The participation trophy conundrum

© 2018 Jim Spence - A few observations seem in order after seeing George H.W. Bush was laid to rest last week. It was astonishing to watch CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times spend hours and hours covering that funeral when these are the exact same media outlets that branded Bush 41 a shameless racist many years ago.
Of course, it is noteworthy that the Washington Post has never in its long history endorsed a Republican for president. And the last time the New Your Times endorsed a Republican, I was still soiling my diapers (I am 62 now). Still, these are newspapers who hire avowed racists (the Times recent addition to their editorial board) while accusing every GOP candidate of being racist and "partisan."
One must wonder why would these media outlets changed their tune suddenly and acted like Bush 41 was a true gentlemen, a self-less statesmen, and an admirable public servant?
Any fair-minded person should know the media's history on this. The media not only treated Bush 41 like garbage, they also did the same with McCain when these men ran against Dukakis, Clinton, and Obama. This stark fact regarding their 180 degree change in tone during both men's funerals, leads to only two possible conclusions.

1) the media was either lying about McCain and Bush when they were running against Democrats, or

2) they are lying about them now.

Here's the point.....Nobody who was a shameless racist in life, should ever be re-cast as an American hero in death. It is no wonder that America distrusts the news media more than any other entity. The media behaves as if nobody has a record of what they used to say.
With the incoming Democratic majority in the U.S. House a question seems appropriate. Does the voting public care about real economic results generated by sound public policies. We are talking about record low unemployment rates for ALL AMERICANS and rising wages for the first time in decades. Why would the majority of voters give power back to Democrats in the face of a two-year economic miracle under GOP rule. This is a head-scratcher. How in the world could American citizens not care about results?
The answer is simple. Americans have been being indoctrinated for decades to not bother to keep score (except in sporting events) or care about real results. There is a deep disconnect between the two types of people in American life. Some people like to compete and like to keep score. And then there are those who really prefer the participation trophy concept that came into public education etc. a few decades ago.
It is the age old clash of philosophies. People who like to compete and keep score also tend to value freedom. Whereas people who want participation trophies think showing up is a big deal and government should protect their egos from objective measurements regarding results. Participation trophy types think measuring success is mean-spirited. Winning is something that only greedy people are truly interested in. Of course this ignores reality, but then, what the heck, that is what public education is all about.....ignoring reality. This explains why the private sector brings us more and more conveniences for lower prices, while public education is manufacturing unemployable dolts by the millions.
There is one thing that most Americans should learn about the participation trophy types. Those who hate keeping score, like having access to resources. And they don't care if they didn't work to get their stuff. They like to spend money, especially other people's money.
Participation trophy types simply don't like to admit that life is generally about competition and that anywhere were competition is encouraged, living standards are higher. Participation trophy types want higher living standards, but they want more, more, more, without accepting the basic economic foundations that create more useful things.
In the end, participation trophy types (a metaphor for Democrats) refuse to admit that despite all of its obvious flaws, the system of free market capitalism, is the system that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This explains why people from everywhere are clamoring to get here. They don't understand the system, they just see all the "stuff." Participation trophy types will always have a "yea but," for every historical truth that bears these facts out. They will also have a "yea but" excuse for all the failed participation trophy systems where people are starving and doing without basic staples of life.
Hating the excesses of Donald J. Trump that comes with all of the sound policies he has implemented, is just the participation trophy types way of having baseless emotional excuse to vote stupid, which is what they do.

The participation trophy conundrum

The fishing contest

© 2018 Jim Spence - I am reminded of what Americans get when the majority votes for Democrats. Nancy Pelosi will soon become Speaker of the House again. She was named leader with the help of all three New Mexico reps in the U.S. House.  Below is a spot-on allegory that illustrates what having Pelosi in charge of the House means for our future:

It seems that President Trump and Pelosi begin arguing intensely over border security in 2019. Pelosi insists that all migrants should enjoy free entry into America. She proposes a bill to increase taxes on working Americans to pay for the benefits illegals will receive. Since it is illegal for any immigrant living here illegally to actually work at a job, taxpayers will have to pay their bills.
Not surprisingly, Trump threatens a veto. He says repeatedly that he wants America to secure its borders and return to a much more rational approach to legal immigration, where everyone waits in line until it is their turn, instead of filing bogus asylum requests using hack immigration lawyers to game our system. 
Since the Democrats and GOP are at a stalemate on immigration reform, Trump and Pelosi work out an agreement to hold a 3-day ice fishing contest to settle the issue. The contest is simple. Between Pelosi and Trump, whoever catches the most fish at the end of the 3-day contest will have his or her immigration reform process implemented.
Trump and Pelosi decide that a remote lake in northern Wisconsin will be an ideal place to have the ice-fishing contest. There will be no observers allowed on the frozen lake, but both competitors will need to have their catches verified and counted each night at 5:00 PM. They both agree to use a team of neutral game wardens to verify the fish counts.
After Day 1, Trump brings in a total of just 10 fish. Surprisingly, on Day 1, Pelosi caught no fish. On Day 2 Trump learned from his successes and failures from Day 1 and caught 20 fish. Once again on Day 2, Pelosi caught nothing.
As soon as the fishing ended on Day 3, it was clear that Trump had been really intent on learning what he needed to learn to improve his fishing techniques. He added another 40 fish to his total. He wished he could have done better the first two days, but he also knew that he had improved and Pelosi needed 71 fish to win the contest. 
It turns out that Pelosi did not bother to fish on Day 3. Instead she and her political cronies got together and decided to accuse Trump of being a "low-life cheating piece of scum." In fact, Pelosi made some phone calls to high-ranking buddies, who were life-long Democrats working at the FBI and DOJ, and asked them to follow Trump, spy on him, and get proof that he was cheating.
To prep the press for her cheating narrative, Pelosi instructed her staff to leak tidbits of juicy “inside information." The leaks strongly hinted that the Democrats had caught Trump red-handed in the middle of a massive illegal cheating conspiracy to win the fishing contest.
That evening, at 5:01 PM, Nancy Pelosi and most of her cohorts from the U.S. House of Representatives gathered in front of a throng of eager reporters from CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times and the Washington Post.
Though her fish count stood at zero, Pelosi looked into the cameras and explained, "You are not going to believe this," she said emphatically. "We have the most damning and incontrovertible evidence that proves Donald J. Trump is a miserable cheat.....it turns out he's been cutting holes in the ice."
The press gasped. Many journalists did not wait to hear from Pelosi's cronies. Instead they began pounding away on their laptop computers and Ipads to get the story out. The TV reporters rushed outside to get in front of cameras and file live reports on air and answer questions from aghast pundits serving on discussion panels.
Within a half an hour every journalist had explained to their devoted followers why this horrific incident demonstrated once and for all why NO business person should EVER be trusted with the immense power of government. We should simply put our futures into the hands of people who had worked most of their adult lives as government employees.
Impeach! Impeach! chanted the pundits on all the major networks except Fox. The story was told over and over on the nightly news shows for days. The details of the ice cutting scandal was trumpeted all around the world. It was soon repeated in every public education institution in the nation during current event segments. Within days Hollywood screenwriters were belting out passionate scripts bemoaning the utter evilness of Trump's ice cutting. A rehabilitated Harvey Weinstein produced a box office smash hit based on the incredible story that rivaled All the President's Men.

The fishing contest

Screwing Kavanaugh mattered

© 2018 Jim Spence -  A few more musings on the 2018 mid-terms. There is a saying that all politics is local. Most often this statement is true, but in the U.S. Senate races all things in the battleground states were national.

Before explaining, let's just say that we don’t interact with socialists much. It sort of goes against the grain of who we are to mingle with people who define things like "compassion" and "generosity" by how willing they are to hand over our precious resources to wasteful bureaucrats. Accordingly, we do our best to politely stay away socialists. However, when we must interact with a socialist, we don’t bring up the subject of what constitutes intelligent public policy because well…..it is like bringing up the topic with a three-year-old. Like a three-year-old, socialists don't like to work much. And they tend to only care about what they want right now. They like to consume resources, but they have no idea how wealth, resources, and rising income streams are created. Not only do they not know, they don't want to know. Thinking is always subordinated to "feeling." We raised our kids already and we never tried to reason with them when they were toddlers.

One of the bell weather talking points of most Trump haters emerged during the Kavanaugh hearings. There was little doubt there was a central clearing house for bullet points that were damning of Kavanaugh. Over and over we heard from Democrats on television and elsewhere say that Kavanaugh did not have the proper “temperament” to be a Supreme Court justice. One had to wonder what sort of temperament should be required for someone to quietly accept the fact that hack politicians had fabricated rape accusations in the bizarre hope that absurd uncorroborated claims from decades ago, might somehow derail the Kavanaugh nomination. Who needs anyone who will sit calmly while political assassins empty a dump truck of excrement on his head?

The Kavanaugh episode was historic because reasonable people might have wanted to oppose Kavanaugh because they disagreed with his judicial philosophy. These types could have simply asked a few questions about opinions he wrote that they disagreed with, and then vote no based on his legal opinions. Of course this would be the classy way to vote no. On the other hand, with Democrats, engaging in shameless character assassination ruled the day. And when Democrats showed a vindictively evil side, many of the non-Trump hating public, who are also fair-minded, did not care for it. 

Here's the point. In the blue states it never matters what Democrats do, they win no matter what. However, in battleground states integrity and fairness matters. And particularly in red states, it turns out that Dianne Feinstein’s gutless charade against Kavanaugh created a political squeeze that helped destroy the political careers of Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and also enhance the GOP majority in the Senate. Each of these three Democrats, was running for re-election in a battleground state. Each was forced to choose between the demands of New York socialist Chuck Schumer’s whims, and the overwhelming preferences of their local constituents. These three senators all decided they could get away with voting against the Supreme Court nominee of a president that carried their state by a wide margin. It seems they forgot Trump took their states in 2016 due mainly to the fact that voters wanted him to make the SCOTUS nomination. All three, under partisan pressure to screw over Kavanaugh, as the saying goes, CHOSE POORLY. Their decisions to screw Kavanaugh were not well-received. The lone Democrat senator from a battleground state who supported Kavanaugh, was Joe Manchin. Manchin was not so coincidentally re-elected. Had it not been for the Kavanaugh affair, the blue wave would have been bigger.

Another interesting development last night was the incredible speed and accuracy with which Fox News projected that the Democrats would re-take control of the House. Switching back and forth between all the networks last night was illuminating. After the pollsters so clearly failed all news media outlets in 2016, it was obvious that more scientific methods of forecasting election outcomes was needed. Just two days ago The Hill, a left leaning news site posted an opinion piece claiming the GOP was bracing for a massive wipe out in the governor races. Nationwide the Democrats wound up with one less governor than they began the night with.

Not every media outlet stood pat while clinging to obviously flawed systems for projecting election results. It seems that Fox was the only network that substantially improved its analytics. Early in the evening Fox went so far as to announce that it was projecting the Democrat takeover of the House. This must have stunned its audience. Switching to all the other networks for confirmation of Fox’s bold prediction proved fruitless. None was projecting any such thing. After returning to Fox, explanations were provided by the chief analytic guy who explained how Fox felt it knew so early on that the GOP was going to lose the House. We’ll spare you the jargon used in the explanation. Safe to say Fox understood much earlier and more than any other network, what was most relevant in the mountains of data everyone had the opportunity to gather. It was almost ironic that only the pro-GOP network in America was the first to tell America the GOP was going to lose the House. In the meantime CNN, the NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, etc. were all engaged in nearly identical race-by-race vote count updates. None had a clue about the bigger picture like Fox. Grasping the big picture and paying for superior analytics just did not seem to be anywhere near the top of the agendas at all of those "news" outlets. No surprise there.

Screwing Kavanaugh mattered

"Pinche Gringo" says it all

© 2018 Jim Spence -  Some full disclosure seems appropriate regarding my personal biases. I am an economic policy wonk. For more than thirty-five years I have committed my time and energy to understanding what is working economically/financially. Because we get paid to know what works and what doesn’t for our investing clients and ourselves, good national and state economic/financial policies really matter to me. Anytime any investor pretends that something works when it doesn’t, it is costly to that investor in a VERY DIRECT way. With voters the direct connection is not made often enough. It seems that the goal of politics these days is to have no immediate consequences for abject stupidity.

We can learn plenty about America based on yesterday's election. Perhaps the most instructive story of the night was El Paso’s Robert Francis O’Rourke. O’Rourke wound up accomplishing what most Democrats would do under the similar circumstances. He gathered up more than $100 million dollars from progressive donors, including several Democrat billionaires, and squandered the money quickly. O'Rourke was trying to win Texas’s U.S. Senate seat held by Ted Cruz. The problem was it was a tricky identity politics coup attempt by O’Rourke. Like the NAACP’s Rachael Dolzeal and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Robert Francis O’Rourke has always been able to talk a good game about "white privilege," especially to minority voters and those susceptible to white guilt in the Texas electorate. It was a great irony that he simultaneously engaged in classic cultural appropriation, which is the rage today. O'Rourke went by the very Hispanic sounding nickname of “Beto.” Yep, it seems that O’Rourke was oblivious to all the amazing benefits of "white privilege" when he tried to scrub the white from his DNA and make himself seem "brown." Still, O'Rourke got as close as anyone could with more than $100 million in contributions from left wing crony capitalists. He almost beat the real Hispanic in the race.....Ted Cruz. But in the end, the majority of Texas voters understood Robert Francis O’Rourke's true cultural identity. They realized that O’Rourke is just another, “pinche gringo.”

Let’s make some broad and general observations about the trends in America. New England, the Pacific Northwest, and California are hopeless. The electorates in these regions are sinking deeper into the financial death spiral of socialism. Politicians who live in these areas are running out of other people’s money. Just yesterday a municipal bond offering from the Portland (Oregon) area came across the desk. The politicians were raising money to get this……..fund extravagant pension promises they made years ago to retired and soon to be retiring government bureaucrats in the local education system. It seems that the politicians never made sure retirement investments were made over the years to meet their huge pension promises. When pensions are funded at the 12th hour with borrowed money, it is a tell tale sign the elected officials are running a thinly veiled government Ponzi scheme. This financial negligence signifies that local elected officials have been buying votes with pension promises that are put on the equivalent of taxpayer credit cards. Current taxpayers in these areas will be funding the previous generation’s retirement accounts instead of funding their own. Socialists always prefer to tax the young workers to fund the retirement lifestyles of retiring bureaucrats. Of course there is a limit to how much of this can be done......just ask the Greeks. Look for taxes in areas like Portland to keep soaring and many workers and businesses that know how to do simple math to exit that area just as they are doing from Connecticut and California where the pension death spiral is farther along.

Closer to home Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada voters are increasingly getting conned by socialists just as New Mexico voters have been for decades. These states seem destined in the years ahead to tip over and surrender full control to Democrats. As this happens, look for the tax burdens on workers and businesses in these states to more resemble those in California. Living standards are sure to stagnate or fall in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada as gullible voters lap up promises made by socialists. Higher taxes and fewer jobs are virtually assured as costs soar out of control. It is a recipe for Europe-like economic and financial stagnation. Sadly, millions of poorly educated Americans with college degrees are falling for these financial shell games like rubes gambling at casinos.

On the national scene, Barack Obama’s endorsement power is still not worth a teaspoonful of sour owl dung. Obama decided to charge very late into the Georgia and Florida governor races to campaign for a couple of race-card playing Democrats who were both running for governor. Both of Obama’s endorsed candidates lost.

In the end, the abrupt arrival (with Trump) of rising wages, falling unemployment, and less government domination of every aspect of our lives, was on the ballot yesterday. So was the idea of secure borders. You would think that those very desirable results would have “sold” better than they did. Nope. Not after twenty-four months of every news media outlet except Fox working night and day to get Americans to believe Trump is the Anti-Christ. More opportunity to work and succeed is not as big a deal as it once was in an increasingly entitled America. One too many American generations has been indoctrinated by the cesspools known as public education, the woefully biased news media, and the hypocritical entertainment industry. The result is millions of entitled Americans take widespread prosperity as a birthright, not a function of sound public policies.

Look for the Democrat House to do everything in its power to torpedo the great economy, the news media to provide help to Democrats every single day, and the entire socialist movement in America to blame every financial setback on anyone who is not a socialist.

"Pinche Gringo" says it all

What's at stake?

What's at stake?

Friends and Enemies

© 2018 Jim Spence -  Here’s a good question for all Americans to answer on the eve of another American election. Is the media the enemy of the people?

All educated Americans want freedom of the press. But do we also want advocates instead of fact finders working at these jobs? How did journalism die?

It seems to have started with the advent of CNN and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. When we began to get "news" all day every day we moved from a press that was mostly fact finders to a profession that got crowded out by agenda driven advocates. There is simply not that much "news."

You could see it all unravel in slow motion with the transformation of people like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. When Fox splashed on to the scene, we got a taste of something new. We saw agenda driven advocates pushing to the right instead of only to the left. There was room for Fox because the media had drifted so far left before Fox arrived, that drift left a gaping hole in the marketplace. Notice I said, "marketplace" not a "search for the truth."

Fox essentially took half of the “market” and the rest of the “news” media kept pushing even farther to the left to try to get what market share remained, from others who were also tailoring their narratives to leftists. Sadly, when you are in the advocacy business and you are pushing only a left wing agenda, it is a highly crowded space. There are literally dozens of morally outraged correspondents preening for the cameras all day every day.

But we have not answered the question. Is the media the enemy of the people? I would say NO. All of the left-wing media outlets have both friends and enemies and their friends are people. The same is true for Fox. Fox has friends and enemies.

What about those of us who don’t want to have someone with a narrative in mind to go searching for tidbits to support their narrative and call it “reporting.” It is important to realize how deeply advocacy has been embedded in the culture of the news media. Virtually every news media outlet in the U.S. (except Fox) and virtually every public school in the U.S. indoctrinates Americans in the hopes of assisting Democrats. The same is true with the entertainment industry. The goal of pop culture is to help Democrats. Their efforts work. You can see the effects in the ways that those being manipulated parrot the talking points. Kavanaugh doesn’t have the temperament. Nazi’s weren’t socialists. It is all about regaining a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and possibly the U.S. Senate now that the Supreme Court battles are over for the time being.

Many of us recall Johnny Carson and then Jay Leno. These top shelf talk show hosts made fun of every sitting president during my lifetime every single night. It all stopped with the arrival of Barack Obama. For some reason Obama was a hands-off guy at NBC. Suddenly pop culture had changed. For Obama’s eight years Americans could not find a late night comedian willing to crack jokes about our president.

My how things have changed. These days late night comics have not only resumed the joke cracking about the president, they have gone straight to crucifixion. It is all part of the shift leftward by pop culture. Scan the news and you will find countless headlines written by outraged columnists who blame Trump and the Republicans for everything including hurricanes. He is also blamed for the nut job who sent non-working bombs to Democrats earlier this month. Yet there was not a single peep from these same “fact finders” about the root cause of a deranged Democrat-supporter who actually shot at and hit Republican Members of Congress at a softball game in Virginia. You had to watch Fox to discover the shooter was a Bernie Sanders disciple.

Is the news media the enemy of the people? Of course not. No more than Bernie Sanders was responsible for the supporter who shot Steve Scalise. However, the vast majority of those working in the news media, public education, and entertainment industry, are the enemy of something even more precious, they are the enemies of the solemn duty to engage virtuously in a fundamental search for truth……not advocacy. Not sure about all of this? Just ask former CBS news correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.

Friends and Enemies

Days of Our Lives

© 2018 Jim Spence -  Daytime drama writers have to be creative. They have to come up with forty-minutes of gripping shtick five days a week. Because all-important viewer ratings are at stake, teams of daytime drama writers choreograph illicit romances, cunning intrigue, acts of violence, endless double dealing, and hypocrisy on steroids for viewer consumption. Do you ever get the feeling you are living inside a daytime soapbox drama where the story lines are disguised as news journalism? The parallels are getting spooky.

The writers for the Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless, and Days of Our Lives have nothing on the news journalism industry. Consider how the contrived accusations against Brett Kavanaugh were depicted by the story writers. We are talking about thirty-six year old unverified claims that were held by Democrat Dianne Feinstein until the time to vote for or against Kavanaugh’s confirmation arrived. For several days, the stunning new "episodes" were performed by seasoned tear-stained actresses, who generated maximum dramatic effect as they reminisced. In the end, no minds in the Senate were changed after listening the dubious accounts and checking with eye-witnesses, no minds of course except for Lisa Murkowski. However, since there is a lively debate over whether Murkowski actually has a mind, it is questionable to assert her “mind” got changed by the coercive daytime drama techniques employed by writers of the Democrat’s shock intended episode.

Let’s move on to the “spontaneous” amassing of a caravan of thousands of migrants from Central America and their trek through Mexico. The daytime drama writers want us to believe that all of the sudden thousands of people came together and decided they needed to leave at the same time to seek “political asylum” at the U.S. border. It is a mere coincidence that these migrants all showed up in the same place at the same time with brand new backpacks. And somehow arrangements had already been made for thousands of meals during their days on the road. Every day there is plentiful drinking water, changes of clothes, laundry services, sleeping bags, and sanitary items. These incredible logistical problems somehow like their asylum needs fell miraculously into place for a trip that also and coincidentally, will culminate in their arrival at the U.S. border just before the mid-term elections.

Let’s think about this daytime drama charade for a minute. Who is financing this junket? The Honduras government suggests it is Venezuela, a socialist country in South America that is on the verge of national starvation. Others believe it is Democrat financier George Soros who is footing the bill to put his arch enemy Donald Trump on the spot. One thing seems certain. There has been some pretty cool calculating going on and lots of planning while the news journalists report on location about the amazing spontaneity of it all.

Yesterday, the Days of Our Lives-like narrative made a quick turn. It seems that ten packages containing explosive devices, none of which actually exploded, were sent to Democrats and ardent Democrat supporters like CNN.

Of course the Secret Service, FBI, Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms and Explosives have begun an investigation. Donald Trump called the attempts by the perpetrators, "despicable acts of political violence."

Not long after the condemnation from Trump, CNN’s CEO decided he was NOT going to wait for the discovery of forensic evidence that is sure to flow out of the massive investigations by federal law enforcement officials. CNN President Jeff Zucker concluded by the end of the day he knew it was time to keep doing what CNN does every day. He pointed the finger at President Trump and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and blamed them as the original source of the incident.

No doubt CNN longs for the good old days when it mounted relentless attacks on Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney without consequences or push back. The fact that Trump fights back against CNN's endless barrage of words is reason enough for Zucker not bothering to wait for the forensic results of the investigation. Zucker not only said, “Continued attacks on the media,” were to blame for these incidents, he went further. “There is a total and complete lack of understanding at the White House about the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media. The President, and especially the White House Press Secretary, should understand their words matter. Thus far, they have shown no comprehension of that,” he declared. Zucker did not mention the effect of his own words, just those of his enemy.

Sarah Sanders was quick to respond this morning. “I think it is absolutely disgraceful that one of the first public statements we heard from CNN yesterday was to put the blame and responsibility of this despicable act on the president and on me personally. When the person that is responsible for this is the person who made and created and put these suspicious packages in the hands, in the arms of innocent American citizens,” Sanders said.

There seem to be plenty of possibilities. Right wing nuts, left wing nuts, low IQ dummies, international terrorists, would-be election manipulators on either side. The early reports suggest these suspicious devices had virtually no chance of exploding. Was the whole thing staged for dramatic effect?

Beyond CNN’s absurd reaction to the latest episode of "news," which has been parroted by most of the mainstream press, the twenty-four hour news cycle will require, as night follows day, that this curious story will become an orgy of pundit speculation. All of this will occur before law enforcement has any chance to gather the “facts.”

Why is this so? The answer is pretty simple. Since there is no journalism in America anymore, just political advocacy, the facts, whatever they turn out to be, simply won’t matter. Before the facts ever come out we Americans will be doused with agenda-driven narratives disguised as news journalism.

Life in America has descended into a daytime political soap box drama and the writers have to fight for those viewer ratings by behaving outrageously. There are so many perpetrators of this atrocity you can't count them all. The copy writers in the mainstream news media are indistinguishable from the daytime soap writers.

Days of Our Lives

A picture sums it up

A picture sums it up

All this prosperity may have to do

© 2018 Jim Spence - The U.S. economy has NEVER turned around like it has over the last twenty-one months. Unfortunately for all of those who are benefiting, Donald Trump makes it harder for all the good news on the economy to get through. He seems compelled to say or tweet things that are devoid of class while he is engineering an economic renaissance the likes of which has not been seen since the Reagan revolution pulled America from the abyss of Jimmy Carter’s follies.

The biggest mistake any American can make on their future is to be so hostile towards Trump’s dumb words that they become willingly ignorant about basic economics. Sadly, many Americans are just that. They are oblivious about the nature of our financial system. Accordingly, they make poor decisions regarding their personal finances and they oppose an obnoxious policy maker like Trump who is making their lives better. Favoring smoother talking politicians who sandbag the economy seems to be the preference.

America is not entitled. There won’t always be plenty of income if too many Americans stop thinking about good public policies and concentrate on how they feel about the offensive things said or tweeted by Donald Trump.

Once Americans get past the offensive nature of Trump, it is not hard to note the changes in America over the last two years. They are nothing short of astonishing. For the first time in more than a decade, growth is projected to exceed 3 percent over the calendar year. There are more Americans employed now than ever before in our history. U.S. jobless claims are at their lowest level in nearly five decades. The economy has achieved the longest positive job-growth streak on record. Job openings are at an all-time high and outnumber job seekers for the first time on record. Unemployment claims are at 50 year lows. The American economic story since the Trump inauguration is even more fantastic for long suffering minorities. African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American unemployment rates have all recently reached record lows. African-American unemployment hit a record low of 5.9 percent in May 2018 and Hispanic unemployment at 4.5 percent. Asian-American unemployment is at record low of 2 percent. Women’s unemployment recently registered its lowest rate in nearly 65 years. Youth unemployment recently reached its lowest level in more than 50 years. Veteran’s unemployment recently hit its lowest level in nearly two decades. The unemployment rate for Americans without a high school diploma recently reached a record low. The unemployment rate for disabled Americans also recently hit a record low. Blue-collar jobs are growing at the fastest rate in more than three decades with manufacturing employment growing at its fastest pace in more than two decades.

All of this great news on jobs is not accidental. It is driven by the PRO-JOBS policies of Trump. All of these jobs are washing through to America’s household finances. Median household income in the U.S. rose to $61,372 in 2017, a post-recession high. Wages are growing at their fastest rate since June 2009. A whopping 3.9 million Americans have come off the food stamps roll since the election two years ago. Median income for Hispanic-Americans rose by 3.7 percent and surpassed $50,000 for the first time ever in history and accordingly, home-ownership among Hispanics is at the highest rate in nearly a decade. Poverty rates for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans have reached their lowest levels ever recorded.

Job creators and risk takers are finally reacting to positive policies that help them grow. Small business optimism has hit historic highs with NFIB’s small business optimism index breaking a 35 year-old record in August.  An astonishing 95 percent of U.S. manufacturers are optimistic about the future, the highest reading ever and consumer confidence is at an 18-year high.

What do we hear about instead of all of this good news? We hear about Brett Kavanaugh’s drinking habits at prep school. We hear about a murder at the Saudi Arabian embassy and finger-pointing at Trump that include demands that he tell us what he is going to do about it. We read tweets from Trump calling a porn star a horse face.

It is a sharp contrast with Mr. Obama who spoke eloquently for eight years. Talk is cheap. Obama never came close to producing the kind of economic results we have seen over the last twenty-one months.

Obama confined his insults and merely took advantage of pop culture’s insistence that it is always open season on “typical white people” and also on entrepreneurs. But Obama failed all Americans with atrocious economic policies.

It would be wonderful if Mr. Trump would take a vow to stick to enacting good public policies but…..if he won’t do so, which seems likely, all this amazing prosperity will have to do.

All this prosperity may have to do

Quacky

We are all very excited at the Spence house. We did a DNA test on one of the family pets. It seems that our favorite duck Quacky is 1/1,024th bald eagle.

Quacky