Economics

Import The Vote!

Authored by Robert Aro via the MisesInstitute,

You wake up tomorrow, finding that in a vote you never thought possible, Ben Bernanke (D), former Chair of the Federal Reserve, has just been installed as President of the United States. Making matters worse, the election in 37 days will secure his position, possibly for the next five years. The other wrinkle, New York City, in addition to all swing states, needs to vote Republican in order to remove him.

…That’s basically what elections are like in Canada… 

Looking at the projections, which were highly inaccurate for the American election, Canada has 343 seats in Parliament to fill (electoral ridings).

CPC (Conservatives/blue) have 126 versus LPC (Liberals/red) having 185; it’s a First Past the Post (FPTP) system, so first to 172 votes takes all. Playing around with the numbers sheds light on the issue, i.e., it seems slanted towards one party. For example, even if the Conservatives win the four maritime provinces considered Liberal strongholds, and Manitoba (MB) in the middle, they’d still only have 162 votes and inevitably lose.

Testing various combinations, the election truly hinges on winning in at least one of the three biggest cities, Toronto, Montreal, and/or Vancouver. Toronto for example had 25 ridings last election.

Like the USA, major cities are notorious for voting “left,” as last election all votes in Toronto went to the Liberal Party.

Naturally, the riding lines rely on guesswork and the bias of its creators. Although the majority of Canadians couldn’t even tell you whose job this is, the calculation looks something like this:

The formula yields some interesting results. Looking at the voter results from 2021:

It’s not uncommon that the party who wins the popular vote manages to lose the election. In 2021 with almost 300,000 less votes than the Conservatives, the Liberals won, ruling over a country of 38 million people via 5.164 million voters.

The election process never seemed quite right in Canada. Through various X posts and the Joe Rogan interview where Elon Musk discusses his experience with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the election strategy becomes quite elucidating. In the interview, Elon says (1:05:30 min) that without massive entitlements to draw foreigners, Democrats would lose a massive number of voters. 

A recent headline from Reuters gives great context:

New York State’s top court on Thursday struck down a New York City law that would have permitted more than 800,000 legal non-citizens to vote in municipal elections.

Musk spoke of this again just last week to Ted Cruz, saying:

By using entitlements fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants.

Should humanity have a future, one can only imagine how this epoch in time is described, where elected officials happily flooded their countries with foreigners in an attempt to enshrine the vote in their favor.

The abstract from the 177-page UN report titled: Replacement Migration, from 2000, illustrates the idea. Based on predictions by the few, being an aging and declining population, requires:

… comprehensive reassessments of many established policies and programmes [SIC], including those relating to international migration. Focusing on these…

Robert Lighthizer: “We’re In A Cold War, A Second Cold War Now”

“A lot of us who were sort of united in this Cold War, particularly in the early years, it kind of brought the country together. We realized we were in a Cold War. Indeed, I think we’re in a Cold War, a second Cold War now,” former US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told Tucker Carlson on a podcast last week while discussing topics ranging from the current failing trade system to trade deficits and more.

Continuing the second Cold War theme, we told readers in 2022 that “The New Cold War Has Begun.”

Over the last decade, the US spent $8.4 trillion on defense, while the rest of NATO spent a fraction of that, around $3.8 trillion.

The ‘Trump Effect’ has created an urgent need for EU countries to boost defense spending in a world where rising geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia drive global superpowers to modernize their armed forces.

In the Americas, Trump has been bolstering efforts to increase hemispheric defense, whether stronger economic integration between the US and Canada or a hardened defense perimeter stretching from the Arctic to the Panama Canal.

Let’s visualize Trump’s hemispheric defense that ultimately will deter China … 

Lighthizer’s view of a second Cold War taking shape is correct. 

Proxy conflicts between global superpowers, an accelerating arms and AI race, economic sanctions, trade wars, and cyber warfare are some of the classic hallmarks of a new Cold War unfolding for the last decade. 

Regarding global military expenditures, Goldman analyst Germaine Khong told clients that the figure topped $2.6 trillion in 2024, accounting for 2.4% of GDP – up from 2.2% in 2021-22, with much of the increase coming from European and Asian countries. 

Khong cited the Geopolitical Risk (GPR) index, a measure of adverse geopolitical events and associated risks based on a count of newspaper headlines covering geopolitical tensions, which finds heightened perceived risk and tension amid conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as well as a worsening Sino-U.S. trade war. 

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Aerospace & Defense-focused funds have been ripping higher and have received inflows totaling $12 billion, with AUM quadrupling to $24 billion, according to Khong, citing fund flow data from EPFR. 

In a separate note, Goldman analyst Sven Jari Stehn and others expect EU defense spending to jump from 1.9% of GDP in 2024 to 2.8% in 2027.

We expect defence spending to increase significantly across the currency union, from 1.9% of GDP in 2024 to 2.8% by 2027 (Exhibit 1, left). We then look for defence spending to eventually reach 3% according to our analysis of Europe’s military needs. In Germany, defence spending already increased from 1.5% before 2022 to 2.1% in 2024 and will from now on be largely exempted from the constitutional debt brake (Exhibit 1, right). In France, a multi-annual budget law already enshrines defence spending of 2% until 2030, and political leaders broadly concur on further increases. In Italy and Spain, the increase in defence will start from a lower level—at 1.4% and…