He works for ABC, er, that's the American one not the Aussie! I met him via the always excellent 'I Hate the Media' site which really should be on your 'Favourites' list. This excerpt from one of his posts made me smile:
"[D]uring his [Obama's] trip to Africa, he said: "No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top".
But of course the American government skims off much more than 20%. Federal taxes alone are roughly that, and when you add in state and local levies, plus the burden of regulation, government in America eats at least 40% of GDP.
If African governments’ skimming off 20% is a bad thing, why is America’s 40% okay, and why is the President trying to make government bigger?"
On another post, he reproduced this graph which 'Oprah' and his gang (I use the word 'gang' deliberately) to persuade people on the desirability of a stimulus package if they wanted to keep job losses to a minimum. In case it is diffucult to see, the light blue line shows what they expected the unemployment rate to be without stimulous, and the dark blue is what it would be with the stimulous. The red plots are, er, the actualite, as they say. Of course, as one of the commenters remarked, this only proves that their estimating ability is useless and that possibly the rate might have been even higher without the stimulous. All I can say is that if it climbed any steeper it would be vertical! You can find John Stossel here and you will, of course, add him to your 'Favourites', won't you?
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