In the piece about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi laying out an economic agenda as the Democrats' strategy in the midterm elections, I was informed that the Democrats would introduce "pay-go" (sic) rules, under which spending cuts would automatically be balanced by tax increases. And vice versa, so spending increases would require tax cuts. Personally I support "pay-as-you-go" legislation, which is about the only sensible reform proposed by Democrats in ten years, requires all tax cuts to be financed by spending cuts, and vice versa, so that all new fiscal activity is deficit neutral (or better), as opposed to the FT's "pay-go" legislation which puts a statutory burden on Congress to increase the deficit with every budget. Did nobody read this article before it went to print?
And by the way, referring to her as the leader of the opposition party sounds like an American student who just spent a semester at Oxford trying out their adopted British expressions. It would be one thing if the whole article was written from that perspective with a consistent style, but this wasn't. Nancy Pelosi in the lower house of a bicameral legislature, not the House of Commons, and isn't even the most powerful Democratic federal legislator. At least they didn't refer to San Francisco as her "riding" and tell everybody about their superior election methods without acknowledging having 90% fewer votes to count and only one question on the ballot, like certain people do whenever American elections come up on slashdot.
In the article about the House Ethics committee subpoenas, I came across the following quote from the White House Press Secretary, "I understand what the question is because, if I say yes, it's 'Ah-ha! they're going have Hastert'. If no, it's 'Ah-ha! they don't care about kids.' No, I'm not going to jump into that vat of boiling oil, as inviting as it may look." The first sentence seemed so garbled (they're going have Hastert?) that it implied the metaphorical vat of boiling oil Tony Snow was afraid of also contained the rules of English grammar. It seemed like it had to be a misprint, but then again it was Tony Snow.
But then there was the article about EU postal reform, specifically the case of La Poste, the French state-owned post office. The sub-header read "La Poste says Brussels' mail reform plans are unfair to incumbents and wants compensation, [...]". The article opens by explaining that if competition is introduced, the French government is planning to compensate incumbent postal operators for the loss of their monopoly. It's just so delightfully backwards and snarky and... French, the idea that they would stop an enterprise from fixing prices and stifling innovation, but just to be fair give them all the money they would have made doing so. So delightful that apparently the FT just thought they'd make it up to give their English readers a chortle. The rest of the article is actually about how the proposed compensation is for the obligation of universal service to all rural areas that incumbent operations are under, which their competitors would not be. This is actually perfectly reasonable, that the government finance the operations it forces incumbent postal carriers into, to allow them to compete fairly in an open postal market.
Usually this is a pretty good paper, with a high quality of writing and content to go with its delightful salmon hue. Today I didn't even get to the Comment & Analysis page the Europe and Americas sections were so strange. I guess sometimes you just get some bad salmon.
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