Category: Corporate Welfare

Because

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, Corporate Welfare, Economics, General, Incentives Matter, The end is nigh, The everything bubble, Too much government, Whither Democracy, Whither Government?

Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery, women have been exceptionally kind to my old age. Leonard Cohen.

That quote has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this post, I just like it and it commences with “because”.

Conspiracy theorists always look for the “because”. It’s human nature to try to make sense of situations, particularly if they are causing you pain, suffering and anxiety.

It’s a fool’s errand though. The chances of someone affected by an externality to correctly guess the sequence of events leading to it are extremely unlikely.

What probably matters more is correctly observing all the pertinent facts about the present and drawing reasonable conclusions about how they might change in the future.

Some observable facts, then.

Using public health as the justification, despite 18 months of data showing it was, at a population level, a mid-severity flu and is now (with vaccines, regardless of what you may think about their safety), a very mild flu, the following changes have occurred:

  • International and domestic border closures,
  • Legislation and heavy-handed policing restricting freedom of movement, freedom of trade, freedom of association,
  • Curfews and military presence in suburban areas,
  • Legislation mandating quarantine of healthy individuals on the suspicion of infection,
  • Legislation mandating vaccinations for certain professions,
  • Closures of schools, replaced by very sub-optimal online lessons,
  • Vaccination of children against a virus that poses little threat to them,
  • Restriction of travel on several major airlines to those with proof of vaccination,
  • International airfares, for those allowed to travel, outside the budget of most people,
  • Unprecedented (there’s a word for our time!) government borrowing and economic stimulus, in the form of direct payments to business and individuals. In many cases, the government cheque is greater than the wage it replaced,
  • In those countries that have lifted some of the legislated restrictions above, the powers to re-impose them have been retained (the UK, for example).

That’s Australia today.

How might these situations change, do we think?

Borders will reopen and flights resume, but not for the plebeians for a very long time. The competition in international air travel drove prices down to a level where a middle class family could leave Australia once every second or third year. That’s not going to happen again for perhaps a decade. You’ll need a vaccination passport too.

Legislation restricting freedom of movement, trade and association will remain on the books, the powers to arbitrarily invoke the laws will be retained and used based on “cases” or new variants. Look at the decades old laws against terrorism for precedent.

Governments will not be tempted in the slightest to turn off the stimulus fire hoses. The creative destruction of free markets will be seen as a sign of policy failure. Universal Basic Income by another name will be here to stay.

Schools will re-open and close again several times based on “cases”. Masks for school kids, perhaps mandatory vaccinations too. Teachers’ unions will make demands for “safety” usually resulting in pay rises. The quality of the outcomes for pupils will be a distant footnote printed in tiny font.

Court cases will be brought by employees fired over vaccinations. They might win, they might not.

Bill’s Opinion

Don’t look for the because. You’ll drive yourself mad.

On the news every night, some idiot financial journalist will tell you “markets rose 17 points today because of new employment data”, or “fell because of new inflation data”.

Unprovable. All we can prove is markets rose or fell.

Similarly, we can’t be certain about the because of the situation we are living in now.

We can make reasonable extrapolations such as those I’ve offered above, though.

What to do then?

Here’s some suggestions:

  • Find a doctor who will give you a vaccine exemption. It might be accepted by employers, airlines, restaurants and governments for a while,
  • If you are eligible for a passport from another country, apply. Having options is wise. Ask any American male with a Canadian passport during the Vietnam draft era.
  • Consider alternative education models for your children. Take control of their curriculum and hire tutors. If you stay within the current system, focus them on what matters only. STEM.
  • Spread your assets across jurisdictions. Be nimble.
  • Perhaps move away from major population centres, if these are where all the police and army presence is focused.
  • Learn to sail. If you one day find it necessary to steal a yacht from the harbour and sail away, having the skills learned in the Day Skipper qualification would be important.

It’s all a bit tin foil hat, isn’t it?

But then, imagine a conversation between your 2019 self and your present day self.

Of course, once we’ve moved to Central Bank Digital Currencies, there will be nowhere left to hide anyway.

So enjoy your current freedoms.

Are any of them studying maths?

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, Corporate Welfare, General, Incentives Matter, Too much government

Universities will foot the bill for international students to return to NSW within weeks, with 250 students to arrive each fortnight on charter flights before quarantining in special accommodation.

The pilot program is expected to start within six weeks and will be scaled up by the end of the year to 500 students each fortnight.

As we discussed recently, in a normal year, Australia brings in about 650,000 students on the “pretend to study for a degree to get permanent residency” scheme.

So, at 250 students a fortnight, the university sector will be back to full capacity in about /checks calculator/ ten years. Five years if they got to the 500 a fortnight rate quickly. Assuming none of those students graduate in the meantime, obviously.

UPDATE: Yeah, my maths was shite today too. The point remains though, it’s lipstick on a pig.

Which is probably a fair assumption given they’re not really spending the money for the quality of the education, but the sticker in the passport.

Bill’s Opinion

I’m willing to bet there was recently a conversation along these lines:

University Chancellors: You’ve got to do something, we’re dying on our arses here. Where our bail out?

State Treasurer: Ok, if you foot the bill for the quarantine accommodation, you can bring in as manly as you want. Roughly how many would that be?

University Chancellors: (stares at shoes, awkwardly).

(By the way, apologies for the lack of verbosity here recently; I’ve been a little distracted. Normal service will be resumed now).

Jenna Hates….. buying leaving drinks

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, Corporate Welfare, Economics, General, Incentives Matter, Jenna hates...

And her exit party might not be far away as the long term career prospects for a lecturer in Humanities in an Australian university can’t be particularly secure.

Today’s whine is on the subject of the financial viability of the university sector, after a year of massively reduced revenue.

In a moment of exquisite irony and demonstrating a profound lack of introspection, Janna Hates discusses critical thinking and freedom of speech. Obviously, she then follows that up by not addressing any of the huge pachyderm-shaped objects in the refectory.

Please bear in mind Jenna teaches journalism, and then wonder about the quality standards we will be subjected to from her students.

The university system in this country is dying. The government used the pandemic to destroy the places for critical conversations; and university management mostly rolled over.

The second sentence both presumes motives, mind reading in other words, and demonstrates a keen grasp of irony when suggesting the Australian academe isn’t an ideological echo chamber.

Mass redundancies, both voluntary and forced across the sector, have left big gaps in teaching staff. In some places that led to decisions to close down subjects, courses, departments. Right now, nearly every university is considering merging faculties.

Which departments are merging, do we think? Physics with Mathematics? Medicine with Engineering? Or maybe Gender Studies with Sociology? Go on, have a guess.

She continues with a complaint over the availability of the government furlough scheme to private but not public universities. Prima facie, that sounds quite damning. Of course, the critical thinkers amongst us might wish to investigate further.

It turns out, some private universities qualified for the furlough schemes due to having a lower turnover and assistance was made available to all universities based on a per capita payment for domestic students.

What two hypotheses might we consider based on those facts?

How about, (1) for reasons unknown, publicly funded universities are significantly larger in financial turnover than private universities and (2) they’d all be a lot better off right now if they didn’t rely heavily on overseas students.

Or, to put it another way, Jenna Hates is complaining because your taxes aren’t being used to bail out the educational infrastructure for overseas students.

Let’s go full reductio ad absurdum; Jenna Hates wants the income tax paid by an Australian worker stacking supermarket shelves on the night shift to be used to subsidise the immigration scam education of Chinese kids with rich parents.

The rest of the article follows the usual modus operandi, wandering all over the place accusing “the government” of being negligent at best but most likely mendacious. Don’t waste your time on it unless you’ve really got nothing better to do. Maybe page to the bottom to spot where she can’t resist having a dig at a man who has been accused without proof, by a dead person, of rape and, because of this, should resign.

Let’s return to the original problem. Australian universities are haemorrhaging cash and are having to cut costs to survive.

That’s interesting, isn’t it. Because, as far as one can tell, Australian high schools are still pumping out kids with all the correct qualifications to go on to higher education. The student loan industry is still active and the economy is going gangbusters.

So why the big problems?

Well…

617,000 overseas students? What’s that as a percentage of all university students in a normal year? About 44%.

How does that compare with another English-speaking country? The UK usually takes about half a million overseas students, or about 20% of the total.

There isn’t a pandemic every year, of course, but even so, a sector which is ostensibly designed to educate a country’s population yet relies on the revenue generated from almost one overseas students for every domestic student was perhaps always built on risky business model.

It’s even worse than that; fees paid by overseas students are often as much as double those paid by domestic students. The first class passengers are subsidising the economy class travellers.

Or, more accurately, they’re not this year. Hence the subject of Jenna Hates’ current cause célèbre.

Bill’s Opinion

I’m really sorry anyone lost their job as a result of the governmental response to the virus. However, the reality is some sectors of the economy were already unsustainable before the pandemic.

An education sector which had grown to provide as many places to people from countries with recognised high quality universities as it does for its domestic customers was one such sector.

If it wasn’t the 2020 pandemic that caught it napping, it would have been the next financial crisis or cooling of international diplomacy.

There is another inconvenient fact our Lecturer in Journalism, Jenna Hates, fails to address; the overseas student visa has been primarily a fast track to residency for many students, with the academic achievement being a far distant second.

Perhaps a shrunken university sector might serve the Australian student population better as it would have to focus on the quality of the teaching of “hard” subjects with, y’know, actual careers waiting for them once they’ve graduated?

Think critically about that for a moment, Jenna Hates.

Australia’s lack of ambition

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Corporate Welfare, Economics, General, Incentives Matter

Stars lobby for Netflix to face 20 per cent local content quota.

Seriously? Just 20%? You’re selling your talent short, guys.

Why not 50% or even 75%? If “Australian content” is so good, surely we should be pushing for more of it? Who doesn’t like “Australian content”?

In fact, why not 89.56161 (recurring) %?

Who on earth wouldn’t want to be faced with pages and pages of Netflix options of shows featuring stars and A listers such as Simon Baker, Marta Dusseldorp, Bryan Brown and Justine Clarke?

We’ve all enjoyed their back catalogues, haven’t we?

Well, at least you’ve heard of these people, right?

Clue: Baker has starred in a USA TV crime series. As for the others, your guess is as good as mine; it’s probably safe to assume they’re panellists on some crappy quiz shows on the ABC.

Anyway, we digress.

This call for legislation mandating the origin of the entertainment offered by Netflix raises many questions. Questions such as:

  • Why is there so little Australian content on Netflix?
  • Of the existing Australian content, how popular is it with the Australian public relative to content from other countries?
  • What’s the international worth of this Australian content? Are other countries lining up to buy it off us faster than we create it?
  • Who the fuck are these so called “stars” and couldn’t they even get Huge Ackman to join them, given his track record of turning up to the opening of anything more significant than an electricity bill?

Bill’s Opinion

There’s a few things going on here. Firstly, this is a very Australian response to the reality and impact of market forces; seek government intervention in the form of protectionism, regulation and subsidies.

From car manufacturing to baked beans, there isn’t an industry in the country that, even before the luxury communism of covid, didn’t benefit from taxpayer largesse. Australia went from being a nation of ex-convict sheep farmers without a chance of leaving to a nation of farmed sheep without a chance of leaving.

More amusingly though, this is the type of lunacy we get when people who get paid to play “let’s pretend” for a living try to interfere in economics and business. That they’ll even get an audience in Canberra for this stupidity also tells us much about the IQ and real life experience of the political class.

In the meantime, anyone with an understanding of economics or recent experience with paging through reams of unpalatable viewing options of woke, race baiting, climate change pushing, unfunny, uninteresting and, frankly, preachy bollocks on Netflix, will be able to tell you what the likely unintended consequences of this will be; cancelled subscriptions.

If your “Australian content” is so good, sell it to us and the world like France does with series like Bureau des Legendes or Dix Pour Cent. Don’t force it on us like medicine.

Toot toot chugga chugga big red car….

Dine and discover unintended consequences

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, Corporate Welfare, General, Incentives Matter, The everything bubble, Too much government

There’s a trial underway in New South Wales which apes Boris Johnson’s “Eat out to help out” stimulus from earlier in the year.

The NSW version is the “Dine and discover” programme.

It’s being trialled in The Rocks area of Sydney, later to be rolled out to the rest of the state.

It differs from the UK version however, as the business categories eligible for the stimulus are far greater, including “scenic and sightseeing transport”, “recreational activities such as go-karting, indoor climbing, mini-golf, billiards, bowling or ice-rinks”, “outdoor adventures”, and “travel agencies and tours“.

Can anyone see a flaw in the scope of the trial and what do we think happens next?

Bueller? Anyone?

There are plenty of pubs and restaurants in The Rocks, but go-karting and outdoor adventures? Not so many. Similarly, there’s not a huge number of travel and touring businesses based out of the small historic part of Sydney.

Why is this a problem?

Well, what won’t be tested as these $25 vouchers are rolled out is whether there’s an opportunity for misuse and fraud.

Anyone who’s ever previously met another human will instinctively know the axiom, if fraud is possible and a large enough number of people are involved, fraud will occur.

Bill’s Opinion

It’s an absolute certainty there will be multiple cases of newly-registered or previously dormant businesses making a load of free money from innovative use of these vouchers.

At its simplest, a scam might simply launder part of the $25 back to the consumer, say, $20 in cash back to you while my “scenic tour business” pockets a fiver and nobody says anything.

More imaginative minds than mine will be working on various elaborate and profitable versions of this idea right now.

This is little league stuff compared with some of the Bernie Madoff-esque scams surely underway already in financial markets, though.

2021 is going to be the “everything bubble” party. Perhaps 2022 is when the hangover kicks in?

2021 surely can’t be any worse?

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, Corporate Welfare, Economics, Hashtag Diversity, Identity Politics, The everything bubble, Too much government, Whither Aussie House Prices

Gonna sleep down in the parlor

And relive my dreams

I’ll close my eyes and I wonder

If everything is as hollow as it seems

When you think that you’ve lost everything

You find out you can always lose a little more

I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down

Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door

Bob Dylan

Last year’s predictions weren’t too far off the mark, with the minor exception of missing a global pandemic and subsequent complete overreaction by practically every national government…..

“Other than that, Mr Waite, how was your holiday in Beirut?”

On to this year’s predictions then:

Australian Politics

Internal borders will continue to open and close like a hooker’s legs throughout the year. The two week quarantine for international travellers will remain all year.

An Australian university will threaten to declare bankruptcy and will be bailed out by the federal or a state government.

An interviewee will point out to a Sky News Australia talking head that they can’t simultaneously berate Dan Andrews for his response to Kung Flu whilst complaining the rest of the world are overreacting to a virus with a 99.93% survival rate.

Global Politics

Kamala Harris will take over the presidency from a medically-impaired Joe Biden. For this selfless act of bravery, she will will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

A proxy war between China and the western powers will be fought in SE Asia.

The USA will return to the Iran nuclear deal. Somewhat related, mysterious explosions will continue to occur at various locations in Iran followed by an innocent face and shrug of the shoulders in Jerusalem.

The UK will have a new Prime Minister, most likely Dishy Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss.

An EU-sceptic party will win an election outright or by enough to form a coalition government in one of the 27 states.

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell will result in weasely apologies and withdrawal from public life of several high profile figures.

A Black Lives Matter leader will be arrested for embezzlement and fraud.

Zeitgeist

The new “Trump TV” internet channel will overtake CNN’s viewing figures within a week of being launched.

As crowds return to sports matches, nobody will kneel before kick off for fear of ridicule.

A new hedonistic and illegal music/dance/drugs genre will emerge as teenagers and twentysomethings kick out against the societal restrictions. It will be inspirational for about as long as the northern hemisphere summer lasts and then it will crash and burn.

Alec Baldwin launches a charity with Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King to help sufferers of the newly identified condition, TransEthnic.

Harry and Megan Windsor-Markle’s podcasts and Netflix output is quietly dropped due to awful listening/viewing figures.

Sport

England wins the Grand Slam in the Six Nations.

The British and Irish Lions tour will go ahead in empty stadia and will be won 2-1 by South Africa.

The Olympics will also go ahead but will be a dull collection of the sports you wouldn’t normally pay to watch, as always.

Economy

Gold will reach new highs and stay above $2,100 an ounce all year.

Bitcoin will reach $35,000 and also fall to $18,000 and back again.

Tesla will reach a market capitalisation of $1 trillion but you still won’t personally know anyone who owns one.

All major stock indices will have and maintain major rises.

Several major airlines will be nationalised.

Bill’s Opinion

Some serious, some jokingly serious.

On verra, on verra.

Everything needs a bail out

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Climate Bollocks, Corporate Welfare, Economics, General, Too much government

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it.
Ronald Reagan
I learned something today; there is a 1c per litre tax on the petrol in my car’s tank used to subsidise Australian oil refineries.

Wait. WHAT???

Worse, the unions and Opposition think this isn’t going far enough.

Primarily, the reason given is the usual “to protect jobs” bollocks.

The government argues keeping refineries open will suppress the price of fuel and modelling suggests wholesale prices would increase by almost 1¢ per litre if production ended, adding up to $4.9 billion over a decade.

Oh good; they’ve got a model.

Well, why didn’t you say so earlier?

We love models in 2020, they’re such a great way to build our confidence in an argument, and they’ve got such a good track record, they’ve never lets us down previously…..

Interestingly, the part not being said aloud in this article is the national security argument. It is referenced by the union though, here.

….our politicians now seem to understand the significance that refineries have to our national and economic security and how difficult the operating environment has been.

A similar low bow was drawn before the car manufacturers took the taxpayers’ money and scarpered.

It was never quite made clear how the ability to build a shitty Holden Commodore would dissuade or slow President Xi and the PLA Navy from steaming into Sydney Harbour and Port Philip Bay with all guns blazing. An allergy to garish paint jobs and shaded windows?

Bill’s Opinion

Putting aside the hilarious concept of Australia needing a refinery for reasons of national security, the protection of refinery jobs is a classic example of the Broken Window Fallacy, best described by Henry Hazlitt.

It’s probably only fair we subsidise fuel refining, after all, we chuck money at wind farms, solar energy and the coal mining industry. Why not oil refineries?

2020; the year we all stopped worrying and learned to love being Keynesians.

A fool and their money

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Corporate Welfare, Economics, General, Incentives Matter, Whither Aussie House Prices

In news that can’t have improved their experience of 2020, it would seem some less than diligent Australians have discovered they’d been “investing” with a female Bernie Madoff.

In the words of Leonard Cohen when he discovered his manager had walked off with much of his wealth, “that can tend to take the shine off your day“.

Whenever one reads of these Ponzi schemes, the depths of gullibility always astound. This one is no exception; statements of investment accounts that were simply the CBA bank logo cut and pasted on to a fake statement and not even the correct number of digits in the bank accounts.

The inference being, none of these “investors” could have ever logged on to their accounts to confirm the balance.

That’s a level of trust bordering on insane.

Speaking of trust, if you believe her husband knew nothing about the fraud, I’ve got a bridge across the river Thames you might like to buy:

“You’re not in trouble“. Riiight.

What was the inflight service like on the private jet to the month long holiday in Aspen, Anthony?

Anthony’s professional life seems to consist of not much activity for several years as a “music producer“. The more cynical and cruel amongst you might suspect he’s been spending a lot more time assisting his wife with her “business” than making shitty bleep bleep music.

Anyway, as we start to run out of new content on Netflix and the cinema while the 2020 break in production flows through to us, this case will be a welcome distraction.

See also, the recent arrest of Joe Anderson and Derek Hatton in the UK’s capital of grief and victimhood, Liverpool. Now that’s a Christmas present worth savouring.

Bill’s Opinion

Stupid and mendacious investments will always find willing suckers and, as long as we don’t fall for them, we get to enjoy the schadenfreude.

However, sometimes one just needs to accept the irrationality and embrace the opportunity. After all, a Ponzi scheme still makes money for some of the initial investors.

Which brings us to this prediction; 2021 will see asset bubbles springing up all over the place. All that easy money being hosed at everything that moves will find a home.

Which asset classes do I think are about to take off?

Gold, silver, the NASDAQ, energy stocks and residential property.

We may as well learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Bird? Plane? No, Superhubris!

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, Corporate Welfare, Economics, General, Incentives Matter, Whither Aussie House Prices

Pension funds in Australia (or “Super”, in the vernacular) are, obviously, a big deal.

To a large degree, they are a captured market as legislation requires all employers to contribute 9.5% of salary into an employee’s chosen fund.

Typically, there isn’t much movement between funds, you are offered one when you start work and many people don’t pay attention to which is good, bad or mediocre.

Similarly, and like passive investors the world over, people don’t tend to pay much attention to what investment choices their Super fund is making on their behalf. One occasionally hears horror stories about people close to retirement in 2008 suddenly discovering they were all in on USA CDOs.

One such Super fund is Hostplus, the “industry” fund for people working in hospitality. Obviously, one doesn’t have to sign up to Hostplus, but I assume it’s one of the main options offered when you start a job.

Hostplus’ members are worst hit by this virus-induced recession and presumably most likely to want to take advantage of the changed rules allowing early access to $20,000 of their money.

Hostplus have a problem though;

They’ve slipped a clause into their product disclosure statement preventing members from withdrawing funds. It’s not clear whether this is even allowed under legislation such as the Corporations Act, but regardless, it’s a bad precedent and one that won’t give people much comfort in the security of their pensions.

There is a some mild amusement to be had at the directors’ expense (well, ultimately the members’ expense, poor bastards);

This from those heady days of January 2020;

Bill’s Opinion

What follows is not financial advice, and you should never seek financial advice from pseudonymous bloggers on the internet.

However if you are young enough for this current crisis to not completely destroy your imminent retirement plans, may I suggest taking a far more active interest in the following elements of your finances;

  1. Is a single managed fund really the best option for you, or should you consider diversifying across funds (e.g. via a self-managed fund)?
  2. If you are staying in a managed fund, are you really invested in diverse (asset class and geography) assets?
  3. Are the management fees fair value?
  4. How quickly can you pivot your investments if required?
  5. How is your financial advisor paid and by whom?

“Feed the birds, tuppence a bag“.

You gotta know when to Holden

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Corporate Welfare, General, Incentives Matter, Too much government

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has declared Australians will be fuming after Holden allowed its business to “wither away” even as it pocketed $2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

For non-Australian readers, Holden is was the brand name for General Motors in Australia and New Zealand, just like Vauxhall in the UK and Opel in Europe.

And, just like all the other brand names, the build quality of the vehicles was woeful. By which I mean, when compared to the overseas competitors’ products, the vehicles were like British Leyland’s Austin Allegro compared to the Toyota Corolla of the time; expensive, fewer features, less reliable, lower prestige.

Given the choice between a German, Japanese, Korean or even a French or Italian car, nobody with the mental age above a fish would choose to buy a Holden. Those few who did, did so out of some bizarre patriotic pride…. bizarre, because what’s the point of being proud of a shite product built by a foreign company?

Of course, this axiom played out over the decades in the Australian car market while market share declined annually as consumers bought every other vehicle brand rather than those locally-produced.

Politicians being, by their nature and the system within which they operate, incentivised only in the short term, pumped ever greater sums of taxpayers’ money into subsidising a company those same taxpayers (as consumers) were voting against.

Both sides of the political spectrum were guilty of this pointless profligacy, citing various fallacious arguments to justify their buying of votes with other people’s money; “saving Aussie jobs”, “ensuring the survival of adjacent industries”, etc.

Perhaps the most laughable reason was “strategic nationally”, by which people meant, “if China or Indonesia ever decide to invade, we can repurpose the Holden factories to make tanks in time to mount a credible defence”.

Yeah, just as long as the tank drivers had been trained in how to replace a faulty gear box ten minutes after driving out of the barracks.

Bill’s Opinion

Holden lingered on in stasis for at least 25 years longer than it should have been allowed. Every taxpayer dollar pumped into the balance sheet of General Motors or added on to the import cost of a foreign competitor, delayed the inevitable and cost Australians twice; once in tax and again in increased prices for a better quality Mitsubishi or Toyota.

Given a choice, politicians always do what’s expedient rather than what’s right.