Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 16sep19 (updated 17sep19)

George Rebane

The Trump haters led by the NYT did their best to relaunch the smear campaign against Justice Kavanaugh.  The formerly prestigious newspaper continued to dig its journalistic grave by publishing a carefully constructed story of another sexual escapade the Justice was supposed to have participated in as an undergraduate, and then later had to ‘amend’ it in response to a public outcry for the truth.  Well, it turns out that in the process the NYT rolled another fake news honey wagon down the street, immediately onto which jumped about twelve leading Dem presidential candidates to start spreading its contents through the lamestream media.  Our moral high-ground progressives (witness also these pages) have decided to respond with their usual crickets.  It’s telling that even Nadler is not going to touch this one with a ten-foot ladle.

Fox News should review the grade school credentials of some of its news editors.  Tonight on Bret Bayer a map showing the latest Iran/Saudi crisis had Oman labeled as the UAE, and the entire Arabian Sea as the greatly expanded Persian Gulf.  Our criticisms of the post-Great Society disaster in educating America’s kids is confirmed daily in what we see and hear on the news.

[17sep19 update]  My main desktop computer died on Sunday morning.  And I mean died, like in DEAD – even its operating system Windows10 did not load, it just got to BIOS and went belly up.  The tech mavens at Quietech (my goto PC docs) diagnosed it as having a hardware failure that required ordering a replacement part from China which will take at least a week to arrive.  Having PCs since ‘Day One’, I have never experienced such a failure in over 40 years.  We always have a bunch of computers around the house, but losing my main brain left me somewhere between devastated and discombobulated (I think psychiatrists know the difference).  The emotional experience was/is an interesting episode, and very revealing about my dependencies.  The dearly departed and about to be resurrected is a very large and very fast Alienware laptop game computer that can juggle multi-million element matrices in a single bound (yes, I still spend time messing with such beasts).  Now Jo Ann has the only working Windows box left in the house; the rest of our laptops, pads, and phones are all Apple products – e.g. I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro which lives in the front room by a comfy couch.  My self-indulging response to all this is having another super-fast (AMD 8-core, 16 thread) Windows tower built that will be delivered with a new 32 inch high-res monitor which will join my formerly biggest 27-incher.  Both of us got addicted to two-monitor setups some years back, and having only one screen to work with is now downright stifling.  Anyway, that’s more than you wanted to know about my current emotional shock and functional deficit.

Dropout Derby - 21aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Inslee bites the dust.

Scattershots – 20aug19 (updated 23aug19)

“nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort”, William Ewart Gladstone (1809 – 1898)

George Rebane

I’m old enough to remember when TVs were the big new whizbang thing.  We common folks were then told of all the wonders that a live screen with sound would be bringing into our living rooms.  And then came computers, and the news was full of how businesses were doing this and that with those new-fangled number crunchers.  After that it was the internet, and we learned to expect all of its wonders, and now we read the breathless reports of AI starting to do all things good and also its (biased, gasp!) dark side.  All of those technologies quickly faded into commonplace roles in our lives.  The next big thing will be personal AGI (artificial general intelligence) companions whom we will demand and trust more than fellow humans.  And this will scare the crap out of autocratic governments – keep your eye on Sacramento and DC.

Meritocracy is a bad thing in modern society, so points out a recent article in The (leftwing) Atlantic. (H/T to Sandbox commenter)  It causes all kinds of bad psychological problems and promotes inequality – kids from richer homes are smarter than those from poorer homes (Stop the presses!).  Therefore, they wind up working ridiculously hard in school and the workplace, and get stressed out as they dominate the 1% class.  The solution, force universities to admit a certain percentage of the dumber students.  Or maybe in the future the smarter ones must have a noise making chip implanted into their skulls to disrupt longer thinking processes, or maybe the too smart ones will just be culled by the state like shown on a Twilight Zone episode long ago (here).

A Pence/Harris VP debate next year is anticipated with some glee by our liberals.  They can just see Harris taking down VP Pence in a one-on-one encounter.  I would counsel a little trimming of such hopes because Mike Pence is not a Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris is definitely not the brightest bulb on an otherwise dimly lit Democrat tree.  Harris commands little to no basis for arguing substantive issues; all she can do is attempt to sway the lightly read with emotional anecdotes.  These the VP can easily dispatch by pointing out the aggregate impacts that such radical leftwing policies have delivered elsewhere, and now portend for the country.

Preventable man-made global warming (PMGW) ascendant. Notice the increased hysterics in the media about all the disastrous effects caused by PMGW.  Time after time the warming data is shown to be politically motivated hokum, but that makes no never mind to the fear mongers (the lamestream does not air that side).  The new level of hysteria is being ramped up by the Dems for 2020 as a back-up argument for their policies that promise to deliver the country's new socialist sunrise.  The message – capitalism causes PMGW that will kill the planet, socialism is the only hope to save mankind.  A good fraction of our electorate has been carefully cultured to uncritically embrace such arguments.

[21aug19 update]  “… the clicking of jack boots and rifle bolts.” As witnessed on RR over the years, this is the form of governance legions of leftists have convinced themselves that conservative America seeks.  They ignore that it is and has been only the goose-stepping collectivists that have constructed leviathans in which citizens are kept in line by such displays and applications of state power.  But true to Lenin and Alinsky, they were taught early to counter political opponents by loudly accusing them of one’s own worst practices.  And as history has shown, you can fool enough of the people all the time to bring down somnambulant republics.

[22aug19 update] ‘Americans Are Richer Than We Think’ write economists Phil Gramm and John Early.  The Democrats and their lamestream lapdogs have done all they can to convince America that we live in a bad economy that doesn’t benefit anyone but the rich, and (go figger) they turn around and tell us that our good economy is about to take a dive.  And all will be well again once we fundamentally transform the country and put it on a firm socialist track. Such reasoning fits well with the liberal mindset.  Gramm and Early present loads of data that debunk the leftwing's advertised misery of the middle class.

Russ Steele has an excellent idea on how to take a census of rural folks who don’t have access to broadband.  Everyone has been trying to get their hands around that problem in order to come up with good public policies that enable government and the private sector to work together in correcting this deficit.  Russ suggests that we use the upcoming census to gather this data.  The details are in his 22aug19 ‘Overwhelmed and Under-counted’ letter to The Union.

US acquiring Greenland. Trump’s recent proposal to Denmark on the reprise of this idea (first proposed under President Truman) has been peremptorily identified as looney by the Left (and a few on the Right), and offered in the lamestream as further evidence that The Donald’s elevator doesn’t go to the top floor.  Now I don’t particularly agree with the way that our president again introduced this proposal; it should have been done quietly at lower levels of diplomatic contact.  But on the overall concept, I think that there exist several approaches in which that piece of strategically located and resource rich real estate can benefit both us and the Danes if the US got or shared sovereignty over Greenland.  The Left in their mirth appear to have put as much thought into the matter as do hyenas before beginning their bouts of ‘laughter’.  (Here is a more sober discussion of this in Politico, and here is Sen Tom Cotton's overture last year.)

[23aug19 update]  Union publisher Don Rogers writes an enticing, yet in the end disappointing, meditation on the meaning of life in today’s paper.  In his ‘The Meaning of Life?’ he takes us on a short journey of futility while keeping hope alive, and then (trigger warning) summarily drops us off with “Life is what life does”? -86-  OK, but then why bother to lead us “befuddled pilgrims” by the nose to ‘It is what it is.’?  Actually, I’m just exposing my naivete here.  One should always temper one’s expectations when reading our beloved Union. 😉

Democrats’ Big Lie #3671 – America’s economy

George Rebane

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, our Left has marshalled their legion of liars to spread the word to the lightly read that Trump’s revamping of our economy to historical levels has not happened, and that only the top 1% derived any benefit from the tax cuts and regulation rollbacks.  This kind of concerted lying campaign does immeasurable harm to the lower half of the IQ curve, causing these folks to vote against their own self interests.  But that makes no never mind to our progressive Democrats; do whatever keeps and increases your power, and bamboozling the snuffies has always been part of the drill.

It’s instructive to take a look at the magnitude of this particular stream of lies from the Left that started back in Obama’s time when we were assured that a max of 2% annual growth was going to be “the new normal”.  And, of course, Team Obama demonstrated that dictum over his tenure which averaged growth under 2%.  These people pulled every trick in the book to stifle the economy and keep workers’ wage growth essentially flat, all the while lying that they were helping the little guy and middle class.  The little guys took it in the shorts also as the Dems boosted the minimum wage wherever possible so as to make the lower rungs of the economic ladder ever more inaccessible to our unskilled and youngest workers starting their careers.

Conservatives and capitalists have known for generations that a rising tide lifts all boats, in direct contradiction to the Left’s teaching that the only friend of the poor and unskilled is big and bigger government.  Here’s a graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to demonstrate the difference between Obama and Trump (filched from the 5jul19 WSJ).

By 2012 it was clear to most Americans that Obama was a socialist who had little interest in implementing demonstrated economic principles to recover the economy from its 2009 Great Recession lows.  I waxed eloquently on this in my ‘What Recovery?’ essay.  In that piece I presented a clear and concise systems flow diagram for how the GDP is calculated from its major components.  It even pointed out how and where the government just pisses away generated wealth.

Most of us don’t have a clue when talking about economic recovery and growth.  Recovery is in the eyes of the beholder, and economic growth is not experienced as a one size fits all – different sectors benefit differentially from any given level of quoted aggregate growth, as the following graphic illustrates.

America’s economy has grown in a remarkably constant range of 3.3-3.4% annually from 1880 to 2008 on the eve of the Great Recession.  To explain the different recovery flavors, I indicated such an exponential growth as the green line in the above graph taken from ‘The Recovery Rigamarole’.  The arbitrary GDP amounts shown vary as a function of time, say, in years.  At year 40 a recession/depression occurs that takes the GDP from around 225 down to 135 over a ten year period.  At year 50 the economy begins to recover.  But from there several 'recovery' paths are possible, three of which (R1, R2, R3) are shown.  At this point it’s important to keep in mind that if the economy’s dip (red line) did not occur, then it would have continued growing at its long term (green line) rate – e.g. at year 50 it would have been about 265.

R1 is clearly a true recovery that regains the long-term growth curve.  R2 is a more tendentious recovery that does achieve the pre-recession growth rate, but perennially lags the sans recession GDP growth trend.  And finally, R3 is at best a propagandized faux recovery, achieving neither the pre-recession growth rate nor its long term trend.

The continuing dissemination of this Big Lie about Trump's economy by the lamestream is one of the most visible pieces of evidence for the ongoing progressive propaganda onslaught through the auspices of fake news.

 

The tragically populous tails of terror (updated 10aug19)

George Rebane

Last weekend’s El Paso and Dayton shootings are today’s national conversation, a conversation that does not yet communicate much beyond the emotional demand that something must be done.  The conversation is yet a babble that has little reason, meaning, or direction in either working toward a shared understanding of the problem, and most certainly not toward any shared understanding of possible solutions, were they even to exist.

The little contribution here is only to record my own perceptions and feelings, and not offered as some definitive insight, the application/adoption of which would miraculously relieve our national pain.  The overarching insight is that all these nativist massacres (as opposed to those motivated by foreign ideology/theology) are the inevitable result of a growing cultural deficit.  The population distribution of cultures has become flatter as the former dominant cultures are practiced by ever fewer people – in a statistical sense, the tails of such distribution of multiple cultures are becoming fatter, and therefore more populous.  This means that the number of people who invent, join, practice new and extreme cultures and belief systems is rapidly growing.  The inevitable result of such an amalgam is that more and more individuals are out there on the borderline of doing something to act out their recently acquired and strongly held beliefs about what is wrong with the society in which they find themselves.  And with more on the borderline, more are likely to cross it with the results we see.

The Lamestream’s Russia Collusion Illuminated

George Rebane

Holman Jenkins in his ‘What Ails the US Press?’ expands the strong point, much massaged in these pages, that “the media’s lack of interest in the Steele dossier amounts to collusion in a coverup.”  In this 3aug19 WSJ piece he lays it out so well that I decided to let RR readers crawl under the paywall and read the whole thing themselves

Ruminations – 3aug19

George Rebane

Our favorite double-dummy communist, Umair Haque writing in Medium, continues his dive into the abyss of ideological idiocy with his latest essay attempting to explain ‘fascism’ to American readers.  In a piece titled ‘America Is Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don’t Understand Fascism’ he does a great job of confusing the matter even further on his journey into regions of history and semantics in which he is a complete naif.  It’s worth a read though, if only to understand how our lightly-read are swayed.

George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility is the latest book to go on my reading list.  The sometimes conservative commentator has enjoyed a long career purveying his right of center ideology in the media (a regular on NBC, MSNBC, WaPo, and the National Review).  Will is both an anti-Trumper and an anti-Republican who shares my belief that our country’s march to collectivism has passed the tipping point, and that conservatism is in a terminal decline – the “Right’s losing battle against progressivism.”  (more here)

For a little light-hearted, local comical relief, I direct your attention to Terry Lamphier’s ‘Grass Valley’s burning desire for growth’.  There I challenge you to discover Mr Lamphier’s point of the article, save his eternal opposition to the county’s growth.  The man continues his established tradition of writing articles both long-winded and opaque.

Tariffs – who really pays

George Rebane

President Trump’s current tariff wars are definitely having a mixed impact on economies in the US and around the world.  His claim that ‘China is now paying us billions in tariffs’ is patently false.  But most people still think that tariffs on Chinese imports now consist of the imported goods plus a check for the tariff amount written by someone in China.  And that a 25% tariff on Chinese imports will increase their price for such goods by 25%.  Not so.

Tariffs on imported goods are paid for by the US registered importers to our Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency within 10 days of the goods landing in the US, which monies go into the Treasury's general fund of tax collections.  That, of course, increases the cost of doing business since the importer must now increase his, usually financed, operating capital by the amount of the tariff, thereby increasing both the direct cost of what he buys, and also adding the cost of financing the tariff amount. (more here)

To see how the tariff impacts us on the receiving end, consider the rule-of-thumb breakdown of end-user price.  For most things the ‘one-thirds rule’ applies – 1/3 to the manufacturer, 1/3 to distribution, 1/3 to the retailer (end-seller).  That means that the distributor (distribution channel) charges the end-seller twice its cost(s) for the item, and the end-seller then adds 50% of his cost to arrive at the price the end-user must pay.

So, let’s look at a pair of athletic shoes for which the consumer pays a pre-tariff $100.  The Chinese manufacturer sells these out the door for, say, $32.  The importer (distributor) must pay, say, a 25% tariff on the goods, or $8 to the CBP for a total cost of $40 for the shoes at the port of entry.  Now how much of that additional $8 cost he passes on to the retailer depends on what kind of a hit he’s willing to take on his profit margin.  Say, he’s willing to swallow half the increased cost, so he sells the shoes to the retailer for 2*($32 + 0.5*$8) = $72.  If the retailer now followed the one-third rule, then the price for the end-user consumer would be 1.5*$72 = $108, or an 8% price increase.  Being sensitive to the price-demand curve (you sell less of what costs more), the retailer may decide to swallow, say, 25% of his increased cost, or 0.25*($72 - $64) = $2.  This brings the consumer price of the athletic shoes to $106 or a 6% increase to the American end-user that was caused by imposition of a 25% tariff on such imports.

You can, of course, play this game with different numbers, for example starting with the Chinese manufacturer also discounting his out-the-door price of $32 to keep his shoe sales volume up.  Anyway, this should give us all an idea how and where tariff charges impact everyone in the process of getting imported stuff into the hands of end-users.  (Those wanting to play with these numbers can now see the effect on end prices by also considering the slightly more complex intermediate ‘end pricing’ of imported components ordered by US manufacturers making goods for US and foreign markets.)  And when all is said and done, everyone in the described chain will hold their breath to see how much the end-user will balk at paying the increased price and thereby lower the sales volume for the shoes, which effect will ripple up the chain impacting all kinds of decisions about what to pay, what to charge, and from where to buy.

In sum, the penalty that China (or any tariff assessed country) pays is that 1) they will sell less of the stuff to end users who have to pay a higher price, and/or 2) manufacturers and distributors on the receiving end will inevitably try to obtain the same stuff from countries that are not tariffed so as to regain their profit margins while lowering end user prices.  When, like China, you have entire industrial sectors geared to make goods for the single largest market in the world, tariffs on the receiving end do impose many forms monetary and financial penalties at the source end.  But make no mistake, the pain of tariffs is felt by all sides, and Trump needs to make that clear instead of spewing only the ‘China pays’ bullshit to the American electorate.  (Don’t mistake this screed as an assessment of the strategic wisdom cum effectiveness of today’s tariff trade wars; that is another discussion altogether.)

Subliminal Manipulation of Votes (updated 8aug19)

George Rebane

This is possibly the scariest post to date on RR.  Dr Robert Epstein’s congressional testimony about the vote manipulation antics of Google and Facebook are jaw-dropping.  Epstein is the former editor-in-chief of the prestigious Psychology Today and continues as Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research & Technology.  In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, this self-avowed liberal Democrat and strong Hillary supporter recounts numerous incidents of subliminal and so far unstoppable vote manipulation by the named tech giants.  As an example of an experimentally demonstrable vote manipulation effort Dr Epstein recounts that Google swung an extra 2.6M to over 10M extra votes for Hillary and the Democrats.  And to date there is not a thing anyone can do about this kind of activity which Epstein says will definitely be the deciding factor in the 2020 election.  We are reminded during the testimony that Alphabet – Google’s parent – was the single largest contributor to Hillary’s 2016 campaign. 

You wanna see what vote manipulation really looks like, then watch the goddam 7-minute video before someone takes it offline!  (H/T to correspondent)

[8aug19 update]  For a recent example of how these social media giants manipulate public attitudes, see the report in 'Scattershots - 6aug19' for what Twitter quietly did so as not to damage the progressive narrative about who are nation's haters and promoters of polarization.

Scattershots – 30jul19 (updated 2aug19)

George Rebane

SB27 just signed by Sleazebag Newsom. Just when you think it can’t get worse, something occurs that shows there is still a long way for us to go down from the dire straits in which we already find ourselves.  Newsom and his single party super socialists just made a law in CA, specifically targeting President Trump to keep him from appearing in our state’s primary next spring.  From now on you can’t appear in a CA primary, specifically for POTUS and governor, unless you have filed your recent years tax returns with the CA SecState.  This is so blatantly unconstitutional as to invite an immediate suit against such obvious mischief, a most fiendish form of federalism practiced by America’s leading klatch of collectivists who want nothing to do with federalism.  And the CA GOP is filing exactly such a suit, but the real legal counter should come from the DoJ.  Candidates for federal office appearing on state ballots should have uniform requirements under the Constitution, and it’s the AG who should bring and argue the case in the SCOTUS.

Split Pill Problem.  Here’s a change of pace for some of you puzzlers and critical thinkers out there.  Suppose a patient is given a pill bottle with N pills in it.  He’s told to take ½ pill per day until the bottle is empty.  When he dispenses a whole pill into his palm, he is to split it, take a half, and put the other half back in the bottle.  When he shakes out a half pill, he takes it and recaps the pill bottle.  He knows that every whole and half pill in the bottle has an equal chance of being dispensed.  He continues in this manner until the bottle is empty after 2N days.  Then he wonders, what is the average (or expected) number of days that must pass before the bottle only contains split pills, and he doesn’t have to do any more pill splitting.  Can you help him figure it out?

[31jul19 update] Last night’s Democrat debate left me with the feeling that half the gaggle of assembled candidates was going through a kabuki performance, while the other half tried to bring the dialogue back to something that more closely matched things possible on this Earth and this universe.  They didn’t have a chance as the CNN lamestreamers kept tossing puffballs at the progressives.  Seeing people like Reps Delaney and Ryan gave me momentary hope which quickly faded as we saw the kabuki performances overwhelm their voices.  And the last vestige of hope was dashed later when, in a more sober moment, Jo Ann and I considered their chances of making it to the convention.  From reading first person histories of 1932 Germany – e.g. Der Führer (1944) by Konrad Heiden (more here) - there sure are a lot of comparisons that can be made with our electorate today, the overwhelming numbers of whom don’t know history, current events, geography, economic basics, and to boot are totally innumerate.  And then there are the Silicon Valley vote vultures well-practiced in turning out the correct constituent cohorts on election day (more here).

[1aug19 update]  The second half Democrat debate was populated by solid progressives, not many leavening opinions were heard.  But we did learn that progressives are strong believers in race-based criminality, and race-based punishments – colorblind application of ‘you do the crime, you do the time’ is racist and must no longer be applied.  And it also became clear that when our Left calls for ‘unity’ and ‘let us come together’, that means what the Left has always defined it to mean – party line opinions only, dissent not allowed.  Examples of that in practice are emerging from leftwing corporatist entities like Google which has been shunning then quietly firing conservative employees when they make their views known to fellow employees.  Cory Booker came out as the fastest and smoothest talking mouth on the stage; DeBlasio showed his true colors as radical wingnut; Biden and Harris faded; and all of them called each other liars.

Russ Steele has assembled some revealing temperature data for all you climate crusaders. (here and here)  As usual, the government’s (NOAA) hanky-panky on reporting global warming goes on unabated.  The full court press on the looming climate catastrophe – they can’t agree whether it’s in 10, 12, or 30 years, but it’s a’comin’ – has been heightened recently as the Dems are using it to rally their true believers.  The rest of us would still like to see a public debate on the matter that features their vaunted climate mavens defending their narrative viz data measurements, data manipulation, data availability, atmospheric physics (e.g. earth’s carbon cycle), the estimation problem, climate model designs, climate model programs, replicable computer runs, … .  So far, none of them want to show up to defend the Gospel according to Gore.

[2aug19 update] Wow, ‘lamestream media’ is now a national meme that President Trump broke out in a tweet (here) about the withdrawal of Rep John Ratcliffe as nominee for DNI, and then FN reported on his use of it this afternoon  Not sure if it’s true, but IMHO I came up with that pejorative for journalism on RR years ago.   My earliest use that I could find was in a 21jan11 post (here).  It didn’t take off too quickly, even with RR readers.  But then readers started using it (ToddJ introduced it on his blog in Nov 2011), and now and then I started seeing it used on other blogs – things can go viral at various speeds, it doesn’t have be overnight.  And lately it has cropped up pretty regularly in unexpected places on the web.  So out of curiosity I’m asking readers to see if they can find, either on RR or elsewhere, a confirmed use of ‘lamestream media’ that pre-dates 21 January 2011.

Some Journalistic Jollies

George Rebane

Readers know that today’s professional journalists comprise one of my favorite foils.  Perusing the morning papers, I ran across three doozies that brought on a spate of self-satisfying chuckles.  First, let’s start with Don Rogers’ essay in his 26jul19 Union.  The newspaper’s publisher is an irreconcilable ‘never Trumper’, and promises to cut off your nose to spite your face.  He observes the national scene and laments that “no one truly acts for the common good.”  But in the sequel he doesn’t seem to understand that in today’s America we no longer have a ‘common good’, all the polarizing evidence withstanding.  Let me begin by acknowledging that Mr Rogers is a likeable man of good character and an intellectual leader of our community

In today’s essay he claims to like “some actions” of Trump “almost exclusively in economic matters”, and brushes off the historic sea change from Obama years as something “any decent Republican could have accomplished”.  But they didn’t, Trump did.  Society correctly credits the individuals who actually accomplished a notable thing, good or bad, and doesn’t withhold accolades or accusations with the excuse that someone else could just as easily have done it sooner or later.  Einstein discovered relativity, Lucky Lindy was first to solo the Atlantic, and Stalin killed tens of millions of his own citizens.  It wasn’t just anyone doing those things.

Mr Rogers joins his legion of liberal colleagues in calling Donald Trump “Racist? Sure, of course, but we’ve known that for a while.”  And along with them he offers no definition of the ‘racism’ to which he hews; Trump is “of course” racist for the reason that Rogers simply echoes that accusation – for a liberal, that is more than enough to make it so.  Consensus ignorance becomes common wisdom.

Our publisher’s main complaint in his ‘Impeach me, please’ is that Trump is flying solo in wanting the House to impeach him as part of some self-serving “thuggery” in his re-election strategy.  Apparently, Mr Rogers has not been exposed to the last two years of news about how Democrats, high and low, are in an all-out assault to impeach and discredit the president based on no culpable evidence, and ONLY as a blatant tactic to end his presidency in 2020.  The long litany of investigations, hearings, conspiracies, criminality, along with gratuitous and baseless accusations in the Democrat-compliant media, to Rogers somehow fall short of thuggery - actions and behaviors which for the rest of us overfill its most basic definition.

Don Rogers would rather vote for the Democrats’ “wrong-headed” and “ill-advised” legislation and policies and deny us the demonstrated benefits of Trump’s policies, why? because he doesn’t like the wrapper in which they are delivered.  And there we have a sterling example of a journalist promoting the common good. 

With a mild segue we now encounter Aaron Zitner, WSJ editor for digital innovation, who discovers the independent voter as those who actually swing elections one way or t’other.  He breathlessly reports the news of both parties having the dilemma of spending campaign funds to nail down their core voters or spend it trying to convince those yet to make up their minds.  His report (here) in the 26jul19 WSJ has got to be evidence of a slow news day.  Why?  That decision and its cash allocation dilemma is as old as electioneering.  Anyone familiar with how America has voted for the last couple of centuries knows the 40-20-40 rule.  We have reported on it extensively (here, here, and here) starting with The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) by Bryan Caplan, who covered the large body research which demonstrated that the minority ruled, and did so until politicians discovered mass media in the 1920s.  This caused voters to succumb to the guile of political sound bites in their number and recency.  And that, of course, brought the whole thing back to which party and candidates could buy more eyeballs and earballs on the media.  So we’re back to the ‘middle minority’ as the swing votes who always determine elections.  But then, you knew that, and so should have Aaron Zitner.

OK, we’ll end with a real subtle knee-slapper.  How many times have you been told about investors moving into this or that investment?  The image painted by these financial reporters is of a mass of agitated people moving en masse from, say, stocks to bonds or vice versa, or to some other area like commodities or real estate.  ‘Investors give up on gold!’ is a regular headline in this genre.  Today we read Jessica Menton’s breathless report (here) about investors pouring money into bonds at a “record pace”.  Apparently investors are forsaking stocks as being more risky and going into the perceived less risky debt instruments.  Well, no they aren’t.  No investor threw their gold bars or stocks into the gutter; no one left their corporate stocks lie fallow in some drawer or some broker account when they switched their investment focus.  Every investor sold their old investments to whom?  Rumor has it that these buyers have always been (seatbelts please) other investors – imagine that.  Just as much money was coming out of one pile of investments as was going into another pile or two.  These monies don’t move by abandoning what was previously valued; they can’t.  Never are there discarded piles of share certificates found in dumpsters when monies move.  For some reason, this important little aspect of investor monies moving around is never mentioned.  You gotta sell stuff before you can buy other stuff.  And if investors are buying something else at a record pace, other investors must also be buying what was sold at a record pace.  Reporters should point this out now and then. 

Scattershots – 23jul19 (updated 24jul19)

George Rebane

Marxist-Leninist ideology has proven itself as the world’s most toxic way to organize society, primarily because of its appeal to the simple-minded and uneducated (according to Rebane Doctrine).  Today the so-called Justice Democrats have joined with Our Revolution to form the most prominent ‘legitimate’ political organization to promote an M-L future for America.  Our Revolution is the front for the three most influential Marxist organizations in America – Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party USA, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  This is what you will get when you back Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the Squad.

‘Can’t We All Just Get Along?’ Here’s Victor Davis Hanson putting many things from the Obama years in perspective, things that our liberal contingent shows us daily that they have forgotten, if they ever even noticed such happenings in the first place.  As VDH reminds us, the Democrats have sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.  (H/T to reader)

Fire Team (a squad is divided into two fire teams) Tlaib and Omar are heading for Israel and the West Bank with the blessings of President Trump and the welcoming Prme Minister Netanyahu.  They will be there to promote their anti-Israeli BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) bill that Pelosi will never allow on the House floor.  That doesn’t matter, the Squad has become the mind and message of the Democratic Party whose more politically astute members are trying to stifle before the election season gets too far along.  Every Republican considers those brainless broads to be the gift that keeps on giving – long may they wave.

Puerto Rico’s hot summer continues as San Juan’s citizens by the tens of thousands demonstrate to get their governor Rossello to resign after some revealing tweets of his were made public.  But the question I ask readers to consider is why Puerto Rico continues to flirt with being a banana republic.  Why has that island remained a corrupt and essentially dysfunctional state after enjoying more than a century of being a succored territory of the United States with special dispensations for its citizens, trade relations, investment sources, economic aid, … ??  I suggest again that it is their culture that keeps them in their perennial dire straits; a culture that they share with much of the western hemisphere south of our border, and the same culture that most on our Left are trying to infuse into our land with its porous borders.

[update]  Seven Dems on the House Judiciary Committee floated fake Russiagate stories. Tomorrow they get to quiz Mueller.  Such is the nature of the carnival that was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.  No more deliberation allowed, just time-worn, disproved allegations and outright lies.  There is the cast of characters ready to expose their character and show their prowess in questioning Special Counsel Mueller in the fervent hope that he will break and tell everyone that Trump was really guilty as sin, his report was a whitewash, and now he is sorry. (more here)

[24jul19 update]  The Mueller testimony to Congress is over. The man came across confused, timid, and uninformed – the Dems ‘movie’ to follow the ‘book’ was a bust.  But au contraire, to hear the Dems on the media outlets tonight, they had a great victory – now the American people know that Trump colluded with the Russians to assure his election victory, and then partook in numerous criminal acts to obstruct subsequent justice.  This is straight out of the Stalinist/Leninist playbook – just counter with bigger lies that contradict truth.  Mueller found no evidence for collusion or obstruction; had he done so, he, who set a new standard for RINO, would have said so.  Instead, his best efforts against Trump was a lame statement, never before heard from a prosecutor, that he “did not exonerate” Trump from the obstruction allegations, having yet to find any evidence of support – a non-news statement first made public in AG Barr’s letter summary of the report over three months ago.  So all the Dems are now busy in the political sweatshop trying to sew silk purses out of sows’ ears.  Only Pelosi is justifiably happy that, no matter the further efforts of Nadler’s nitpickers, the butt stupid effort to impeach the president is dead.  As a footnote, one of my liberal friends assured me today that Mueller’s 17 crack lawyers only included 4 Democrats, when in reality they were 13 Dems, 0 Repubs, 6 Hillary donors, and most having being associated with Team Clinton in one way or another.  But all that only underlined that Mueller’s obvious unfamiliarity with his own investigation and report, strongly indicated that he did little to lead the investigation which was conducted and reported by his ‘never Trump’ troops (e.g. "not familiar with Fusion GPS").

Ruminations – 18jul19 (updated 19jul19)

George Rebane

Gold-backed dollar or not?  Interesting debate now going on over how to set the value of the dollar which is fiat money but still the world’s leading reserve currency.  Gold is pooh-poohed by governments and pundits as just an “alternative asset class” which serves many as a “speculative store of value”.  Interesting to note is that it is the governments who hoard massive amounts of gold and use it to clear inter-nation trade accounts.  Hmm?

Counting Trump’s ‘lies’ has become another favorite pastime for leftwingers.  Books have been written on the subject.  On closer inspection, such counts include all the bravados and projections and predictions and promises that politicians over the ages and of all hues have generously poured into their constituents’ ears.  Today’s under-educated TDS sufferers know nothing of this, and feel proud that they are plowing new ground in such endeavors.

AOC for all seasons and reasons.  Seldom has a politician come along who gives so much pleasure to both sides campaigning in a highly polarized political landscape.  Today both Repubs and Dems hope that AOC and her brood will continue spewing loud and clear their anti-American assessments and prescriptions for a fundamentally transformed US.  Karl Rove calls her “the gift that keeps on giving.”

[19jul19 update] 'Impeachment Phonies' in the 19jul19 WSJ - "So much for high crimes and misdemeanors. Faced with a resolution to impeach President Trump on Wednesday, House Democrats blinked. That was the smart move politically, but what does it say about the courage of their conviction that Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to the country and Constitution?"

Dropout Derby Update - 9jul19 (updated)

George Rebane

OK, Swalwell bailed yesterday 8jul19, and today that in/out/in again Tom Steyer threw his hat into the Dems' candidate carousel ring.  Tom Steyer will be #26 in the Dropout Derby, and those who wish can resubmit their dropout lists by inserting Steyer's number into their existing list with no other changes in their ordering.  These will be accepted before the next Dem comes to his senses and hits the silk.  And I'll do this update only once on the scoring and then lock down this competition with 26 declared candidates, 25 remaining as of today.  Additional hopefuls will be ignored.  The fun has already begun.

[update]  Mr Tozer submitted his updated dropout list.  You'll notice that he put Steyer in exactly the same place that I did (we did not consult).  The figure below shows the current dropout lists.  Those with zeros at the end have not updated and are invited to do so.  The 'CumScore' row lists the cumulative score to date as the dropout continue.  (You'll note that I'm bringing up the rear.) Recall that each dropout's score is equal to ((26-1) - miss distance)/(26-1).  Miss distance is the absolute value of (dropout list entry - actual dropout location).  If you nailed it - miss distance is zero - then your score for that dropout is equal to 1.0 .  If you would have put Swalwell (#20) in position 26, you would get a zero score added to your cumulative score.  Of course, no one did that, and as the dropouts proceed it will be more difficult to get low scores, but perfect scores will always be possible.

Anything to undermine America (updated 7jul19)

George Rebane

The Democrats and their lamestream media are now in high gear doing anything and everything they can to undermine this administration and weaken the US in the eyes of its adversaries.  The first and most important victims of the Left’s lies are their constituents relegated to the low end of the bell curve on smarts.  As evidence, they are so bamboozled by the sleazebags that only 17% of them believe that Trump’s tax cuts benefit them, when IRS data shows that almost everyone benefited from the tax cuts.

And to put a ribbon on it, only 47% of Americans believe that Trump’s policies pulled the economy out of its Obama doldrums of under 2% growth, making no never mind of the fact that when Trump took over the GDP growth rate jumped over 60% and has remained there.  The lamestream has made certain than none of these light thinkers ever hear of Obama’s famous prognostication, “To get the GDP to grow at 3% again will require a magic wand.”  Well, our current president most certainly has that magic wand, which today’s market underlined by finishing the highest June gain in over 80 years.  (For the non-investors, the summer months beginning with June are historically the doldrum months on the stock markets.)  In spite of all this, the Dems have convinced 53% of Americans that Trump is mishandling the economy.

On the foreign policy front, Trump has exposed longstanding and dramatic shortcomings in our agreements for trade, mutual defense with allies, nuclear proliferation by rogues, and border security.  For decades America’s position in each of these areas was being taken advantage of by nations who saw us as weak and without direction.  Trump has changed all that, and in every area he has gotten people off the dime and things moving.  Now the feckless Democrats are criticizing him and telling their know-nothings that Trump is not doing any good because he hasn’t solved all the decades-old problems in his first two years in office.  And none of them, not a single one, has anything better to offer than to stick our head back in the sand and let friend and foe steal us blind.

In the meantime, the Democrats have totally abandoned their former positions and goals, as they have wrapped themselves in socialism to tout Marx’s message to the masses of the western hemisphere, ‘Workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains!’  And where do you think that all of this uniting of the workers will take place as our formerly porous borders disappear completely?

[2jul19 update] This painting by Jon McNaughton titled 'National Emergency' says it all.  (H/T to reader)

[3jul19 update] A regular reader suggests that to better understand what the Democrats in Congress and our own leftwing socialist commenters share as worldviews and objectives to strive for can be found in the Jacobin Magazine.  Take a look at the real meaning of free speech as we celebrate an independence they are working to take away.

[7jul19 update]  Here’s another big lie pushed by one of our favorite communists, Umair Haque, who writes ‘The origins of America’s unique and spectacular cruelty’.  America is the one nation in the world that has THE preeminent culture of altruistic giving to those afflicted and less fortunate.  Yet this propagandist exercises his 1A right to constantly reel off lie after lie about America, Americans, and our role in the world’s community of nations.  The importance of his thought is that it is shared by almost all the Democrat presidential candidates who daily echo his words.

Ruminations - 1jul19 (updated 2jul19)

George Rebane

George Boardman writes ‘Trump wants to turn the 4^th of July into a political rally’ in the 1jul19 Union.  Students of American history know that patriotic holidays, especially the 4^th of July, have been used by politicians – incumbents and wannabes – to meld their message within a patriotic mantle.  It is the recently educated who have no knowledge of our country’s past, and today are using everything to excoriate Trump.  I could have sworn Mr Boardman to be old enough to know better.

Kamala Harris owes her career to being a privileged mulatto – Jamaican father, Indian mother – which in today’s racial labeling allows her to call herself a black - “I am black and I am proud of it.”  She has played the black card for advancement all her life, and now she is beating her fellow Democrat presidential candidates over the head with it.  And it might even get her the nomination, unless one of her opponents has the courage to tell voters that her claims of having risen through racial discrimination is just politically motivated bull crap.

Bullet buying background checks start today in California.  This new law will have no impact on criminals and their use of firearms to commit crimes.  But it will further constructively restrict the Second Amendment rights of the state’s law-abiding citizens.  And after all, the constructive confiscation of guns is the objective of all socialists, especially those still in denial.  The objective has always been to restrict guns to government and criminals, and out of the hands of citizens who might one day choose to revolt as autocracy evolves into tyranny.

[2jul19 update] Under Obama, porous borders admit a dull roar of illegals who are incarcerated with children in separate quarters.  Millions are subsequently deported under our immigration laws, Republicans promote border security infrastructure, but do not criticize the stark detention quarters.  Under Trump, Democrats issue international invitations to disgruntled foreigners to enter the US illegally with promises of amnesty and citizenship.  Millions respond, creating a security and humanitarian crisis at the border.  The Democrats refuse to fund either border barriers to slow the flow or increased detention facilities to house the illegals as required by law.  Instead, they attack the president and Republicans for “separating families” as our law requires, and having created the crisis by not allowing free access through our border, sufficient welcoming succor at our border, and the unvetted and unconditional release into America’s interior.

The 2020 campaign – capitalism vs socialism (updated 3jul19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 June 2019.]

Today’s dramatic tack to the left by the Democratic Party and its legion of presidential candidates has brought capitalism vs socialism to center-stage in the public forum.  The Democrat candidates share a common vision for their fundamentally transformed America, but each of them has fashioned their own particular path to their promised land.  By this I mean that each has outlined a particular sequence of wealth transfer and confiscation policies designed to solidify support from their leftwing core and attract the maximum of mid-road and undeclared voters to the collectivist cause.

Their message is simple and effective – ‘we’ll give you a lot more free stuff, and tax the bejeezus out of the evil and greedy rich to pay for it all’.  After half century of controlling public education in America, we now have at least two generations of voters who know absolutely nothing about capitalism, and little or nothing about socialism.  What the Millennials and the lightly read have been taught is that socialism works – look at how we describe Europe.  Today capitalism for these Americans is akin to a dirty word that refers to a broken social order which allows the rapacious rich to rape the middle-class and the poor who have no opportunities to advance.  America’s history has been taught as a three century long dystopian trail of tears that has spread its misery worldwide.

Scattershots – 24jun19 (updated 27jun19)

George Rebane

The Left wants nothing measured the public reporting of which it cannot control, or that goes against their established narrative.

Our intrepid progressive pundit and Union columnist George Boardman is all exercised in his ‘Double dipping at the public trough, in the spotlight, and just the facts’ published in the newspaper’s 24jun19 edition.  There he leaps off the rails to rail those double dipping Dahles, while totally missing the definition of double dipping as it pertains to government payees.  Megan Dahle plans to run for her husband Brian Dahle’s recently vacated California Assembly seat since winning his seat in the state’s Senate.  If Mrs Dahle wins, she will become the elected representative from her district, doing the work of an assemblyman, and on her own merits and efforts earning that position’s pay.  That having a second member of the family also performing an independent job in government is in no way double dipping, save it serve a distinctly progressive political narrative.  Apparently Mr Boardman misses that significant nuance that spouses of elected politicians are also individuals with a duplicate set of rights to independently seek employment and recompense as they see fit.  Ah, the bespoke blinders of the Left.  (On the same op-ed page see also Manny Montes’ commentary that helps explain Mr Boardman’s values.)

In the 24jun19 update to my ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ commentary, I posited the following observation about cultures.

Peace and prosperity were generally maintained as long as such a governed society’s culture was allowed to evolve without obvious interdictions by government.  It is easy to see why this approach to organizing societies worked as long as the dominant culture was sufficiently cohesive.  A little reflection reveals that culture is able to inculcate and control the most complex sets of human behaviors, and allow their natural expressions in new environments/situations without having to write down a single law or regulation.  Behaviors (acceptable and unacceptable) are learned in the family and in the village square, and ‘enforced’ by the culture’s collective – i.e. everyone.

In searching for exceptions to the above, the Talmud of the Jewish diaspora occurred to me.  The Talmud is an extensive collection (or collections if you consider separately its Babylonian and Jerusalem parts) of Jewish civil and ceremonial law along with its ethnic legends.  It comprises quite a collection of volumes that painstakingly detail a comprehensive body of behaviors and processes permitted and proscribed to practicing Jews everywhere.  And ‘everywhere’ here is the key idea.  After the Romans destroyed their Jerusalem temple in 70AD, the Jews were driven from their traditional homelands, and found themselves spread all over Europe and northern Africa.

While always seeking to stick together wherever they found themselves, they were necessarily separated and for centuries mostly out of touch with other Jewish communities.  So how to retain, practice, and promulgate the culture that defined them and their very Jewishness when so dispersed?  The answer was through the formalization of their culture in written form, which, as I have often argued, requires many volumes to record, study, and teach.  The Talmud is thus the exception that highlights and supports my dissertations on the function and efficiency of cultures in prescribing normative behaviors within coherent populations.

[25jun19 update]  The lamestream outlets are exorcising President Trump for his new sanctions against individuals in the Iranian leadership.  Specifically, vindictive opprobrium is dished out at Trump’s sanctioning Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and leading negotiator who has been our main point of contact in the sub-rosa diplomatic efforts between the two countries.  Their common wisdom is that now we have lost someone with whom we have been able to communicate.  What these pinheads and pundits miss is that the president has to include Zarif in the sanctions if he is to remain as our point of future contact.  Omitting Zarif’s obviously needed inclusion would have made him suspect among the raghead mullahs, and cost him his job or worse.

[26jun19 update] "Remarkably, a recent study cited in The Atlantic (gasp!) found that “the most politically intolerant Americans” tend be white, highly educated urban progressives. ... Long ago, religious zealots embraced feudal ideals, but increasingly it’s the ultra-secular progressives who reprise the role of Medieval Inquisitors."  Whoulda thought?  (H/T to reader)

[27jun19 update] Photo journalism at its worst as far as providing information to impact public policy - that is conveyed by the photo of the drowned father and his toddler daughter floating face down at the water’s edge (here).  This emotional picture drives all reason and logic from viewers’ uncritical minds; whatever narrative you want to connect with that image will now be taken as God’s truth about illegal border crossings, immigration, President Trump’s border security policies, … .  No one will consider factors such as the abnormally low death rate that is connected with illegal border crossings per se – illegal aliens die before getting to the border, and a few die after successfully entering the US, but given the circumstances, the death rate is mercifully low.  How do we know?  Had there been any previous border crossing deaths, crack photo journalists would have had such pictures posted and published in every imaginable outlet all over the globe.  Fortunately, that is not the case.  I do note that the father did a very foolish and deadly thing by stuffing his daughter into his t-shirt, thus guaranteeing the toddler’s death should he not be able to stay afloat with that ungainly load in the roiling waters.  In any event, now we are guaranteed another spate of public policies based on emotion and the absence of reason.

Democrats continue to dramatically disrespect and discount the intellect of their base and those voters they desire to attract.  A particularly specious attractant their presidential candidates are using is their promise to forgive student debt.  They are betting that their supporters will be like the now-infamous video clip of an Obama voter who believed that all the promised goodies she received would be paid for out “the President’s stash”.  OPM continues to be the salve Democrat elites will use to fix everything that ails us if you just give them your vote.  Michael Solon in the 27jun19 WSJ adds to the obvious when he writes - Debt forgiveness punishes those who did the right thing, made sacrifices, and acted wisely and frugally, as well as those who simply didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. Isn’t this the sort of private gain at public expense that people on the left claim to abhor? … Such forgiveness would also eliminate a quality-control device that drives students to ensure their investment can be monetized to cover their costs. A student who borrows must make sure his future earnings will be enough to pay off the loans. If that incentive disappears, with free debt or free college, the graduate and the nation would suffer economically.  (Also see my ‘Student Loan Scam Solution’)

Dropout Derby Updated 23 June 2019

George Rebane

I don’t know how much of this piling on of Democratic presidential candidates will go on, but that 23-member gaggle just got two more wannabes to join the race.  Talk about a snow ball’s chance in hell IMHO.  Nevertheless, I am adding #24 Mike Gravel and #25 Joe Sestak, with indicated ID numbers to the list of 23 candidates shown in my original 5jun19 Dropout Derby post (here).  I’m not sure that either of them will do much as candidates at this late date – the debates start on 26 June – but I’ll continue to accept new and updated lists until the first dropout bites the dust.  Please submit them in the vertical list format as you did before.  Thanks.

Rich Ulery – CA escapee writes

[Rich Ulery was a longtime resident of Nevada County.  As a professional realtor Rich found time to give generously to the community through various leadership positions he held in civic organizations.  He also served as the chairman of the NC Republican Central Committee.  Rich and his bride are among the great exodus from California, having pulled up stakes and moving to Arizona last year.  I post Rich’s email as received by permission.  gjr]

Hi George,

I read that Nevada County supervisors just approved the 2019-20 budget of $258 million. While I understand the difficulty of comparing two different county budgets in two different states, I do find it interesting that Pima County, Arizona is wrestling with the approval of its $1.4 billion budget. Pima County has slightly more than 10 times the population of Nevada County, meaning that it costs Nevada County taxpayers almost 2X what it costs Pima County taxpayers to operate the county government. 

Certainly, the impact of Federal and State mandates and differing demographics will pollute this comparison. There are also cost of living considerations, although I will assure you that Nevada County COL is not double Pima County -- not even close. I will also assure you that Pima County has negligible unfunded pension liabilities. I suspect Nevada County is still hovering close to $200 million.

I'm not sure what conclusions, if any, to draw from this, but I found it at least intriguing.

Rich Ulery

 

When will the bull run end?

George Rebane

We are now in the longest bull run in the history of America’s security markets. The nearby figure filched from the 15jun19 WSJ provides some perspective.

The question on everyone’s lips is when will this bull run end. As readers know, I’m a semi-retired successful entrepreneur and capitalist who has managed his own securities portfolio for decades, has recently focused on financial engineering, and still enjoys inventing and coming up with new squigglies in that field. One of my recent contributions has been the extension of Gott’s theory that probabilistically treats the future termination of minimally known processes. This extension was described here in – ‘…, and this too shall pass’ - on 10 November 2014.

Well, it turns out that stock market bull runs are exactly the kinds of minimally known processes that succumb to the expanded R-G theory – all we reliably know about the bull market is its current age. So we can now ask more interesting questions such as, ‘What is the probability that the bull market will end in any future quarter (three-month period) starting now?’

The answer to that question is shown below for the next couple of years.  The blue dots/line indicate the diminishing probabilities that the bull will end in the quarter starting then, and the red dots/line indicate the growing probability that the bull will end sometime between now and the date shown.  (click on figure to enlarge)

Should there be more astute investors reading this, a natural extension of the above question is ‘How can we update such a probability when later we get some new information that bears on the markets?’ The good news is that this question can also be answered by using a form of the Bayes formula in which the then computed R-G probability serves as the ‘Bayesian prior’ from which to calculate the new (posterior) probability of the process about which we now know more than its age. The Bayes formula (described here) should be used thereafter as more pieces of relevant information are obtained. Fun stuff if you’re a bettin’ man (or woman).

Soaking the Middle Class

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 June 2019.]

By this time we have all heard the nearly two dozen Democratic presidential candidates promise Americans so many free things we’ll get that most of us have lost track of all the goodies coming our way when one of the newly declared socialists replaces President Trump.  Let me just recount a partial list to get us all on the same page, because I’m going to talk about paying for all the free stuff.  We are promised Medicare for All, free college, forgiven student loans, national job guarantee, paid family medical leave, guaranteed national income, and, of course, all the things in the Green New Deal.  There is more to the list, but I think that these are enough to give the flavor of what we all are encouraged to expect after 2020.

What no one wants to talk about is how the coming workers’ paradise will be paid for.  The few candidates who dare to venture there give short answers that can be paraphrased as, ‘well, we’re gonna tax the bejeezus out of the corporations and the rich, and make them finally pay their fair share’.  And this usually brings out a sigh of relief from the light thinkers in the middle and lower income classes – ‘we’re gonna get all this free stuff and other people will be paying for it, where do I sign?’

Those requiring more meaty answers are assured that we will follow the European model, and everyone knows that they’ve cracked the code on how bigger governments are really the source of the people’s succor and largess.  However, that’s not the case when we look at their data from the EU and OECD countries.  There we quickly find that 1) they get a lot less than our Democratic candidates promise, and 2) the money to pay for it comes from the middle and lower classes, for the simple reason that the rich don’t have enough loot to foot the bill.  And there’s even a more sinister method by how the taxes eventually get raised on everyone.  The entire story with lots of numbers, charts, and graphs unfolds in the recent Heritage Foundation paper, ‘A Progressive Road Map for Soaking the Middle Class’ by Adam Michel.

Michel summarizes his research with – “Taxes on the rich cannot raise the necessary revenue to fund large European-style welfare states. If left on the current trajectory, U.S. government expenditures will require large tax increases on middle-class Americans. The current progressive agenda to further increase spending on health care, education, environmental policy, and income supports will require even higher taxes on a larger share of taxpayers. If America’s spending continues to look more and more like that of Europe, U.S. tax policy will also need to shift. In European countries, lower-income and middle-class taxpayers pay an average marginal wage tax rate of 49 percent on income above $37,000 a year, and an average value-added tax (VAT) of 20 percent. Those same U.S. taxpayers face a marginal wage tax of 32 percent and an average sales tax of 6 percent. The only sustainable way to avoid a high-tax American future is to reduce the growth rate of federal spending.”

For those still in terminal phases of denial, consider that our federal spending has been growing faster than the economy, tax revenues, inflation, Americans’ wages, and savings.  There is no alternative other than taxes have to be raised to European levels to pay for European size governments and spending.  And as Michel shows from EU and OECD data, that means tax bills will have to be raised to a minimum of three times for everyone – no one, rich, middle, or low earners will be spared.  Everyone will pay because at that level of proposed spending we will have run out of other people’s money.

The Democrats’ proposals will cost a conservative $50T over the next 10 years, more than doubling the current $4.4T annual federal budget which is already one-third funded by debt.  The tax implications are so horrendous that no one on the Left wants to talk about it as we witnessed in this week’s Democrat controlled House Committee on the Budget, which pointedly refused to consider any discussion of where the money would come from for all the things promised in just the Green New Deal.  My recommendation is that you get some answers to these questions before you vote in 2020.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  To put some meat on the above arguments.  Here are a couple of graphics illustrating the data from Adam Michel’s paper.  The first shows how much of each nation’s GDP is made up from the total tax burden its government imposes on its citizens.  The reason for America’s high ranking in most economic metrics that bear on people’s QoL should be clear.  There’s a reason why people from all over the world continue to risk life and limb to get into the United States, a reason that is totally, and I do mean TOTALLY, lost on our Left.  (Perhaps promoting policies to make us into a second rate country is the Democrats’ new stealth immigration policy that will then dramatically decrease the pressure on our borders.)

And here’s a compendium of more detailed albeit complex graphs placing the US relative to the EU and OECD countries.  It shows how tax revenues are spread over the spectrum of the countries' wage earners through the marginal rate burdens put on earnings.  It should dispel notions that all the socialist goodies currently in the EU, and promised in the US, are paid for by everyone, and not restricted to monies collected from the socially unjust rich and corporations.

The point to focus on in the above graphs is that the Democrat candidates want to put America right into the middle to upper end of the groups of blue dots representing the EU-OECD countries.  Check out the new tax rates that would apply to ALL our wage earners, and the resulting growth of government to absorb and redistribute the larger share of our nation's GDP (from the first figure, we are now only at the 27% of GDP level).  Does anyone really think that such a massive hit will not put brakes on our economy with the resulting impact on all our lives and motivation to take investment and entrepreneurial risks?  Look to Europe for the answers.

America’s politicians of all stripes know that Americans are overwhelmingly innumerate – they ‘don’t do numbers’.   Data such as presented above make no never mind to the overwhelming share of our citizens who, today more than ever, are focused on polarizing one-liners for their understanding of public policy proposals.  That is why the Democrats have no problem promising unattainable ‘free’ government benefits after they are elected to office.  The tools to make discriminating decisions on such matters were removed long ago from our public educational curricula.

Is Nevada County’s Broadband Leadership AWOL?

Russ Steele

How embarrassing to have a nationally known industry observers conclude that political leadership in your community is an allusive mirage when it comes to building out critical broadband infrastructure.  And, then publishing the details in a well-received book. 

First, these leaders do not seem to grasp the economics of having robust broadband (BB). They do not consider high-speed Internet as one of the essential infrastructure utilities such as water, power, sewer, and transportation. Broadband has gone from nice to have to must-have status. Local leaders still think broadband is nice to have-not critical economic infrastructure. 

Yes, Nevada County’s Supervisors and City Council Members supported Spiral at the CPUC meetings, but only after a significant bit of cajoling by local BB entrepreneur John Paul and some encouragement from SEDCorp's Brent Smith.  As reported here previously, Susan Crawford, an independent observer, did not find much evidence of strong community leadership:

"Laissez-faire is not working for rural America, particularly in areas like Nevada City/Grass Valley where the local authorities are uninterested in intervening to ensure that their people have communications capacity."

". . .one of the key reasons that both Greensboro and Grass Valley/Nevada City are making such slow progress toward any flavor of publicly oriented Fiber is that there is no prominent public leader willing to stand behind it."

Scattershots – 8jun19 (updated 11jun19)

George Rebane

California’s homeless population continues to grow; it now exceeds 130,000 and is heavily concentrated in metropolitan areas like LA, the Bay, and Sacramento with smaller scale infections even reaching rural counties like our own.  According to the feds, CA is now also #1 home for those without a home, and growing.  And the big surprise by our leftwing politicians and bureaucrats is that they can’t figure out why these numbers are going up given all the public monies that have and are being spent on welcoming benefits to CA’s indigents.  WSJ’s Alejandro Lazo describes the current situation in ‘Homelessness Grows in California Despite New Government Spending’.  The answer to this apparent conundrum is beyond simple – the homeless of the country are infinitely smarter than the double dummies who make up our electeds and bureaucrats in Sacramento.  If you’re homeless, or illegal, or on welfare, or a criminal, or …, why not head for the Idiots Paradise that sanctifies, succors, and salutes every kind of person whose vote can be bought with monies taken from the state’s well-to-do and remaining middle-class wage earners?

The Dems are pulling in the big bucks from the country’s corporatists. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, … are giving tens of millions to progressive candidates in hopes that they won’t get hurt too badly in Washington's growing anti-trust sentiment that threatens to break up the big guys.  The Left’s complaint is that open markets are not working, capitalism is broken, and Big Brother needs to step in to make things right.  The denied truth is that government hasn’t promoted open markets for at least 30 years.  So, there is no reason to pass more legislation to enlarge govt watchdog bureaus and staffs to mangle more markets, just step back from accepting corporatist payola, and enforce existing laws against monopolies and oligopolies.  But doing that would dry up the inflow of funds into corrupt pockets.  As an example, today Sens Warren and Sanders have each received more than $30M from Google’s parent Alphabet.  The interesting part is that the ill-read younger employees of the behemoths are contributing much of the money that will be used to buy the rope to hang them after socialism sweeps Silicon Valley. (more here and here)

Unclear about working out their futures are both our Millennials and the Europeans.  Fundamentally, both are afflicted by the same mental rot.  See comment stream below and the graphic sent to me by a reader in response to the above scattershot.  A picture is worth a thousand ... (and all that).

[10jun19 update]  Politicians of all stripes like to tell us what “the American people” like, reject, demand, deserve, think, ignore, want, … .  However, those of us who have paid attention over the years know that the more certain a politician is assuring us about the sentiments of the American people, the more sure we can be that he’s spewing BS on thin ice.  Author Joe Epstein agrees – “There’s no shortage, I realize, of ways of detecting falsity in contemporary politicians, but I’ve come upon one that I find most helpful. The more politicians use the phrase “the American people,” I believe, the less they are to be trusted.” (more here)

The double dummies in Sacramento are now planning on spending billions to provide “complete healthcare” to the state’s illegal aliens according to the AP (here).  California seeks to retain its position as the nation’s idiot state, emplacing more policies to attract the indigent, the under-educated, the welfare recipient, the illegal alien, the criminal, …, and then wonders why it needs higher taxes and more regulations which convince middle-class workers and their employers to leave the state.  It will cost $3.4B to provide such healthcare coverage to include the 1.8M illegals now in California.  How many more will arrive as a result is anybody’s guess, but not anticipated by our state’s legislative super-majority.  Here’s a sample of the thinking behind this legislation – “The state Senate wants to cover adults ages 19 to 25, plus seniors 65 and older. That bill’s sponsor, Sen. Maria Elana Durazo, scoffed at cost concerns, noting the state has a projected $21.5 billion budget surplus.”  So we’re again spending projected surpluses which have a horrible record of not arriving, while ignoring all the collateral costs that this invited ingress will incur as an ever larger share of California’s population is made up of professional gimmes.  (And here is more about soaking the middle class and taxing the rich.)  But we all know how they will vote, don't we?

Women of color remain victims in America, so maintains “ZORA”, a new “publication that centers on and celebrates the hopes, dreams, aspirations, and experiences of women of color”.  Zora is one of many newly minted online outlets promoted by Medium, itself a menagerie of Marxist missives from Millennials who regularly exhibit there the horrific educational deficits they have suffered in unionized government schools, bequeathed us by the Great Society.  Their raison d’etre is to “challenge the stereotypes and outdated tropes associated with women of color” through offerings that provide a “multi-textured, multilayered, multifaceted take on life as a woman of color.”  I provide these links to readers as yet one more witness to the broad spectrum of inputs from which I and other well-read RR readers benefit.  As such, reciprocity is recommended to our leftwing brethren in order to elevate their discourse in these pages.

[11jun19 update]  Another more succinct perspective on socialism.

Trans Athletes Debate – The BBC will air a documentary at the end of this month to explore the trans athlete issue which now impacts primarily women’s sports competitions.  The documentary – ‘Trans Athletes: A Fair Playing Field?’ - will feature Martina Navratilova on the BBC One channel.  For those new to this issue, the problem is that natural female athletes who have spent their careers training to be champions in their sports are now left in the dust by trans-female athletes.  These competitions are inherently unfair to the women, and illustrate the undeniable fact that men and women are different, even after having their plumbing altered.  We don’t hear much about trans-male athletes competing in individual male sporting events, mainly because they don’t have chance to shine.  But to make progressive political hay, we do have examples of trans-males insisting on being on the men’s football teams where their inherent physical handicaps can be camouflaged in team play.  Nevertheless, their coaches and teammates know that the trans-males don’t carry their weight in such competitions.  My own opinion is that once you become a trans anything, that you forfeit your right to compete in your chosen gender sporting events.  If we get enough transgender athletes, then perhaps they can start their own sports leagues and individual competition events to maintain level playing fields.

Dropout Derby (updated 7jun19)

George Rebane

By last count there were 23 Democrat declared candidates running to become the next POTUS, with two more standing in the wings making up their minds.  And here they are –

Now it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that all but a handful will make it through the debates and primaries, and to the convention floor.  One by one, most of them will start dropping out of the race for one reason or another.  And it occurred to me that trying to noodle the order of such casualties over the coming months would be much like filling in the March Madness basketball championship playoff brackets.  Only here it would be even simpler, and involve just making a list from the first to drop out all the way to the last one surviving as the 2020 Democrat candidate.