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  1. Wealth
March 11, 2013

Please welcome Beppe Grillo and the Grillini

By Spear's

Yes, it’s taken an Italian comedian to wind up the EU: how about taking their Club Med austerity package and stuffing it?

If you’re heading for Italy any time soon, don’t ask the waiter for grissini, ask for Grillini! Yes, it’s taken an Italian comedian to wind up the EU: how about taking their Club Med austerity package and stuffing it?

Some hope, indeed, and now the whole dream of the EU’s pushers has gone up in a puff of smoke, with everyone laughing their socks off – sorry, their calzini off. It would take a comedian to expose the bad EU joke, which is damaging whole nations and a whole generation, and to show it up as the complete economic nonsense that it is.

And then the affronted professional class of Italian political Eurocrats realised they had to do a deal with Signor Grillo and his Grillini, as they had 25% of the vote, but he’s not stupid, and he’s having none of it.

His response: “None of you lot are fit for government, so why would I want to do a deal with any of you losers?” Now the idea of usurping Bunga-Bunga-Berlusconi from his elected office, and parachuting in the unelected Eurocrat Mario-the-Full-EU-Monti doesn’t look so smart at all. His reforms in the name of austerity are now dead in the water.

It’s a real kick in the teeth too for the architect of all this absurdity: Angela Merkel. She has to face her voters in September, on a ticket, she hoped, that said austerity and the eurozone are working. Her problem is that September cannot come soon enough as her own [younger] voters realise she is effectively racking up mind-boggling debts to fund her Bismarckian takeover plans.

The younger generation are looking beyond a federalised Europe, which doesn’t have a future at all in the fast-evolving modern digital world. “It’s not Europe, stupid! It’s now a connected world!” And Brussels is just a pin-prick on a map that no longer exists, in a country that barely exists at all.

The difference between the Disunited Europe and the United States was exemplified when the Republicans put one over on the spendthrift Obama: the new name of the spat between Congress and the White House is called ‘Sequestration’.

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On Friday, Congress took away – sequestered – Obama’s ever-ready cheque book, and made him cut expenditure by $85.0 billion, starting today. It was about time too: as Thatcher said, “The trouble with Socialism is that they run out of other people’s money!” Quite.

But in the US, this is forecast to cut growth by just one half of one percent … Whether that’s enough to tip the US back into a UK-style triple-dip is doubtful, but not impossible.

The cuts will hit military spending very hard, but then the US armed forces are enormous and could do with some refocusing – there’s not a great need for a $125 million joint-strike fighter, when you can zap and bump off Al-Qa’eda with a pilotless drone. Saves money too!

Read more from Stephen Hill

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