“In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.”
- George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941.
Get your Free
financial review
To paraphrase Lenin, there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where Trump gets re-elected. Within hours of being reinstalled at the White House, DJT 2.0 had issued a blizzard of executive orders that almost completely consigned the four-year crime spree of a demented Socialist puppet to the Orwellian memory hole. Amongst the things that got defenestrated with extreme prejudice:
- Discriminatory DEI practices
- DEI staff
- Affirmative action mandates in federal government hiring
- The idea that there are more than two sexes
- Working from home
- Joe Biden’s energy regulations
- US membership of the Paris Climate Agreement
- The ongoing incarceration of the January 6th “hostages”
- Government censorship
- Unsecured borders.
All of which led many of us on this side of the pond to cheer, only to be slapped in the mouth with the cold fish of the reality that we are still stuck with an aggressively Socialist administration under Keir Starmer and Rachel from Accounts. The world now seems split between newly rediscovered free(ish) market capitalist ideology versus long-discredited Socialist / globalist contempt for basic human freedoms. A war, in other words, between two fundamentally irreconcilable worlds.
‘Energy Diplomat’ on Substack expressed the popular mood amongst Americans in this response to the sustainedly excellent energy commentators, Doomberg:
“I was optimistic your assertion that COP28 in the UAE in late 2023 was peak ESG and climate catastrophism globally, but I remained concerned its grasp on global energy policy could not be broken in the West. However, I am more and more convinced you are correct. The Trump Administration actions to date have increased my optimism about a return to pragmatism. Climate offices are being shut down, catastrophism is gone from USG messaging, and federal employees who were climate crisis warriors are now rapidly trying to learn about dirty old fossil fuels. A lot of work is left to be done as the rot runs deep, but promising times ahead!”
Substacker Alyosha expressed a similar sentiment:
“There was no way Trump could have foreseen the coordinated resistance to his first term or the depth of its political depravity. But now everyone sees it. What is obvious today, on the 4th day of his administration, is that his lessons are his weapons now. This blitzkrieg of action has blown the opposition, here and abroad, away like a nuclear wind. One could almost feel the testosterone pouring out of the WEF yesterday like a castrated bull being readied for slaughter. Estrogen pouring out of gender insanity. The power of common sense trampling out the wrath of the climate scams.”
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the speed and scale of the Trump fightback against patently self-harming energy policy is not that it happened, but how flimsily the Net Zero narrative had been constructed in the US before it suddenly and seemingly conclusively collapsed in on itself on contact with the most basic reality. This offers hope to those of us in the UK and Europe facing a now thoroughly discredited but wildly expensive green energy policy built on a foundation of little more than outright lies and government corruption.
But there are some things beyond even Supertrump – and easily fixing the US government’s debt predicament is undoubtedly one of them. David Stockman:
“..if something drastic is not done now – like a $2 trillion annual budget savings by the end of Donald Trump’s second term – America will be paying more interest on the public debt within 25 years than the entirety of today’s Federal budget. That’s right: Debt service will exceed current outlays for Social Security, defense, Medicare, education, highways, the national parks, Head Start, interest, and the Washington Monument, too.
“Obviously, the sprawling Federal government and its prodigious expanse of spending and debt literally defies easy comprehension and graspable solutions. After all, the current annual budget of $7 trillion amounts to Federal spending of nearly $20 billion per day and $830 million per hour. And when you talk about the 10-year budget outlook, comprehension literally fades away completely: The current CBO spending baseline for 2025-2034 amounts to $85 trillion or just shy of the annual GDP of the entirety of planet Earth this year.
“So based on experience we suggest that the DOGE team needs to build its $2 trillion case around a target year and several big buckets of savings by broad type. The latter can then be used to fashion a detailed but comprehensible blueprint for arraying and conveying the desperately needed housecleaning of the Federal budget that the DOGE has been tasked with accomplishing.
“In that context, FY 2029 makes the most sense as a target year since it would represent the 4th and outgoing Trump budget; and also one which would give sufficient time for phasing in some of the sweeping cuts that will be needed, but not so far in the distant future as to be largely irrelevant to the here and now of fiscal governance during Donald Trump’s second term.
“We’d also suggest three big buckets of savings, which we would short-hand as follows:
- Slash the Fat….by eliminating unnecessary and wasteful agencies and bureaucrats wholesale.
- Downsize the Muscle….by curtailing national security capacities and functions that have grown up during the Forever Wars but are not needed for an America First foreign policy.
- Cut the Bone….by reducing low-priority entitlements and subsidies that the nation cannot afford, and which a reasonable view of societal equity does not require.
“Needless to say, when it comes to the vast wasteland of the Federal budget there are innumerable ways to skin the cat. But based on our own experience of more than a half-century of familiarity with the Federal budget as both a participant and an informed observer, we judge the following mix to be the most plausible and balanced way to get to the $2 trillion of annual savings by FY 2029.
“To be sure, even this relatively judicious mix is sure to ignite firestorms on the banks of the Potomac like never before, but it can be strongly justified and defended for the reasons we will lay out in detail below.
“Annual DOGE Savings Targets By Component:
- Slash the Fat: $400 billion or 20%.
- Downsize the Muscle: $500 billion or 25%.
- Cut the Bone: $1.1 trillion or 55%.
“Suffice it here to say that the first bucket alone would leave them screaming to high heaven in the swamplands of DC. But even that $400 billion savings could be accomplished only by eliminating 16 agencies entirely, slashing another nine departments by 50%, cutting the balance of the nondefense payroll by 34%, terminating $40 billion per year worth of wasteful farmer subsidies, cancelling entirely $60 billion per year of energy boondoggles including all EV credits, and eliminating $150 billion per year of all other forms of corporate welfare and subsidies embedded in the budget and tax code.
“..attacking the usual shock effect lists of outrageous studies, stupid foreign aid projects, or even payments to dead people, as is often used to illustrate wasteful spending, will get you barely a fractional decimal point of the savings target, as desirable as eliminating this nonsense might be in its own right.
“For instance, a recent “outrageous spending” list showed $4 million was wasted on “Dr. Fauci’s Transgender Monkey Study” and $6 million on a “USAID Fund to Boost Egyptian Tourism,” among countless more absurdities. Still, eliminating these two items would contribute only 0.0005% to the $2 trillion savings target.”
Another dark cloud hanging over the political landscape is the, for want of a better phrase, imperial nature of the entire executive order process. To an admitted outsider, rule by executive order fiat seems to run a coach and horses through the idea of a constitutional framework for democratic government, and the concept of checks and balances against Presidential overreach. It also seems to refashion the Presidential role to something akin to a ‘primus inter pares’ amongst a cadre of philosophically and morally unreliable tech bro robber barons.
But let’s not allow the best to become the enemy of the good. Given what’s at stake, we’ll take robber barons over doctrinaire Communists every day of the week.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and also in systematic trend-following funds.
“In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.”
Get your Free
financial review
To paraphrase Lenin, there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where Trump gets re-elected. Within hours of being reinstalled at the White House, DJT 2.0 had issued a blizzard of executive orders that almost completely consigned the four-year crime spree of a demented Socialist puppet to the Orwellian memory hole. Amongst the things that got defenestrated with extreme prejudice:
All of which led many of us on this side of the pond to cheer, only to be slapped in the mouth with the cold fish of the reality that we are still stuck with an aggressively Socialist administration under Keir Starmer and Rachel from Accounts. The world now seems split between newly rediscovered free(ish) market capitalist ideology versus long-discredited Socialist / globalist contempt for basic human freedoms. A war, in other words, between two fundamentally irreconcilable worlds.
‘Energy Diplomat’ on Substack expressed the popular mood amongst Americans in this response to the sustainedly excellent energy commentators, Doomberg:
“I was optimistic your assertion that COP28 in the UAE in late 2023 was peak ESG and climate catastrophism globally, but I remained concerned its grasp on global energy policy could not be broken in the West. However, I am more and more convinced you are correct. The Trump Administration actions to date have increased my optimism about a return to pragmatism. Climate offices are being shut down, catastrophism is gone from USG messaging, and federal employees who were climate crisis warriors are now rapidly trying to learn about dirty old fossil fuels. A lot of work is left to be done as the rot runs deep, but promising times ahead!”
Substacker Alyosha expressed a similar sentiment:
“There was no way Trump could have foreseen the coordinated resistance to his first term or the depth of its political depravity. But now everyone sees it. What is obvious today, on the 4th day of his administration, is that his lessons are his weapons now. This blitzkrieg of action has blown the opposition, here and abroad, away like a nuclear wind. One could almost feel the testosterone pouring out of the WEF yesterday like a castrated bull being readied for slaughter. Estrogen pouring out of gender insanity. The power of common sense trampling out the wrath of the climate scams.”
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the speed and scale of the Trump fightback against patently self-harming energy policy is not that it happened, but how flimsily the Net Zero narrative had been constructed in the US before it suddenly and seemingly conclusively collapsed in on itself on contact with the most basic reality. This offers hope to those of us in the UK and Europe facing a now thoroughly discredited but wildly expensive green energy policy built on a foundation of little more than outright lies and government corruption.
But there are some things beyond even Supertrump – and easily fixing the US government’s debt predicament is undoubtedly one of them. David Stockman:
“..if something drastic is not done now – like a $2 trillion annual budget savings by the end of Donald Trump’s second term – America will be paying more interest on the public debt within 25 years than the entirety of today’s Federal budget. That’s right: Debt service will exceed current outlays for Social Security, defense, Medicare, education, highways, the national parks, Head Start, interest, and the Washington Monument, too.
“Obviously, the sprawling Federal government and its prodigious expanse of spending and debt literally defies easy comprehension and graspable solutions. After all, the current annual budget of $7 trillion amounts to Federal spending of nearly $20 billion per day and $830 million per hour. And when you talk about the 10-year budget outlook, comprehension literally fades away completely: The current CBO spending baseline for 2025-2034 amounts to $85 trillion or just shy of the annual GDP of the entirety of planet Earth this year.
“So based on experience we suggest that the DOGE team needs to build its $2 trillion case around a target year and several big buckets of savings by broad type. The latter can then be used to fashion a detailed but comprehensible blueprint for arraying and conveying the desperately needed housecleaning of the Federal budget that the DOGE has been tasked with accomplishing.
“In that context, FY 2029 makes the most sense as a target year since it would represent the 4th and outgoing Trump budget; and also one which would give sufficient time for phasing in some of the sweeping cuts that will be needed, but not so far in the distant future as to be largely irrelevant to the here and now of fiscal governance during Donald Trump’s second term.
“We’d also suggest three big buckets of savings, which we would short-hand as follows:
“Needless to say, when it comes to the vast wasteland of the Federal budget there are innumerable ways to skin the cat. But based on our own experience of more than a half-century of familiarity with the Federal budget as both a participant and an informed observer, we judge the following mix to be the most plausible and balanced way to get to the $2 trillion of annual savings by FY 2029.
“To be sure, even this relatively judicious mix is sure to ignite firestorms on the banks of the Potomac like never before, but it can be strongly justified and defended for the reasons we will lay out in detail below.
“Annual DOGE Savings Targets By Component:
“Suffice it here to say that the first bucket alone would leave them screaming to high heaven in the swamplands of DC. But even that $400 billion savings could be accomplished only by eliminating 16 agencies entirely, slashing another nine departments by 50%, cutting the balance of the nondefense payroll by 34%, terminating $40 billion per year worth of wasteful farmer subsidies, cancelling entirely $60 billion per year of energy boondoggles including all EV credits, and eliminating $150 billion per year of all other forms of corporate welfare and subsidies embedded in the budget and tax code.
“..attacking the usual shock effect lists of outrageous studies, stupid foreign aid projects, or even payments to dead people, as is often used to illustrate wasteful spending, will get you barely a fractional decimal point of the savings target, as desirable as eliminating this nonsense might be in its own right.
“For instance, a recent “outrageous spending” list showed $4 million was wasted on “Dr. Fauci’s Transgender Monkey Study” and $6 million on a “USAID Fund to Boost Egyptian Tourism,” among countless more absurdities. Still, eliminating these two items would contribute only 0.0005% to the $2 trillion savings target.”
Another dark cloud hanging over the political landscape is the, for want of a better phrase, imperial nature of the entire executive order process. To an admitted outsider, rule by executive order fiat seems to run a coach and horses through the idea of a constitutional framework for democratic government, and the concept of checks and balances against Presidential overreach. It also seems to refashion the Presidential role to something akin to a ‘primus inter pares’ amongst a cadre of philosophically and morally unreliable tech bro robber barons.
But let’s not allow the best to become the enemy of the good. Given what’s at stake, we’ll take robber barons over doctrinaire Communists every day of the week.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and also in systematic trend-following funds.
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