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| “I see soft third quarter earnings . . . for you, and for your little dog too!” |
Not kidding:
Legislation being debated in Romania would require witches to get a permit and make it possible to fine or even imprison one whose prediction turns out to be false.Imagine if this were the case with economists. Imagine if every time, say, Jan Hatzius predicted an unemployment number that turned out wrong, or Jim Cramer pitched some stock or other that then immediately tanked, they not only got fined—they even ran the risk of going to jail.
Would we all be happier?
Um . . . yeah.
Accountability makes everything better
ReplyDeleteHey GL
ReplyDeleteI'm from Romania and I am a very big fan of your blog, keep up the good work! The things you talk about here are extraordinary.
Related to the witches LOL - our government wants to tax THE SHIT out of everything because it doesn't have enough money and they thought of creating a law that taxes witches too, meaning that it will be treated like some sort of profession. It is indeed sad and hilarious that we have come to this. I haven't heard anything about fining witches who make wrong predictions, but who knows, anything is possible when it comes to defining the profession of being a witch.
I also want to tell you a bit about Romania:
After completing the IMF loan of 20 billion euro, the IMF conditions made our officials raise taxes, VAT and others, cut salaries by 25% officially (but actually they cut also a lot of bonuses so the end result is an approximately 30-40% cut as an average). Because of the crisis our government doesn't even have enough money to pay the pensions, so it actually took the money from the public investment department and spent it on other debts - pensions, salaries, debts to the banks etc.
Well, let's say that our situation is similar to the US - from what I can tell, but we can't issue debt out of thin air. So we have austerity measures. We also have a political crisis: the current politician leaders are hated outright, corrupt, incredibly stupid - usually they don't do anything about the crisis or other problems like the inability to pay pensions, and when they do, they usually make it worse. For example we had a tax law for a little over an year which had as an effect the shutting down of 300,000 small and medium businesses. Romania is running on a deficit each month but the problem is that we must keep it under 3% which is very difficult.
Anyway, the idea is that it is pretty bad here - although the folks don't realize it, they just keep talking about mundane crap on TV, it all seems stable and working, but it is rotten to the bone.
I wish at least 30% of Romanians were interested and read about the stuff that you present here... Then we would be the best country ever! I'll never stop wondering why people are so ignorant.
The witches responded by putting a curse on the legislature. That's got to be a nice job perk--someone pisses you off, there's no need to sue. Just send Satan after them!
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of casting a spell on the no good bums!
ReplyDeleteFrom: A beautiful day in Kansas.