple, hey? Wonder why no one is on the streets in the U.S.? Because even the blue-haired ninnies know that the Biden/Harris regime consisted of failed crooks that brought only chaos and poverty and war. They know that things are so bad out there, the mood so sour, they’d likely be ignored, hated, fired, expelled or jailed.
Milei found that government offices were lying about all the stats. Every single one. They were lying about unemployment, they were lying about inflation, they were lying about government debt, they were lying about the poverty rate. They had run up prices through theft and regulation, then fixed prices, and lo and behold, no one could afford to make or import anything so there was nothing to buy.
“We found that 13.5% of GDP was from money printing.”
Biden printed almost $10 trillion in the past four years, shoved it into the economy, mostly by funding bank debt, hiring government workers and calling it growth. Therefore, roughly an equivalent %age of the U.S. GDP is from money printing. Which means the real growth rate is around -5%. That’s what real people are facing — feeling outside of the sheltered neighborhoods, we are losing 5% a year. Which means every year, we lose more agency, are more enslaved to debt.
In Argentina, once they took office in January and took apart the stats they realized that inflation was scheduled to be 47,000% for 2024.
They found that the numbers had been fiddled to show that poverty stood at 41%; in fact, it was 57%.
By April, after the reset, inflation had dropped to 24%. Essentially, while they did play around in the central bank, cancelling some of its debt and stopping the printing, mostly they cut government corruption to the point of putting a former President in jail for six years. Laugh all you want about an obscure country at the foot of the world, but this corruption is dug deep into government in every country, and the more sophisticated the country, the more intricate the thievery. Every left-of-centre election win stampedes it into a rolling Catherine Wheel of criminality. It is where the wealth of the people has gone. Your struggling parents? Your inability to get health care? Your stall in a profession? Your unemployed nephew? The destroyed cities? This. This. This.
Worse, the outfits, sorry “NGOs” at the border, receive millions to protect migrant children and as I write there are 350,000 migrant kids in sexual or other slavery, lost by these idiots, these irresponsible, criminal do-gooders. Jewish, Catholic charities are stealing hand-over-fist. That’s the classical definition of “prebendary” btw.
Above all, this wholesale larceny is why family formation and the birth rate has crashed. Your average young couple with a median income can’t afford to buy a house, because housing costs, thanks to regulation, have risen 600% since the 80’s. It’s worst in the working classes — 70% of us now. You cannot have a stable family life if you have to choose between heat and food. A young woman looks at that and says no way.
Can you imagine the theft in the average “private-public-partnership”, that vaunted arrangement that was supposed to bring efficiency to public works, but instead allowed corporations to drain the public purse because no failed audit was ever punished?? Milei looked into it and stopped all public works cold.
“One of the things that also generated a lot of corruption was public works.
Another thing that led to significant acts of corruption were the discretionary transfers to provinces. In general, these transfers were made to the provinces with accounting as obscure as possible. So the national government, in collusion with the governors — let’s say, the money ended up being used for other things.
Furthermore, today the Ministry of Human Capital is always filing complaints in court. Not in the media, in court. We are addressing acts of corruption like never before in Argentine history. For example, two days ago, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was sentenced to six years for defrauding the state. I mean, due to corruption. And the next day, that is yesterday, we took away their privileged pensions.
At the same time, we have discovered that Kirchner used disability pensions for acts of corruption. For example, there is a city that has more disability pensions than people.
And also in Argentina, we have restored freedom to the judiciary. We do not pressure the judiciary. And this is so true that during my government, not only was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner convicted, but also the two terrorist attacks carried out by Iran were condemned.”
[Iran pays politicians in every country, working to destabilize the state. Because so many politicians and judiciary are bribed by Iran, terrorists too often walk free. Wonder where the two-tier justice system comes from? Yes. Your bribed politicians.]
In order to keep the theft going, government officials had to corrupt the media, corrupt the judiciary, corrupt the central bank, corrupt the economic ministries who kept the stats. All of these people had to be either paid off or threatened. The same is happening in the U.S. and Canada. In Europe. In Scandi. In Australia.
Even the grunts, the clerks, steal. The U.S. taxpayer pays billions to keep empty government buildings running, while 25% of us can’t afford to keep our houses warm in the winter. Only 17% of government employees turn up to work while we fund those buildings and equipment, their home offices, their cafeterias, their “work’ lunches and their mileage and gas to the home office. That is theft, blithe, careless, contemptuous theft.
Here is Elizabeth Warren debanking anyone she doesn’t like. Think Canada’s Trudeau is bad? Warren, stuffed up to the noseholes with a sense of her own righteousness, debanked anyone whose politics she didn’t like. And every innovative bitcoin and financial venture. For the big banks. Those were her clients. Not “the people”.
The public service has decided – I know all the specious arguments. I took public administration in graduate school, read the texts, the graphs, the “math” – that they make the economy work through regulation. Aside from the necessary basics, the truth, as they know, is the opposite. They slow down activity – ten years and $100,000,000 to get a mining license or build a ski hill – and then they bring it to a halt. The Green Economy, the Green New Deal, DEI, ESG meant we were cannibalizing the future and the wealth of the past.
In France and Britain today, full steam ahead on the oligarchs Agenda 2030, farmers and citizens flood the streets in protest. In the U.K., 1,00,000 have signed a petition demanding a new election
In Canada, the entire country seethes, while the hated Trudeau dances and plays out his remaining months in power. Hatred doesn’t really describe the contempt Canadians have for Trudeau and his enablers. The arts and media class that promoted him has lost every scintilla of their persuasive power. They are next for the chopping block.
The media and government propaganda holler that it is far-right fascist racist homophobe sexists seducing the dummies. But no. It comes down to one thing and one thing only. The government has stolen our life’s energy. Every individual pulling down a lush public sector salary is a thief. Every. Single. One. They are feeding on a private sector which is shriveling, producing less and less wealth every year. Even the stock market is based on debt, monetizing that debt, trading debt instruments, running the thing up and down and making money on the trades. Hell, if I know this trick, you can bet the banks and hedgies do. They can game the market, make it run up one day and down the next and make money on each movement and call it growth.
Theft, manipulation, bribes and threats. And the stealth corruption of basic government statistics.
It turns out that the thing saving Argentina is honesty.
“When you make prices transparent you also make the basic indigence/poverty line transparent.” – Milei
From the moment of government stats transparency, Argentina began a cyclical recovery. “Real wages have been growing above inflation. Nominal wages are beating inflation, same as pensions. There is a rebound of activity due to the recovery of the stock cycle, therefore more and better paid jobs. Wages are growing the most in the informal sector which means real poverty is decreasing faster than in the formal sector.” (By the informal sector, Milei means the entrepreneurial economy.)
“By eliminating inflation, you remove the inflationary tax. The real burden was the fiscal deficit which was 15% of GDP. Initially we raised tax, but gave the people back 15 points in terms of GDP and this December we are eliminating the tax entirely. Not only that when you remove inflation, you remove the distortion of relative prices, the allocation of resources is much better. “
A strong fiscal performance meant Argentina’s country risk was reduced from 3,000 basis points to 770, so Moody’s has raised the risk to triple C. Interest rates lowered (real interest rates) meant an increase in investment and an increase in consumption.
This is decidedly not rocket science. It is basic math, something that socialists complicate to the point of absurdity.
The Cultural Fight
Milei considers the fight with the media as one of his great battles.
They demand to have a monopoly on the microphone – they are entitled to hurt, insult and offend and they don’t want anyone to bother them, they expect me to not even respond.
They hate the X network.
Why we love the X network – we can say what we want – these journalists want to censor all opinions they don’t like, and because they are leftists they are woke and they can’t stand the competition. If they had to fight face to face hand to hand on a level playing field they would lose with their ideas because they have failed on a fiscal, economic, social and cultural battlefield.
We experience all sorts of media torture because the journalists who have vested interests and are corrupt, are professional torturers. Yes, because they invade your personal life, your family, and your privacy. Let me tell you something to show you the kind of garbage the media in Argentina can do. They send three drones to spy on me at my presidential residence, to spy on me. Do you think that’s right?
A creeping socialism has taken over every government ministry in every country. Despite their 100% record of failure. “We must not forget that those murderers called socialists killed million people – they cannot fight on equal terms. These are useless people who have ruined the planet – have made it much worse.”
People are sick and tired of WOKE.
Its control, theft, and obvious insanity we are sick of.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the sacred social caste in this country is essentially immune to fiscal corruption and incompetence. They already own vast “real wealth” which appreciates under inflation and devaluation so they may refinance their debt, once again, taken out with the better evaluated currency of the past and now being paid in devalued government scrip. Rinse and repeat. A $100,000 Califirnia home from 1970 is worth many times that today… But the bitter truth is that the home is really worth the same.its the money that isn’t worth squat. Apply the same to all your non-real estate or physical asset investments and your nest egg begins to look like an ant egg. This is what the WEF caste has done to us, and every other OECD country. There should be a trial to hold these parasites accountable.