The Rachel Maddow – Hoover Dam joke

I just saw the new Rachel Maddow commercial for MSNBC, where she stands in front of Hoover Dam and exhorts America to borrow more money to build dams that kill rivers.

This might stir my heart strings, except that’s not what she means America should borrow money to do.  Because any major public works project is going to involve hiring lots and lots of engineers and constructions workers.  And engineers and construction workers are not just ignoramuses, their real sin is that they’re the wrong demographic.  And the environmentalists would protest and hogtie any permit process to do anything even remotely like Hoover Dam.

How about if we have an enormous federal construction project to do something really useful, like building 200 new nuclear power plants, and a nationwide grid to deliver that power where it’s needed.  Rachel?  Whadda’ ya’ think?

Rachel Maddow and Spike Lee (who apparently shot the commercial) don’t mean a word of what was said.  This is classic Fifth Generation, hate-America-first, Progressivism … desperately attempting every possible ploy to shame, scare, or trick ordinary Americans into doing more of exactly the things that have brought us to the brink of our own demise.

Rachel, here’s a free clue, just for you.  The America that built the Hoover Dam is dead, gone, shot, a fading memory.  Today’s America cancels the NASA manned space flight program and offers it up for privatization, while working furiously to nationalize the healthcare system.  Private space flight, public health care … hmmmmm.  Now you think we can do anything even close to what our parent did and build a Hoover Dam?  You think that after savaging the culture that “built our way out” of the Depression and won WWII, that now you can invoke that heritage and get everyone who knows how to build things to forget the abuse and get with it on your behalf?

Rachel, go get a degree in engineering and do something useful.  We have no shortage of TV pundits.  We do need people who know how to build dams.  Show us how.  I’ll wait.

G’night all, and may God continue to bless America!

Fixing the budget – Part Troi

I’ve written most of these thoughts in dribs and drabs elsewhere, but I want to pull them all together.  Time is running out, patience and elasticity are both quickly evaporating.  Either we soon get things on a sustainable track, or we place our children’s children in shackles for life.

There are three elements to balancing the federal budget.  First, revenues must be adequate.  Second, expenses must be controlled.  And third, and ultimately lastly, the economy needs to be very substantially more robust than it is now, because a healthy economy makes the first two issues far less important.  As you will see, the surest and fastest way to a robust economy is to create an appropriate environment where the federal government is not crushing productivity, robbing credit, and ruining the currency.

So we cut, and we raise revenues, and we set a few wickets.

1.  Cut the Dept of Defense by 50% over 10 years.  This is accomplished by a number of steps.  First, combine strategic systems, we no longer need nuclear bombers, and may not need both land and sea based ballistic missiles.  We may not need ballistic missiles at all.  Then, redesign the Navy and Air Force for 21st Century threats.  Neither force will confront a peer-adversary, they must be recrafted to much more of a support role for ground forces, which will drastically lower the cost of these forces as CVN’s become LHD’s, and F-15’s become Predators.  Third, combine support functions for all services, things like: legal and military police, chaplains, medical and hospital services, logistics and transportation, civil engineers, musicians, and numerous other non-service specific functions.  Finally, resize and remission the Army and Marine Corps to be more clearly complimentary rather than overlapping.  Convert all non-combatant functions into wage grade (non-GS) civil service positions, similar to the way Naval Fleet Auxiliary Force ships are operated (not military, not career competitive (GS/SES) civil service, and not contractors).  Consolidate and close bases ruthlessly.

2.  Means test social security and Medicare, so that those who need the benefit get it, and those who have independent income and wealth gradually lose the benefit as their wealth increases.  Twenty five percent of households headed by a senior 65 or older has an income greater than $75,000 per year.  I don’t have the exact numbers, but somewhere around twice the median household income, social security and Medicare benefits should begin a gradual reduction, until somewhere around three time the median income, all money benefits cease.

3.  Reform the tax code.  The preferred solution is to tax consumption, not income.  There is plenty of material on the “fair tax” which, if read for understanding, clearly explains how this system benefits the nation.  Failing that, reform the income tax code to provide a truly progressive tax structure that recognizes that incomes don’t stop rising at $250K or $383K a year, and that $250K/yr is a long, long way from “truly wealthy”.  Establish separate tax rates for incomes of 7 figures, 8, 9, and 10 figures a year.  Income above $100M a year should be taxed at a confiscatory rate for the primary purpose of discouraging piratical capitalist greed by eliminating the incentive.  Eliminate all deductions except for a mortgage interest deduction for a principal residence up to (say, for example) twice the national median home price.  Eliminate the corporate income tax and instead tax all corporate proceeds (stock sales, dividends, salaries, bonuses, stock options … everything) received by individuals as ordinary income, at the individual’s income tax rate.  Fire the lawyers, fire the accountants, put them to work at something useful.

4.  Very carefully examine all round-trip tax revenue activities.  This is where individuals are taxed by Washington DC, only to have the funds returned to the states.  There will be some legitimate areas where this is unavoidable.  But as a general rule, the sticky fingers in DC consume billions and billions every year (check the real estate markets around DC) with no advantage to the taxpayer.  All this practice does is enrich the Imperial Capital.

5.  As for changes to education, there are two changes that are absolutely mandatory.  First is a change in the primary/secondary curriculum, second is a change in the structure of post-secondary education.

5a.  The K12 curriculum must be revised to include multi-level education in personal finance management and microeconomics, and food preparation (cooking classes).  Every student who graduates from High School should be able to calculate the sum of interest payments on a loan, read a loan agreement, write a budget and balance a checkbook, cook a meatloaf, shop effectively, and maintain food service sanitation.

5b.  Post-secondary education must be revised to provide separate post-secondary avenues to academic and vocational (trades/crafts), and currently binned curriculum re-binned to reflect this.  Programmers, nurses, and airline pilots (not to mention airline mechanics) do not need college degrees.  Certified welders and machinists are more valuable to society that a room full of never-completed generic liberal arts degrees.  Germany provides a perfect example of this type of apprenticeship culture.  It has to be supported in society, American arrogance and snobbery over trades and crafts is a pernicious characteristic.  Parents, community, the society and the culture have to encourage kids to do what they will be able to complete, and what they will be able to support themselves with.  We need technicians and craftsmen more than we need generic, pointy-haired college graduates.

I could write a lot more, but this simple, easy steps would turn the federal budget, and this nation, around completely.  This is the beginning of a blueprint for a 21st Century America.  There’s not an electable politician in the nation with the guts to take this on.  Oooopsy, didn’t mean to say that.  Let’s say, instead, that we’ll have to wait and see whether the politicians will take these things on, and provide a future for the nation, or whether they’re more adept at getting elected than they are at governing.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

Keynesian havoc being wrought

John Maynard Keynes proposed an economic theory that government could act to moderate the business cycle, reducing booms to boomlets and busts to bustlets.  He also said that government deficit spending to stimulate the economy could lift a nation out of recession or depression.  In theory, he was correct, as was Karl Marx.  In practice, his theories have wrought more destruction than can readily be imagined.

First, Keynesian deficit spending did not fix or solve or even mitigate the Great Depression.  All the hyperactivity of Roosevelt’s advisors during the 30’s did almost nothing to improve the plight of the Nation.  This goes against socialist orthodoxy.  These theories of economics, and attempts to implement them, were coincident with the early years of the USSR and the Stalinist claims of fantastical successes under that system.  If the Soviet government could do such a magnificent job of managing their economy, why couldn’t Western governments duplicate that success?  Of course, in retrospect, all the Soviet successes were utterly fabricated, and at enormous human cost.

So Keynes and FDR did not fix the Great Depression.  We spent like drunken sailors, and after several years of this, we tried weaning the economy off the government teat in 1936.  And of course the economy fell right back into Depression.  Nothing had been fixed, at which point nobody knew what to do, so we tried doing everything.  By 1939 the situation was so dire that Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau made  his famous speech, “"We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. After eight years we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot.”

Ref: http://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2009/02/sourcing-morgenthau-1939-quote-at.html

What did finally get the United States out of the Great Depression was two consecutive events.  The first was World War II which would have financially destroyed the nation were it not for the second, which was the utter worldwide desolation in the aftermath of WWII.  WWII deficit spending built the industrial plant that we then used to rebuild the rest of the world.  Because the Greatest Generation was doing this, having grown up during the Depression and having fought and won WWII, prudence and thrift and personal responsibility were foremost.  We had an intact social fabric, WWII being the last war fought equally by rich and poor.  And that social fabric, warp and weft, was that the rich paid their taxes, and the poor didn’t demand a right to expensive government benefits.

So today’s Americans inherited a legacy that we have completely failed to live up to, which brings this to the rest of Keynes’ real world performance.

Government deficit spending can work to unclog an otherwise functional economy.  If it’s a minor or temporary disruption, the government can borrow and spend to get the gears turning again.  But in case of a fundamental malfunction, such as what we now have, government deficit spending is a positively dangerous approach.  But first, let’s finish dispelling the myth that government deficit spending can jumpstart(1) a dysfunctional economy.

(1) worst metaphor ever

At the height of Depression-era deficit spending, the deficit never exceeded 3.5% of GDP.  And that didn’t work.  So today’s academic and governing elite insist that we simply have to spend more to make this scheme work.  Well, guess what?  We have been, we’ve been running deficits above 10% of GDP for the past three years and it isn’t even close to working!  And remember, in the aftermath of WWII we had supernatural prosperity because the rest of the world lay in smoking ruins.  If Secretary of the Treasury Geithner had more honest bones in his body, he would dust off Morgenthau’s speech and use that at his next major speaking engagement.

In this environment, the only prudent course is for the government to put their accounts in order, quit generating debt, and solidify the nation’s credit and currency.  That might not work, either, but at least we’ll be drowning in less debt, and we might have a credit rating and currency that are strong enough to give the nation a negotiating position that doesn’t involve holding “hat in hand”.

Very quickly, the problem with our economy today is that the jobs are gone.  They aren’t “gone overseas”, they are gone as in “they don’t exist any more”.  We used to need lots of people to raise enough food to feed themselves and have a little left over to sell to city folks.  Two hundred years ago, 80% of the people in America were farmers.  Agriculture improved and now 2% of the population can feed themselves, plus the other 98%.

Without our realizing it, the same thing has happened in industry.  People are no longer required to build automobiles, refrigerators, or iPads.  The only reason there are jobs in China doing those things is because labor is so cheap.  If the labor were any more expensive, the corporations would capitalize the final stages of Total industrial production automation.  It can be done, and it will, if it comes to a choice between that, and bringing back a General Motors that employs 600,000 hourly union workers.  All is not necessarily lost, but it is threatened.

The new jobs in America are going to be in design, a few jobs in production prototyping (typically, expensive complex stuff that costs a lot of money, but is pumped out in low volumes), and in content creation (writing, producing videos, etc).  My greatest concern today is that the New Media entrepreneurs are showing themselves to be every bit as predatory and rapacious as the Robber Barons ever were.  Think of websites that are based on user-contributed content that have made their founders/owners wildly, spectacularly, obscenely rich.  And those founder/owners have kept all the money for themselves and equitably disbursed none of it to those who created the content(2) that generated the wealth for them.  Of course, there was not a contract, but nobody has seen what this situation is until I just now.  And these New Media entrepreneurs bask in their own righteousness, while young Americans volunteer for serfdom by contributing to someone else’s fortune at no benefit to themselves.

(2) The paid staff who built the website, or administer the website, or sell the advertising, don’t create that wealth, the content creators do.

Contributing for free is something that the elites can do, or the retired, or the community minded.  But when a New Media mogul cashes in, then the “community minded” premise is out the window.  So I strongly encourage anyone who’s still trying to make a living for themselves to get this clue:  Never give something for free to someone who is going to sell it to someone else.  If we need a Facebook, or Twitter, or HuffingtonPost as a new age town square, then do it the Linux way, or the Wikipedia way.  Everyone contributes their best for the common good, and nobody takes the whole hog.

As for the celebrities and elites who contribute for free, you should be ashamed of yourselves.  You have more than you will ever need, of course you don’t need to be paid for your contribution.  Try growing a social conscience and think about the young, or not so young, freelance writer who’s trying to scrape out a living for themselves.  Of course you understand that you are discounting the value of their work by giving away what you will never miss for free.  When you go on Jay Leno, you don’t need the $500 or whatever it is, but you know it’s there to protect struggling actors.  Open your eyes and stand for social and economic justice for struggling Americans.  Use your celebrity for the benefit of the less well off by demanding a fee (and to assuage your conscience, donate it to a worthy fund).

So, I think I’ve done a dandy job of confusing the initial issue sufficiently.  This is the future of America.  We have this chance to get it right, there is little chance we’ll have another opportunity even as good as this one.  All change is not improvement, but all improvement requires change.  We can’t make the situation better by continuing with what hasn’t been working.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

What motivates America?

DNA motivates America, and most of us have it.  With the exception of the descendants of Native Americans and African Slaves, the rest of us come from ancestors who weren’t happy, well adjusted, or successful in “The Old Country”.  Whether Prussia or Schezuan, our descendants pretty much left their land of birth and threw their fate to the wind in search of something better.  We are a nation of malcontents.

This is what motivates us, this is what makes us who we are.  This is our energy, this is our restlessness, and the farther from ones ancestral lands (East for Asians, West for Europeans), the more unhappy, restless, and driven we are.  This is who we are, one singularly unhappy and restless people.

For all its good sides, think of Steve Jobs, this has a downside.  In European social-democracies, hatred of one’s parents is a known phenomenon, but it is not the norm.  In the United States, there are kids who are well adjust and respectful (most of them in Asian, Hindu, and Jewish families) but that is not the norm.  In Europe, being at peace with one’s parents is the norm, in America being at war with one’s parents is the norm.  How is this an issue?

Europeans and Asians can learn the lessons of history because they don’t need to reject history out of hand.  In America, we cannot learn the lessons of history, because our discomfort with our parents demands that we reject history out of hand.  And in rejecting history (the story of our parents), we become unable to learn from history.  So we invent things, create new synthetic realities to replace the real reality.

The question becomes, is our creativity driven by our genetic unrest sufficient to overcome this rejection of the wisdom of history, or have we reached the end of that particular source of wealth?  Only time will tell.  But (as I’m sure you’re guessing), I suspect not.  I think that America’s anger (exemplified by the young and not-so-young Progressive) has now become an albatross around our necks.  Moreso then ever in the past, we are each on our own.

G’night all, and may God continue to bless America!

The Huffington Post is finished

Read it and peer into the dark hole where the soul of Progressivism was supposed to be:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/huffington-post-lawsuit_b_848942.html

Bootlicking adoration of their avaricious millionaires (but not those other, nasty, millionaires) is the new Progressive orthodoxy.  Whatever happens at the Huffington Post from this point on is irrelevant to America.  The show and the audience have both been shown to have no underlying ethic beyond self interest, and diffuse rage at anyone resembling a parent figure.  One thing I must give the Huffington Post credit for: they are consistent from top to bottom.  There is no departure at any point from this toxicity.

In the fairly recent past, Progressivism held out such hope for America.  Watch President Kennedy’s inaugural: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLmiOEk59n8.  That is what was, and what could be, were in not for the plotters and schemers who’ve highjacked Progressivism, some of whom used to be Conservatives and jumped ship when they saw an opportunity, and twisted that proud movement into an annular ring.  Which is what Progressivism has become, just another annular ring.

G’day, and may God continue to bless America!

Why stuff don’t work … social fabric

The success of public policy depends on an intact social fabric.  This will piss off a lot of Progressives, who think that all authority and wealth and control flows from a highly centralized federal government.  They are wrong.  Government, even on its best day, relies on this underlying social fabric to convert policy into results.

Before I explain this, there are two points that anyone who wants to make accurate and useful observations on government policy needs to understand.  First, we will never know the results of the policy we implement today.  Our grandchildren will still be studying and analyzing and debating the outcomes from policy we institute today.  We are still debating events in and around the Civil War.  During Richard Nixon’s first visit to Communist China, an American diplomat asked his Chinese counterpart what he thought of the French Revolution.  The Chinese official replied, “Too soon to tell.”

Second, many of these outcomes are things that cannot be measured in any meaningful way.  Putting numbers to employment, incomes, longevity, crime, or any number of other facets of human achievement are, all too often, nothing but the roughest of approximations masquerading as fact.  The precision of these numbers far exceeds their accuracy.  If you do not actually know exactly what that means, please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision for background and a cool “AhHah!” moment.  Only the accumulated weight of observation and analysis over historical timespans will determine whether a policy was successful or not.

So, here goes, and this is going to be blunt.  When the social fabric of a society is rent, policy will simply return increasingly unanticipated consequences, until it finally appears that government policy is returning random results for some unrecognized reason.  We craft legislation to enact policy with certain preconceived notions of outcomes, and these preconceptions are based on the population acting in accordance with the norms of the social fabric of that society.  Take taxes.  We need more revenue for public expenses so we raise tax rates, expecting that people will keep working hard and pay their taxes (a norm defined in our historical social fabric).  When that social fabric is rent, people avoid paying their taxes by various means, and the public policy intent is frustrated.

The social fabric of American is frayed, if not ruined.  Why and how did this happen?  The answer is extraordinarily simple.  We need only go back as far as 1946.  A generation of Americans raised during the Great Depression and come of age during World War II stood alone in the world.  They had suffered ever privation, experienced every horror, and returned home to the only major intact industrial and agricultural power on Earth.  Having suffered, and fought and died, together (WWII being the last war fought equally by rich and poor), they were “in in together”.  The social fabric was strong.  The rich paid their taxes, the poor struggled and when they needed it, they got help.  GI’s went to school and promptly graduated and went to work repaying the WWII war debt.

The rich paid their taxes while maintaining appropriate modesty, and the poor, doing what they could for themselves, did not demand a right to expensive benefits from the federal government.

All that changed in the 1960’s with President Johnson’s “Great Society” that institutionalized direct federal payments to the mass of Americans.  When the rich saw the poor being showered with federal funds (into the trillions of dollars), and without the intended outcome being achieved (ie; little or no reduction in poverty), that is where the decay of our social fabric began.

BTW, free agency in professional sports, an apparently minor issue, has played a large role.  Where fans in the past could feel genuine loyalty to “their team”, that is now too often a matter of whim or convenience.  If the players hop around for their own benefit, showing little or no loyalty as they reap ever more publicly large rewards, what really is the point of professional sports, except “In it to win it”.  Contrast that to the post-WWII attitude of “in it together”.

Listen to this to see what a Progressive President had to say just 50 years ago, when American was still strong and optimistic (even in the face of imminent nuclear incineration): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLmiOEk59n8.  Now, imagine a Progressive, or a Conservative for that matter, saying those things today.

In the face of the advanced state of decay of our social fabric, we must re-reference our expectations from public policy.  We can no longer expect that people will pay their taxes.  We can no longer assume that people will strive to provide for themselves and achieve personal freedom and independence.  We can no longer assume that a citizen in a bad situation will make the changes, take the risks, or move to where opportunities are brighter.  The weakening of the social fabric since John F. Kennedy’s era now results in entirely different expected outcomes.

I’m not even saying that one is right and the other wrong.  What I am saying is that unless a citizen enjoys being caught by unpleasant surprise, that citizen needs to understand how the social fabric effects public policy and how changes in that implicit contract change the results of programs.  We cannot have our cake, and eat it, too.

Fundamentally, what is missing today is a new social fabric to replace that which is being lost.  But no one is willing to define exactly what the conditions implicit in that would be, that would be too uncomfortable for too many Americans.  It’s easier to insist on a law that says we can, most improbably, indeed have our cake and eat it, too.  (Eg; continue to enjoy American personal freedoms in a world that has proven that making social democracy work demands a government policy that “multiculturalism is an utter failure”).

G’day, all, and may God continue to bless America!

The British are coming … and going

In most healthy and durable relationships, it is the smaller and weaker (although perhaps more clever), partner who wields a majority influence and effective control over the acts of the couple.

For almost 150 years, U.S. foreign policy has been guided by the interests of the British and, to a lesser extent, the French.  Most recently, we are in Libya in support of British and French foreign policy objectives, yet again doing for them what they cannot do for themselves.  Naturally, the U.S. will bear blame and shame for whatever the outcome is, while the Brits and Frenchies clink glasses and smile slyly at each other.

I actually like the British and French a lot.  I’ve been deployed with them both, and they have always proven themselves courageous, steadfast, reliable, and cordial allies.  Well, except for the time that guy on the French frigate yelled at me on the radio, but I suspect he later felt embarrassed.  That doesn’t change the fact that they have been leading us around by the nose since the end of the Civil War.

Here is what happened.  For the first 90 years of this nation, the British essentially pummeled the United States, non-stop.  They burned the White House, eh?  The French helped the United States to exactly the extent that it served their interests.  Remember the Quasi-War?  The only reason that the United States survived was because steam power for ships was not yet practical for crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

During the Civil War, the British really pulled ahead in their contest with the French, by threatening to recognize the Confederate States of America.  This vexed Abraham Lincoln no end, and put that final abuse into the former child that finally broke the will of the United States to resist, and turned us into abject victims, seeking permission and approval from Britain almost regardless of our own interests.

Woodrow Wilson let us be suckered into WWI, Lusitania and all that, to save the British and the French from a dire fate born of their own lack of preparedness and military disposition (Okay, you Brits and Frenchies, I say this tongue-in-cheek, I’m having some fun here).  That led to the lesser Roosevelt leading us into WWII to save the British and French once again, and then give them their colonies back!  How cool was that (if you were British or French)?

And we were still seeking approval from our ‘parents’ in the aftermath of WWII.  The British got us to use our power to overthrow Mossadegh to protect British Petroleum.  France got us to wade into Viet Nam in an effort to protect Michelin rubber plantations.  And still we hadn’t gotten enough approval from the ‘parents’ to be able to set ourselves free.  Even a President often used to epitomize the cowboy-foreign-policy ethic so despised by Progressives, Ronald Reagan himself, gave Britain a pass on that whole Monroe Doctrine thing to back them in their war to retain the Falkland Islands.

Can we never get enough approval from Britain and France to empower us to go our own way?  Well, I hope not, they are good allies.  Along with Israel and Japan, they are our best allies.  Canada would be up there, except they’re even more clever and devious than the British and French.  All the Canadians do is piss and moan as the United States does what needs to be done.  And then when Britain and France (who both treated the infant Canada far better than they did the infant United States, perhaps because Canada was the more demure and polite child) have an interest (Libya, anyone?), they step up to the plate and provide forces and the commander of the NATO mission.  I don’t know about the Australians, but that doesn’t matter.  Even though they’ve been leading us around by the nose for a couple centuries, Britain and France are good allies.

But nobody should allow themselves to be deceived, or try to deceive anyone else, that Britain and France have ever for one second done anything except use America’s guilt and insecurity to manipulate the U.S. into doing their bidding.  Progressives make their expected contribution by praising Britain and France (and Canada) for being so “civilized”, the very obvious corollary being that we should do whatever they want us to do, and be thankful for the opportunity.

Shortly after taking office, President Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the White House for decades.  This was an act that was much commented on, but little analyzed.  And he got zero support in this hugely symbolic act.  The Brits and Americans alike were outraged.  Fair enough, if I were British I’da been upset, too.  The world would look like a much scarier place for them without having the use of the US Navy and Marine Corps (not to mention Army and Air Force, and cripes, Coast Guard, for all I know).  I didn’t care for that move very much, either, but at the time I did not understand the symbolism.  In retrospect, the relationship between the U.S. and the traditional European powers has become clear to me.  Even though I still disagree with President Obama’s symbolic severing of a special relationship with Britain, I do respect him for making that statement on the topic.

We need democratic allies, we should be extremely close to Britain, France, other European powers, Israel, India, Japan, and any other democratic nation that seeks alliance.  But let us not be deceived.  As the bigger and stronger in any alliance we enter, we will do the bidding of our smaller and weaker allies.  We should keep doing this, but we should always see clearly what is happening.

G’day, all, and may God continue to bless America!