3 Comments
Mar 1Liked by Joachim Klement

This exposes the myth that the left are tax & spending‘depriving’ the markets of capital and the right is good for the economy due to tax cuts. Both parties in the US support an ever increasing military budget that pump primes the economy, or welfare for the rich depending on your perspective. Conservatives tend to forget W turned the US into a Socialist country by creating homeland security that made the US government the #1 employer in the US. And yes, Lost Trust was a walking disaster, yet being used as the face of the ‘Popular Conservative’ movement with a negative image rating of -50 🤪.

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Duly noted. And yet one remembers that you previously wrote about how bad populists are for the economy. Indeed, it doesn't take a Perón to create harm; a Berlusconi can also easily waste a decade's worth of growth. The U.S. and postwar Germany were just lucky they didn't elect any such character. (Or if they did... Trump was too lazy and ineffective to be harmful).

"Useless" is a damn sight better than harmful, anyway.

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Soon after the approval of generation eu, Italy passed the crazy measure of the superbonus for building renovations/restorations, conceived by the populist left of the 5 stars and supported by the Pd (less populist left). By doing a building renovation that included energy efficiency, up to 96000 euros per property, the state gave the landlord back 110% of the expense in tax credit. This tax credit could in turn be transferred to banks or other institutions in exchange for cash, net of a discount. Obviously, the wealthy families who owned properties and were able to anticipate part of the expenses took advantage of it. The state then ran a deficit to pay for the new apartments to those who would have had the money to pay for it themselves. A sort of stealing from the poor to give to the rich. Not to mention that such tax credits were also transferable to the construction companies that did the work. Therefore, many of them pretended to do the work by issuing false invoices paid with the credits accrued by fictitious customers; credits that in turn were transferred for real money. When Mario Draghi became prime minister, he did nothing about this scandal. The current populist right-wing government (allied to the less populist right) thought of putting an end to the mess.

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