In which the pond cancels our Henry and must make do with Killer and pearls of wisdom ...

 

Whenever the pond's father embarked on one of his anti-Oliver Cromwell tirades, the pond thought that life was decidedly weird for those brought up in a household bearing the weight of history.

If only the pond had the hole in the bucket man as an overbearing uncle, the pond might have considered raging about the events 1599-1658 and the persecution of the Irish to be almost normal.

Consider this elephant memory, this deep bitterness, which bobbed up in the lizard Oz this day...

That rage has deep roots in Shia Islam. Thus, Sheik at-Tabarsi (1073-1153), whose Compendium on the Exegesis of the Qur’an is considered one of Shia scholarship’s greatest works, asserted that God had literally turned Jews into “apes and pigs”, despite their seeming human form. They were consequently so impure that any water source they touched was contaminated, as was merchandise they handled.

Phew, and never mind what Martin Luther might have said.

Talk about a deep, vengeful brooding ...

The battle to foil those plans, said Khomeini, was merely the latest phase in the struggle the Prophet himself initiated in 627AD when he ordered the execution of all the adult male Jews in Medina. The logical inference, explicitly drawn in the vast apocalyptic literature Khomeini’s acolytes produced, was that the Prophet’s struggle would only end when the Jews had been exterminated.

Yes, it was all the fault of the Islamics and never mind what assorted Xians said, or what Adolf - not from an Islamic household the last time the pond checked - actually did, or what all the god botherers said about hapless, persecuted atheists wanting to live a free of religious delusions and internecine wars.

How vengeful does our Henry get this day?

Why he's perfectly comfortable with killing the spawn, offing up the tadpoles...

And yes, Tony Burke is right: the 1.2 per cent or so of Gaza’s children who have perished are hardly responsible for Hamas’s atrocities. But nor were the 1.9 per cent of Japan’s children, the 2 per cent of Germany’s or the 5.5 per cent of Korea’s who lost their lives to bombs, famine and disease in conflicts they had done nothing whatsoever to cause.

Our Henry's being completely biblical ...

Samuel also said unto Saul, “The Lord sent me to anoint thee to be king over His people, over Israel. Now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the Lord.
Thus saith the Lord of hosts: ‘I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he lay in wait for him on the way when he came up from Egypt.
Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’”

Sorry, but the pond really has to categorise all this as shameful hate speech, an incitement to fear and loathing, and madness, a form of barking mad fundamentalist intolerance, made worse by our Henry pretending that his blood lust isn't fundamentalist ...

Just look at the wrap up ...

Moreover, having celebrated, just days ago, the end of the Pacific War, we would do well to remember that the battle of Papua New Guinea, in which Australian soldiers played so heroic a role, cost the life of 2.5 per cent of the islands’ children.
Does Burke really believe the Diggers in PNG were callously trying to prove their “strength” at innocent children’s expense, as he accuses Israel of doing? If so, he should be ashamed of himself. For what they were doing, in sacrificing their own lives, is securing our freedom – and his.
That, in the end, is the tragedy of war. But far from justifying appeasement and acquiescence, it is precisely because of war’s horrors that Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran must be neutralised: not merely for Israel’s sake but for the sake of the people they have repeatedly condemned to hunger, death and despair.
To think the Islamic fundamentalists, inebriated by their fanatical hatred of Jews and of the West, will disarm voluntarily is far worse than stupid. And to think they won’t use a ceasefire to regroup, strike again and unleash yet more bloodshed is far worse than delusional. As Islamists extend their attacks into Australia’s cities, and proudly parade Khomeini’s portrait across our most iconic landmarks, those fantasies betray the recklessness of fools and the political opportunism of charlatans.

One note: the pond has absolutely no idea where our Henry garnered his data. 

How he arrived at 2.5% loss PNG's children in the "battle of Papua New Guinea", when perhaps he means campaign rather than battle, must remain a mystery to the pond, though perhaps there's a correspondent able to offer some insights.

There were many battles in PNG, but these are usually subsumed under the notion of a "campaign", as in the wiki.

The pond fears that that the bloodlust and the pleasure in counting dead children has rather blinded the old bigot.

As for the rest, the pond has decided it constitutes hate speech, does nothing to improve the world and so must be cancelled.

For those who want to imbibe his hate speech, the pond has arranged for our Henry to be available in the archive in full...

If you want your hate speech, you must click for it.

If you want to contemplate how the world has been just one vast bout of incestuous mating - if you believe Exodus - you have to head off to YouTube to wonder where Cain's wife came from ...

The pond realises that the archive can drop in and out, but it's the best that can be done when confronted by a terrifying emotional ugliness.

In later times, the pond abandoned its obsession with Cromwell, but the pond suspects that our Henry is so deep into his fundamentalist thinking that he will never abandon his jihad. 

Take care children if you happen to cross his path...

And so to lighten the mood, a plunge into the hive mind pool ...

The pond could have frolicked with the reptile desire for Albo to be given an excruciating Zelensky style humiliation ...

That was the lead this day ...

EXCLUSIVE
Marles’ meeting with Vance part of mission to secure Trump meeting
The true reason behind Richard Marles’s Washington visit has been revealed, as he made assurances on defence spending and laid the groundwork for a Trump-Albanese meeting.
By Ben Packham and Joe Kelly

And that was the way it was over on the extreme far right ...

Geoff had chambered his way to top of the world ma, with the same angle ...

PM tiptoeing his way towards Trump meeting
After the recent end of the US beef trade ban, there are rising expectations Anthony Albanese will find ways to raise defence spending levels closer to 3.5 per cent of GDP.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Meanwhile the country gets weirder and weirder ...

What entertainment it will be for the reptiles to see Albo mix with that bunch of toadies (hint, be sure to praise the clothes, and ignore the bruising, the poor quality make-up and the blooming cankles).

Also see Jonathan Cohn in The Bulwark, A Still-Unfolding CDC Purge

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the agency with direct responsibility for protecting America’s health—may have just lost its director and four other seasoned leaders, evidently because they dared to push back on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade against vaccinations.
That tentative “may” is necessary because the story is still unfolding this morning. But already it’s shaping up to be a crisis of governance as chaotic and unnerving as anything we’ve seen in the Trump era.
It started late Wednesday afternoon, when the Washington Post reported that Kennedy was about to oust CDC Director Susan Monarez, who has been in the job for less than a month. Just after 5 p.m., HHS seemed to make her firing official with a tweet saying she was “no longer director.”
That’s when things really started to go sideways. At a little after 7 p.m., prominent D.C. attorney Mark Zaid tweeted that he and his partner Abbe Lowell were representing Monarez—and that she had indeed “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives” from Kennedy. But, they added, she had “neither resigned nor yet been fired.”
Eventually the White House put out a statement to some reporters in which it said Monarez had “been terminated” (yes, a lot of passive voice happening!) because she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” But in a pair of midnight tweets, Zaid responded that the termination notice Monarez received—apparently from the White House personnel office—was not sufficient because the CDC director is a presidential appointee, meaning Trump has to fire Monarez directly.
The precise clash or sequence of clashes that precipitated all of this is not fully clear. But there are some key details in the Post story, co-written by staff reporter Dan Diamond, who laid it out in a live video discussion on The Bulwark last night.
And there’s no mystery about the broader conflict playing out. Kennedy has been on a mission to restrict access and to pull research funding for major vaccines, which he says have been shown to cause severe harms that far outweigh their benefits. The scientists at the CDC—like mainstream scientists all over the United States and all over the world—have found these claims preposterous and frightening, thinking among other things about the measles outbreak that just tore through West Texas and killed two unvaccinated children.

And so on, and the original is full of links, with the one to the WaPo story to hand on the archive ...

What a tale of woe that told ...

...After news of efforts to oust Monarez, at least three top CDC officials announced their resignations Wednesday, citing lost funding, the political climate and a broader attack on public health, according to their emails to staff obtained by The Washington Post.
Demetre Daskalakis, the CDC’s top respiratory illness and immunization official, posted his scathing resignation letter on X where he blasted Kennedy and his appointees for unraveling coronavirus vaccine recommendations, which he said “threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people.”
“I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us. Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources,” Daskalakis wrote. “At a hearing, Secretary Kennedy said that Americans should not take medical advice from him. To the contrary, an appropriately briefed and inquisitive Secretary should be a source of health information for the people he serves. As it stands now, I must agree with him, that he should not be considered a source of accurate information.”
The CDC’s chief medical officer, Debra Houry, told staff that “ongoing changes” prevent her from continuing in her job.
“Vaccines save lives — this is an indisputable, well-established, scientific fact,” Houry wrote. “Recently, the overstating of risks and the rise of misinformation have cost lives, as demonstrated by the highest number of U.S. measles cases in 30 years and the violent attack on our agency.”
Dan Jernigan, a longtime official who helped oversee the CDC’s infectious-disease response, also announced his resignation.
Public health advocates had hoped Monarez would be a check on Kennedy and block him from limiting access to vaccines. Kennedy on Wednesday announced that the health agency signed off on new coronavirus vaccines but that the agency limited approval to people 65 and older or who have risk factors for severe coronavirus disease, instead of everyone 6 months and older.

And so on, and that scathing resignation letter can be found here...

 Navigating any or all of this lunacy - the inmates are now in complete control of the asylum - is a fool's errand.

Talk about an epic distraction from the Epstein files, but still that fuss reminded the pond of the vaccine hesitant, mask fear and loathing Killer, out and about this day to destroy dreams in his usual affable Killer way...

The header: Secretly, many politicians are quite happy about unaffordable housing, The time it takes to build a home has jumped from a little more than eight months to almost 13 months over the past three years.

The caption for the execrable illustration: Government regulations have added time and expense to building houses.

The pond realises it might be the only reptile reader distracted by the abysmal stock footage archive snaps that the reptiles these days trot out in lieu of meaningful or sensible illustrations.

But please note how insufferable it's become, as the trend has veered sharply downward into the world of AI slop, or equivalent ... 

On the other hand, the pond's agitation at being bombarded with visual dross is probably no worse than Killer getting agitated about Taylor and Travis ...

Housing Minister Clare O’Neil on social media this week lauded the impending marriage of American multi-millionaire celebrities Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce as “the perfect love story”. I’m not sure which is worse: the minister actually believes it, or her staff thought the message would resonate with voters. Either way, it’s not an especially edifying manifestation of our political culture, albeit being harmless enough.
What’s not so harmless are the endless lies politicians, of all persuasions, tell about their aspirations for the housing market. Practically all of them, including Minister O’Neil, profess to want “more affordable” houses and apartments, but in reality most back policies they must know will have the opposite effect.
The government’s latest plan to subsidise lenders’ mortgage insurance for first-home buyers, allowing them to buy a home with as little as a 5 per cent deposit, is a classic example. Combined with official cuts in interest rates in recent months, cheered on by the political class, Labor’s policy is bound to make homes more expensive and less affordable.
It’s a sad indictment of the level of economic understanding of many voters that it’s not obvious to them that subsidising demand by permitting bigger loans, even for a portion of buyers, will push up prices overall.
Reputable modelling by Lateral Economics for the Insurance Council this week estimated prices would rise between 4 and 7 per cent in the first year of the election pledge alone.
Martin Eftimoski, a former Reserve Bank economist who has joined the nation’s army of real estate advisers, also warned the policy would “set the market for properties between $800,000 and $1.5m on fire in Sydney”.

Not Sydney real estate! 

And then we come to another illustration, as if the sight of an unfinished home had anything to do with anything, and most especially IPA "analysis" (the pond deploys the word lightly, as Killer does) IPA analysis reveals the time it takes to build a new home has jumped from a little more than eight months to almost 13 months in the past three years. Picture: Getty Images

On Killer ranted in his IPA way ...

Independent economist Chris Richardson this week estimated the benefit of saving on LMI would be wiped out if dwelling prices increased only 0.5 per cent in aggregate, let alone the larger, more likely increase in the pipeline.
“We’re actively making housing less affordable at the same time as the ‘help for younger Australians’ translates in practice to ‘more money for older Australians’,” he said.
To be sure, the Coalition’s election pledge to make home loan interest tax-deductible would arguably have pushed up prices even more, for similar reasons.
Government policies have made construction of dwellings more expensive too, by adding a thicket of feel-good planning and environmental regulations that politicians know can only add to the ultimate cost of housing. The time it takes to build a new home has jumped from a little more than eight months to almost 13 months in the past three years, according to Institute of Public Affairs analysis of ABS data. No wonder the government’s vaunted target to build 1.2 million homes by 2029 is projected to fall almost 300,000 short.
And when they do manage to build, governments then inflate costs further with stamp duty, infrastructure levies, and charges that have nothing to do with bricks and mortar but everything to do with state treasuries addicted to property revenue. Every added dollar of these costs is passed on directly to the buyer and, in aggregate, pushes prices further from reach.
The political economy is easy to understand: roughly two-thirds of the voting public, either outright owners or those with a loan, perceive they benefit from rising dwelling prices. Indeed, 68 per cent of Labor and 57 per cent of Coalition politicians own at least two properties, according to analysis this year by the Nine Entertainment papers.
The people making housing policy are disproportionately those who gain from housing inflation. So don’t expect to hear much advocacy for “cheaper housing” because that implies falling house prices – something they know most voters, banks and their own treasuries don’t want. “Affordable housing” is a politically safe euphemism: it signals concern without ever promising to bring prices down.

Killer's rant was broken up by yet another mindless image, Advocacy for “cheaper housing” implies falling house prices, which most voters don’t want. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Was there an upside?

The pond was spared a plunge into bitter religious wars, only to have Killer knock off the dreamings of vulgar youffs ...

I write “perceive they benefit” above because it’s unclear this national desire for ever higher dwelling prices ultimately makes us more prosperous. Quite aside from the obvious fact that aggregate increases don’t alter the property pecking order, the diversion of ever greater shares of income into repaying home loans enriches only the financial and real estate sectors.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence Australia’s embarrassing recent record on productivity and innovation coincides with the era in which speculation on housing became the country’s main economic activity. Capital funnelled into property – often speculative investments such as second homes or rental apartments – yields lower productivity gains than investments in technology, manufacturing, or education. A country where talented young people, such as Eftimoski, become real estate advisers instead of innovators or scientists shouldn’t be surprised when its economic dynamism withers.
Australians should be told that the only durable way to make housing affordable is for housing to become cheaper relative to income. If that means some recent buyers, including myself, don’t get to enjoy the misguided thrill of paper capital gains for a few years, then so be it.
Pruning regulations is laudable but isn’t a silver bullet. Lots of homes, high- and low-density, can already be built but for whatever reason they aren’t. In other words, the actual density of housing observed in any given area is often less than maximum permitted under existing zoning regulations.
Significantly reducing immigration for a time to see the impact on rents and prices would be a valuable experiment.
My fear is a refusal by both sides of politics to countenance anything that might lead to a decline in the value of housing in absolute terms, or relative to other assets, will ultimately lead to extreme, high-tax policies. Calls for the reintroduction of inheritance tax are beginning to be heard. It would be far preferable to let the air slowly come out of dwellings than go down destructive, higher-taxation pathways.
Some greater honesty with voters would be appreciated. Politicians will keep uttering the safe phrase, “more affordable housing”, while quietly celebrating higher prices. It’s a perfect love story of its own: between political cowardice and economic folly.
Adam Creighton is senior fellow and chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Honesty? That's his answer to it all? 

Nah, you're never going to get your own home, you're always going to be waking up at 4am to a sumptuous meal of tar before clocking in for a 25 hour shift before getting up at 4 am again for another starter meal of tar, with a serve of Oz newspaper on the side (no tomato sauce allowed, but plenty of vinegar is to hand)...

And with our Henry cancelled, the pond turned to pearls of wisdom for a bonus, a rare voyage into the world of lemons, without any lemonade resulting ...

The header: Punishing savers fits will with Chalmers’ hard-left agenda, These days our self-funded retirees have become the pantomime villains, benefitting - we are told - from unaffordable tax breaks.

FFS, and there's another of those dreadful, meaningless illustrations, with a caption attached: The savings of older Australian who are self-funding their retirements might be targeted by Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

"Might be"? So we're on a fear and loathing crusade on the basis of a "might be", and must suffer visual pollution as a distraction from the "might be"?

But the snap reveals one thing - the deeply Sydney-centric world of the hive mind, and a walk on the beach. You'll have to wait until the 12th of never to see a snap of Barners and his beloved taking a walk along the Peel river.

With that image polluting the minds of innocents, the pond hastens to add that it likes to think of this dropper of pearls of wisdom as a lightweight Dame Groan, and so it proved to be...

Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s reform roundtable was the stitch-up it always promised to be.
This time around, it wasn’t our nation’s employers who were in the government’s crosshairs, but Australia’s entire population of savers.
Not just our self-funded retirees, but the millions of working-age Australians who – above and beyond their super contributions – choose to save in order to climb the economic ladder, provide for their retirement or self-insure against life’s uncertainties.
In the days leading up to the roundtable, I wrote that Chalmers was bent on reviving Labor’s 2019 savings tax manifesto. This called for a doubling of the capital gains tax rate, sweeping negative gearing restrictions and the abolition of cash franking credits.

When not looting stock photo archives, the reptiles resort to snaps of the head villain looking insufferably smug as he performs a "stitch-up", Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s reform roundtable was the stitch-up it always promised to be.. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

On with the pearls of wisdom about the hard left (oh they're so hard, a woman would shrink in fear at the hardness)...

I suggested that rather than explicitly endorsing these measures, the roundtable would develop a tailored problem definition to help build media support for them.
Right on cue, we now have one: the notion of intergenerational fairness, which in the space of a few days has become a national buzzword. Like many problem definitions offered by the left, this one sounds innocuous enough, but has a nasty sting in its tail.
Chalmers is a foot soldier of the hard left, which has always maintained – whether in its traditional or now progressive guise – a deeply regressive, zero-sum view of the world. This creed holds that if some people succeed in life, it must have been at the expense of others.
Karl Marx’s notion of exploitation pitted the owners of capital against their employees (a belief ACTU boss Sally McManus still appears to hold).
John Maynard Keynes censured savers, who – he argued wrongly – suppressed aggregate demand and forced up unemployment.
And now it is our self-funded retirees who are the pantomime villains, benefiting – we are told – from unaffordable tax breaks and forcing those of working age to carry a heavy tax burden.

At this point the reptiles offered an AV distraction, Stepmates Studios Mark Nicholson says Treasurer Jim Chalmers is perceived as excessively taxing vulnerable populations while avoiding self-reflection on his financial decisions. “He’s not silly, he's actually way more sinister,” Mr Nicholson told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “Now he's armed by this little roundtable, so he can do whatever he wants.”

He can do whatever he wants?

That's not quite how it works in the real world, as any student of "Yes Minister" would realise ...

Sir Humphrey Appleby: A minister can do what he likes.
James Hacker: It's the people's will. I am their leader. I must follow them.

Well yes, if you do what you like James, there might be plenty who might not like it. Remember ...

James Hacker: This is a democracy, and the people don't like it.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: The people are ignorant and misguided.
James Hacker: Humphrey, it was the people who elected me!
[Humphrey nods]

Real pearls of comedy aside, the pond owes its correspondents a profound apology. 

By sheer deviousness and cunning, the reptiles managed to sneak in a 'toon even more dire than the stock photos.

They used to say about modern art that any five year old could do it, and the pond reckons it could draw teeth in a way that would match that tedious attempt at a caricature.

The pond immediately moved to correct this insufferable affront with a redeeming infallible Pope...

Now that's more like it, as the hound erupts from the grave, and now back to the pearls of wisdom ...

This is the dog-whistled message Chalmers is sending, supported by the Grattan Institute and the ANU’s Tax and Transfer Institute. The Commonwealth Bank’s Matt Comyn – knowing what Chalmers wanted to hear – has even called for a wealth tax.
(Think about it. A man who is entrusted with the savings of millions of Australians giving the government a green light to raid them. The bank’s board should sack him.)
Of course, Chalmers’s class war against savers has nothing to do with fairness or helping working-age Australians. It is a desperate tactic from a Treasurer who has lost control of government spending and knows he can’t rely on bracket creep alone to balance the books (even though it will raise the average income tax burden by 15 per cent in the coming decade).
The treasurers of banana republics raid private savings, not those presiding over serious developed economies. And history shows it always ends in tears.
To understand why, we need to remember a basic truism of economics: that without savings, investment and therefore sustained economic growth are not possible (countries can tap overseas savings, but this has limits).

The pond has come to dread the visual interruptions, and this was a corker,  Now it is our self-funded retirees who are the pantomime villains, benefiting – we are told – from unaffordable tax breaks and forcing those of working age to carry a heavy tax burden.

Really reptiles? Why was the pond reminded of all those AI images being used to scam people?

Never mind, back to the ranting ...

When governments overtax savings, not only do they unfairly penalise all people – young, middle-aged and older – who want to set aside part of their income to fund future consumption, they damage the economy’s economic foundations.
As a result, the growth in wages and other incomes will be lower than they otherwise would be, weakening savings even more and drying up government revenues across the board, necessitating further tax assaults.
This is the vicious cycle many failed economies have fallen into.
The economic case for taxing savings far more lightly than labour income is unimpeachable if we are serious about aspiration and economic growth.
Both here and internationally, review after review has called for lower and more consistent, rather than steeper, taxation of savings.
In 2010, the highly respected UK Mirrlees Review recommended the exemption of all savings income from tax (earning a normal competitive return).
The case for a tax mix switch from income to consumption rests largely on the fact it would tax savings more lightly.
And let’s not forget many of the big reforms Hawke, Keating, Howard and Costello championed were pro-savings interventions, including: compulsory superannuation, our dividend imputation system, the capital gains tax discount, the introduction of the GST (and big income tax cuts), and adherence to strict fiscal rules.
If Chalmers goes ahead with an assault on savings, the biggest victims will be working-age Australians. After all, they have the biggest stake in a strongly growing economy. Chalmers claims to have the interests of these people in mind but, lacking a coherent economic framework, he doesn’t see that it is his government that is penalising them.

It's almost a relief to be able to offer a screen cap of an AV distraction, all the better in that it puts these feuding Jimbos on mute (not to mention a silence instead of dog bothering), Shadow Finance Minister James Paterson says Treasurer Jim Chalmers has let spending “get out of control”. Mr Paterson told Sky News host Chris Kenny that Jim Chalmers’ only way of fixing record spending is by “raising taxes”. “So, he’s softening the ground, trying to prepare us for tax increases that Labor did not take to the election.”

And amidst all that ranting, what did the pearls of wisdom man offer as a solution?

First, it insists on taxing wages and salaries in the punitive way and hitting all taxpayers with bracket creep each and every year. By squeezing after-tax income, these policy settings limit the capacity of younger people to save.
Second, by refusing to cut government spending (including by better means-testing of welfare, including pensions and aged care) or commit to balanced budgets, it is locked into raising income taxes further on both present and future generations.
By rejecting a broader or higher GST out of hand, it is all but guaranteeing that result.

Ah, a higher and/or a broader GST, a way to ravage mug punters while protecting the income of the rich.

See King Donald and his new taxing tariff regime...

How's that going?

Through June, US consumers had absorbed 22% of tariff costs, but that share was expected to rise to 67% by October, according to an August 10 estimation from Goldman Sachs economists. That assessment led to a demand from Trump that the investment giant fire its chief economist.
Goldman Sachs economists said they expect that about 70% of the direct costs of the tariffs will eventually fall on the consumer, and that the total could rise to 100% if including the spillover effects of domestic producers raising their prices (something that has already occurred and is expected to continue — more on that below).
There’s a laundry list of reasons why tariff-driven price hikes are a slow boil: Businesses loaded up their warehouses with pre-tariffed goods; higher costs have been split by entities along the supply chain, lessening the blow at the retail store; and Trump’s fits-and-starts approach to tariffs has meant that the bulk of them did not go into effect for months, and many items are exempted (for at least now).
At the same time, inflation has remained relatively tame for both good and not-so-good reasons: Ongoing deflationary trends in key areas, marking a continued unwinding from pandemic-era shortages and price spikes; falling gas prices (they’re down 9.5% from July of last year) amid global economic uncertainty; and then because of depressed consumer demand in areas such as travel.
Still, recent Consumer Price Index inflation reports reveal increases in the cost of certain imports the United States relies on heavily, including household furnishings, linens, tools, toys and sporting goods.
As of August 8, imported goods cost 5% more than pre-tariff trends predicted and domestically produced goods are running 3% higher, according to newly released research from Harvard Business School professor Alberto Cavallo and colleagues.

A bigger and better GST regime? 

Bah, humbug, what we need is to tariff trade up the wazoo ...why, in 30 years time, we'd be able to wipe a gazillion off the national debt.

Sorry, the pond sometimes experiences an AI meltdown, the result of too much exposure to reptile pearls of wisdom.

Please, master of pearls, finish the listicles ...

And third, there is its commitment to net zero, which is lowering living standards today and, through its negative compounding effect on growth, will hurt future generations even more (with no discernible benefit to the climate).
Chalmers underestimates the intelligence of the Australian people. His attempt to revive Labor’s failed 2019 savings tax agenda under the fraudulent banner of intergenerational fairness will be given short shrift outside the Canberra bubble.
By taking the low road, as he always does, all Chalmers has done is given a much-needed leg-up to the opposition.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.

Desperate stuff, but will Sussssan be around to enjoy the much-needed leg-up? 

Per James Massola ...

And that's more than enough of all of that, and time to wrap up proceedings with the immortal Rowe for the day ...

(And for those wondering what that's about ... just do a search) ...

Good on him... now there's a real pearl of wisdom ...