They’re both Zombie economies

The USA has the benefit of having the world’s most dominant currency as it endeavours to conceal the fact that it is experiencing a debt deflation.  It can therefore print more and more money to keep its zombie businesses going in order to present the illusion of recovery and growth.

This approach is dilatory only, the US living on borrowed time until even neoclassical economists will have to acknowledge the bottoming of another Kondratieff-Wave (viz, that another economic depression has arrived).  The US delaying tactic is much the same approach taken by Japan since 1989, during which time it has sought to prop up its banks instead of letting them go to the wall as a result of their vast 1980s’ real estate excesses.  As with the US, Japan thought it better to try to save face and keep the economy in Zombie land rather than reform its economy by capturing her economic rents to the public coffers (instead of continuing to apply counter-productive taxes).

Africa’s Burkina Faso did not have the luxury of this US or Japanese deception and, like ‘Arab Spring’ countries, its citizens have moved directly to the revolutionary phase by storming parliament. Unfortunately, they’ll be no more successful in their ‘reforms’ than Arab Spring nations.

Why am I so pessimistic about this?

Because, like US citizens, Burkina Fasoans haven’t the wit to overturn the tables on their rent-seeking 0.01%.  They don’t even understand that their economic rents have been stolen.

Nor do we in Australia, where Tony Abbott’s rat-cunning is pointing us towards an extended GST that will most affect those with no capacity to save, instead of to the land taxes proven to be most efficient and to have no deadweight. He knows extending the GST will hurt neither his big rent-seeking mates nor his parliamentary property-speculating fellows.

The argument above is why this site exists: to educate people who, understanding the need for fiscal reform, can learn how land value capture can remedy financial and social collapse.

Alternatively, we can continue down the plug-hole.  We do have this choice.