Depressing Descriptions of Reality

David Brooks wrote a thought provoking column yesterday.  It was not an optimist piece particularly when you add in Thomas Egan's column today.

1st Egan's point.  We are a nation of opinionated ignorants.  That is why Donald Trump can get away with telling on average 5 lies a day.  He says it and his supporters believe it.  That leaves me speechless so I will just put in the link.

Link to "We're with Stupid"

As I have written before, we expect our leaders to lead.  My original purpose in writing this blog was to promote governing from the middle taking the best ideas from the Right, Center and Left to solve problems in the interaction of government and the citizens.  The U.S. has not moved in that direction.

And as Brooks writes, that is the fault of our government leaders in both political parties have they have obfuscated the legitimacy of the other political party's point of view to the point where large bodies of citizens believe their point of view is the only legitimate one.  Since no one is perfect, policies are complex in how they interact with the citizenry, this is a prescription for frustration and failure to move the country forward in a productive manner.

What Brook's focuses on is the roots of belief in the political parties.  The GOP has become a slave to the mantra that each person has to be free to maximize their economic condition.  The Democrats have become a slave to the mantra that each person has to be free to maximize their right to personally be treated fairly by society.  The result is a hyper focus on identity politics that has no roots in communal well being.  Political parties used to share common values respecting the roots that belonging to a community generated.  That loss of sense of community and belonging has been replaced by splintered identities.  Politicians created this situation and Brooks is not sure how we get back to that better place.

That is my take away 24 hours after reading the column.  The column is a complex thought and well worth reading.  So I will put in a link in now.

Link to Brooks Column

I can't really put a finger on how society got here.  Economic conditions (globalization and technology) certainly created stress on segments of society and a complex web of issues created a serious separation between rural and urban voters in how they prioritize their thoughts that determine how they vote.  I want to blame Mitch McConnell for saying he wanted Obama to have a failed presidency.   That goal and how he accomplished it certainly laid the foundation for where we are today, but he is a politician and that thought did not materialize out of the ether, it had to have some basis in reality that I cannot identify any more.

I long for a government that understands its responsibilities to govern well and produce a steady state of the nation.  That means agreement on certain basic goals and they compromise or experimentation at the state level to figure out the best way to get to those goals.

Finally, a comprehensive plan to address income inequality and provide hope

This is from an article by Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, which Google tells me is a conservative think tank.

"This requires a generational strategy to build an education system based on innovation, school choice and an emphasis on vocational training.  It means rewriting tax and regulatory law to stop discouraging domestic investment and squelching job creation, while also attacking corporate cronyism that gives special treatment to wealthy and entrenched interests.  It demands authentic compassion for people on the periphery of society."

I would add to that comprehensive tax reform that lowers our corporate tax rate to 15%, but does away with other tax expenditures that reduce the taxes below that rate for firms that benefit from such largesse.  The reason I support that is multi-national companies can locate jobs anywhere.  That is the level many other countries use to tax corporations.  If we make taxes neutral, the only influences on plant location will be costs, demand distribution and transportation costs from location to demand.  Taxes will not be a consideration.

Insulting People is now Standard Operating Procedure and a Danger to our Democracy

David Brooks wrote an outstanding column yesterday on what the design of democracy creates and how the current political atmosphere created by Grover Norquist, the NRA, the Tea Party, and personified by Donald Trump's authoritarian philosophic tendencies is poisoning our Democratic traditions and despite these people wrapping themselves up in the Constitution, the process they are employing to try and implement/enforce their positions has little basis in a well functioning Democracy.  So this election is evolving into a referendum on how a American Democracy should function and it is the GOP that is offering something very radical.

Link to David Brooks Column


I know RedStateVT hates the Kardashianing of America, yet he can be prone to copying Donald Trump's pattern of using partisan characture to slam individuals without showing respect for those individuals, and the acceptance of this behavior as appropriate is closely related to the popularity of the Kardashian's.  It is a focus on celebrity fandom as a cultural phenomenon, and the use of it as a political tool to trash political opponents.

So it is no surprise that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have a mutual admiration society for each other as they both use this technique to advance their political fortunes.  And that is only one reason I detest Donald Trump.

I have detested Donald Trump for many years as a High Yield Bond Analyst.  I never had his bonds in my portfolio because I found him untrustworthy and he actively use bankruptcy remote corporate structures to rake in money for himself and then let the company go bankrupt as was his legal right.

He also trades in his name, selling it to others so he can get paid and they can attract uninformed people who think that by associating themselves with Trump, they will achieve personal benefit.  That was the business model of Trump University which failed to educate its students.  So it is no wonder that Trump says he loves the uneducated, they paid tuition to him with student loans they cannot pay back.  As President, would he forgive those loans?

And today we read in the Sports Section, that the members of a golf resort in Florida that Trump bought before it went bankrupt have a Class Action lawsuit against Donald Trump.  The Class had refundable deposits that when Trump bought the gold course assumed as part of the deal, meaning he owed the money.  Trump then proceeded to try and strong arm people into giving up their rights to a refund for pennies on a dollar by threatening them with other possible economic paths that would harm them.  Doesn't Donald Trump love golfers too?

So Chris Christie in an effort to find a job for himself after he fails to win reelection as Governor of New Jersey endorses Donald Trump and we have one bully fawning over another bully.  In the process Governor Christie called Donald Trump an honorable man.

An honorable man does not conduct business like Donald Trump conducts business.  An honorable man does not insult entire classes of people.  People deserve respect.  That is above all else what our Judaic Christian history as a democratic country is founded upon.  Respect for individual rights and a democratic process which involves negotiation to maintain a stake in government for all.

And meanwhile, there is a news article that one reason for Japan's economic malaise is the fact that the population has declined by 1 mm people over the last 5 years.  This supports my position that if Trump deports 11 mm people from the U.S., the U.S. economy will go into a recession that will last for years which will expand the fiscal deficit and ruin fixed income as an asset class for another decade, at least.  That is hardly making America Great Again.  America is great when our economy is great.

RedStateVT claims that the passage of ObamaCare violated this tradition of respect.  But ObamaCare was designed by the Heritage Foundation and implemented by a GOP Presidential Candidate in his state first, where it was successful.  So Mitch McConnell in his desire to make Obama a one term president, tries to foil Obamacare and demonizes GOP ideas on how to improve the populations health and then the GOP punditry blames Obama for poisoning the atmosphere. I have no idea what else the President could have done to make the GOP happy beyond taking the blueprint of a right wing market based Think Tank and making it happen.  My memory has faded on the political machinations of 2009/2010.

This is what GOP punditry has become;  using Falsehoods to belittle people:  the President is not an American, he is a Muslim Socialist,  an all powerful political manipulator.  He is anti-Democratic.  I could go on but if you read this far, I know I am trying your patience by trying to express my disgust for lying.

As a manager, I fired anyone who lied to me and it happened 3 times in my 15 years as a manager.  Lying is a fireable offense and I acted upon it.  I would not like to say that I will not vote for a lier, but since all politicians shade the truth, we are left trying to pick out the least offensive individual in that regard.  But the GOP has become so anti-Democratic, that none of them can be trusted with anything. 7 debates and I don't know what any of them would do to reform health care except return us to the hell that was health insurance before ObamaCare.  And they want to balance the budget; how will that happen?  They want to create a War budget for the Middle East and the Ukraine, and sub-Saharan Africa, and Libya and the South China Sea and ......, but cut taxes, not raise taxes to pay for it.  And will all this conflict play out in the valuation of global wealth?

If you read this far, thank you for reading.  This election is trying my soul and I get so agitated that I need to vent.  I hope other Democratic voters exist in sufficient number to protect our Democracy.

The GOP is truly insane now from a policy standpoint.

Sunday Musings 1/17/16

It was 20 years ago that I realized my time as an employee of a sell side firm was coming to an end because I had an a**hole of a boss who believed that no one older than him should work for him.  He actually had the nerve to say that to me.  So I started to network around and see what I could find with another firm.  That led to my going over to the buy side where I would last for 5+ years until I caught up in one of those inevitable corporate downsizings.  Which led to a period of unemployment but eventually I found a job in Vermont and became friends with RedStateVT as we shared observations of dysfunctional clients, while not being able to see the dysfunction in our own firm, which ultimately led to both of us being retired too young (for our ideal long term financial health).

I muse on that because we saw a play last night about the stresses globalization and Moore's Law (technology advances at an ever increasing rate) put on a work force and the different ways people react to that and how their humanity may come through.  And the play left me pondering this morning the state of our politics, the anger people feel at things they do not control, and how that can come to manifest itself with varying degrees of humanity toward our fellow man.

As I have said before, there is only so much politicians can do for people whose skill sets get left behind by globalization and technology. Society by virtue of its need to compete much always focus on the young (educate and keep them healthy) and encourage those older workers to achieve the best they can and live an honorable life within their means recognizing that they must bear responsibility for decisions they made earlier that have ramifications later on.  That was the moral of the play last night while it also explored why even these unfortunate souls deserve some support from society if they are working to be deserving of that support.

And it is that latter point that is so underdeveloped in our political discourse.  Neither party is really addressing what can society afford and how should we spend it and how do you make people happy when they have to downsize their economic needs and objectives.  If you can't get a $25 an hour job, you take a $15 an hour job, downsize your lifestyle, and find ways to be joyous.  But at the same time, the minimum wage cannot be so low that hard working people without an education cannot afford the basic necessities of life including health insurance.  That is why the Heritage Foundation, when they had a soul, designed Obamacare the way they did.

In a similar manner we are not having an honest discussion of the real problem with guns because the two sides speak past each other and do not give.  The ease of access for the criminally minded and the mentally deficient is the real problem, not 7 vs 10 bullets in a gun magazine, and as one liberal columnist pointed out this morning, not concealed weapons with a carry permit.  And how do the criminally minded get so many guns, straw man purchases in places where there are no background checks.  And how do the mentally deficient get guns, well that is a huge problem as no one has a sanity problem until they have exhibited the sanity problem and that is frequently after they already have their semi-automatic weapon.  Maybe there should be an age restriction on use of semi-automatic weapons, along with background checks on obtaining them.  It seems to be angry frustrated older teens and early 20's who shoot up movie theaters and commit acts of terrorism.  Technology with thumb print recognition systems would seem to be a place where some effective gun control policy could be created in the middle if the NRA were isolated politically.

In conclusion, once again as I write on a Sunday, I am left feeling very discouraged about our political discourse and see little hope of it improving after November.  The anger on the right is encouraging anger on the left with the result that we will not have Clinton vs. Bush III in November, we may well have Sanders vs. Cruz or Rubi and then one can only hope that Michael Bloomberg decides to run (I think he needs to make that decision very soon).  And without Bloomberg in the middle, calm rational people will have a very hard choice to make and while I would vote for Bernie in that case for the 1st time (having never voted for him while I lived in Vermont),  I am not at all sure Bernie can win Florida, Ohio or Virginia with his European Socialism.

The New York Times some years ago had a game like graphic where you could pick and choose policies to balance the budget over 5 years.  If you value the need for infrastructure, defense, providing some level of humanitarian support for all ages, controlling the percentage of GDP the government takes, you had to control the growth in Social Security and Senior Health Care (Medicaid 's worst growth is in paying for Long Term Care of people with dementia who spend down what they have saved and they have no more) and no politician wants to talk about this.  They are just going to let us spin into a crisis.

While I promised myself I wouldn't go there, the problem is not Heritage Foundation/RomneyCare/ObamaCare. That is trying to keep the cost of health insurance and the health of people under 65 affordable and effective.  The problem is dementia and the use of Medicaid to pay for it.  My mother had dementia for over 20 years and my father paid for her care until he hit the minimum wealth allowed and my mother went on Medicaid.  Her final Medicare bill was $400,000 for care that should have never occurred because of her DNR, but it did.  And I don't know exactly what Medicaid actually paid because I never saw those bills, but at $150 a day for the 10 years of her institutionalization that was another $550,000.  And now those dementia care costs are somewhere between $200 and $500 a day.  So a dementia patient can cost society close to $1 million each and if over time (the favorite government accounting technique) 30 million people end up with dementia (10%) and they end up on Medicaid, that is a potential cost of $3 trillion.

That is not trivial, and I wish our political discourse would allow a coherent holistic discussion of the demands on our budget and a balanced approach to giving ourselves a budget surplus when we have full employment and an affordable deficit when we are in a recession.  Right now we are nearing full employment, have a budget deficit of 2.5% or so, and political Armageddon between liberals and tax cutting conservatives.

Oh, and what happened to that a**hole younger boss who made me leave the sell side, he returned to N.C. ran for Congress as a Conservative GOP and lost.  So now he is on some Board of Directors enjoying the income of being a pal of rich people who appoint him to their Board's.