Tax Cuts...Again? (Part II)

It has been a week since the Trump Administration announced its framework for tax simplification and rate cuts. A week in the Time of Trump seem like a month to a year in the past. The past week has seen the continuation of the feud with the NFL, the devastation of Puerto Rico, the feud between Trump and his supporters and the mayor of San Juan, and now the Las Vegas massacre. Still, parties on the Hill are working on this tax cut, so it seems very important to look between the covers at some numbers.

In my previous post I pointed out that these tax cuts serve to disproportionately benefit the wealthiest 1% of the country. Gary Cohn refused to answer the question of wether the tax cuts would benefit the wealthy, saying only that he thought everyone was concerned with what they would be getting. How true! And no one is able to determine if the tax cuts will benefit Trump (he says they won't) because he still hasn't released his tax returns. So let's look at some numbers and charts.

First question: Do we need more or less taxes? Looking at a chart of the Debt to GDP ratio says we do. The ratio of debt to GDP is rising to the levels that haven't been seen since WW II - debt above 100% of GDP.

Notice though that revenues have remained pretty much in the same band, between 15% and 20% of GDP (brown points). Here's a chart of Receipts as a percentage of GDP:

Outlays have tended to remain between 15% and 25% of GDP:

The difference between Outlays and Receipts is our Surplus or Deficit:

WW II was a global fight for Democracy, funded by war bonds and deficit spending. That "Greatest Generation" didn't want to pass on debt to their children and hiked marginal tax rates to payoff all that debt. And despite those high marginal rates businesses and individuals thrived and grew. Today, we argue that high tax rates are a disincentive to businesses and individuals, but history doesn't agree. And history also doesn't support the idea that tax cuts lead to economic growth.

Here's a chart of the marginal rates:

By 1988, Regan had cut the marginal rate to 28%. If you refer back to the first chart of Debt to GDP, that was the year that the debt had fallen to its lowest level after WW II. The Regan tax cuts and subsequent Bush tax cuts sent the debt levels back up again.

We can't afford any more tax cuts. Our infrastructure, our bridges and highways and water systems and electrical grid, is old and needs replacement. The effects of climate change are going to cost money as more and more superstorms hit our shores. These are new outlays, added to our existing debt. It is time to say no to Trump's tax cuts and have the rich pay their fair share by increasing marginal rates.

Tax Cuts...Again?

The Trump Administration is proposing another Republican tax cut. And those tax cuts, like the Regan and Bush tax cuts before them, are slated to disproportionately aid the wealthy. Not withstanding Gary Cohn's lie that the wealthy won't benefit from the Trump Tax Plan () the Trump tax cuts appear to give:

• 50% of the net tax cuts to the top 1% of households, those that earn over $700,000 annually
• 30% of the net tax cuts to the top 0.1% of households, those that earn over $3.8 million annually

(based on an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities).

The plan has some special benefits for special households:

• Pass-through income would get a special 25% rate. Pass through income is income from partnerships, S corporations, and sole proprietorships that business owners claim as their personal income. This includes hedge funds, real estate developers and law firms exempt from corporate tax rates and taxes on dividends. 79% of the benefits of this tax cut would flow to filers with income over $1 million.The 400 households with the top income would each receive a cut of $5.5 million.
• Only the wealthiest 0.2% of estates pay the estate tax. The first $5.9 million ($11 million for a couple) is already exempt from taxation. 
• Most economists conclude that cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% would mainly benefit stockholders, who would receive stock buy-backs and dividends, rather than workers receiving wage increases or consumers receiving lower prices.
• The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) was designed to ensure that the wealthiest individuals that benefitted from inordinate deductions would have to pay a minimum amount of taxes. Ending the AMT (rather than updating its provisions) will allow the wealthy to game the system and avoid taxes.

In total, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimate that the top 1% of households would receive 50% of the tax cuts or about $150,000 each, while the top 0.1% of households would receive 30% of the tax cuts or about $800,000 per year.

Perhaps Gary Cohn thinks that you need to be above the top 0.1% to be wealthy, i.e. make more than $3.8 million per year? What would you expect from a former Goldman Sachs exec? 

It IS Time to Talk About Climate Change

The Director of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, doesn't think that it is time to talk about climate change. With the effects of two devastating hurricanes being felt in Texas and Florida, Pruitt says that it is inappropriate to talk of climate change:

“What we need to focus on is access to clean water, addressing these areas of superfund activities that may cause an attack on water, these issues of access to fuel,” he said. “Those are things so important to citizens of Florida right now, and to discuss the cause and effect of these storms, there’s the… place (and time) to do that, it’s not now.”

While I absolutely agree that the items Pruitt enumerated in the Washington Post article need attention at the moment, there is absolutely no reason not to focus on climate change at this moment also. Americans have shown a remarkable propensity to question science, and it is leaders such as Pruitt who foster this regrettable tendency with their actions, actions which probably stem less from a disbelief in science but rather from a vested interest in reaping monetary benefits from the results of questioning what is truly unquestionable.

In the 1960's NASA was at the forefront of America's exploration of space. While a large portion of NASA was made up of administrators and engineers that designed and managed the spacecraft that astronauts rode into space, they were working based on the theories and discoveries made by the scientists. When President John Kennedy charged America with reaching the moon in a decade, America didn't question the advances NASA scientists and engineers where making. This was probably due to the decades of American scientific achievements that had been made to win World War II, develop new drugs and vaccines, and all the other achievements that made the late 40's and '50s a period of plenty for the growing American middle class.

But today, when NASA presents the evidence and scientific consensus (97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree on the causes of global warming), major administration officials, including the President and the Director of the EPA refuse to acknowledge what is known scientifically: Global Warming is man-made, is an existential danger to man's existence, and that we must change the way we live if we are to save our way of life.

I suspect that Scott Pruitt understands man-made climate change. He simply stands to gain too much from his associations with fossil fuel developers. Al Gore's new movie 'An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power' covers the dramatic fall in the price of renewable-based energy generation, which now is comparable to the price of fossil fuel generation. It seems a no-brainer: if you can generate electricity for the same price using a resource like wind or solar that costs the same as oil or natural gas, but doesn't contribute to global warming, why wouldn't you choose the renewable energy? The answer, of course, depends on whether you own fossil fuels or renewables. And therein, I believe, is the real reason Scott Pruitt doesn't want to talk about climate change.

Trump's Vast Nuclear Arsenal

On Thursday Aug 10, 2017 President Trump implied that his administration had improved and increased the US nuclear arsenal. It was a lie. The US nuclear arsenal is at its lowest level ever since the US began building up its nuclear weapons after World War II. While at times the US has possessed upwards of 30,000 nuclear warheads, today the country has deployed less than 1780 weapons. And when you look at the way those weapons are deployed, the numbers that are available on a no-notice basis are much less. Here's how they breakdown.

The US maintains a strategic triad, composed of land-based ICBMs, submarine launched missiles, and land-based bombers. The land-based ICBMs are Minuteman III missiles, and there are only 400 of the original 1,000 remaining. While half are capable of carrying 3 warheads, they currently only carry 1 W78 350 kt warhead. The other 200 carry ex-Peacekeeper W87 300 kt warheads. So the ICBM force fields 400 warheads.

The SLBM force consists of 12 deployable subs carrying a total of 248 Trident missiles. These missiles can carry from 1 to 8 W76 100 kt or W88 455 kt warheads, for a total of 1,984 warheads, but only 890 of those are deployed on missiles loaded in submarines. Therefore, the sea-based leg of the triad deploys at most 890 warheads.

The land-based bomber force is composed of 44 B-52H and 16 B-2A bombers tasked with the nuclear mission. The bomber force has the capability to carry up to 1,038 W80 150 kt warheads on Air Launched Cruise Missiles or B61 or B83 gravity bombs. However, only 300 are deployed at the bomber bases; the remaining are in long-term storage. Therefore, the bomber force can only deploy 300 warheads.

The B-1B bombers that the administration sent to overfly the Korean peninsula this week are not nuclear capable.

So, the total number of nuclear warheads that the US can project in a no-notice nuclear war are about 1590. That is a far cry larger than the estimated 60 warheads that North Korea may have accumulated. And the use of a single nuclear warhead would be a catastrophe. We are not fighting an existential war like WW II, facing the potential casualty count that an invasion of the Japanese mainland might have resulted in. But the Korean War still exists, technically. The Korean "Police Action" of the 1950's ended in an armistice. The war was never concluded. And it produced thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of enemy casualties. A modern war on the Korean peninsula would surely produce millions, and would produce the potential for a nuclear release that could involve North Korea, the US and China.

Is it any wonder that we should require our President to understand the true state of the US nuclear arsenal before he starts lying about its vast capabilities?

Trump, Bannon, Priebus, Scaramucci, and all the rest - May 31, 2017

It has been some time since I last made an entry - a month. Last November, as Donald Trump was being elected the 45th president, my soon bride to be (December 31, 2016!) convinced me to give Donald Trump a chance. Complete disclosure: I supported Bernie Sanders but felt that he was unlikely to be elected because I didn't think he had developed the methods to implement the ideas he proposed. Single payer medical, free college tuition, higher taxes on the 1%, overturn Citizens United. After his narrow defeat in the Democratic primaries, I convinced myself to vote for Clinton because I felt that Trump was a far worse evil. I have held little positive feelings for the Clintons from the times of Bill's presidency when the Clinton White House was unable to keep to a daily schedule. While Bill Clinton may be a sharp cookie, the president needs to manage, and Bill's propensity to get down in the weeds on minutiae was also symbolic of his inability to focus. Furthermore, Hillary's first attempt at Health Care reform was very similar to the problems with the ACA: a band-aide measure that patched the existing Health Sick Care System and allowed the waste of Health Care Insurance to continue.

Very simply, in the area of Health Care, I believe that American Health Care is poor in medical quality and very poor in economic quality. I recommend that anyone who wants to understand why US health care is lower in quality than all other OECD countries and more expensive than all other OECD countries should first read "An American Sickness" by Elizabeth Rosenthal. A Harvard Medicine-trained physician, she practiced for ten years and then retired to become a health care reporter for Time Magazine and the New York Times. Her book is full of explanations about physicians and hospitals and insurers all gaming the system to extract what they desire - money - from every American. Simple examples: the insurers who hire physicians to determine what they can get out of paying on a claim; the anesthesiologist who manages four to six nurse anesthetists and thereby bills for 4 to 6 procedures at the same time (and who's patients are then charged double the procedure costs; the hospitals that hire consultants to determine what charges they can safely maximize; the drug companies that "reformulate" a medication to extend the patent protection for 18 months or who make a minor change, such as the "Epi pen" and then raise the cost by many thousands of percent.

But I digress. I did vote for Clinton, and when she lost, I knew America was in for trouble. But I agreed to give our new President a chance. And just over 7 months in, I am very unhappy to conclude that I was right to be apprehensive regarding the new President and his cabinet and hangers-on.

This past week, I was very happy to see Senator John McCain join Senators Murkowski and Collins to vote down in the Senate the so-called "Skinny Repeal" bill that would have sent some kind of Senate bill that every Senator agreed was bad - "A Fraud" said Senator Graham - but which Speaker Paul Ryan would not rule out sending to the president for signing. And which Senator Graham voted for, knowing that Ryan would not rule out sending it up for signature!

But again, I digress. Despite the glee of Obamacare Repeal dying again in the Senate, this week saw the arrival of Anthony Scaramucci as head of White House Communications Director and his successful work at pushing out White House Chief of Staff Rance Priebus. I am no fan of Priebus, but he had at least some history of success predating President Trump. But it was telling that the new Comms Director started off by calling Rance Priebus Rance Penis. Scaramucci's tirade only grew and grew all week, until Thursday night a foul-mouthed telephone call to a New Yorker reporter ended with Priebus' resignation. I might add that Sean Spicer had resigned last week upon hearing about Scaramucci joining the White House. Spicer, despite his poor performance in Trump's tenure, had been a professional communications man before, and evidently knew what was coming.

The real kicker is that President Trump just loves what Scaramucci is doing, because Scaramucci is acting as Trump does, foul mouth and all. And while Scaramucci has promised to tone it down, now that he has gotten what he wanted, I sincerely doubt that point. Furthermore, Ivanaka Trump and Jared Kushner are also happy with Scaramucci's performance. Which just reinforces what I had concluded during that period when I have the President "a chance".

President Trump and family are a cabal of rude, crude, rich New Yorkers who only care about themselves and what they can get out of their current position. President Kennedy said "Ask not what your country can do for you", but that is exactly all that the Trumps are asking. They are intent on making the most hay they can while they can, and they seem to be arrogant enough to think they can get away with it.

We need a few more John McCains and Collins and Murkowskis, to step up and do what is right for America and Americans to resist the cabal of Trumpsters that are using the White House for personal gain. How long?

Go Watch Sicko!

Today is Saturday, June 24, 2017. As we wait for the CBO to score the Republican Senate's new Health Care Proposal and watch what changes the Republican leadership will make to attempt to convince a majority of Republican Senators to vote for this proposal, it's a great time to remember what American medical care was like just before the ACA (Obamacare) was passed and compare that with what medical care is like in other countries around the world. I chose to do so by watching Michael Moore's movie Sicko. Filmed in 2007, the movie compared America's for profit Medical Insurance and Pharmaceutical systems in comparison with the free medical systems of Canada, Britain, France and Cuba.

I warn you, it will make you cry. It will make you cry that Americans have more expensive health care, live shorter lives, and have higher infant mortality than any of those countries: Canada, Britain, France and Cuba. American infant mortality in 2007 was poorer than El Salvadore. Sicko will make you cry when you find out that citizens of all four of those countries, Canada Britain, France and Cuba pay nothing for their medical, dental and vision care.

The standard response of conservatives in the US is to assail socialized medicine as practiced in those countries. I warn you, when you watch Sicko, you will find out that you have been lied to, because all the standard replies about government interference, long waits, poorer care, rationed care, etc. are all lies, and Moore refutes those lies well.

There's the lie the AMA puts out about doctors not being able to work where they want or being poorly paid. Moore interviews a late 30-ish London family practitioner who shows off his £550,000 ($700,000) house and his brand new Audi, who is paid about $200,000 salary and pension. Of course, that London doctor talks about how a physician might not be happy with British National Healthcare is he wishes to have 4 or 5 million pound homes.

I won't talk further. Just be prepared when you watch Sicko for the feeling that the only people benefitting from American Health Care are the Insurance Companies, the Lobbyists, and the Congress members bought and paid for. Certainly not you.

We are missing the whole point of Jim Comey's Testimony

Thursday morning at 8:00am CDT, an hour before Jim Comey was scheduled to speak before the Senate Intelligence Committee, I was entertaining a DirectTV technician while he reconfigured our TV system. I had read the opening remarks that the Committee had released the night before, and like a few Americans (more than 19 million watched by TV alone) I was interested in hearing Comey's live remarks; I just needed my TV working again. Fortunately, the technician was able to get my setup hooked up and live again, just as Comey started speaking, for which I was finally pleased with DirectTV over something.

I listened to Comey's remarks, and to several station's wrap up and discussions thereof. I basically followed the discussions, Trump's Rose Garden reply the following day, and the President's lawyers concept of what happened, which apparently was very different from what I heard, since the attorney seemed to say that Trump was completely vindicated, that Comey was both a leaker and a liar, and that a DoJ complaint was on the way from the Trump crowd. (Now how could Comey have vindicated Trump is he was a liar?)

After all that, I realized that the most critical point of the testimony was being missed by most everyone:

Everyone seems to be focused on whether Flynn broke the Logan act, or whether Trump colluded with some of his campaign staff, or that Kushner was trying to setup a channel to keep communications away from U.S. Intelligence Officials, or whether Trump obstructed justice. To my way of thinking, the single most important point I heard from Comey's testimony was this:

Russian Government-directed Intelligence Operatives directly interfered in the 2016 election. The hacked hundreds of organizations in an attempt to gather and release information, some real, some faked, all intended to obscure the truth by which American voters would make their decisions on whom to vote for in the 2016 elections, plural, not just the 2016 Presidential election. They did so in an attempt to advance their aims and goals, whatever they were.

Not once did Trump ask Comey about Russian interference in the 2016 election. One of the primary responsibilities of the President of the United States is to protect the country. The process of electing representatives is a basic part of the stability of our government. If the people's right to choose their representatives is threatened by a foreign power, the President is responsible for removing that threat. That Trump refuses to recognize the Russian intervention in the 2016 election and fired Comey for not making the Russian investigation go away is dereliction of duty by the President.

Today, Saturday, June 10, both the left and the right are claiming victory in the Comey-Trump controversy. Trump's backers, chiefly through Fox, are claiming that Trump was vindicated and Comey is both a liar and a leaker. Those on the left, through MSNBC and CNN, are saying that Comey called out Trump's interference in the Russian investigation, Comey's firing, and Trump's lying.

The sad thing is that neither side seems to understand that America is the big loser, that we all are losing in this process, because there is so little focus on the Russian interference in our government, in our basic rights to elect who we want to represent us. All of the questions yet to be answered, all the issues that haven't been examined, are very important, and need to be investigated. But all the details rest on the basic act and its implications:

A foreign power, one which has been our adversary for more than a century, became more involved in obscuring the truth that Americans need to be free to choose their elected representatives. In past times, we would label that an act of war. That foreign power is still involved in the process of obscuring the truth and will continue to do so until our chief executive recognizes it, acknowledges it, and takes steps to stop and prevent it.

Bob Inglis is the only Republican I would trust

Robert D. Inglis Sr. is the former Congressman from S. Carolina. I listened to an interview he gave to CNN's Erin Burnett on Jun 9, 2017 about Trump and the Republican Party. He is the first and only Republican I have heard who looks with reality at the Trump debacle and the way the Republican party is enabling him.

What caught my attention was the comment Paul Ryan made about the Trump firing of Comey, and the way that Inglis described Ryan's comment. Ryan excused Trump's firing of Comey, as well as all the events that Comey described in his testimony of June 8 before the Senate Intelligence Committee, by saying this:

"The president’s new at this. He’s new to government," Ryan said. "So he probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI and White House. He’s just new to this."

Inglis called Ryan on his pass for Trump, saying that Trump is now President and is expected to act Presidential. Inglis pointed out that any person who shows up for a job is expected to do the job and perform to the expectations for the position.

Inglis further pointed out that had Hillary Clinton been elected President, and Comey had reopened his investigation of her email server, and had Clinton then fired Comey for investigating her, that Ryan (and the rest of the Republicans in Congress) would be calling for her impeachment.

Perhaps it is simply the relief I feel in hearing that there is one Republican in the US that sees this issue the same way I do. Perhaps there is a shred of hope for the Republican side. My lack of admiration for Paul Ryan continues to slide into the depths of the ocean. Ryan has been prostituting himself for Trump since before the Republican convention, when he lost his contempt for Trump and decided to support him come hell or high water.

Another item that Inglis covered was the "hope" issue: Trump told Comey that he "hoped" Comey could let the Flynn matter go. The gyrations Republicans are going through trying to explain that Trump was not threatening Comey with his job over dropping the Flynn investigation was starting to look like a rerun of Bill CLinton's "that depends on what "what" means, this time over the definition of "hope". Inglis flat out calls it what it was: Trump threatening Comey with being fired if Comey didn't drop the investigation. When the President of the US tells you he "hopes" you do something, that is an order to do it, and Inglis was correct in stating that the Republicans are enabling the bad behavior of Trump.

I think, though, one of the saddest things I have to point out is that Inglis was defeated in the Republican primary in South Carolina by Trey Gowdy. Perhaps it was the fact that Inglis had stated that we should go with science on client change. Inglis was done in by the Tea Party types that are sitting in Congress now facilitating Trump's bad behavior. I guess I have to take back what little relief I feel, because the one Republican I heard speak reality is not a sitting Republican.

There is a solution to the debt crisis; it just won't be adopted

I wonder what happened to all those Republicans who were convinced that the deficit, and public debt, was problem number 1 for America. Well, they haven't gone away, but they are still wedded to their strange ideas that cutting taxes can increase GDP and thereby grow tax receipts. And they are the same folks backing the replacement health care bill, the A. H. C. A., which threatens to cut Medicare and deprive 23 million Americans of health care coverage.

It's not as if this problem hasn't happened before. Just as the problem of the decline of coal came around before in history, our current high debt levels happened before as well. So, why won't we look at the solution we used before?

The reason we won't look at the solution we used before is because we are not yet in an economic crisis. And, frankly, because most Americans don't care about history or learning from their previous mistakes and successes. "Those that fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it" has so much truth for modern Americans. But let's look at it, anyway.

That's a chart with two lines: in blue, the Debt/GDP ratio, and in red, the Revenue/GDP ratio. Notice in the blue line two peaks. The first starts during the Great Depression and peaks at the end of World War II, in 1945. The other peak hasn't occurred, but we are getting there. Notice the second peak started in 1982. I will give you a hint: that's the year of Reagan's first tax cut.

Here's another thing to notice: the red line, the ratio of Revenues to GDP, never varies that much. In other words, it doesn't take a large increase in Revenues, when gathered over a long time, to pay off a lot of debt. In fact, the ratio of Revenues to GDP has never grown over 20%, and has never dropped below 13% in the era since the Great Depression. A range of 7%. Yet, when the Greatest Generation faced paying off the debts run up fighting the Great Depression and World War II, they didn't hesitate to raise revenues, and that means taxes, to the upper range, so that the Debt/GDP ration was reduced from 120% in 1945 to 31% in 1980.

And hasn't fallen since. Because the Reagan Tax cuts and the Bush Tax cuts and the Clinton Tax cuts and the Bush II tax cuts and, yes, even the Obama Tax cuts, have driven that Debt to GDP ratio back up to 105% in 2016. And the Trump Tax cuts will simply extend the process.

Why? Why do we continue to do exactly the opposite of what has solved the process in the past?

It's pretty simple, when you look at how those revenues where gathered, and you will see why those tax cuts were put in place.

This chart is a bit more complicated, but not that much. The lines represent the percentage of income tax you would pay each year, between 1929 and 2012. The color represents your income, in constant 2012 dollars. So, the blue line represents a person with $10,000 in 2012 income. They would have paid a 2% tax in 1929 (on $754 of income), a 23% tax in 1945 (on income of $794), a 20% tax in 1960 (on income of $1269), a 15% tax in 1990 (on $6,100 of income) and a tax of 10% when their income reached $10,000 in 2012. By contrast, the grey line represents a person with $500,000 in 2012 income. That person would have paid 8.6% in 1929 (on $36,369 of income), a 52% tax in 1945 (on $39,200 of income), a 58.6% tax in 1960 (on income of $64,462), a 27.1% tax in 1990 (on income of $284634), and a tax of 30.4% on their $500,000 of income in 2012.

Sounds pretty bad if your income was the equivalent of $500,000 in 2012 dollars, right?

Yet, for all the protests of how entrepreneurial spirit is broken by high taxes, I have yet to hear anyone state that the progress made in the U.S. from World War II until 1980 was held back, dashed, destroyed, due to high taxes. That flies in the face of the history I have studied. In fact, I would venture to say that the phrase "Make America Great" is an attempt by some to go back to that period post WWII where jobs where plentiful, American manufacturing was supreme, exports were high, and America was the leader.

Isn't it about time we consider something that worked, instead of continuing the craziness of tax cuts and throwing people off medical care because we can't afford it? We can, we just need the will to stand up to those who have the most to gain.

I saw a man called power
Who said you've got to fit my vision
I saw a man called law
Said if you don't I'm going to put you in the prison
I saw a man called peace
Who was shaking with the laughter of derision
Hey, oh America, they want to love you
Please be true to thee

Shawn Phillips - I took a walk

Neil Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination; What About Garland; or, What Now?

I have been trying to decide what I think should happen regarding Trump's nominee for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. There have been quite a few articles that have demonstrated that Mitch McConnel's assertion that a Presidential Supreme Court nominee has never been confirmed during an election year to be patently false. Like McConnel's pronouncement that he would resist Barrack Obama in 2008 in an attempt to make him a one term president, his assertion regarding Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland was equally self serving, obstructionist, and lacking in principal (except his principal of "My way or the highway".

Yet, if everyone took followed McConnel's way, there would never be workable government. His methods of obstructing everything which does not suite his purpose, or that of his party, are methods of gridlock and inaction.

But that, it seems, is what the Democratic base is calling for, and which Chuck Schumer appears intent on following. There was talk, albeit only a small amount, of bargaining with the Republicans, for a compromise to support Gorusch in exchange for a return to the 60-vote filibuster for all judicial appointments, which Harry Reid undid in 2013. But that talk was quickly silenced by Schumer's announcement of his intent to force McConnel to choose between the nuclear option (ending the 60-vote filibuster on SCOTUS nominees) or loosing Gorsusch.

First of all, I wouldn't sign any agreement with McConnel. He isn't to be trusted. When he needs to deliver something, in this case, Gorsuch, he will agree to anything then, and be happy to renege when he needs to deliver something else.

And what about obstruction?

Forget about obstruction. Here's a quote that tells me what the correct action should be on Gorsuch:

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, or a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

No less an expert than James Madison in Federalist, No. 47, points out that the tyranny is the accumulation of all power in the hands of one group. Currently the Republicans have control of both houses, the executive, and a majority of the state houses. And I agree with Madison that it smells like tyranny.

I stand with Schumer. Filibuster and Resist!

Trump, in returning us to greatness, is killing our future

President Trump and his billionaire cabinet are turning away from clean energy, in the form of solar and wind, and returning to the old, dirty staples of oil and coal. In the meantime, China is embracing solar and wind and turning away from coal, which, besides contributing greenhouse gasses to climate change, has caused years of health damaging smog in Chinese cities. China will be investing $360 Billion over the next three years in renewable generation. America will invest how much?

Leaving aside the argument on climate change is the argument for jobs. China's investment is expected to produce 13 million jobs in the clean energy sector. How many jobs will be created by America turning back to coal? And keep in mind that most energy sector analysts believe that jobs in coal will not materialize because of the fall in the price of natural gas and the conversion of many old coal fired power plants to natural gas.

Let's assume that President Trump is pushing coal simply because he want to produce jobs for those coal miners and producers who have been put out of work by the moves away from coal, and not because he is pandering to the millionaire coal mine owners that want to extract more money from their past investments. Let's view it strictly as a job works issue.

America lags behind every other industrial country in providing resources to retrain and support workers hurt by economic changes, whatever their causes. Globalization has been of major benefit to Americans, in terms of product costs and trade. Globalization has impacted workers, but those workers have been further damaged by an absence of retraining programs or assistance to move to locations where jobs are available. This has been compounded by societal changes that have seen American workers less willing to change locations. In the 1930's to 1950's, during the Great Depression and World War II and Cold War, Americans were on the move, changing location to match the economy. Americans seem less likely, or less able, to travel to find new jobs.

In the area of energy generation, the rest of the world has recognized the need to change the sources of energy from fossil fuels to renewables. Even if you are less than 100% sure that coal and oil cause global warming, there is the fact that fossil fuels will someday run out. Renewables will not. Peak oil may be 20 years from now, 200 years from now, or already past. Regardless, wind and solar are forever. That alone should be a reason to continue the conversion from fossil fuels to renewables that every country on the globe has started.

But most important is the job question. That is, supposedly, why the President is pushing coal, to put those miners back to work. Why not invest in training those workers for the jobs of the future. Only America will want to continue with those old, polluting jobs and energy sources. Why aren't we, instead, concentrating on the jobs of the future, where everyone else is going?

Well, maybe it is about rewarding his billionaire capitalist friends, not returning those coal miners to work.

Make America Great Again?

Our new president, Donald Trump, when he isn't tweeting about vote fraud or signing executive orders to refuse visas to people from terrorist state, is telling us he will "Make America Great Again". Like most politicians he is throwing out a phrase that acts like an ink blot test and allows his followers to project their own definition of "great" so that he doesn't have to. Setting aside whether America is no longer great, and when in its history America might have been greater than now, he hasn't specified what he means by that phrase, or when America was so greater than it is right now, much less how he means to make it great again.

So let's try to figure this out for him. Mr. Trump was born on June 14, 1946, making him 70 years old. I suppose he might have been brought up with stories of World War II as the last time people were united in America and fighting together to defeat the threats of Nazi Germany and Japan in what author Studs Terkel called "The Good War". And in many ways, World War II and the twenty years after were very good years for America. Prior to WW II, America was fighting the Great Depression, and times were exceedingly tough for most. If nothing else, WW II brought much greater prosperity for Americans, along with the tears of fighting a cataclysmic world war. But by and large, America avoided most of the destruction, and the post war years brought twenty years of economic growth and full employment, thanks to the destruction of almost all of our competitors productive capacity.

How might we return to that economic prosperity?

Unfortunately, you can't run history backwards, and you can't undo the changes of technology.

I'm going to use just one example to prove my point.

During World War II, the U.S. Navy needed ships. Lots of ships. Including lots of aircraft carriers. Henry Kaiser was one American that fought the war through technology, by brining new methods of shipbuilding to building U.S. Navy ships. He build escort carriers, "baby flat tops", in a new shipyard in Vancouver WA at Ryan Point. Here's a photo of the builder's ways, with a batch of carriers on the ways:

There are twelve CVE's on the ways, in various states of completion. Here's another shot, with the builders ways in the foreground and the fitting out dock towards the top (pardon the stock photo):

Looking at both these shots, it's easy to see the highway and rail line that brought workers and parts to the shipyard, the buildings between the highway and the ways that housed the managers and fabrication shops, the piles of materials waiting to be added to the ships, and finally the ways, where the carriers are being built. Kaiser's yard is all the more fantastic when you learn that this yard alone produced 50 escort carriers in one year, between July 8, 1943 and July 8, 1944.

This shipyard produced more escort carriers than any other yard in America, and faster to boot. His other yards were famous for producing more Liberty ships faster than any other yard.

And here's the Kaiser shipyard today:

Same highway and rail line, towards the top. Along the river's edge, to the right of Ryan Point, you can see the remains of the builders ways extending into the Columbia River. To the left of Ryan Point, the fitting out dock is no longer a dock, just a river bank. The buildings of the old shipyard have been acquired and made into new businesses, including Thompson Metal Fab, Greenberry Industrial, Robinson CH, Watson & Shepard Trucking, Lincoln Electric, etc. Here's the link to Google Maps. In a way, it's great to see that the remains of the Kaiser shipyard have been recycled for use.

But if the purpose (and the need) is to Make America Great, and one area that America is no longer a leader is in shipbuilding, then returning this one time leading shipyard to its former glory days is going to take lots and lots of time, money, and effort. In fact, I venture that it will not be done. There is one shipyard in America today that produces aircraft carriers. Here it is:

That's Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News VA. It's huge, and has four building ways and two heavy lift cranes, necessary for lifting modules when building major size ships like aircraft carriers. Here's a zoom in on just one of those ways:

That's one of the U.S. Navy's Nimitz-class carriers undergoing a Service Life Extension Plan upgrade, or SLEP. This is the only ship yard that can build a nuclear powered aircraft carrier.

Here's my point: America changes every day. Technology changes, mostly for the better. American's have, over the years, mostly changed to fit the times. Before we start rolling back progress, undoing the changes we have already made in search of past greater, more glorious times, shouldn't we figure out what it is we are seeking? What was glorious about the past? Is it still applicable? Achievable?

And ask ourselves if we wouldn't be better served by working to adapt to the present? Maybe retrain those workers who have been harmed by the change? Maybe put more dollars into researching our future?

The hallmark of conservatism is resisting change and trying to keep things constant or returning to a better previous time. I find our current president and his new cabinet to be little better than the radical islamists they are always disparaging, in that ISIS too wants to return to a greater past (just a little further back, say the 1500's). Mr. Trump and friends seem to want to roll back social change, economic change, modern trade policy. The problem isn't the trade policies. American businesses did well with modern trade. The problem is that American businesses and American government did nothing to protect the American workers who were harmed by the trade.

Interestingly, this was all predicted back in 1971 by one of President Nixon's economic policy advisors Peter Peterson. Edward Alden covered this well in Failure to Adjust. Peterson was asked to predict the effects of taking the US off the gold standard, the adoption of floating currencies, the increase of exports, and the rise of competition from foreign companies. The economic crisis of 1970's was due to changes in trade and the inability of America to recognize the changes and adapt to them. "If all countries specialize in producing those things which they are best at producing, then the world's wealth will be maximized by the international specialization of labor which results". The United States refused to refrain from protecting industries that made no sense to protect. The United States failed to keep faith with the displaced Americans by retraining them. When states compete and businesses move from state to state, workers can move to follow. When businesses move globally, Americans can't follow. In these cases, American business and government should retrain rather than casting aside those workers.

We are still making the same mistakes today. Simply put, if our world will be destroyed by climate change, we can't burn coal, but we also owe our coal miners retraining and/or assistance in moving. Every other industrialized country provides assistance to its workers. Only the U.S. takes its workers taxes and then casts them aside.

Mr. Trump and the conservative Republicans are likely to get a different America than what they seek. I believe that they will ultimately reveal themselves to want a return to the gilded age of the 1890's and 1920's and will again attempt to benefit the 1%. This time, instead of an Occupy Wall Street, they will get a real revolution. When more and more people see the tax cuts for the rich return while their real needs for jobs and income and healthcare are not met, the tree of liberty will again be watered with blood.

Dear World...America Speaking

Dear World,

This is America speaking. I know you are wondering about what is going on here. I know you are worried about the direction that I appear to be going. This is a message to reassure you that things will be ok.

You have ample reasons to be worried. I have been this direction before, just last century. The twentieth century saw two huge cataclysms that shook the very foundations of society. Peoples of the world had to start numbering our global wars, and there was ample evidence that the numbering might stop at three. Mankind was very fortunate not to end itself in a third global war.

And after both global wars, having waited to join the fighting, I appeared ready to return to my norm, isolationism. Our people have a long history of wanting to be left alone by the world. It started with our first president, George Washington, who warned of foreign entanglements. After World War I, Americans shrugged off our brief period of global involvement and turned within. Perhaps it was because Wilson, president at the time, shouldn't have spent six months in Paris at the peace conference. Perhaps it was because he didn't take any Republicans to Paris. Perhaps it was all the people he had alienated by 1919. For whatever reason, the Senate refused to join the League of Nations, and left the world stage.

After World War II we were quick to demobilize, just like after WW I. That vast armada of ships that had brought death and destruction to Europe and Japan was used to bring the boys (and not a few older men) home. Five million men and women in our Armed Forces rapidly dropped below one million. Most of the ships were mothballed. Almost all of the aircraft were recycled, or left for scrap at the hundreds of airbases that had been so rapidly created. The demobilization was so swift that raw recruits, fresh out of basic training, were sent to Germany and Japan for occupation duty. Americans had always hated occupation duty.

Many of you in the world had wondered if America would turn inward again. Those of you in Berlin wondered if the Soviet Union would take over. Those of you in South Korea wondered the same, although North Korea would be the Soviet's proxy. It took an airlift in Berlin and a "police action" in Korea to force our hand and to demonstrate that Americans would protect the freedoms that FDR and Churchill proclaimed through the Atlantic Charter.

After both of those World Wars, Americans became tired of fighting for freedom. It is a sad fact that many times the people on the ground no little of what they are fighting for. It took a real effort, and a movie series, to help the men and women fighting World War II understand the reasons they were fighting. That included the folks at home who were fighting by building the weapons of war and growing the food to feed the army and navy.

It's not often that Americans are united to that degree. America truly is a melting pot. That means that all manners of people will have all manners of opinions. We appear to oppose each other all the time. That hasn't changed. But there are some things we all agree on. The freedoms that were enumerated in the Atlantic Charter. The basic freedoms in our Bill of Rights. Americans become overbearing when we attempt to wish our freedoms on other peoples in other countries. We forget that many others do not have our basic freedoms.

And now we appear to have a president that wants to "Make America Great Again". Even many Americans, much less the rest of the world, wonder what that means. Great Again when? When we were truly united to fight the world wars? When we were the only superpower that had not been damaged by WW II, and could sell our goods to the rest of the Western World? When we lead the world in space by sending a man to the moon?

Just when were we great? And how were we great?