Tag Archives: Trade
The EU’s Existential Crisis
Will the EU ship sink? With Britain leading the way and being the first member state to jump overboard, the question now hangs in the air of what will happen to the Union. There is no need for it to … Continue reading
The Future of Populism is Conservative, Not Liberal
Populism gives Trump the opportunity to save the Right from its lassitude. And to conjure up the worst nightmare for the Left, a revival of national unity and purpose; the fear of which has already sparked hate speech and flag-burning … Continue reading
Brexit Means Business
My advice to Theresa May is “come to Ghana”. Come to the smaller countries in the developing world, trying to break through into the global market place. Come to the African Commonwealth who have been heinously undermined by multinational trade deals piped through the one-stop-shop of plutocratic Brussels where big business have dictated terms which have seen West African nations stripped of tariffs that afforded one third of their national GDP, being forced to trade on even terms when the ground is far from that. This week Theresa May said Brexit offered the UK the opportunity to be a world leader. Come to Ghana, Mrs May, or as Ghanaians would say ‘Akwaaba’. I am sure you will be very welcome indeed. Continue reading
The First Trump-Clinton Debate: A Brief Analysis
There were just a few moments of the debate that frame the more unconventional wisdom that Trump may have done better with many voters than some of the media smart people might suspect. Continue reading
An Enemy of Income Tax Reform: The “Business Transfer Tax” (a/k/a “Business Activity Tax” and “Business Flat Tax”)
The “Business-Transfer Tax” in all its forms is a proposal for a dual-tax system, to have a value-added tax built upon a rejiggered income tax. This second tax comes disguised as income-tax reform with the VAT label avoided. Sad to say this ill-conceived proposal amounts to a cover-up and remedy for the failure of U.S. trade negotiators to insist that VAT nations abide by the principles of free trade. But, two wrongs don’t make a right. As an enemy of real income-tax reform, it would make the income tax even more disjointed and difficult to unscramble into a simple, tax-neutral, low-rate income tax. Continue reading
Boris Johnson: Brussels, Brexit and the Uncertain Future of the EU
“Let’s suppose somebody came to us all today, 2016, and said, bonjour, or guten tag, or ciao, we’ve got this brilliant idea for a new project to take all these higgledy-piggledy nations and turn them into a single political unit with a single currency and gradually moving, actually ever more rapidly, towards a single system of government, and you Brits will have to sign up for virtually all of it except the single currency. They would then be told that they would have to give up the right to make their own laws, pay for membership and have no border control. That’s the offer they make to us – a club that wastes our money massively, that subverts democracy in this country, takes away people’s power to elect the people who take the decisions, reduces the competitiveness of the European economy, and all for no real economic benefit. Why would we join such a club today? Why would we join such a woefully unreformed Europe? Would anybody in their right mind join the EU as it is today? I don’t think so.” – Boris Johnson Continue reading
Revisiting the “Reset” and Russian Expansion into Crimea
Putin has every reason to think that the Ukraine crisis will pass as did the Georgia crisis. And President Xi Jinping in Beijing will be watching as well, calculating how far to push in Asia. What is being reset is the map of the world.
OBAMA’S ENERGY POLICY: SLOWING GROWTH HERE AND ABROAD
As a professional staff member on the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in 2011, I was able to visit several countries to check on how the U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) agency was fulfilling its many missions. On the agency’s website is the statement, “Broad-based economic growth is essential to sustainable, long-term development. It creates the opportunities impoverished households need to raise their living standards, provides countries with the resources to expand access to basic services, and—most important of all—enables citizens to chart their own prosperous futures.” Absolutely true, and not just in “developing” parts of the Third World, but in all parts of the world as “development” is an ongoing process everywhere.
