Deutschland Thrives, Italia Withers

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=3uVB

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=3uVA

Blue is real GDP as a percentage of Euro area real GDP (indexed at Q4 2007=100), red is nominal GDP as a percentage of Euro area nominal GDP (indexed at Q4 2007=100). Note that, for Italy, nominal GDP was consistently stronger in relative growth than real GDP, especially before 2004, while in Germany, nominal GDP was consistently much weaker in relation to the rest of the Euro area than real GDP until the 2008 financial crisis, after which they both became tightly linked. In fact, for Italy, nominal GDP was so strong that as a share of Euro area nominal GDP, it continued rising until 2004, while for Germany, real GDP was so strong that it grew as a percentage of Euro area real GDP from 2005 to 2008, and continued growing at this same trend (with the exception of the Great Recession, which impacted German real GDP unusually strongly) until the end of the graph, while German nominal GDP as a share of Euro area nominal GDP actually shrunk between 2005 and 2008. This, my friends, is the supply side in action! You can’t realistically hope to see it much more clearly than that. Italy is sclerotic and did terribly even when its demand side was good; Germany is resilient and did surprisingly well when its nominal income performed terribly. In fact, even though its nominal GDP as a percentage of Euro area nominal GDP in late 2013 was far lower than the same in 1999, its real GDP as a percentage of Euro area real GDP was even higher than in late 2013 than in early 1999!

Thanks to Marcus Nunes for inspiration.

BTW, more graphs.

In conclusion, have a free labor market, kids.

On Late 19th Century Indian Famines under British Rule

I’ve been researching this topic intensively over the past couple days and feel as though if I don’t type a post on it today, all my work shall be for nought, as my browser is piling up with tabs at a pace sufficient to prevent me from typing this post after today.

From some point in the first half of the twentieth century to 1990, Great Britain’s GDP (PPP) exceeded that of India. This was despite a much larger population and stronger population growth in the latter than in the former, the latter being ruled by the former, and a re-industrialization in the latter following an 18th and early 19th century de-industrialization. This curious absence of economic development despite the presence of British institutions shows the truth of Adam Smith’s claim that “The difference between the genius of the British constitution which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot perhaps be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries”. For reasons behind this, see Acemoglu 2001. In the late 19th century British Raj, tax revenues as a percentage of income were twice as high as in the U.K. And, indeed, during the first half of the British Raj, India was wreaked with famine so severe, the only only reliable source of food men had was in prison.

Which makes it all the more interesting why, even during the darkest days of the Indian famines of 1876-9, 1896-1897, and 1900-1901, Indian exports of foodgrains to the U.K. continued to constitute roughly 2% of total Indian grain production -enough to feed six million Indians per year in the same quantity they were commonly fed at the time. This was greater than the amount they are fed by foodgrains today, though India has been a consistent net exporter of foodgrains since about 1990 after being a consistent net importer of the same since independence, part of this, obviously, being a result of a dietary shift towards superior goods. The gap between deaths and food exports in the 1876-9 famine was even greater than that in the more severe ones of the 1890s and 1900s. Indian per capita foodgrain production also rose strongly during decades characterized by famine while declining in the decades after 1920, when Indian famines also disappeared, reaching a nadir in the years around independence. Several things may account for this phenomenon- the transformation of India from a net exporter to a net importer of foodstuffs by the 1930s, the revival of the Indian manufacturing sector, the end of the strong El Nino disasters, and the end of the process of the expansion of the cultivation of famine-vulnerable marginal lands.

No doubt this export of grain when there should have been imports took place due to lack of sufficient industrialization -anecdotally, despite British rule, it was still difficult for Indians to acquire European capital. The debt payments to Britain, which hurt, but did not totally prevent, equalization of Indian with world grain prices via inflow of specie, something essential to prevent some grim humor, also couldn’t have helped. Aid to the poor for the whole of India was generally less than half that for the U.K. in nominal currency, despite the latter having less than a sixth of the population of the former. And the vast majority of the British famine aid was spent not on actually delivering any food, but on building railroads. And, indeed, the Indian famines were perfectly soluble by a sufficient amount of British aid; the main victims of the famine were those unemployed by lack of employment opportunities to work the land or to supply those refocusing their purchases on consumption of foodgrains with their goods and services. This manifested itself as both a labor supply shock due to a rising reservation wage and a labor demand shock due to reduced nominal demand for farm and artisan labor.

The effect of the British railroads on Indian famines was decidedly mixed. While the rise of the railroad did lead to increased co-movement of prices throughout India, which might well have made famine toll more severe by raising prices strongly throughout the land, rather than to near-infinite heights in only some parts of it, as well as the elimination of actual shortages (in the economist’s sense) of grain, it also permitted the grain export trade out of India to rise, expand, and continue, even during times of the most dire famine. There were no foodgrain exports out of India before the rise of the railroads. Indian wheat exports, constituting 13% of Indian wheat production and 23% of British wheat imports in 1886, were quite significant, even in the famine of 1876-79. Indian rice exports and internal rice production, however, were much greater at the time, with Indian rice, due to its low price and quality, constituting the majority of rice sold in Europe, nearly half of it being used to produce alcohol, and much of the rice sold in South America during the famine of 1876-9. The rise of the railroads also permitted grain to be exported from already famished Indian provinces to others, with more purchasing power and different comparative advantages.

The stupidity of wasting food by making work a requirement for receiving welfare in order to prevent sloth does not need to be pointed out, of course. Especially in the 1876-9 famine, British famine aid was marked by stupidity.

Now, how, exactly, would Britain have been able to prevent the famines that afflicted India during the late 19th century? Firstly, ban food exports. That would have kept enough food in the country to save millions of lives without even much of an effort on Britain’s part. But, to prevent that food from being consumed solely by the unfamished,  Britain needed to do much more than just ban food exports; prices would have still skyrocketed even with this action due to internal crop failure. Consumption-side cash grants to the unemployed might have been disastrous and counterproductive, as would have price controls, which, while raising affordability of food for the poor, would have resulted in shortages (in the economist’s sense). What needs to be understood is that the demand for food in India was highly price-insensitive -the nominal revenue of able producers strongly spiked with price increases resulting from food supply shocks. The price sensitivity of Indian food supply is less clear. What was needed was to pay more producers to import grain into the famished provinces to sell at a price level set by the British government. This supply-side subsidy would have successfully lowered prices and prevented Indian famines by lowering producers’ marginal cost.

A supply and demand graph of a typical late 19th century Indian famine.

Obviously, structural changes, especially superior institutions, greater market integration, and faster industrialization, would have been superior to all this. But the conditions were not yet ripe for massive outsourcing and offshoring to be profitable for British business and the British government. Had they been, it would have led to changing government policy to promote export-led industrialization and economic development, as actually happened in Puerto Rico and other territories imperialist powers held on to in the age of independence from imperialism.

How does one rank the cruelty of these famines in comparison to those of the Communists? I believe that, overall, the British famines in India were comparable to those of Stalin in the southern Soviet Union. While Stalin did more for the Soviet Union than the British did for India (the Soviet economy was roughly twice the size of that of India at Indian independence; they were roughly comparable in size when Stalin came to power), and the famines under him were smaller than those of British India terms of pure human cost, the famines under Stalin did end up killing a larger proportion of the population in the affected areas than those under the British Empire (with exceptions in the 18th century). Stalin does get a demerit for covering up the famines going on under him in order to avoid embarrassment, while the British at no point did anything of the sort. The 1959-61 famine of Mao, meanwhile, was completely inexcusable; it took place during the early phases of the Green Revolution, when China could have imported millions of tons of grain, it took place over a background of declining mortality since the founding of the PRC, it was covered up by Mao in order to avoid embarrassment, and it was partly caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which should have received special scrutiny of its results from the Chinese leadership, not the cover-up of its failures that it did. Those of Hitler were certainly worse, if not in raw human cost, then in intent. Those of Pol Pot, imperial Japan, and Kim Jong-Il deserve their own special place in hell.

 

Europe: The Real Problem is Real

The Great and Mighty (I do not use those words lightly) economist Scott Sumner has frequently claimed that the 2011-2013 Eurozone crisis was caused by the Eurozone Central Bank’s tight money and (bizarrely) that it’s Trichet’s fault, since it was under him that the Eurozone crisis began. Is this really justified by the facts?

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=31TI

This is perhaps the clearest graph showing my point. While the ratio between Real GDP and the price level stayed the same in the U.S. during the EZ crisis, in the EZ, the ratio sharply collapsed, leading to a far greater crash than explicable by simple differences in nominal GDP. Another look at the same fact, though less clear than the first, and certainly not suitable for viewing without having seen the first:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=31TW

Reasoning from the above graph and imagining the RGDP/Price Level ratio was the same in Europe as in the U.S., while price levels were what they actually were, European RGDP would look something like this:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=31Uh

Assuming European RGDP was multiplied by the quotient of the American and European price levels, European GDP would look like this:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=31Ud

But, you say, this, of course, does not account for the effects of differences in NGDP, only for the effects of differences in price levels. But it does get us closer to imagining a Europe with NGDP problems, but without supply-side problems, which is what we want to do here.

And, indeed, this is what I’ve done. After literally hours of work and half a day after finishing this post (mostly spent asleep) I have at last created a graph that does account for differences in NGDP (or at least the average of the price level and Real GDP, which is close enough for our purposes). The formula should be easy enough to follow:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=32cB

The red and blue lines are the Real GDPs of the U.S. and the Eurozone, respectively. The green line is Eurozone Real GDP assuming the quotient of the American and Eurozone Real GDPs was just as large as the quotient of the American and Eurozone price levels. The purple line is Eurozone Real GDP assuming the quotient of the American and Eurozone Real GDPs was as just large as the quotient of the American and Eurozone averages of the price level and Real GDP (our substitute for nominal GDP here).

If the purple line is to be used, the divergence between American and Eurozone Real GDPs between Q4 2007 and Q3 2013 would be 34.5% due to real causes. If the green line is to be used, the divergence between American and Eurozone Real GDPs between Q4 2007 and Q3 2013 would be 67% due to real causes.

Were an aggregate demand shock the only shock that led to the divergence between American and Eurozone Real GDPs after Q4 2007, Eurozone Real GDP should have been somewhere between the green and purple lines -that is, either none or a negative percentage of the divergence between American and Eurozone Real GDPs would have been due to real causes, as judging by the purple line. As you can see from the graph, in real life, it is most definitely not- somewhere between one and two thirds of the gap is a result of supply-side factors, depending on which line one judges by.

For reference, here’s a graph of the averages of the Real GDP and price level for both the Eurozone and U.S.

So in Europe, the facts are clear: the real problem is real. Let us have no more talk that an aggregate demand shock killed Europe. Were Europe’s problems solely due to aggregate demand, the Eurozone crisis of 2011-2013 would have been known as a two-quarter-long slowdown in late 2012.

Five Years of Against Jebel al-Lawz

This year’s Annual Report.

Last year’s Annual Report.

2013’s Annual Report.

The 2012 Annual Report.

This blog’s first Annual Report.

This blog was founded around 11 AM-12PM Eastern Time on December 29, 2010. By far the most notable event relating to the lands of the Bible and their archaeology which has happened since that day has been the destruction of Libya, Syria, and northern Iraq, by the vile Obama administration and its servant, the Islamic State, which today rules Syrtis, Raqqa, Tadmor, Calah, Nineveh, Mari, Hatra, and virtually all the land of Aram-Naharim. Never on that day or at any time before could I have imagined this occurring.

When I started this blog, Syria seemed like a stable oasis of peace, full of fertile archaeological sites to be explored in the next half decade. By the command of the Great Satan, this has been turned into a land dominated by a covertly U.S., Turkish, and Israeli-backed Caliphate, created by Obama to crush the back of the Axis of Resistance while encouraging the rise of new domestic terrorists to destroy civil liberties both at home and abroad. Less than half a year after I started my blog, Obama killed Bin Laden. We know know that this was not in legitimate and serious faith to fight against the threat of Islamist militancy, but a ploy; a vile and despicable ploy for the Great Satan to take control of the international jihadist movement, destroying any true resistance to its plans for world domination by stealth. Libya seemed like a pretty damaged place, but still a stable one, and not one likely to be home to a U.S. backed faux-reactionary caliphate any time soon.

Nevertheless, despite all the setbacks the Syrian government has suffered during the past year- the loss of Palmyra, Mahin, Bosra, and almost all of Idlib province- it has continued to make gains on the outskirts of Damascus and Aleppo and has gained a new direct ally in the form of Russian airstrikes by that champion of Russian sovereignty and international strength and credit, the most powerful White man in the world, Vladimir Putin. Though the airstrikes have not been effective at effecting any significant territorial transfers, they have weakened the heart of the enemy and have led to renewed confidence among anti-Islamist fighters. Indeed, even as we speak, the Syrian Kurds are advancing across Tishrin dam to combat the American-created menace (although, bitterly enough, by the will of the Americans). There is also good news on the Iraqi front, with Sinjar, Ramadi, Baiji, and Tikrit having been recaptured by previously unwilling elected Iraqi political entities all in the past six months. But we have to remember this is all reversing the losses made during the past two years, and that none of these cities were controlled by any Obama State on the day this blog was founded. Things could have gone differently were different people in charge of the Executive Office (though the present head of the Great Satan may well have been much superior to the vast majority of alternate contenders for that office- thus is the state of America).

I am also hopeful this year for prospects for American politics. Despite the loss of Ron Paul as Representative for Galveston, a great tragedy which shall be mourned, Congress has gained another, much more credible, yet, lukewarm advocate of liberty in the form of his son, Rand Paul, who, sadly, has condemned Russia’s rightful reunification with Krim. However, the most positive development in American politics this year has been the transformation and the rise of Donald Trump, who, while by no means a friend of liberty, free commerce, and privacy, has by far the best foreign policy of any Republican candidate, while also being the clear front-runner today for the Republican nomination.

Though the Ramat Rachel and Ramat Rahel WordPress blogs have not, as of yet, been developed, a new blog has sprung up of my authorship, the Marginal Counterrevolution, a true great addition to the realm of countering the censorship of my comments at the original Marginal Revolution, perhaps the easiest blog to write in the world, as well as whose authors are the most overrated.

My thinking has changed in the past five years. It has become less libertarian, more sympathetic to the claims of racists, sexists, anti-semites, and homophobes, and less concerned with offending the Left. But I have also become less conspiratorial, preferring to see the world of human affairs as a product of interactions between genetics, sincere dreams, conspiracies, and environment, with me having completely failed to have seen the importance of the first on the day of this blog’s foundation, and having neglected the importance of the second. I have also vastly improved in my understanding of macroeconomics, switching from relying mostly on the Austrian school, to relying upon that lightning and sun, that man who is most like what gods are imagined to be, Scott Sumner, a truly great exponent of sound opinion on monetary policy, inequality, and taxation.

This blog has been visited about the same number of times each year since 2013. Comments are down significantly this year, with G.M. Grena preferring to send me notifications by email. This was the year in which the greatest number of pictures was uploaded to this blog, but the number of megabytes of pictures uploaded was also the second-smallest in this blog’s history. The rate of posting has also improved since last year, largely due to greater free time on my part, but this has been almost entirely due to the publication of posts not related to the Lands of the Bible -though I am still sharp there as well, debating some other person on the relevant subject in the comments of this post.

All my most popular posts during my most popular day of each year were above-average ones, with the exception, perhaps, of my first year’s. For some reason, since 2012, every single year my most popular post of the year has been Ron Wyatt: the Saga of the Ark of the Covenant. I consider it a good piece of investigative blogging, but due to its partially speculative nature, it’s by no means the best post on this site.

Let this blog have at least fifteen more years of advocacy and information.

Graphs of the Day

Conclusion: high savings rates are necessary, but insufficient, for strong real GDP growth. Even the oil states will have this pattern, BTW, for obvious reasons. The U.S. savings rate is around 18% of GDP.

This is from Vladimir Popov’s book Mixed Fortunes: An Economic History of China, Russia, and the West, which proposes a mostly wrong theory of the Great Convergence and Great Divergence. It’s too colored by the Soviet experience to make any strong conclusions about either early European industrializers or the Asian Tigers by my taste. I found it when searching for information about the ancient Egyptian economy.

How Much Does National Income Matter for Test Scores: A Look at Yemen, Qatar, Japan and Russia

Once, questioning the commonly-accepted claim of European-level Mongolian IQ, I went looking for some international test scores to get an anchor point for my expectations about the subject. I will report those in a later post. What I found was the 2007 TIMSS reports, and right before the section reporting Mongolian scores, there was a section reporting scores by percentile for most tested countries. Among these, something struck me: the scores for Yemen (GDP per capita in 2007: $1210 nominal currency) and Qatar (GDP per capita in 2007: $84000 nominal currency -neither of those are typos, BTW). Have a gander:

Data here (xlsx).

What surprised me most was that Russia’s and Japan’s science scores were almost exactly the same, with Russia having a larger standard deviation. I also find it curious that while Yemen’s scores in 4th grade math clearly converged with those of Qatar at higher percentiles of achievement, as did Russia’s with Japan’s, this was not the case for Yemen’s and Qatar’s science scores, with there being a near-constant gap at every percentile of achievement in this subject, with only the mildest convergence at the 95th percentile. My guess is this is because while 4th grade mathematical knowledge could easily be gained from a tutor using a few old books, this is not the case for scientific knowledge, which requires a constant updating of sources of educational information and an immersion into a modern environment. Indeed, it is precisely questions like “how are dogs and rabbits similar”, with the answer being that they are both mammals, that have the largest Flynn Effect, with the Flynn effect for Arithmetic (the most important part of Fourth-grade Math) being almost non-existent. This makes me suspect that, consistent with the qualifier in my previous post, there might be a real Flynn-based IQ gap between Yemen and Qatar.

Note that in every case, non-income factors are more important at explaining the Arab test score gap with Japan (per capita GDP in 2007: $34000 nominal currency), and even Russia (per capita GDP in 2007: $9100 nominal currency) than national income per capita.

Update: I now also notice that while the Qatar-Russia Math test score gap remains of roughly the same size across percentiles, this is not the case for the Qatar-Russia science test score gap, where the gap narrows dramatically in the higher percentiles of achievement. This is the reverse of the pattern presented by the Qatar-Yemen test score gaps (see above). It suggests science skills are, on average, have a steeper learning curve than math skills, while science scores are also more affected by national income than math scores. This is all consistent with science scores being more Flynnable than math scores, while math scores being more accurately indicative of innate intellectual ability across space and time.

Recession 2016?

Two of my preferred and most valued leading indicators are not going in a good direction. If the year-to-year growth rate of Real M1 goes below zero and there’s no tech boom, the country’s screwed. In any case, I continue to predict that there will not be a period of longer than ten years in U.S. history with no recession. Nevertheless, the Leading Index for the United States hasn’t experienced any rapid deterioration, so the next recession, while possibly within sight, is not imminent.

I’m certainly not saying the U.S. is in a recession now. All I’m saying is that with tighter monetary policy in this environment, it soon will be. Of course, an economic deterioration in 2016 will be really good for the Republican nominee.

Real Manufacturing Wages in the First World

The Great Stagnation reaches everywhere

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=2i5z

As usual for international comparisons I couldn’t find good PPP numbers for, the peaks are set the same for each country.

As everybody knows, U.S. real average hourly wages have been stagnant for approximately forty years. The influx of women into the labor force has corresponded to women moving into higher-paying occupations, thus having little net effect on real average hourly wages, as well as real average hourly wages for males. As real manufacturing wages have been recorded longer and are the best proxy for real wages in the U.S. as a whole, I’ve used real manufacturing wages here to illustrate their rise and stagnation across the First World. As the U.S. is the richest of the major economies, and has been for a long time, it is to be expected that it has had the slowest rate of real wage growth, and, consequently, longest real wage stagnation.

The major exceptions to the trend of stagnating real wages over the past decade or two I could find are Sweden and especially Finland, which have had strong real manufacturing wage increases in the past couple decades, but these are not known as major manufacturing countries, so I’ve excluded them. Mexico’s real manufacturing wages have been stagnant since 1980 and have been surprisingly stable since the start of the century, and don’t expect any miracles coming out of there. Korea’s real manufacturing wages have doubled since 1990, with the post-Great Recession recovery being much slower than the post-1997 one. Mexico is excluded here because it is not first-world, and Korea is excluded here because it is not all caught up (though it certainly mostly is).

Germany, Italy, and France all have peak real manufacturing wages in the latest period recorded, presumably due to stronger union power than in the U.S. and Canada leading employers to share their income with employees. In the case of Germany, this has coincided with exceptionally low unemployment due to Germany not taking on many unsustainable debt obligations during the 2000-2007 boom. In the cases of Italy and France, real manufacturing wage hikes have coincided with high unemployment. Japan has had falling real manufacturing wages since 2007, and also has also had decently falling unemployment. The U.S. (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Canada) have seen very strong wage stagnation since the late 1970s. The Axis Powers and France (which also had a real GDP/worker peak relative to the U.S. in the 1990s-early 2000s) have a basically similar history of rapid real wage catch-up from the 1950s to the first half of the 1980s, then slower catch-up (though no U.S./Canadian level stagnation) thereafter. Maybe that’s because they were all roughly equally strongly affected by the war, with France a little less so and Japan a little more so, and all recovered from it at the same time.

The interesting story here is the Canadian catch-up. Canada wasn’t affected much by the war, so how did it fall behind the U.S. before the late 1960s, and catch up during the late 1960s-late 1970s? Canada also disproves the leftist implication that U.S.-style real wage stagnation is unique to the U.S. It also seems that the strong European real wage hikes during the period 1973-1983 explain at least some of the rise of European unemployment and (in some countries; not Germany) uncontrolled European inflation, as unions demanded strong late 1960s-style nominal wage hikes and monetary policy makers proceeded to accommodate their demands. Maybe most 1970s-1990s Eurosclerosis can be attributed to European unions expecting the 1960s to go on forever, no matter the changing real economic conditions. Old Krugman once blamed Eurosclerosis on European institutions attempting to enforce equality in a time of universal first-world-wide economic forces (not related to trade) yielding so-called “superstar effects” and other such greater inequality. Perhaps that is the case, with unions keeping real wages high in a time of extraordinary inflation being a large part of this half-failed response to rising equilibrium free-market inequality.

There’s Something Rotten About Leftist Rhetoric Regarding the State of Kansas

To those in the distant future: at the time I’m writing this the present Leftist rhetoric regarding the State of Kansas is composed of crap like this:

“Two years later, in 2014, the promised economic benefits hadn’t arrived – in fact, Kansas was lagging badly in job growth, bleeding money and slashing spending to try to make up for the losses.”

“Point being, the woeful employment numbers in Kansas are now a horrible long-term trend.”

“The governor promised his “pro-growth tax policy” would act “like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy,” but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the state’s credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas’ neighbors.”

Of course, as the good Scott Sumner pointed out, if all this was true, the great mystery was why Sam Brownback was re-elected in 2014.

Needless to say, the above are, to a great extent, leftist lies:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=29Ri

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=29Rk

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=29Rn

I notice nothing important happening since Brownback’s election. Nothing at all. And this graph by Kevin Drum should be a textbook example of how to nakedly lie with statistics. Of course, don’t expect Krugman not to have joined in on the fun.

Also, as the good Scott Sumner says, this shows that, for leftists, the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus depends >100% on how it is named.

More Neo-Nazi Neoconnery

Summary of Cotton’s remarks:

1. Putin is Hitler! We need to be more like Hitler and start an unprovoked attack on Russia*

1.1 Munich! Munich! Munich!

2. Russia is an enemy.

3. Ukraine is under occupation.

4. Estonia and Latvia are worth conducting military operations against!

5. There are still 100s of thousands of refugees left to be made homeless!

6. Appeasement everywhere! Georgia didn’t attack first with its tanks!

7. I can’t pronounce Russian names while spouting on about the country!

8. Krim was invaded! It totally wasn’t the will of the Crimean people to join Russia.

9. I am the new Hitler! Operation Barbarossa 2.0 now!

10. No American arms have been sent to Ukraine!

11. No, seriously, when I said Operation Barbarossa 2.0, I meant it.

12. Also, destroy the Syrian gov’t, and make up phony excuses to prevent the removal of Iranian sanctions.

13. Operation Barbarossa 2.0! Literally! In Eastern Ukraine!

*The alternative to Munich was… what? An unprovoked invasion of Germany.

I want the guy who said you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be a Senator back!!!