Monthly Archives: July 2019

The Red Ink Disaster

26 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by in National Debt

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Has anyone noticed the first thing a new president or prime minister wants to do is cut taxes and regulations to jump start their economy. Funny thing is their country is always heavily in debt. Cutting taxes further puts them further into debt. We are a prime example of this stupidity. We were told the Trump cut wouldn’t add to this debt — Ha!

When George W. Bush came into office he cut taxes on a budget that was paying down the National Debt. His tax cut stopped the debt reduction and together with his wars started us going on a downhill debt trajectory. When Obama came into office we were in the depths of the Great Recession so raising taxes was out of the question. As the economy started to recover and revenues started to increase, Obama put a sequester on expenses. However the National Debt continued to rise. When Donald Trump got in he cut taxes again during a booming economy and our expenses now exceed revenue by over a trillion dollars each year. In order to even balance the budget we need a 40% increase in taxes.            

We currently have a better than average debt to Gross National Product of approximately 80%. Each year the percentage will go up since the yearly deficits add to the debt. At what point can we no longer pay the interest? At what point do the investors here and abroad decide they don’t want to finance us anymore? Foolish short-sightedness to get elected and stay in office is going to bankrupt America. Maybe that threat is the point. To stave off financial collapse, the conservatives will demand elimination of most aid programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food subsidies, and others.

Unpleasant Facts

14 Sunday Jul 2019

Posted by in Population

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Bob Wyman says my opinions are narrow-minded and unsubstantiated. Bob, everything you read with my name is factual and not off Fox News or the websites (Russian?) that you must use to get your information. You said my claims about climate change were unsubstantiated and wild predictions. I am quite confident of my predictions since seventeen out of seventeen federal science agencies and all three branches of the military and the coast guard agrees with me. So do the people in the cities and areas I said were already flooding from the rising oceans. Bob, hop in your car and wade the streets at high tides in those towns.

You criticized my population crisis projections which are readily available from many sources. Yes, my solutions were drastic and radical but the time to cut growth was years ago. Look around you Bob; we now have over 330 million in the United States. Imagine 500 or 600 million which we may have by the end of the century! I bet you are a baby boomer. When you were born the population was maybe 3 billion. It is now over 7 billion and growing. We are not going to get help from any religious group because they want to grow the faithful faster than the others. Currently we subsidize growth. The bigger the family, the bigger the subsidy. I suggested we need to eliminate deductions, spread contraceptives, and make the growth a moral issue. Bob, if you have ideas better than the ones I promulgated, the world awaits them.

The projections for temperature increase and rise of sea levels are for the end of the century and not for the centuries after. Those projections have already been found to be too conservative so your plans are urgently needed!

Subsidies and Currency Manipulation

09 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Subsidies

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One point the executive and legislative branches have agreed upon concerns other countries subsidizing their businesses. We have complained about how Canada, Europe, and China have subsidized autos, grains, lumber, wine, cheese, steel, and a myriad of other products. We have criticized China as being a currency manipulator as a way to subsidize their businesses.

We do the same thing for our businesses. We just gave the farmers billions of dollars to compensate for the tariffs with China. That is a subsidy. We have a farm program that puts a base on farm products and an insurance to compensate for losses. We give them huge tax breaks. This is just for agriculture. It is easy to come up with subsidies of other exporting businesses. Many of them were subsidized to export jobs so we could import their cheaper made products.

How does a country like China manipulate their money? They lower their national bank’s interest rates, buy other currencies, and lower their tax rates. Does that sound familiar? Trump has cut business taxes causing the Federal Reserve to sell more debt to foreign countries. He is harassing the Fed to cut their rates.

What else is new? We always criticize other countries for doing what we are also doing. Trump and his people are saying China is trying to lower the Yuan’s exchange rate to make their products cheaper in relation to the dollar. Actually, they are trying to keep the Yuan the same rate as the dollar. Trump is the one trying to manipulate currencies.

The whole thing is just another old problem Trump is trying to recycle for his deluded supporters.

King? Emperor? Dictator?

08 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in President Trump

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            Donald J. Trump has always thought more of himself than anyone else because of his pampered life. He has lied, cheated, and flouted laws all of his life. He has deceived millions of people into thinking he is looking out for their best interests by catering to their lowest denominator. He is able to jump back and forth over the fence while deceiving each side into believing he is defending their values. The following are four of his deceptive practices. He has always been a racist like his father. The white supremists know this, but he has managed to convince some racial, ethnic and white people he isn’t. When he was running, he was asked about his religion and what church he attended. He told which one, but the minister barely remembered him. When asked about the difference between the two sects, he didn’t know there is one. He says he is against abortion, yet he has given tens of thousands to Planned Parenthood. He actually said he is for the sanctity of marriage. He is a confessed adulterer and married three times.

            When Trump is cozying up to his dictator friends in public and private, he jokes about how he wishes he could get rid of the press and the investigators looking into his actions. He just said the former with Putin an in the past with Kim and Xi. Trump can’t kill journalists like Putin and the Saudi Prince, so he tries to persuade his followers that all news media is fake except Fox, which supports him. Too often Fox persuades him to do things against the input from his advisors.

            Like Trump’s dictator friends, he rules by executive orders even when the law and courts have ruled otherwise. A recent example is his executive order to put a citizenship question on the census questionnaire. The Supreme Court just ruled it illegal. Another is keeping migrant children longer than the legal 72 hours. Most of his immigration policy is illegal. Shifting designated funds around by executive order is illegal.

            Trump is constantly dictating to the rest of the world what he demands they do to satisfy his ego. He has pulled out of long standing treaties and alliances because he wanted to show his power. He thinks by threatening other countries with military action, he can make them kneel before him in submission. Kim is playing him now and Iran’s religious government and military are showing his fallibility. In spite of his constant claims to the otherwise, his tariff wars have accomplished nothing but closing world markets for his own country.

            The President’s constant lies and threats are becoming more transparent as more Americans and nations see him for what he is: an emperor with no clothes.

Tomorrow’s Mountains

08 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Trash Mountains

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When thinking about what the world will be like in fifty or more years in the future, climate change and population may be the top two. Garbage should be in the top ten. Northern Illinois is mostly flat except for the hills and mountains of garbage dumps. Many communities have used old quarries as dumps so the millions of tons of waste have little or no mound. Others have made the mountains of garbage into winter skiing and sledding sports areas. Pontiac, Illinois could put rocks up one side of their mountains for people to practice for the Mt. Everest attempt. Their height is only realized when seeing a garbage truck weaving back and forth up the sides of the mountains.

New York City used to (may still) dump their garbage in the ocean. Back in the 1980s, I saw a documentary about NYC loading their garbage onto trains and shipping it to Ohio dumps. About the same time, I saw where California was dumping old tires. Instead of recycling them, they had piled them onto a quarry gouge in the side of a mountain. Will we continue to build more Pontiac size dumps or fill more quarries to get our waste products out of sight?

The Texas size plastic island in the Pacific Ocean gets lots of press but the Atlantic Ocean has two large ones and the Indian Ocean has one, too. These plastic islands may have a lifespan of forever and will continue to grow long after we solve the problem of dumping plastic into our streams and rivers. Two noted examples are in the circulation in the North Pacific. After the earthquake and tsunami destroyed several cities and towns in Japan, the backwash was filled with debris. It has circulated around to Alaska, Washington, and Oregon shores. Another was the container of sneakers that washed off a container ship coming from China. Shoes are still washing up on our shores. It may take a few more years, but what is left will end up as part of the Pacific island of plastic.

Some cities have done away with recycling programs because no market exists for the materials. Since the Chinese are no longer taking our cardboard waste, it is going into the dumps. In an ideal world most of our trash and garbage would be recycled, but Americans in particular have never adopted the practice without regulations and laws. If we don’t develop recycle economies and composting food wastes, we can anticipate hundreds more leaking mountains and garbage pits as our population grows.