(originally written Nov 2; posted Nov 16)
It looks like the Democrats are going to get clobbered in next week’s tomorrow’s today’s US elections. Economic malaise tends to do this to governing parties, which is one reason currency devaluation is the policy-du-jour: if country A can make its currency cheaper, it becomes more competitive and can export goods (and unemployment!) to countries B, C and D, whose currencies remain more expensive. It’s this kind of race to the bottom which has given gold aficionados their current decade in the sun. Of course, though Hemingway never lived to write about it, the sun also sets… 
The Tea Party’s emergence has been an interesting but predictable phenomenon. The stagnation in American incomes for the past generation has finally hit a boiling point (what took so long?). Increased prosperity has largely been confined to the top 1% — and even then mainly the top 0.1% — of income earners in the population; those nice folks whose job titles begin with “Chief” and end with “Officer”.
In many cases, union-busting concessions levied in the name of improving competitiveness went straight into C-suite compensation: “trickle-up economics”, as it were. I don’t have the American numbers handy, but here are some Canadian ones. Perhaps one day, left-leaning parties will realize that they’ll get more support if they confine talk of tax increases to the very, very topmost folks. Noblesse oblige, and all that.
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