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zvaigzdelasas · 3 months

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[Calcalist is Private Israeli Media]

"We have a huge deficit of ammunition not just in Ukraine but all over the world. We understand we should produce this here in Ukraine because all around the world it’s finished, it’s depleted. All the warehouses are empty," said Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal to the "Financial Times" in October of last year, addressing the ammunition situation of the Ukrainian army, which is interconnected with the challenges faced by the IDF.

The increased ammunition usage in the wars in Gaza and Ukraine has led to an unprecedented global shortage of ammunition of all types. While the IDF tries not to address the issue publicly, Major General Eliezer Toledano admitted last month that the IDF is reducing air attacks, emphasizing the necessity to "manage the economy of armaments" because the war will last a long time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also commented on the matter, stating that "we need three things from the U.S.: armaments, armaments, armaments." At a press conference two weeks ago, Netanyahu announced that Israel is preparing the Israeli defense industries to "cut off dependence on the world," a goal that is not realistic in any way.[...]

[L]ast week the Director General of the Ministry of Defense Eyal Zamir concluded a huge deal with the American government for the supply of aerial ammunition in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and so far over 25,000 tons of weapons have been sent to Israel since the beginning of the war in about 280 aircraft and about 40 ships. The Israeli defense industry is also tasked with filling the IDF's stocks. About two weeks ago it was published in Calcalist that the Israeli companies postponed the supply of weapons worth more than $1.5 billion to their customers across the world to divert resources for the IDF's combat needs and that in the last three months, the Ministry of Defense ordered more than NIS 10 billion ($2.7 million) worth of weapons from them. It should be noted that the shortage does not stem from a lack of budget but from a lack of supply, and the Treasury does not restrict the IDF from purchasing ammunition of any kind.

The tremendous need for armaments stems from the unusual amount of bombings that the IDF has carried out in Gaza since the outbreak of the war. Two weeks ago, the army announced that 30,000 targets had been attacked in Gaza. A security source told Calcalist that the rate of fire the IDF is using in the current war is similar to that of a "superpower," is comparable only to the capabilities demonstrated by the U.S., and probably also exceeds the number of armaments of the Russians in the campaign against Ukraine.[...]

Another reason [for the increase in targets bombed] is that in the current war, the IDF adopted a policy of a lighter finger on the trigger [sic] regarding damage to infrastructure and Hamas operatives who are in a civilian environment, thus increasing the ability to hit targets that were not previously attacked. In addition to these reasons, there is also the added pressure from the political level, as well as from the [Israeli] public, who demand an increase in air force bombing to prevent as much as possible a risk to the forces on the ground.[...]

[O]ne should ask whether, considering the existing ammunition stockpile, this policy may not harm the IDF's readiness to carry out future missions, especially given the existing security challenges and the probable scenario in which the IDF will be forced to [sic] carry out an attack in southern Lebanon as well. The IDF may be forced to better clarify its limitations to the politicians to avoid reaching an extreme scenario of an ammunition shortage, or in the words of General Toledano: "There is no infinite army."

28 Jan 24

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allthecanadianpolitics · 1 month

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The Town of Stony Plain and other municipalities across Alberta are wondering how to best approach a population influx alongside long-standing infrastructure deficits given annual funding from the province fell well short of their request. The Alberta government in its annual budget, which was introduced last week, committed $722 million towards the new Local Government Fiscal Framework (LGFF) capital program. The LGFF replaces the Municipal Sustainability Initiative as the province's primary funding foundation for municipal infrastructure. Stony Plain Mayor William Choy says the funding simply isn't enough for the Edmonton bedroom community of 18,000 as it addresses $28 million in infrastructure projects this year. The town is receiving $2.1 million in provincial funding this year for infrastructure through the LGFF.

Tagging @politicsofcanada @abpoli

#cdnpoli #canada #canadian politics #canadian news #alberta #public infrastructure #funding

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Why the Fed wants to crush workers

The US Federal Reserve has two imperatives: keeping employment high and inflation low. But when these come into conflict — when unemployment falls to near-zero — the Fed forgets all about full employment and cranks up interest rates to “cool the economy” (that is, “to destroy jobs and increase unemployment”).

An economy “cools down” when workers have less money, which means that the prices offered for goods and services go down, as fewer workers have less money to spend. As with every macroeconomic policy, raising interest rates has “distributional effects,” which is economist-speak for “winners and losers.”

Predicting who wins and who loses when interest rates go up requires that we understand the economic relations between different kinds of rich people, as well as relations between rich people and working people. Writing today for The American Prospect’s superb Great Inflation Myths series, Gerald Epstein and Aaron Medlin break it down:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-19-inflation-federal-reserve-protects-one-percent/

Recall that the Fed has two priorities: full employment and low interest rates. But when it weighs these priorities, it does so through “finance colored” glasses: as an institution, the Fed requires help from banks to carry out its policies, while Fed employees rely on those banks for cushy, high-paid jobs when they rotate out of public service.

Inflation is bad for banks, whose fortunes rise and fall based on the value of the interest payments they collect from debtors. When the value of the dollar declines, lenders lose and borrowers win. Think of it this way: say you borrow $10,000 to buy a car, at a moment when $10k is two months’ wages for the average US worker. Then inflation hits: prices go up, workers demand higher pay to keep pace, and a couple years later, $10k is one month’s wages.

If your wages kept pace with inflation, you’re now getting twice as many dollars as you were when you took out the loan. Don’t get too excited: these dollars buy the same quantity of goods as your pre-inflation salary. However, the share of your income that’s eaten by that monthly car-loan payment has been cut in half. You just got a real-terms 50% discount on your car loan!

Inflation is great news for borrowers, bad news for lenders, and any given financial institution is more likely to be a lender than a borrower. The finance sector is the creditor sector, and the Fed is institutionally and personally loyal to the finance sector. When creditors and debtors have opposing interests, the Fed helps creditors win.

The US is a debtor nation. Not the national debt — federal debt and deficits are just scorekeeping. The US government spends money into existence and taxes it out of existence, every single day. If the USG has a deficit, that means it spent more than than it taxed, which is another way of saying that it left more dollars in the economy this year than it took out of it. If the US runs a “balanced budget,” then every dollar that was created this year was matched by another dollar that was annihilated. If the US runs a “surplus,” then there are fewer dollars left for us to use than there were at the start of the year.

The US debt that matters isn’t the federal debt, it’s the private sector’s debt. Your debt and mine. We are a debtor nation. Half of Americans have less than $400 in the bank.

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/49-of-americans-couldnt-cover-a-400-emergency-expense-today-up-from-32-in-november/

Most Americans have little to no retirement savings. Decades of wage stagnation has left Americans with less buying power, and the economy has been running on consumer debt for a generation. Meanwhile, working Americans have been burdened with forms of inflation the Fed doesn’t give a shit about, like skyrocketing costs for housing and higher education.

When politicians jawbone about “inflation,” they’re talking about the inflation that matters to creditors. Debtors — the bottom 90% — have been burdened with three decades’ worth of steadily mounting inflation that no one talks about. Yesterday, the Prospect ran Nancy Folbre’s outstanding piece on “care inflation” — the skyrocketing costs of day-care, nursing homes, eldercare, etc:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-18-inflation-unfair-costs-of-care/

As Folbre wrote, these costs are doubly burdensome, because they fall on family members (almost entirely women), who have to sacrifice their own earning potential to care for children, or aging people, or disabled family members. The cost of care has increased every year since 1997:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/18/wages-for-housework/#low-wage-workers-vs-poor-consumers

So while politicians and economists talk about rescuing “savers” from having their nest-eggs whittled away by inflation, these savers represent a minuscule and dwindling proportion of the public. The real beneficiaries of interest rate hikes isn’t savers, it’s lenders.

Full employment is bad for the wealthy. When everyone has a job, wages go up, because bosses can’t threaten workers with “exile to the reserve army of the unemployed.” If workers are afraid of ending up jobless and homeless, then executives seeking to increase their own firms’ profits can shift money from workers to shareholders without their workers quitting (and if the workers do quit, there are plenty more desperate for their jobs).

What’s more, those same executives own huge portfolios of “financialized” assets — that is, they own claims on the interest payments that borrowers in the economy pay to creditors.

The purpose of raising interest rates is to “cool the economy,” a euphemism for increasing unemployment and reducing wages. Fighting inflation helps creditors and hurts debtors. The same people who benefit from increased unemployment also benefit from low inflation.

Thus: “the current Fed policy of rapidly raising interest rates to fight inflation by throwing people out of work serves as a wealth protection device for the top one percent.”

Now, it’s also true that high interest rates tend to tank the stock market, and rich people also own a lot of stock. This is where it’s important to draw distinctions within the capital class: the merely rich do things for a living (and thus care about companies’ productive capacity), while the super-rich own things for a living, and care about debt service.

Epstein and Medlin are economists at UMass Amherst, and they built a model that looks at the distributional outcomes (that is, the winners and losers) from interest rate hikes, using data from 40 years’ worth of Fed rate hikes:

https://peri.umass.edu/images/Medlin_Epstein_PERI_inflation_conf_WP.pdf

They concluded that “The net impact of the Fed’s restrictive monetary policy on the wealth of the top one percent depends on the timing and balance of [lower inflation and higher interest]. It turns out that in recent decades the outcome has, on balance, worked out quite well for the wealthy.”

How well? “Without intervention by the Fed, a 6 percent acceleration of inflation would erode their wealth by around 30 percent in real terms after three years…when the Fed intervenes with an aggressive tightening, the 1%’s wealth only declines about 16 percent after three years. That is a 14 percent net gain in real terms.”

This is why you see a split between the one-percenters and the ten-percenters in whether the Fed should continue to jack interest rates up. For the 1%, inflation hikes produce massive, long term gains. For the 10%, those gains are smaller and take longer to materialize.

Meanwhile, when there is mass unemployment, both groups benefit from lower wages and are happy to keep interest rates at zero, a rate that (in the absence of a wealth tax) creates massive asset bubbles that drive up the value of houses, stocks and other things that rich people own lots more of than everyone else.

This explains a lot about the current enthusiasm for high interest rates, despite high interest rates’ ability to cause inflation, as Joseph Stiglitz and Ira Regmi wrote in their recent Roosevelt Institute paper:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/RI_CausesofandResponsestoTodaysInflation_Report_202212.pdf

The two esteemed economists compared interest rate hikes to medieval bloodletting, where “doctors” did “more of the same when their therapy failed until the patient either had a miraculous recovery (for which the bloodletters took credit) or died (which was more likely).”

As they document, workers today aren’t recreating the dread “wage-price spiral” of the 1970s: despite low levels of unemployment, workers wages still aren’t keeping up with inflation. Inflation itself is falling, for the fairly obvious reason that covid supply-chain shocks are dwindling and substitutes for Russian gas are coming online.

Economic activity is “largely below trend,” and with healthy levels of sales in “non-traded goods” (imports), meaning that the stuff that American workers are consuming isn’t coming out of America’s pool of resources or manufactured goods, and that spending is leaving the US economy, rather than contributing to an American firm’s buying power.

Despite this, the Fed has a substantial cheering section for continued interest rates, composed of the ultra-rich and their lickspittle Renfields. While the specifics are quite modern, the underlying dynamic is as old as civilization itself.

Historian Michael Hudson specializes in the role that debt and credit played in different societies. As he’s written, ancient civilizations long ago discovered that without periodic debt cancellation, an ever larger share of a societies’ productive capacity gets diverted to the whims of a small elite of lenders, until civilization itself collapses:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/07/michael-hudson-from-junk-economics-to-a-false-view-of-history-where-western-civilization-took-a-wrong-turn.html

Here’s how that dynamic goes: to produce things, you need inputs. Farmers need seed, fertilizer, and farm-hands to produce crops. Crucially, you need to acquire these inputs before the crops come in — which means you need to be able to buy inputs before you sell the crops. You have to borrow.

In good years, this works out fine. You borrow money, buy your inputs, produce and sell your goods, and repay the debt. But even the best-prepared producer can get a bad beat: floods, droughts, blights, pandemics…Play the game long enough and eventually you’ll find yourself unable to repay the debt.

In the next round, you go into things owing more money than you can cover, even if you have a bumper crop. You sell your crop, pay as much of the debt as you can, and go into the next season having to borrow more on top of the overhang from the last crisis. This continues over time, until you get another crisis, which you have no reserves to cover because they’ve all been eaten up paying off the last crisis. You go further into debt.

Over the long run, this dynamic produces a society of creditors whose wealth increases every year, who can make coercive claims on the productive labor of everyone else, who not only owes them money, but will owe even more as a result of doing the work that is demanded of them.

Successful ancient civilizations fought this with Jubilee: periodic festivals of debt-forgiveness, which were announced when new monarchs assumed their thrones, or after successful wars, or just whenever the creditor class was getting too powerful and threatened the crown.

Of course, creditors hated this and fought it bitterly, just as our modern one-percenters do. When rulers managed to hold them at bay, their nations prospered. But when creditors captured the state and abolished Jubilee, as happened in ancient Rome, the state collapsed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

Are we speedrunning the collapse of Rome? It’s not for me to say, but I strongly recommend reading Margaret Coker’s in-depth Propublica investigation on how title lenders (loansharks that hit desperate, low-income borrowers with triple-digit interest loans) fired any employee who explained to a borrower that they needed to make more than the minimum payment, or they’d never pay off their debts:

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-sales-practices-of-biggest-title-lender-in-us

[Image ID: A vintage postcard illustration of the Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC. The building is spattered with blood. In the foreground is a medieval woodcut of a physician bleeding a woman into a bowl while another woman holds a bowl to catch the blood. The physician's head has been replaced with that of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.]

#pluralistic #worker power #austerity #monetarism #jerome powell #the fed #federal reserve #finance #banking #economics #macroeconomics #interest rates #the american prospect #the great inflation myths #debt #graeber #michael hudson #indenture #medieval bloodletters

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1americanconservative · 2 months

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Argentine President Javier Milei has fulfilled another campaign promise:

Argentina achieved a balanced budget in January for the first time in over a decade.

It was done by cutting many agency budgets by over 50% in real terms.

Who else thinks this needs to happen in the United States?

https://x.com/TaraBull808/status/1759726893614653528?s=20

Javier Milei racks up a big win, balancing a massive 12-year budget deficit in just 9 weeks. Showing spineless Washington Republicans how it's done

Milei's clearing the way to ending Argentina's hyperinflation nightmare and decades-long stagnation. Despite bitter resistance from the socialist union-run opposition.

If he succeeds, he'll be a role model for radically slashing government. Not just in Latin America but the entire world.

Including -- dare we dream -- the alleged small-government champions in Washington.

https://x.com/profstonge/status/1761019288406642868?s=20

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probablyasocialecologist · 9 months

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For most of the time, politicians have ostensibly retreated into the pre-Keynesian view that governments should run like households and seek to ‘balance their books.’ And most of the media has tended to endorse this fallacy. But when it was obviously necessary to act to save the economy, for example after the Global Financial Crisis or during the height of the pandemic when much of the economy had to be shut down, governments suddenly remembered that they have the extraordinary power to create money. After the Global Financial Crisis, the government – via the Bank of England’s Quantitative Easing programme – created around £445 billion of new money to prevent a collapse in the banking system. During COVID, the government created around £450 billion more to prevent a collapse in household finances when people would otherwise have had no income. In total, during the 21st century, the government has created £895 billion of new money – when it had the will to do so. And the view from economists is supportive. The argument for government spending to pay for healthcare, save businesses from bankruptcy, create new jobs and prevent a climate apocalypse has been made by the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory, for example Stephanie Kelton in her book The Deficit Myth. This book explains in detail how money is created and shows that the idea that governments should – or even responsibly could – budget in the same way as a normal household is no more than (admittedly compelling) rhetoric. But politicians and the media have – by and large – reverted to the notion that the government finances constitute a brake on what can be done for the public good. And our government continues to rein-in public spending even though it is clear that most public services are struggling badly.

#money #bank of england #Quantitative Easing #modern monetary theory

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simply-ivanka · 15 days

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Bloomberg Economics made headlines last week when it disclosed that a supercomputer programmed to run millions of simulations about the trajectory of our federal debt found that, in 88 percent of all scenarios, the debt becomes unsustainable. That these results seemed startling enough to produce headlines is probably news in itself—an indication that, despite soaring budget deficits, many people until now believed that our government debt is manageable. Who can blame them? After all, the supercomputer spit out these results just a week after Congress and the White House cemented a deal for a $7.3 trillion budget, with the deficit swelling to $1.8 trillion by 2025, the Congressional Budget Office estimated. If Congress doesn’t worry about our debt, why should the average citizen?

TRUMP 2024

WE KNOW THE DEMOCRATS WILL NOT STOP.

#trump #trump 2024 #president trump #america first #americans first #america #donald trump #democrats #repost #ivanka #put america first

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progressi9 · 4 months

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN POLAND IN LAST DAYS?

To perfectly understand what happened in Poland in last days, we need to take a look back at events that was in October. In Poland election to the Parliament took place at 15th of October 2023. Two main political parties (PiS and KO) got results as 35,38% for PiS (Kaczynski) and 30,70% for KO (Tusk). PiS had more percent of voters but opposition took power because they had more places in parliament. This is because of the fact that opposition includes not only KO but more parties such as the Left, „Third Way” and so on. To make it shorter, we had problems with putting opposition into power, but finally they made it.

While PiS was in power, they had everything. They had media (TVP „Polish Television”), police, courts. The main thing that the opposition need to do is to take this out of them. On Wednesday, the government wanted to take the TVP and make it democratic. However, there was a problem because PiS politicians were inside of the television building and they were protesting against the new power. They said that they are fighting in the name of „freedom of speech”. (How ironic, judging by the fact that they were the people that took this freedom of speech away from the National Television in 2015, after winning the election).

What was happening at the National Television at that time? The „journalists” decided the episode of news program as there was nothing happening. The new government fired them. Before 7:30 pm, they went to another radical and right wing television where they were asked by the journalist about the what happened before (about they be fired).

At 7:30 pm, new journalist from the National Television announced new program on air. It was very short and the journalist Marek Czyż said hello to the viewers and he told: „As you probably heard, there were some changes, so you can expect explanations. Let me explain: no polish citizen, who gives money to public television from they taxes, don’t have a duty to listen to propaganda. No matter of who’s the propaganda”. There is also programme’s new name. There is no „News” (in polish „Wiadomości”) anymore. Now there is „19:30” which is a reference to the hour that the program is on air.

I was watching „19:30” every day since Wednesday and I can say that personally I see some changes. First of all, I would like to tell that I think that there are new journalists. The program seems to be more objective. In example, when they were showing the budget deficit, they showed it how it was during Morawiecki being prime minister (PiS) and during Donald Tusk (current prime minister) so the viewers can make a comparison.

I am still very skeptical about new program. I can’t forget about what was going on before, during PiS government. However, they started in quite a good way and I will be watching it still to have a control about what is going on.

Marek Czyż was TVP journalist before PiS, he left because he could not agree on what was happening with the television during PiS power. Now he came back. I don’t know what it means. Is it will be good or bad? We will see.

I am happy that we are coming back to Europe and that our country is democratic again.

I’ll still be watching their backs about what they will be doing. I chose that party in the elections so that is why I believe that I can demand some things from them. Politics is not black or white, it is grey and that is something that we have to remember about. What will happen with the previous „journalist” from the TVP? Time will tell and we will see.

@fuerst-von-argot

@elenatria

#poland #polska

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 11 months

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In March, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s colleagues laughed as the California Republican mocked President Joe Biden’s age, saying he would bring Biden “soft food” so they could negotiate over the debt ceiling.

But McCarthy apparently did not bring Biden anything to eat during their talks, and the President chewed up the GOP’s debt limit proposal instead. Republicans aren’t laughing anymore.

“Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) tweeted on Tuesday, making clear she opposed the compromise legislation that came out of Biden and McCarthy’s negotiations.

Biden, 80, is the oldest person to serve as President of the U.S., and his age and alleged senility have been a constant focus of Republicans and right-wing commentators, despite assurances from his doctors that there’s nothing wrong with his mind. Polls have also shown that voters have concerns about Biden’s age.

During the debt limit standoff, McCarthy repeatedly said that by refusing to negotiate with Republicans, Biden was “bumbling” the U.S. toward a potentially catastrophic default. Even some Democrats criticized the President for not publicly engaging as much as McCarthy has in recent weeks. But as of Wednesday, default seemed unlikely, and the outlines of the deal appeared favorable to Democrats.

Asked if Biden had gotten the better of McCarthy, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), replied, “Yeah, I think that’s a fair assumption.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), meanwhile, said he believed McCarthy had simply been “misled.” He didn’t say by whom.

Even McCarthy conceded that he had been impressed with Biden’s negotiating team during the talks, calling them “very professional, very smart” and “very tough at the same time.”

But the Speaker has denied that he was outsmarted, touting the bill’s reductions to government spending and stricter “work requirements” for federal food benefits that Democrats opposed. The legislation would reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, in large part due to cuts to non-defense programs, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“How were we outsmarted? The largest cut in the history of Congress. The biggest ability to pull money back,” McCarthy told ABC News on Tuesday. “We’ve got work requirements for welfare where the Democrats said was a red line.”

Still, Biden got plenty of wins in the bill, which cuts federal spending far less than Republicans initially hoped. And in a twist, the CBO said the work requirements won’t reduce spending or enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The program supports 20 million households and already limits benefits for unemployed adults without children or disabilities who are between the ages of 18 and 49, unless they work or perform some other qualifying activity for 20 hours a week. Republicans proposed expanding the work requirement to people in their early 50s, as well as restricting states’ discretion to exempt some recipients. The CBO estimated the Republican proposal would have saved $11 billion and reduced SNAP enrollment by 275,000.

Biden signaled early on that he was open to stricter work requirements for SNAP, just not “anything of any consequence” — a statement that drew mocking laughter from McCarthy and his colleagues as someone, apparently a lawmaker behind the Speaker, shouted, “Loser!”

Sure enough, Biden agreed to expand SNAP’s work rules to people as old as 54 — but the White House also won changes that render the net impact of the bill inconsequential, at least from a budget perspective. The CBO said that, thanks to brand-new work requirement exemptions for veterans and homeless people, the bill would actually increase SNAP enrollment by a small amount and boost federal spending by $2 billion.

The analysis was not a surprise to the White House; a senior administration official said Sunday that “we expect that the number of people subject to SNAP work requirements will stay roughly the same under this agreement.”

The deal also preserves key Democratic priorities like student loan debt relief, climate change funding, and the bulk of investments aimed at making sure the wealthy pay their taxes.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) likened the bill to a “shit sandwich” that Republicans would have to eat — a sentiment shared by other Republicans planning to support the bill in a vote on Wednesday.

That doesn’t mean Democrats don’t have concerns about the legislation. Progressives, in particular, are furious that Biden was forced to negotiate over the debt limit at all, warning that he set a precedent Republicans will exploit time and time again if the debt limit isn’t abolished.

“It rewards the hostage-taking that the Republicans have gotten so damn good at,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Tuesday.

Still, Democrats maintain the GOP has underestimated Biden at every turn, pointing to his many legislative accomplishments in the last Congress, including bipartisan investments in infrastructure and semiconductor research, and his signing of a historic climate change bill.

“If you haven’t figured out by now that our president is in the top 1% of negotiators, you haven’t been paying attention the last two and a half years,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told HuffPost.

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