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(Today, our friendly mob boss learns the ultimate conclusion of punitive taxation:) Greco was making his rounds, one cool December morning, when he turned the corner and saw an unexpected sight. One of his clients, a shopkeeper who was never late with his protection payments, was sitting on the park bench in front of his shop, covered in bandages, gently rubbing his cheek and temples. “Giannis!” shouted Greco as he strode up. “What happened? Were you in an accident?” Giannis looked up. “Yeah, it was an accident, all right.” “You look like you were hit by a bus!” said Greco....

The 2013 EU budget has been agreed after MEPs signed off on a deal worth €132.8 billion ($173.8 billion) in Strasbourg on Wednesday (12 December). The agreement breaks months of deadlock between MEPs, the commission and national governments. It increases EU spending next year by just €3.8 billion ($4.97 billion), over €5 billion ($6.5 billion) less than the sums demanded by MEPs and the EU executive. It also includes a controversial deal providing just €6.1 billion ($7.98 billion) of emergency funding to the European Commission to cover outstanding bills from 2012. …

The US Is Entering A New Era Of Fiscal Austerity Comstock PartnersDec. 6, 2012, 6:59 PM In discussing the fiscal cliff issue, the one big takeaway not to forget is that it is all about austerity----extreme austerity if we go over the cliff and a lesser amount of austerity if we settle it before year-end. More than likely, this is the start of new era of fiscal austerity in the U.S. In no way do we see this as a solution to the myriad of problems besetting the U.S. economy and stock market. These include the still excessive level of...

Sen. Lindsey Graham said President Barack Obama’s plan to prevent American from going over the fiscal cliff is “a joke.” “I think we’re going over the cliff,” the South Carolina Republican said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “It’s pretty clear to me they’ve made a political calculation. This offer doesn’t remotely deal with entitlement reform in a way to save Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security from imminent bankruptcy.” …

Connecticut is hurting. We have a Democratic Governor with a stacked state house. We've been cooking the books for 20 years (with RINO gov's too). Today, a giant list of cuts was released... Now we'll see what happens. The cuts are here.

When Greece's government pushed through a law last week aimed at slashing public wages and raising taxes, its biggest threat was not the firebrand opposition or the 100,000 protesters thronged at the gates of parliament. It was the assembly's workers themselves, a well-connected group that has long evoked disdain for enjoying the kind of lavish pay and benefits that have become emblematic of the public sector excess at the heart of Greece's debt crisis. The staff dispute that image. But, having discovered that a 500-odd page draft law of cost cuts and tax hikes included a last minute amendment giving...

A woman jumped to her death as bailiffs approached to evict her from her fourth-floor Spanish apartment for failing to pay the mortgage. It was the second apparent suicide linked to evictions and further highlights the dire conditions many Spaniards find themselves in as the country’s economy sinks. The government recently created a task force to study how to reduce evictions because of the devastating personal impact of repossessions due to tough mortgage rules and growing unease among the public on the subject. The unnamed 53-year-old woman threw herself from her balcony in a suburb of Bilbao, the regional Interior...

The Dow plunged 313 points yesterday, but don’t believe news media reports that it was the nearness of the “fiscal cliff” that caused the selloff. What spooked investors is a bigger picture that recognizes the economically catastrophic implications of a second Obama term. To be clear, there is nothing Romney could have done to avoid the deflationary Depression that lies ahead. However, a Romney presidency might have at least served as a reality check on malfeasant fiscal practices, delaying the onslaught of hard times for perhaps long enough to allow Americans to put their financial houses in better order before...

The 1920s began with a severe post WWI depression even worse than the start of the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the Roaring Twenties (get the name?) Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge implemented an austerity strategy, including a re-embracing of the laissez-faire free market policies from the late nineteenth century. It included severely cutting taxes across the board, a huge reduction in government size, massive spending reductions, and extensive deregulation. Their only mistake was not cutting trade barriers, so when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was proposed in 1929 under new President Herbert Hoover to drastically increase tariffs and implement stricter domestic industry protection...

Regardless of who the President is after this close election, the equity markets and the U.S. economy are in trouble. Debt has spread throughout the Western world. The fallout is political dissonance, growing economic hardship and, in some places, mob violence.Ground zero for the spreading fear and panic is Greece, which was once the worldÂ’s greatest civilization and the birthplace of democracy, poetry and philosophy.There is violent evidence of the contradiction from what the ancients taught and what is unraveling in Greece. It would all just be another boring story at the end of the news day, except there is...

WASHINGTON—If Mitt Romney becomes president, he might need a crash course in Diplomacy 101. He irritated Britons and Palestinians during a summer tour abroad and has declared Russia to be America's No. 1 geopolitical foe. Just last week, the Republican candidate, who plans a foreign policy speech Monday, raised eyebrows in Spain by holding it up as a prime example of government spending run amok. That left Spaniards confused, and threatened to reinforce Romney's perceived handicap in international affairs, precisely at a time when lingering questions over the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, has President...

French President François Hollande faced his first serious public backlash after up to 50,000 lined the streets of Paris on Sunday (30 September) in protest against his €37 billion austerity budget. Organizers of the event, which brought together around 60 left-wing groups, claimed that 50,000 protesters took to the streets to denounce the cuts program. "Today is the day the French people launch a movement against the politics of austerity," said the Front de Gauche president, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who finished fourth in the Presidential elections. …

Sweden, like Norway, is often held up as a country which is "socialist and successful." For example, Sweden has high taxes yet also has had healthy economic growth recently. In this century so far, Sweden's total tax bite amounted to 52% of GDP, while the U.S.'s was 32%. Yet Sweden's real GDP grew 2.3% per year from 2001 to 2011, and ours grew only 1.6% per year. Prima facie evidence that high taxes don't kill an economy, right? In July I deconstructed the Norwegian "Miracle," the other "socialist and successful" country. It's Sweden's turn now. Sweden, like Norway, consists of...

Kicking Common Sense Down the Road- By: Larry Walker, Jr. -When one of today’s most brilliant liberal economists recently mentioned the European fiscal crisis, he said, “Spain is suffering the hangover from a huge housing bubble, which caused both an economic boom and a period of inflation that left Spanish industry uncompetitive with the rest of Europe. When the bubble burst, Spain was left with the difficult problem of regaining competitiveness, a painful process that will take years.”Yet, when far less knowledgeable left-wingers, including the President, speak of America’s economic woes, they routinely regurgitate the meaningless thread, “We are suffering...

France's Socialist government on Friday (28 September) unveiled €30 billion ($38.6 billion) worth of tax hikes and spending cuts in a bid to bring the public deficit in line with EU rules next year. Dubbed a "combat budget" by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, the fiscal plan is based on sharp tax increases for the rich (75% on millionaires) and for companies expected to bring in €20 billion ($25.7 billion).The budget is based on the assumption the economy will grow by 0.8 percent.This may prove difficult, as France's growth was zero this year and the continuing eurozone crisis is worsening the...

DOW FALLS 100 AND SPAIN PROTESTS AUSTERITY: Here's What You Need To Know Sam RoSeptember 25, 2012AP Images Market volatility picked up amid some mixed signals from the economy. First the scoreboard: Dow: 13,458, -100.2, -0.7% S&P 500: 1,441, -15.2, -1.0% NASDAQ: 3,117, -43.1, -1.3% And now the top stories: * After the U.S. markets closed yesterday, global economic bellwether Caterpillar shook the earth by cutting its earnings guidance for 2015. "Our goal hasn't changed but the economy has," said management. * However, more evidence suggests the U.S. housing market is recovering. According to S&P Case-Shiller, home prices rose 1.2%...

Greek police protesting against austerity cuts blocked the entrance to the riot police headquarters on Thursday, preventing buses carrying riot police from leaving for the site of major demonstrations this weekend. The government plans to slash police pay in a new round of spending cuts worth nearly 12 billion euros over the next two years. The savings plan is expected to provoke new street protests in the coming weeks by austerity-weary Greeks fed up with repeated wage and pension cuts.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- Greece's unemployment rate surged to 24.4 percent in June, according to official figures Thursday, as protests continued against a massive new austerity package, with police blocking their colleagues from starting work.

The left-wing Socialist party is expected to seize the largest gains in September's Dutch elections, threatening to deprive German Chancellor Angela Merkel of one of her closest allies in response to the eurozone debt crisis. With Dutch voters set to go to the polls on 12 September 12, opinion polls indicated that the Socialist party, which has never formed part of a government, is running marginally ahead of caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte's Liberal party (VVD). … The Socialist party is more euroskeptic than the mainstream Dutch parties, leading opposition to the ill-fated Constitutional Treaty, which was defeated in a...

...Today, the shoe, as they say, is on the other foot. The debt owed by Greece is in the neighbourhood of US $345 billion (reports vary). The likelihood of eventual repayment is very slim indeed. And, not surprisingly, the Greek people feel the same way the German people did following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Correspondingly, events in Greece bear similarities to those seen in Germany in the 1920's. So, will we be looking at a repeat of Weimar Germany for Greece in the coming years? The first developments will most assuredly occur in connection with the new...