Will America have a debt Jubilee?

So far it is mostly Left-leaning economists who have been calling for it but conservative financial prophet Porter Stansberry thinks it is going to happen soon. I will let him outline the matter and then I will follow up with an even more radical but fairer proposal

Stansberry is something of a panic merchant and tends to put dates on things where he would be better to avoid that.  It has been clear to me for some years that America is effectively bankrupt but I have no idea when that will come to a head. As Keynes is alleged to have said: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". And with Mr Trump in the equation, anything or nothing is possible. So Stansberry and I agree on all but the timing of the crisis.

We owe a trillion dollars on our credit cards—which often have interest rates as high as 28%! We've borrowed a trillion dollars to buy new cars—which plummet in value the minute you drive off the lot. And we've racked up about $1.5 trillion for college education with dubious worth.

The debt load for the working poor has nearly quadrupled in the past 20 years as a percentage of their income. And this debt can never, ever be repaid.

It's this system that dooms every average worker to poverty. And almost guarantees that the rich and the powerful will stay that way.

Simply working harder—or working smarter—isn't benefiting employees anymore. On the other hand, Americans who own assets and businesses have seen their wealth soar over the last 40 years.

And so we are left with the biggest income and wealth disparity in America in nearly 100 years.

For those who have taken on these incredible new debt loads, it's a very stressful way to live. So many Americans today are in a hole. They are extremely stressed out, and there is no way out.

And herein lies the problem. This group is growing, and this stress and anger is building... ultimately fueling many of today's biggest issues...

It's why you see people rioting in Charlottesville, Virginia...

It's why you see massive increases in violence and desperation in cities like Baltimore and Chicago...

It's why you see more and more radicalized politics—like resurgent neo-Nazi groups and the rise of Black Lives Matter...

It's why you see the tearing down of historic statues, and why according to a recent Harvard study, more than 50% of young people no longer believe in capitalism!

It's why we now have the highest-ever percentage of people on food stamps—double the historical rate.

It's why in some states, nearly 10% of working age adults receive disability payments!

Remember: These uprisings and protests may be nominally about race, or Donald Trump, police brutality, or immigration.

But what they're really all about is money, debt, and economics.

And that's why we will soon see a dramatic political and economic event, the likes of which we haven't seen in nearly 50 years...

Very soon, millions of Americans will be calling for the government to "do something."

Specifically, they'll be calling for a clean slate... to wipe out their debts and "reset" the financial system.

The crowds will cheer and march like never before. The violence will escalate. Our politicians will promise this reset of the financial system as a way to a "new and better prosperity."

And while it might sound like good news to those who have gotten in over their head—what will really happen is a national nightmare.

You see, this idea of erasing debts to reset the financial system is not new. In fact, in the Bible, it's referred to as a "Jubilee."  If you're unfamiliar with the term, it comes from The Old Testament, the Book of Leviticus, Chapter 25.

A Jubilee in the Jewish tradition was said to occur roughly every 50 years.  It was a time for total forgiveness of debt, the freeing of slaves, and the returning of lands. Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Christian Jubilee in 1300.

Since then, it's been used dozens of times, when anger among a population hits extreme levels, typically because of an explosive divide between the wealthy and the working class.

And very soon, millions will be calling for a new Debt Jubilee here in America. Believe it or not, many are already doing so...

Folks like Carmen Reinhart of Harvard University and Stephen Roach of Yale have advocated for a Debt Jubilee in one form or another. So have financial pundits Barry Ritholtz and Chris Whalen.

In Congress, more than a half-dozen Jubilee-style laws have been proposed, by folks such as Rep. Kathy Castor and Senator Bill Nelson from Florida.

And many of the most powerful left-wing economic "experts" are calling for a Debt Jubilee by name...

London School of Economics Professor David Graeber says: "we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee... it would relieve so much genuine human suffering."

The national affairs correspondent for The Nation says we should: "Think Jubilee, American Style... because it combines a sense of social justice with old-fashioned common sense."

Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kaufman Foundation (a liberal think tank), says: "we need a fresh start, and we need it now... we need... a Jubilee."

A Jubilee—which wipes the slate clean for millions of the most indebted Americans and "resets" the financial system—is inevitable.

And mark my words: This trend will accelerate. The idea of a Debt Jubilee will become THE leading political issue in the months to come.

Today, for millions of Americans, there's no more powerful political promise than a Debt Jubilee. Politicians will soon be promising it all...

I will wipe out your debts.
I will allow you to start fresh.
I will reward all of your bad decisions.
I will solve America's massive income inequality.

Who will pay for it?  You guessed it...  You, me, and millions of Americans with pensions, retirement accounts, and other types of savings.

Just as in the past, the folks in Washington will disguise this Jubilee under a different name. They might call it a "National Restoration" or "Patriotic Solvency." They'll pass an "Act" like they did in 1841... or invoke an Executive Order as was done in 1933 (Executive Order #6102)... or simply issue a mandate to the Secretary of the Treasury (which they did in 1971).

But it all means the same thing. The Jubilee will redistribute trillions of dollars from those who have invested and saved... to those who can no longer pay their debts.

Excerpt from an article received via email.  Stansberry has more in his recent book "The American Jubilee, A National Nightmare is Closer Than You Think"

What Stansberry predicts is obviously unjust but does seem inevitable.  Debt "forgiveness" happens all the time in international affairs.  Argentina and Greece live on it.  But how would you feel if a bank's debts to you (your deposits) were suddenly "forgiven"?  Your savings would vanish.

There is a better way:  America can't pay its debts so it is effectively bankrupt. So America should declare bankruptcy.  But how do you do that?  To whom do you make your declaration?  It can't be done in anything like the normal way.  The only way it can be done is to void the currency.  America needs to declare that the Greenback is no longer its currency and all debts denominated in it lose any authority.

America then needs to issue a new currency (Maybe called "Feds") and declare that only debts denominated in Feds will be honoured. All dollar debts would be wiped.  The streets would be filled with cheering students celebrating the end of their student debt and householders suddenly finding that they own their house outright after their mortgage debt has disappeared. And that pesky credit card debt is gone too. And without debt a lot of businesses would become more viable too. A weight will have lifted off the backs of the whole nation, resulting almost certainly in a huge economic boom.  And a free government grant of 1,000 Feds to every citizen would get things rolling.

But what about your savings?  The bank now owes you nothing.  Nobody owes anybody anything.  That's where the government can use its money issuing power.  Certain losing groups can be compensated by GIVING them Feds.  All savings accounts with a balance up to 5 million could be reinstated showing the same amount in Feds that they once showed in dollars.  And social security payments would be re-denominated in Feds and would continue as before

China and Wall St would not be compensated or else the whole thing would be a farce.  And labor unions that have extorted huge retirement benefits for their members would also find that their extortions had been in vain. Benefits their members had been receiving would come to a grinding halt.  Their retired and retiring members would have to go on to the same social security payments (in Feds) as everyone else

So average Americans, whether previously savers or debtors, would all be better off and only the parasites would lose. Abandoning the greenback would root out a whole world of corruption.

That is just a very brief outline of how a national bankruptcy could be managed and I am not hopeful that the idea will be adopted.  But it shows that the coming Jubilee would not necessarily hurt the little guy.  He could be compensated.

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Conservatives Need to Argue About Ideas, Not About Trump

“Let’s grow up, conservatives.”

That call to arms was delivered by Barry Goldwater at the 1960 Republican convention to implore members of the then-youthful conservative movement to hold their noses and rally around Richard Nixon’s candidacy.

Neal Freeman, a battle-scarred veteran of the conservative movement — he was a correspondent for National Review and the producer of William F. Buckley’s TV show, “Firing Line,” among other tours of duty — recently echoed Goldwater’s clarion call for a different cause. It is time for conservatives to get to work on updating or even reinventing what it means to be a conservative. The conservatism of the last 50 years, programmatically, politically and psychologically, is in dire need of rejuvenation.

One sign of the exhaustion, Freeman writes, “is that the largest and most urgent issues are left unaddressed by any of the entrenched interests. Incumbent politicians deal with old issues. Movements ride new issues.”

The most obvious such issue is the exploding debt, which both parties have decided is something they should only care about when trying to unseat their rivals, if at all.

But the challenge of the debt is a bipartisan or, more aptly, a nonpartisan one, simply because the math doesn’t care about your politics. The pressing question for conservatives is, simply, “What is a conservative?”

“Are we free traders or fair traders?” Freeman asks. “Do we want open borders or high barriers? Can we save public education or should we euthanize it?”

Part of the dilemma is that in the modern era, Republican presidents define for many Americans (particularly in the media) what conservatism is, just as Democratic presidents tend to define what liberalism is. That may not be true in the eggheadier or more ideologically pure corners of the Left and Right, but for lots of normal Americans, that’s just how it works. Conservatism, in journalistic shorthand, is largely whatever constitutes the “Trump agenda” at any given moment, just as liberalism was whatever Barack Obama wanted to do when he was president.

But this is a remarkably recent development, and the fact that we assume it should work this way is a symptom of the polarization of the moment, which recasts partisan loyalty as philosophical principle.

Lyndon Johnson did not define liberalism for legions of left-leaning activists and voters, nor did Richard Nixon define conservatism among the ranks of right-leaning ones (which is why Goldwater felt it necessary to plead with conservatives to support Nixon).

Indeed, despite the fact that modern American conservatism allies itself with an old, even ancient, political tradition, it’s largely forgotten that it is arguably the youngest of political movements in America — certainly younger than progressivism, socialism or libertarianism (in all of its strains from anarchism to classical liberalism).

I understand very well that conservatives often bristle at the idea they need to change with the times. As the famous line from (the far from famous) Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, goes, “Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

But we forget that the conservative movement’s strength came from the fact that it was armed with new arguments from diverse intellectual sources. More importantly, its vigor stemmed from the fact that these various strains of conservatives were eager to argue amongst themselves. There are arguments aplenty on the Right these days, but the vast majority of them are arguments over a specific personality — Donald Trump — not a body of ideas. And to the extent that there are arguments about ideas, they tend to be subsumed into the larger imperative to attack or defend Trump.

As I’ve argued before, the best thing Trump did was to shatter the calcified and sclerotic policy agenda of Reaganism. To paraphrase “Ghostbusters,” he was not the form of destroyer I would have picked, but the destruction was necessary nonetheless.

Don’t misunderstand me: Reagan was the indispensable man for his time. But the challenge for conservatives — at least my brand of conservatives — is to find ways to apply Reaganite principles to our times.

It is possible, all too possible, that the Reaganites will fail to win the necessary arguments ahead. But that is not an argument against having those fights, for the Reaganites will surely lose them by default if they don’t engage. We need more arguments — but the right arguments.

SOURCE

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Rent Control Pits Current Tenants against Potential Renters

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti would like to expand rent control in California. Doubtless he has many supporters among current renters. Nevertheless, rent control is actually detrimental to the interests of most renters, as Independent Institute Research Fellow Gary M. Galles explains in an op-ed published in the Orange County Register, and Los Angeles Daily News, and other SoCal news outlets.

Most “renters,” it should be noted, are not current renters but potential renters. “As a result, it is truer to say rent control harms renters than to say it helps them,” Galles writes. Rent control cuts incentives for new construction, it undermines maintenance of the existing rental housing stock, and promotes evasive efforts such as the conversion of rental housing to non-housing uses. Rent control is famous for creating housing shortages. It also robs value from property owners.

“A decade ago, such loses were estimated at $120 million annually under Santa Monica’s strict rent control laws,” Galles writes. “Those tripped property values are given to current tenants, whose bonanzas are shown by the fact that those under such controls almost never leave.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Is Jordan Peterson a conservative?

Jordan Peterson and I both spent decades fascinated with authoritarianism and doing research into it.  I am 20 years older than him, however, so our research activities did not overlap. I think, however, that our common research interests may enable me to judge his views more insightfully.

The first thing I have to say is that both Peterson and I have studied, Nazism, Fascism, amtisemitism etc as something which horrifies us, not something we admire.  Many people seem unable to allow that, however.  You must secretly admire it in order to study it seems to be the claim.  And some justification of that will always be devised by misquoting or misunderstanding some isolated fact or bit of text that in fact provides no such justification at all.

And in my case, my frequent promotion of libertarian ideas should show where I belong on the political spectrum.  The fact that libertarianism is the exact opposite of Fascism should be convincing about what I believe but it is not, of course.  In the twisted minds of the left, liberarianism and Fascism are often equated.  Black can be white for them. Even my cast-iron support for the State of Israel can be ignored.

An interesting example of Peterson being accused of what he is not is the case of the now famous article in the historically Leftist NY "Jewish Forward" which implicitly accused Peterson of being antisemitic.  The article was such a total denial of everything Peterson has said that it got angry rebuttals from several sources and the "Forward" itself quickly published a retraction.  Peterson gives all the detail of that here

So: Don't believe anything about Peterson in the Left-leaning media. Just read what he himself writes.  Media comments will be reliably distorted. A rather amusing example of such a distortion is the NYT claim that Peterson advocates "enforced monogamy".  Does that mean he wants to abolish all divorce laws?  No.  As one of Peterson's defenders summarized the matter:  "Peterson is using well-established anthropological language here: “enforced monogamy” does not mean government-enforced monogamy. “Enforced monogamy” means socially-promoted, culturally-inculcated monogamy", not legally required monogamy.  In other words, faithful marriage should be encouraged by the society at large.  See here

Peterson himself says he is a classical liberal, meaning that he believes in a broad spectrum of individual liberties.  Conservatives do too but they tend to add in other beliefs about patriotism and such social issues as abortion and homosexuality.  And yet Peterson has such conservative positions too so I think he is simply resisting "conservative" as an overinclusive label.  He offers no guarantee that he will agree with all conservative positions.

He is right to be cautious. "Racist" is a label that is ceaselessly thrown around by the Left and all conservatives are racist in their view.  I did rather a lot of survey research showing that not to be so but Leftists don't need evidence for their accusations.  So any mention of race brings howls from the Left and conservatives do in fact mention race in some ways at times.

And that is where Peterson and I part company.  I try to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth at all times.  And as a psychometrician I am well aware of important black/white differences.  And I talk about them, sometimes at length.  Peterson wisely avoids the topic.  Because I do talk about scientifically well-established black white differences I am someone who has to be avoided.  The fact that the official position of the American Psychological Association is that blacks are on averge about 15 points lower on IQ does not excuse me. I am simply putting the majority conclusion of academics in my field but I am outside polite society to say so publicly. I see blacks as requiring assistance rather than persecution but that doesn't count either. And I am vociferous in mocking the false assistance of "affirmative action".

So Peterson is something more than a classical liberal but he is not wholly a conservative.  So what is he?  I think it is reasonable to say that he is a traditionalist.  His self-help writings lie well within that description.  They do not rely heavily on laboratory research or surveys but also use clinical insights and traditional wisdom:  Christian wisdom in particular.

He is certainly using pre-Spock childrearing advice. That Spock himself eventually recanted much of his permissive views and saw much wisdom in earler teachings would support Peterson in that. Anybody who has absorbed Bible teachings in his youth -- as I did -- would find Peterson's personal development teachings familiar.  And Peterson makes no secret of that.  He appears to be an atheist -- as I am -- but sees Christianity as a great source of wisdom -- as I do.

So his views are not entirely scientific.  They are sourced widely rather than in surveys and experiments.  But where available the academic literature does offer some cautious support for what he says. And it should be noted that use of insights from clinical work has always been a major source of psychological thinking -- starting from Sigmund Freud -- JR

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All public forums should be open and uncensored

A huge silver lining from a recent court ruling

Trump should embrace (and expand) court ruling that his Twitter account is free speech forum

President Trump may not block even rude or obnoxious criticism from his Twitter account, because it is a public forum that is protected by the First Amendment, US District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald has ruled. The President’s use of his Twitter account to comment on important policy, personnel and personal announcements made it a public forum, akin to a park or town square, she concluded.

Blocking unwanted tweets is thus viewpoint discrimination, which public officials are not permitted to engage in. Indeed, his Twitter account is not just a public forum. It is also “government space,” and thus may not be closed off, Judge Buchwald continued – rejecting a Justice Department argument that, since Twitter is a public company, it is beyond the reach of First Amendment public forum rules.

Free speech proponents hailed the ruling as a groundbreaking decision, saying it expands constitutional protections deep within the realms of social media. The executive director of Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection called it “a critical victory in preserving free speech in the digital age.” Blocking people from responding critically to presidential tweets is unconstitutional, because it prevents them from participating personally and directly in that forum, others said.

The Justice Department said it disagreed with the decision and was considering its next steps. Here’s another option: Embrace and expand on the decision. Assess how these District Court principles and free speech guidelines can be applied in other vital free speech arenas. Take it as far as you can.

Some will then predictably want to construe the decision narrowly, saying it applies only to government officials, perhaps especially conservatives who support this president. Conservatives, the White House and the Trump Administration should not feel bound by such partisan, self-serving assertions.

As Supreme Court and numerous lower court decisions have interpreted the Civil Rights Act and other laws, no person may employ race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability status or other categories, to discriminate in admissions, hiring or anything else under any program or activity receiving any form of federal financial assistance, including loans or scholarships. Those that do discriminate will lose their Internal Revenue Service non-profit status and their government funding.

Should that list of categories not include one of the most vital and fundamental civil rights of all – the one addressed and protected by the very first amendment to the United States Constitution? The right of free speech and free assembly, especially regarding one’s beliefs, interests and political viewpoints, and one’s ability to participate in discourse and debate over important political and public policy matters?

Our colleges and universities were once society’s crucible for developing and thrashing out ideas. Sadly, as anyone with a milligram of brain matter realizes, they have become bastions of one-sided ideological propaganda and intolerance. Every conceivable element of “diversity” is permitted and encouraged – nay, demanded – except for our most fundamental civil right of personal views, free speech and robust debate.

That right now applies only to liberal-progressive-leftist views and ideologies. Anything that challenges or questions those teachings is vilified, denounced and silenced, often violently – as being hurtful, hateful, objectionable or intolerable to liberals. Faculty members are hired, protected, promoted or fired based on their social, scientific or political beliefs. Viewpoint discrimination, bullying and mobbing are rampant.

It’s time for pushback. Judicial and Executive Branch decisions and guidelines hold that even private universities that receive federal money for faculty research, student loans and scholarships, or campus facilities, are subject to Civil Rights Act rules. Presidents, administrators and faculty members of public universities are arguably public officials. Campuses and classrooms are clearly public forums.

If they tolerate or encourage viewpoint bullying, mobbing or violence, they are violating the civil rights of students, professors and speakers whose views have been deemed inappropriate, discomforting, hurtful or intolerable to the fragile sensitivities of climate alarmist, pro-abortion, atheist and other liberal factions.

Judge Buchwald’s ruling and the reactions of free speech advocates provide useful guidelines to buttress this approach. The Trump Administration, state attorneys general and free-speech/individual rights advocates should apply them to help restore intellectual rigor and open discourse to our campuses.

The ruling and reactions could also help expand constitutional protections even more deeply in the realms of digital age social media. As they suggest, today’s most popular social media sites have become our most vibrant and essential public forums: today’s parks, town squares and town halls. People, especially millennials, rely on them for news, information and opinions, often as substitutes for print, radio and television (and classrooms). But they now seem far better at censorship than at education or discussion.

Google algorithms increasingly and systematically send climate realism articles to intellectual Siberia. Unless you enter very specific search terms (author’s name, article title and unique wording), those sly algorithms make it difficult or impossible to find articles expressing non-alarmist viewpoints.

Google thus allies with the manmade climate cataclysm establishment – which has received billions of taxpayer dollars from multiple government agencies, but has blocked Climate Armageddon skeptics from getting articles published in scientific journals that often publish papers that involve hidden data, computer codes and other work. Even worse, it facilitates repeated threats that skeptics should be jailed (Bill Nye the Science Guy and RFK Jr.), prosecuted under RICO racketeering laws (Senators Warren and Whitehouse), or even executed (University of Graz, Austria Professor Richard Parncutt).

Google is a private entity, there are other search engines, and those seeking complete, honest research results should see if those alternatives are any better. But there is something repugnant about mankind’s vast storehouses of information being controlled by hyper-partisan techies, in league with equally partisan university, deep state, deep media, hard green and other über-liberal, intolerant elements of our society.

Meanwhile, Google YouTube continues to use its power and position to block posting of and access to equally important information, including over 40 well-crafted, informative, carefully researched Prager University videos – because they contain what YouTube reviewers (censors) decreed is “objectionable content” on current events, history, constitutional principles, environmental topics and public policies.

Scholar-educator Dennis Prager sued YouTube for closing down yet another vital public forum to views that question, contest or simply fail to pay homage to liberal ideologies and agendas.

District Court Judge Lucy Koh concluded that YouTube did indeed apply vague standards and the arbitrary judgments of a few employees, and did indeed discriminate against Prager U by denying it access to this popular social media platform and digital public forum. However, she ruled that Google YouTube is a private company, and thus is under no obligation to be fair, to apply its services equally, or to refrain from imposing penalties on viewpoints with which its partisan officers and employees disagree.

In other words, YouTube may operate as a public forum but it is a private business and thus may discriminate as it wishes – since it does not bake cakes or provide food or overnight accommodations … or deal with any civil rights that Judge Koh would include among protected constitutional rights.

These actions are the hallmarks of communist, fascist and other totalitarian regimes that seek to control all thought, speech, economic activity and other aspects of our lives. They drive policies that further limit our freedoms, kill countless jobs, and cost us billions or trillions of dollars in lost productivity.

The Left is clearly afraid of conservative ideas and principles. It refuses to participate in discussions or debates that it might lose, and instead resorts to mobbing, bullying and violence to silence our voices.

Up to now, lower courts have not always been supportive of the analysis and prescriptions presented in this article. But appellate courts and the Supreme Court have yet to weigh in on the Trump Twitter, Prager YouTube, Google search bias and similar cases. So we are still in uncharted territory.

Conservatives, climate chaos skeptics and true free speech advocates should build their own social media forums – while helping to create the legal precedents that will protect our hard-won rights and freedoms, and exposing, ridiculing, embarrassing and challenging the dominance of the Intolerant Left.

Via email from Paul Driessen, JD

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Ted Cruz Says Media Is Avoiding Santa Fe School Shooting Because Texas Students Don’t Want Gun Control

In an interview in his Senate office Tuesday with The Daily Signal, Cruz said support for the Second Amendment in Texas is why CNN and other media outlets aren’t giving these students the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that followed the school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Cruz also talked about why the Senate should work full workweeks and potentially skip the August recess to get more done. From making tax reform for individuals and small businesses permanent to repealing Obamacare’s employer mandate, the Texas senator said plenty of legislative priorities could be passed with a simple majority and Republicans should take advantage of the relatively rare opportunity of being in charge in Washington.

Cruz also applauded President Donald Trump both for listening to many views and for standing up to much of official Washington and fulfilling his promises to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and get America out of the Iran nuclear deal.

SOURCE

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France signs contracts for €1bn direct investment to Russia

Aha! So it must have been Russia that gave Mr Macron his win in the recent French elections!

Russia and France have signed six contracts for direct investment into Russia worth about €1 billion as part of the ongoing business forum in St Petersburg and the coinciding visit of the French president.
The billion-euro ($1.17 billion) sum of the deal was reported on Tuesday by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The six contracts were signed at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), which is being held in the former Russian capital on Tuesday and Friday.

For comparison, the entire foreign direct investment into Russia in 2017 amounted to $27.9 billion.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Trump Delivers What May Be the Best Line of His Presidency at Naval Graduation

There were plenty of epic moments Friday as President Donald Trump gave the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for the United States Naval Academy.

For instance, he shook the hands of every one of the over 1,100 graduates. That was pretty epic.

Or there was Trump confirming “that we are committing even more to our defenses, and we are committing even more to our veterans. Because we know that the best way to prevent war is to be fully prepared for war. And hopefully, we never have to use all of this beautiful, new, powerful equipment. But you know, you are less likely to have to use it if you have it and know how to work it.”

But it wasn’t the most epic line of the commencement speech. Oh, no. In fact, there was a line that got plenty of us here at office thinking it may just be the best line of his presidency.

It came as the president was giving a paean to the class of 2018, telling them that they “are still not tired of winning.”

“You chase discovery, and you never flinch in the eye of a raging storm. America is in your heart. The ocean is in your soul,” Trump said. “The saltwater runs through your veins. You live your life according to the final law of the Navy. The word impossible does not exist, because Navy never quits.

“You don’t give up. You don’t give in. You don’t back down. And you never surrender. Wherever you go, wherever you serve, wherever your mission takes you, you only have one word in mind, and that’s victory.

“That is why you are here. Victory. A very important word. You are now leaders in the most powerful and righteous force on the face of the planet. The United States military. And we are respected again, I can tell you that. We are respected again.”

During his eight years in office, Obama almost seemed to apologize for our military power.

He did it through hasty withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Islamic State group and Taliban were allowed to grow and metastasize. When he did fight them, it was using limited engagement tactics that handcuffed our pilots.

SOURCE 

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Comey Brings Up Trump’s Grandkids, So Trump Returns the Favor… and Scorches Him

As the Trump-Russia collusion narrative continues to unravel, allegations that the Obama administration’s FBI utilized “informants” or “spies” as part of their counterintelligence investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign have entered the national discussion.

President Trump and his supporters have keyed in on those allegations as proof of what has now been scandalously dubbed “Spygate,” even as many elected Democrats and liberal media figures — who once scoffed at the notion of Trump’s campaign being spied upon — now say it was for the campaign’s own good.

One who has made such a ludicrous claim that spying on Trump’s campaign was a good and acceptable thing is fired FBI Director James Comey, who took to Twitter on Wednesday in an apparent attempt to defend the likely illegal and unethical actions.

Comey tweeted, “Facts matter. The FBI’s use of Confidential Human Sources (the actual term) is tightly regulated and essential to protecting the country. Attacks on the FBI and lying about its work will do lasting damage to our country. How will Republicans explain this to their grandchildren?”

President Trump was asked for his reaction to that particular tweet during an interview with “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade, and his response absolutely scorched the fired former director.

“How is he going to explain to his grandchildren all of the lies, the deceit, all of the problems he’s caused for this country?” replied Trump.

“I think a thing that I’ve done for the country — the firing of James Comey — is going to go down as a very good thing,” he continued. “The FBI is great, I know so many people in the FBI, the FBI is a fantastic institution.”

“But some of the people at the top were rotten apples — James Comey was one of them — I’ve done a great service for this country by getting rid of him, by firing him,” Trump added.

Kilmeade followed up and asked if the president would have any problems explaining all of this to his grandchild, to which Trump replied with a chuckle, “None.”

“No, we’re doing a great job, our country is coming back, our country is respected again, and what we’re doing over there is just another side of it, just one of many things,” stated Trump.

Trump then shifted gears and spoke about the economic renewal the country was experiencing, especially in terms of historic and record low unemployment numbers among various segments of the population.

The “Fox & Friends” crew noted afterward how interesting it was that despite all of the other major issues facing his presidency — most especially the Russian collusion allegations — the president still managed to shift the focus toward the steadily improving economy.

It was further pointed out that doing so was an incredibly smart move on Trump’s part, as the economy, jobs and more money in people’s pockets is always the biggest issue for a vast majority of voters, far more so than anything else the president’s many detractors and haters would prefer to focus the public’s attention on.

As to his scorching rebuttal of Comey’s sanctimonious remark about what people will tell their grandchildren, well, that is just the latest example of Trump’s classically devastating counter-punching ability against those who take a shot at him, one that will likely sting for quite some time.

SOURCE 

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Joe diGenova on 'Spygate': Obama Knew About All Of This

diGenova calls the conspirators "psychotic".  He is right to detect serious mental problems but the correct word for what he is talking about is "psychopathic".  Psychopaths have no conscience.  Psychotics hear and see things that are not there

Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova and FNC's Tucker Carlson discuss "SPYGATE," the president's allegation that the Obama administration infiltrated and spied on his 2016 campaign.

"So, how could the president of the United States, who oversaw the FBI at the time, Barack Obama, not have known about it?" host Tucker Carlson asked.

"He did know about it because you remember that memorandum that Susan Rice wrote on inauguration day, memorializing the meeting on January 5th," DiGenova responded.

"On January 5th, the president, Biden, Yates, Rice, they were discussing exactly what we're finding out now and they were trying to figure out a way to explain it because they knew since Hillary didn't win, now it was going to come out and they needed a story," he added.

DiGenova also called Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan psychotics who "can't stop lying."

"What you are hearing from Clapper and Comey is gaslighting," he said. "This is Charles Boyer talking to Ingrid Bergman trying to make her think all the things that she sees in front of her are not real. They are lying in the most unbelievably brazen and insidious way."

"Comey and Clapper and Brennan are a group of psychotics who now - they can't stop lying," DiGenova said.

Transcript:

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: Joe diGenova is a former US attorney for the District of Columbia. He joins us now.

So, the ironies in this, Jim Comey beginning a tweet with facts matter are self-evident. But to the specifics, this spying, this use of confidential human sources is tightly regulated. Did a judge sign off on this?

JOE DIGENOVA: No, a judge did not sign off on this, and a judge usually doesn't sign off on it. This was not the traditional use fo a source, this was a spy on the campaign of the opposing party of the incumbent president, who at the time was Barack Obama.

What you are hearing from Clapper and Comey is gaslighting. This is Charles Boyer talking to Ingrid Bergman trying to make her think all the things that she sees in front of her are not real.

This is, they are lying in a most unbelievable brazen and insidious way. If they were not spying on the Trump campaign, why didn't they just tell the Trump people the Russians are coming after you, be careful. Because that's not what they were doing. They were spying on the Trump campaign, trying to frame people, set them up. That is what the use of Mr. Stefan Halper was to plant evidence os it would blow back so they could use it in FISA warrants.

Comey and Clapper and Brennan are a group of psychotics who now can't stop lying.

CARLSON: What I'm interested, among many things, is in the response from the left, the self-appointed civil libertarians who have been telling us for generations about protecting the rights of the individual against the state.

I asked a member of this House Intel Committee Eric Swalwell of California the other night who signed off on this? And he suggested that a judge knew about and approved this spying on the campaign. You are saying that's not true?

DIGENOVA: No, the FISA surveillance was signed off by a judge, but not this intrusion into the campaign. This was done without judicial approval.

CARLSON: So why wouldn't we want to know more about how and why this happened? There's no precedent for this that we know of, why is this not a big deal in the eyes of liberals?

DIGENOVA: Because liberals are no longer liberals, they are progressive. They have given up on liberal ideas... where everybody is an enemy who isn't on your side. They hate Trump so much that they were willing to besmirch the Constitution to achieve a goal, which was his ultimate defeat at the ballot box, and if that didn't work to have him removed from office.

CARLSON: I feel like I'm going crazy here because I'm reading these stories day after day that are denying what they are reporting.

DIGENOVA: Right.

CARLSON: Here is one just pulled out of a hat. Some guy called Justin Miller at "Daily Beast" just put this piece up. He refers to it, and I'm quoting, "The false claim that the FBI spied on the Trump campaign."

DIGENOVA: An informant is a spy. A confidential informant who weasels into any organization for good or ill is a spy. That is the classic definition of a spy. Indeed, James Clapper, while fumbling through his television appearances has actually conceded that it was spying, but in his words, it was good spying.

TUCKER CARLSON: So how could Barack Obama, who was president of the U.S. at the time, not have known about it?

DIGENOVA: He did know about it, because you remember that memorandum that Susan Rice wrote on inauguration day immortalizing the meeting on January 5? On January 5 [2017], the president [Obama], [V.P.] Biden, [acting A.G. Sally] Yates, [national security advisor Susan] Rice, they were discussing exactly what we're finding out now and they were trying to figure out a way to explain it because they knew since Hillary didn't win, now it was going to come out and they needed a story.

Obama knew all about this and the notion that he didn't is ludicrous.

CARLSON: It's shocking to me that nobody sees this as a terrifying precedent going forward that one administration suspicious of its political opponents would use our most powerful law enforcement agency to gather information on them.

Do we really want that to be the precedent?

DIGENOVA: We do not. And what's tragic about it is, in the course of doing that, they have destroyed the FBI. It will take a generation for the FBI to return to the respect of the American people that it deserves.

James Comey, who says he loves the FBI, has actually slit its throat.

SOURCE 

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Can the FBI be trusted?

The FBI is in serious trouble, not just the people in the bureau that lied to the Office of Inspector General, fixed the Clinton investigation, and spied on a political campaign. The American people are losing confidence in the bureau. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich stated in January, “When I look through the prism of risk for our organization, I find the No. 1 risk for our organization is losing the faith and confidence of the American people.”

The FBI has reason to be fearful because public trust in the institution is headed in the wrong direction. A recent poll by Axios showed that less than half of America had confidence in the FBI, with only 38 percent of Republicans having faith in the bureau. This should be extremely worrying to any prosecutor using the FBI’s evidence or agents as a witness at a trial — and a dream for any defense attorney. Half the jury pool has an unfavorable opinion of the feds, and recent revelations about the once revered law enforcement agency are sure to increase the unfavourability.

The FBI’s treatment of Carter Page was reprehensible. The propaganda outlets never mention it, but Carter Page was a witness for the FBI. Page is an energy expert concentrating on Russia and central Asia, a region rich with oil and natural gas. Page has also never hid his work with or for Russian companies. In 2013, while Page was running a consulting business and lecturing at NYU Russian diplomats and scholars attempted to recruit him. The FBI informed him the people that approached him were, in fact, Russian intelligence, and Page agreed to work with the FBI.

Page passed binders of his work with listening devices to the Russians, which allowed the government to convict one of the three of espionage, the other two were diplomats and could not be charged. One would plead guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent and sentenced to 30 months in prison. Carter Page helped the FBI secure the conviction of a Russian spy, and all he got for it was huge lawyer fees and his privacy invaded by the very people he helped.

Who would want to work with the nation’s preeminent law enforcement agency if doing so would get you investigated yourself?

What happened to former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn gives everyone a reason to not talk to the FBI. The conversation the FBI had with Flynn was under dubious pretenses, to say the least. Sara Carter reported, “McCabe had contacted Flynn by phone directly at the White House. White House officials had spent the “earlier part of the week with the FBI overseeing training and security measures associated with their new roles so it was no surprise to Flynn that McCabe had called…. some agents were heading over (to the White House) but Flynn thought it was part of the routine work the FBI had been doing and said they would be cleared at the gate.”

It was only after the agents were in his office talking to him, without his lawyer, did Flynn realize he was being questioned like a suspect. Despite the sneaky tactics by the FBI, the agents did not believe Flynn was lying to them, according to their boss, then Director of the FBI James Comey.

The House Intelligence Committee report details testimony from Comey stating, “They didn’t see any change in posture, in tone, in inflection, in eye contact. They saw nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them,” when speaking about the interviewing agents. Then FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe echoed Comey’s testimony referring to a “conundrum that we faced on their return from the interview is that although [the agents] didn’t detect deception in the statements that made in the interview.” This begs the question, if he didn’t lie, then why was he charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller? What changed?

And the most recent example of a reason to not trust the FBI is Stefan Halper. Halper is now at the center of the storm swirling around the 2016 election. Halper is believed to have been a mole, spy, informant, or whatever Clapper wants to call him, against the Trump campaign for the Obama administration.

This hurts the FBI because when the going got tough on the issue of an informant in the Trump campaign, it was likely the FBI and/or DOJ that leaked the information about Halper. Halper believed he was helping the FBI and was expecting his identity to be kept confidential. Regardless if you agree with what he did, the FBI threw him to the curb when it suited them.

Why would anyone want to help the FBI if they know the feds will abandon them and even out them to save their skin?

And all this has happened before the expected release of the Inspector General’s report, which according to reports, paints the FBI is an extremely bad light.

In this disastrous chapter of FBI history, the bureau has given citizens a reason to never talk to them, never help them, and never work for them. If Wray cared about the FBI, as he says he does, he should immediately move to cooperate with House and Senate investigators fully. The bureau’s reputation is beyond tarnished at this point, and only full disclosure of all misconduct can begin the process of rebuilding the FBI brand. Christopher Wray must rip the band aid off, fighting the Congress, which is trying to help you, will only prolong the pain.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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'We are living through a crisis in our democracy': Hillary Clinton receives Harvard medal for 'impact on society' as she blasts 'authoritarian' trends

The truth is the reverse.  America has just escaped from authoritarian trends.  What could be more authoritarian than Obama wanting to "fundamentally transform" American society?

And the only "threat to the rule of law" came from Obama, who tried to do and end-run around Congress with his "pen and phone".

Obama signed little of the legislation sent to him by Congress. By contrast Trump has signed legislation put before him by Congress even when he disliked a lot in it.  So who is disrespecting the rule of law, again?

And who is threatening the free press?  All the censorship is coming from the Left, not conservatives

And who is trashing free elections?  It wouldn't be the Leftist attempts to unseat the democratically-elected Trump would it?  And the critics of the electoral college are conservatives, are they?

It the usual Leftist style Hildabeest is upending reality and projecting Leftist faults onto others


Hillary Clinton, again wearing a long coat and bulky scarf in hot weather, has lectured a crowd that there is 'a crisis in our democracy' as Harvard University awarded her a medal.

Clinton spoke on Friday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she accepted Harvard's Radcliffe Medal for her leadership, human rights work and 'transformative impact on society'.

The former Democratic presidential candidate, secretary of state, US senator and first lady said that American democracy is in crisis because of threats to the rule of law, the free press and free elections that are 'undermining national unity.'

She did not mention President Donald Trump by name as she called on audience members to do their part by voting and calling out fake news when they see it.

SOURCE

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Kim backs down

Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump announced that the United States will out of the upcoming summit with North Korea, the regime issued a major statement.

According to Axios, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan released a statement saying the regime is ready to meet “at any time, in any format.”

“Leader Kim Jong Un had focused every effort on his meeting with President Trump,” Gwan said, adding that North Korea is “willing to give the U.S. time and opportunities” to reconsider talks.

The summit was set to take place on June 12 in Singapore, but White House officials say North Korea refused to accept communications with the U.S. numerous times in recent weeks, leading the administration to believe the talks were off.

On Friday morning, the White House said they are “talking to” the regime and that they will see what happens next based on the regime’s behavior.

While the regime is apologizing and begging for the historic summit to take place, Trump made it clear in his statement on Thursday that dictator Kim Jong Un has displayed aggressive behavior in recent weeks, which resulted in the cancellation.

The president said Kim appeared very willing and open to achieving peace on the Korean Peninsula a few weeks ago, but said the dictator is now refusing to honor those initial commitments, saying the U.S. is not going to accept a bad deal.

After a speaking very diplomatically and saying he’s saddened that North Korea won’t respect the idea of peace for the Peninsula and the world, the president reminded Kim that he didn’t appreciate his recent threats about nuclear war.

Earlier this week, Kim boasted about the regime’s nuclear capabilities and said he could match the United States weaponry in a war.

Trump made it very clear in the letter that America has the strongest and most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, and that threatening the U.S. would have major consequences.

SOURCE

LATEST: Trump says 'very productive' dialogue with North Korea is underway, hints Singapore meeting may still happen

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Trump Walks Away With a Win Over North Korea

Donald Trump's cancellation of the Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un is not a loss for the United States — far from it. Trump understands dealmaking. And, as it turns out, he may also know a bit about history.

Let's go back 32 years to the Reykjavik summit, during which Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev offered sweeping nuclear arms cuts to President Ronald Reagan — provided Reagan stop development of the United States' then-fledgling anti-ballistic-missile defense system known as Star Wars. Reagan refused and walked away. It was arguably the moment that our nation won the Cold War. And it happened because Reagan walked away from an opponent who, as we now know from Peter Schweizer's book Victory, was on the ropes.

North Korea has similarly been on the ropes. The collapse of its nuclear test site set back that rogue country's nuclear weapons program. Sure, Kim has his missiles, but intercontinental ballistic missiles aren't as effective without nuclear warheads. Since that collapse, the North Koreans released three hostages, and then decided to finish by demolition what the collapse had started in the run-up to the summit.

So far, that means the North Koreans have made the bulk of the concessions (the U.S. did cancel one exercise with South Korea, but that can always be rescheduled). As Ari Fleisher, George W. Bush's former press secretary, noted, "It's about maneuvering, lack of predictability and leverage. Considering how often NK has played us in the past, I welcome this development."

Let's be blunt: Our nation's previous efforts have been failures. All along, North Korea still pursued nuclear weapons and missiles (the latter having been fired over Japan, incidentally). Furthermore, there has never been a serious consequence for North Korea's threats until now. It wasn't just about what Trump called North Korea's "tremendous anger and open hostility" exhibited in part when a North Korean official called Mike Pence a "political dummy." North Korea also went so far as to threaten to nuke the United States.

Losing the Singapore summit places Kim in an even tighter spot. North Korea's a basket case of a country, an unequivocal humanitarian nightmare.

The bigger message, though, goes to three countries: China, Russia and Mexico. China has been in talks with the U.S. to prevent a trade war and now has to realize that Trump is willing to walk away from a bad deal. Mexico has to be thinking the same thing with NAFTA renegotiations. Russia also has to rethink whether Donald Trump can be bullied.

Right now, President Trump is in a no-lose situation. If the summit cancellation sticks, we've still secured the safe return of three American hostages from that country, and its primary nuclear testing site is out of commission for a long time. Indeed, his cancellation letter to Kim is masterful in applying a geopolitical carrot and stick for that eventuality.

If the summit is back on, though, even at a later date, the North Koreans will likely have to make more concessions to President Trump. Furthermore, they'll be facing the reality that if they want the summit to happen, their behavior will have to change. That counts as a win, too.

As of this morning, Trump says, "We'll see what happens. We are talking to them now. They very much want to do it. We'd like to do it. It could even be the 12th."

SOURCE

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Trump Notices Something To His Right, Then IMMEDIATELY Runs Over And Does Something Amazing

President Donald Trump attended a round table event on Wednesday in New York to discuss MS-13 and combating illegal immigration.

He spoke with and met families who have lost loved ones at the hands of the brutal gang, and spoke about the importance of law enforcement arresting and deporting the “animals” from the country.

When the event was over and Trump was walking back to board Marine One, he noticed a group of law enforcement officers to his right who wanted to meet him.

In a video clip posted on Twitter by Dan Scavino Jr., the Director of Social Media for the Trump administration, Trump can be seen breaking away from the group and literally running to greet the law enforcement officers.

Just let that soak in. The president of the United States stopped what he was doing and ran about 20 feet to shake the hands of every single police officer before he left.

When was the last time a president gave a spontaneous, genuine, and personal appreciation for the police? It has been many years.

I wish there was a button stronger than love on this thing. Classy move Mr. President. Obama wound have NEVER done this

It’s unclear what Trump said to the officers, but he was likely thanking them for their heroism, bravery, and everything they do to protect their communities.

The media will never report on or show the American people this amazing video, which shows how much our president loves our law enforcement officers.

SOURCE

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Trump Agrees To Stay for ‘Hours’ To Shake the Hands of Over 1,000 Naval Midshipmen

Trump clearly has a genuine appreciation of the armed forces

After delivering the commencement address at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland on Friday, President Donald Trump chose to stay and shake the hands of all the over 1,000 graduates of the prestigious school.

“I was given an option. I could make this commencement address, which is a great honor for me, and immediately leave and wave goodbye,” the commander-in-chief recounted. “Or I could stay and shake hands with just the top 100. Or I could stay for hours and shake hands with 1,100 and something. What should I do? What should I do?” he asked.

The midshipmen responded with shouts of “Stay.”

SOURCE

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GOOD GUY WITH A GUN: Armed Oklahoma Man TAKES OUT Mass Shooter Before Any Casualties Occur

According to the Daily Wire, A good guy with a gun took down a shooter at an Oklahoma City restaurant on Thursday.

Police reported that “A man walked into the Louie’s restaurant and opened fire with a gun. Two people were shot. A bystander with a pistol confronted the shooter outside the restaurant and fatally shot him.”

The shooter’s motivation for the attack is not yet known and his identity has been kept concealed at the time of this report.

Police Capt. Bo Mathews reported that an adult woman and a child were shot when the man walked into the restaurant and opened fire. Also, a man broke a bone on his way running out of the restaurant. A fourth victim reportedly suffered a minor injury.

Police officials say at two people were rushed to the hospital, and are expected to survive. All of the injured victims are expected to fully recover.

Oklahoma City Police tweeted the good news: “ALERT: The only confirmed fatality is the suspect. He was apparently shot-to-death by an armed citizen. Three citizens were injured, two of whom were shot. A large number of witnesses are detained. There is no indication of terrorism at this point.”

SOURCE

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Typical Democrat fraud



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Trump Slashes $6B in Red Tape

The president is cutting government regulations at double the rate he campaigned on

One of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises that he has been most successful in accomplishing is slashing onerous and unnecessary federal regulations. He promised to cut two regulations for every new one added. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently calculated the ratio of regulations cut to those added and found that, from the fall of 2017 to spring of 2018, Trump’s rate of deregulation had not only met his 2-to-1 pledge but surpassed it by the rate of 4-to-1. He currently sits at an impressive 5-to-1.

This aggressive deregulation amounted to a regulatory cost cut of $6 billion in 2017, and this year it’s estimated that Trump’s effort will ease Americans’ regulatory burden by another $10 billion. While $10 billion is small savings compared to the recent $300 billion omnibus bill, it’s certainly a step in the right direction. As James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal notes, “How beautiful is Mr. Trump’s $6 billion cut in year one in the regulatory costs imposed by Washington on the U.S. economy? It depends on how you look at it. It is certainly a remarkable and welcome change from his predecessor, who in eight years increased the regulatory burden by some $600 billion.”

In spite of stiff resistance from the Washington swamp and the Leftmedia, Trump has been able to succeed where many previous politicians have failed. And he’s carrying out the agenda he campaigned on. Americans benefiting from a growing economy are thanking him for it.

SOURCE

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That's a big "crumb": United Tech to invest $15 billion, hire 35,000 in U.S. over next five years thanks to GOP tax cuts

United Technologies Corp said on Wednesday it would invest more than $15 billion for research and development and capacity expansion in the United States over the next five years, spurred by the recent tax cuts.

The company also plans to hire 35,000 people in this period and spend about $75 billion with U.S. suppliers to strengthen local economies.

The maker of Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines said about $9 billion of the investment is expected to go towards research and development, including on artificial intelligence and autonomy.

The remaining $6 billion will be used to increase capacity in existing manufacturing facilities and improve efficiency.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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California Dem. Claims Trump Sent Secret Messages to Russians by Telling Joke

This insistence on his story despite common sense and contrary evidence sounds remarkably like paranoid schizophrenia.  It's unlikely that the Democrats blaming Russians for Trump's success really are all schiz but the similarity does show that their mental processes are problematical

For more than a year, elected Democrats and the liberal media have alleged that President Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to “steal” the 2016 election away from the “rightful winner,” Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a narrative that has been steadily unraveling over time.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has grown impatient at the lack of actual evidence put forward to justify such claims or the investigations that have sprung from them, so Monday he invited one of Trump’s most vociferous critics on the topic of Russia —  California Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee — to appear on his program.

Carlson asked Swalwell for any evidence he has seen after 18 months of investigation to back up the collusion case, according to BizPac Review.

Swalwell offered up nothing that hasn’t already been made known before about tenuous business connections and marginal meetings that went nowhere, and even seemed to point to an obvious joke by Trump on the campaign trail in July 2016 where he asked the Russians if they knew the whereabouts of Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails as “proof” of some sort of secret coded message to encourage Russian hacking and interference.

Carlson noted that those emails have never turned up, to which Swalwell replied, “let’s let the Mueller investigation continue,” insinuating Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had perhaps obtained them.

He also said that the mere “attempt” by Trump to invite the Russians to hack and obtain Clinton’s emails was, in and of itself, a crime.

“I hate to inject common sense into this,” Carlson said. “If you’re trying to make secret contact with Russia, your handlers back in Moscow, wouldn’t you dial them up on the short wave in the basement? Would you really sent a coded message in the middle of a joke at a press conference?”

Swalwell replied, “I’m not saying he’s the smartest guy in the world, Tucker. Never accused him of that.”

Incredulously, Carlson asked, “So that’s — that’s the smoking gun right there?”

“No, it’s part of the evidence,” Swalwell said with all seriousness. “An invitation made by the candidate, telling them it’s OK … he’s not the smartest guy in the world.”

Carlson couldn’t help but point out the absurd duality of Swalwell’s assertion. “So he’s both a secret agent for Putin but he’s so dumb that he spills his secrets at a press conference on TV?” he asked.

Swalwell replied, “The latter,” making it clear that he is part of the camp that believes Trump is an incredibly unintelligent individual. “There’s no ‘who could be so stupid they admit the crime in public’ exception,” he added.

Carlson later pointed to several examples of how Trump has been tougher on Russia than former President Barack Obama — such as sending lethal arms to Ukraine, killing hundreds of Russian soldiers in Syria or hurting their economy with increased U.S. oil and gas production — all of which Swalwell simply dismissed as things Trump was forced to do because of public sentiment that he was too favorable to Russia.

Carlson could only laugh at the ludicrous replies from Swalwell, which was pretty much the reaction the entire interview received on social media.

Despite having ample time and countless opportunities, this Democrat representative — like the rest of his colleagues and cohorts in the media — was unable to produce any sort of compelling evidence that definitively linked Trump or his campaign with the Russian government during the election.

But that won’t stop them from continuing to insist that evidence of collusion will eventually be uncovered, just you wait and see.

SOURCE

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The NFL Just Made A HISTORIC Rule Change About The National Anthem

NFL owners unanimously approved a historic rule change on Wednesday that requires all players, coaches, and team officials to stand for the national anthem. The new rule states that if anyone associated with a team is on the field, they must remain standing for the anthem.

Players can remain in the locker room during the national anthem if they choose to do so, which will take away all of the media hype from players who are desperate for attention. Here’s what ESPN reports:

“The new policy subjects teams to a fine if a player or any other team personnel do not show appropriate respect for the anthem. That includes any attempt to sit or kneel, as dozens of players have done during the past two seasons. Those teams will also have the option to fine any team personnel, including players, for the infraction.”

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell admitted the massive uproar from the American people over players disrespecting the flag and anthem forced him to create the new policy. Here’s Goodell’s statement:

“This season, all league and team personnel shall stand and show respect for the flag and the Anthem. Personnel who choose not to stand for the Anthem may stay in the locker room until after the Anthem has been performed.

“We believe today’s decision will keep our focus on the game and the extraordinary athletes who play it — and on our fans who enjoy it.”

SOURCE

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Canadian healthcare

Like all single-payer systems, the constant problem is delays in getting attention.  I contrast that with the system in Australia, which encourages private hospitals.  A few years back I got a very painful attack of kidney stones.  I was cat-scanned and on the operating table within 6 hours of arriving at my usual private hospital

This woman spent 47 hours waiting for surgery in the Sunnybrook ER, with shattered wrists, a broken elbow, cracked ribs and internal bleeding

The day Kelly Yerxa had her accident was mostly uneventful. It was a Friday in January 2016. After finishing work in Cambridge, where she is the city’s director of legal services, she drove to Haliburton to join her 19-year-old son, a competitive snowboarder, who had spent the day training there. Yerxa is tall and lean and, like her son, athletic. She went to university on a swimming scholarship and now, in her 50s, competes as a triathlete. She was scheduled to officiate during the weekend’s snowboard events, and she met up with her son and about a dozen other parents and athletes at a cottage they had all rented. It was late when she arrived, and since everyone would be getting up early, she and the others headed off to bed. Just before midnight, Yerxa made a trip to the bathroom, and on her way back along the pitch-dark hallway, she veered slightly to her left and took a wrong step. She plunged down seven wooden stairs, hit the landing, punctured the drywall there, and then continued down four more stairs before coming to a stop in the living room.

An athlete sleeping on the couch rushed over. Bones were sticking out of Yerxa’s right elbow, and her wrists were in the shape of the letter S, her hands dangling limply. But she was in shock, and she felt no pain. She told the young man not to worry, that he should go back to sleep since he had to compete in the morning. Then she passed out.

When she came to, two of the other parents were hovering over her, and she was soon being rushed to Haliburton Hospital by ambulance, sirens blaring. Doctors there told her that in addition to the two shattered wrists and broken elbow, she had a couple of broken ribs and a lacerated kidney, and she would require complicated surgery, which was beyond their capability as a small hospital. The pain was by that point intense, and doctors gave her strong painkillers. The next day, a snowstorm hit that made an airlift impossible, so Yerxa was transported by ambulance to Sunnybrook, and her husband, Trevor Clough, drove in from Cambridge to meet her there. He sat in the ER for nearly three hours, waiting for her arrival, and he couldn’t believe the pandemonium he witnessed. “I’d never seen a hospital that busy,” he says. “I was amazed at how many people were coming in.” He remembers ambulances arriving every 15 or 20 minutes, disgorging patient after patient. There had been a major accident on the 401, which he thought explained the deluge, but the nurses told him it was always that way on a Saturday night.

In the hallway, there was no curtain, no call button, and Yerxa was next to the bedpan dumping station. Illustration by Jeffrey Smith
When he finally got to see his wife later that evening, Clough discovered that her bed was in what Sunnybrook staff call the “orange zone”—essentially a holding area for patients when no rooms are available. Her bed was pushed up against a wall, with the IV pole and other paraphernalia wedged in beside her. Clough had nowhere to sit, so he stood awkwardly next to her until a nurse kindly brought him a chair. There was a curtain, but no switch to turn off the lights at night. That location would be Yerxa’s home for the next 19 hours—and her predicament would get worse from there.

Hallway health care is epidemic in Toronto right now. Hospital administrators typically strive for an occupancy level of about 85 per cent, a rate that balances the need for efficiency with the ability to accommodate sudden surges in patient numbers. In other words, even on really busy days, a hospital should be able to find a bed when your father has a stroke or your partner contracts pneumonia. However, for most of the past year and a half, Toronto hospitals have had average monthly occupancies well above that target.

Occupancy at the University Health Network, which includes Toronto General and Toronto Western, didn’t dip below 97 per cent between January and May last year, according to documents obtained by the NDP. The three Mississauga hospitals that make up the Trillium Health Partners went as high as 109 per cent in January last year and didn’t fall below 103 per cent all spring. Etobicoke General spiked to 122 per cent last January and stayed above 106 over the next few months. The pattern has continued this year. Throughout the first half of January 2018, Toronto East General hovered between 104 and 119 per cent occupancy, and Scarborough and Rouge Hospital’s Birchmount site reached 147 per cent. Toronto’s hospitals are, in a word, bursting.

When a hospital finds itself with 147 patients and only 100 places to put them, administrators have to be creative. The first place patients are typically stowed, after being admitted through the ER, is in the emergency department itself—a terrible place for admitted patients. It’s frenetic, loud and bright, making it impossible to rest, and elderly patients, who make up the majority of admissions, often develop delirium as a result, which can take days to clear. In addition to serious privacy and dignity concerns, the cramped conditions make it hard to do the job right.

To relieve the congestion in ERs, hospital administrators have been forced to use what they euphemistically call “unconventional spaces.” In Yerxa’s case, it would end up being a spot in the hallway. In other instances, it is an office, a sunroom, a conference room, a TV room or even a bathroom, with the bed placed between the toilet and bathtub. There’s often no door, no curtain, no call button, no space for loved ones. If a wound needs inspecting or a private detail has to be discussed, it happens out in the open. If you need a bedpan, you just do your business right there.

This is no way to practise medicine, says Paul Pageau, an emergency doctor in Ottawa and president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. But he has noticed that patients seem to be slowly resigning themselves to the inevitability of long waits and a war zone atmosphere. “I find it remarkable that the patients we see seem to a great degree to accept this,” he says. “Which in itself I find unacceptable.” He thinks if the public demanded more, things might change faster. “I don’t mean to blame the public. But I don’t want us to become too complacent.”

Keeping track of patients who are stashed in hallways, bathrooms and alcoves sometimes requires doctors to get creative. Illustration by Jeffrey Smith
Her first evening at Sunnybrook, Yerxa was heavily sedated, so after she was settled into her bed, Clough drove home to Cambridge for the night. The next morning, a friend drove him to Haliburton, where he picked up his son and collected Yerxa’s car. First thing Monday morning, father and son drove to Sunnybrook to visit Yerxa.

Thirty-eight hours had elapsed since Yerxa had arrived, so Clough was surprised to find that she hadn’t been moved into a room but was instead in a hallway. She had a dressing on her right arm that stretched from her bicep down to her fingers, and another on her left arm that went from elbow to fingers. There she was, lying in the hallway of one of Canada’s premier hospitals, still waiting for surgery.

The hall was noisy, with machines constantly beeping and people talking. There was nowhere for her husband and son to sit where they weren’t in the way. “It was like parking in a fire route,” Yerxa says. Worst of all, they were next to a bedpan dumping station, which stank to high heaven. Yerxa couldn’t eat or drink by herself, let alone get out of bed or go to the washroom. She was entirely dependent on the nurses, who, despite being clearly overloaded, she says, took excellent care of her. Rather than venting or getting snippy, they just kept apologizing.

After lying in the emergency department for almost two days, Yerxa finally had surgery to install plates in her wrists and to repair her elbow. Then she was moved into a room, where she stayed until her discharge, five days later. In retrospect, she is glad she was so subdued by the pain. Had she been more lucid, she says, she would have been angry.

Since her time at Sunnybrook, the hospital-bed crisis has only escalated. Typically, there’s respite in the summer, after the flu season is over, but last summer that didn’t happen. “The surge from last winter hasn’t gone away,” Anthony Dale, CEO of the Ontario Hospital Association, told me in December. “All across the GTA, you’ve seen hospitals spike as high as 140 per cent at any given moment.”

When numbers surge like this, hospitals have to care for the extra patients without extra resources. Nurses, cleaning staff, clerical staff, food workers—they are all being run off their feet, says Pam Parks, a registered practical nurse and CUPE union rep who has worked at Lakeridge Hospital in Oshawa for nearly 30 years. Whereas normally a nurse on day shift might have been assigned four patients, she says, now they’re routinely getting six; on night shift, they sometimes have more than 10. They forgo their breaks. People yell at them and even throw things. “We can’t do it anymore,” she says. “We’re tired, burnt out and getting sick.”

Administrators are also exhausted. Figuring out how to accommodate all the extra patients has become a major obsession. “I can’t put in words the amount of stress I’ve witnessed on the entire hospital,” says Ari Zaretsky, who between July and December last year stepped in as Sunnybrook’s interim chief medical executive. He described hospital officials regularly having to clear their schedules and “call a huddle”—code for an ad-hoc crisis meeting to come up with a plan for how to accommodate the excess of patients without cancelling key services. Overcrowding is especially serious for a hospital like Sunnybrook, which not only accepts regular patients through the emergency department but also, as a specialist trauma centre, takes in many of the province’s car accident, burn and gunshot victims.

Part of Zaretsky’s job was to oversee what’s known as “flow and occupancy,” and when I spoke to him in December, the winter’s flu season was just gearing up. Modern hospitals have teams of specialists who use computerized bed maps to track every patient—Zaretsky likens them to air traffic controllers. As new patients arrive, these specialists have to decide how to reconfigure them according to illness type, severity, infectious disease status and likely discharge date. If someone needs to be isolated because of infection, for instance, they might jump the queue. The same is true if their condition is life-threatening. In rare cases, an extremely sick person can even bump a less sick person, ideally someone for whom discharge is imminent, out of their room and into a hallway. “It’s very contentious,” says Zaretsky. “You can imagine. You’re still ill—you have to be in hospital—but you’re not ill enough, compared to the poor person who has just been admitted.”

By the standards of most developed countries, Canada doesn’t have a lot of acute care beds: just two for every 1,000 people, compared to 4.1 in France, 6.1 in Germany and 7.8 in Japan. In terms of total beds, Ontario is one of the most sparsely bedded provinces, with just 2.3 per 1,000. The average in the other provinces is 3.5. That said, some places have low bed numbers but aren’t in crisis. Denmark, for instance, has just 2.5 beds per 1,000. The difference is that Denmark also has an extensive and well-orchestrated system of alternative care for patients who need treatment but don’t necessarily need a hospital.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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House votes to ease post-crisis bank rules in victory for Trump

The U.S. House of Representatives passed on Tuesday bipartisan legislation that would ease bank rules introduced in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, giving President Donald Trump a major legislative victory.

Tuesday's vote rolls back some of the 2010 Dodd-Frank rules that restricted operations by smaller banks and community lenders and keeps the Republican president's campaign promise to try to spur more economic growth by cutting regulation.

The bill, which was approved by the Senate in March, marks the first significant rewrite of U.S. financial rules introduced following the crisis, which saw Wall Street lenders bailed out to the tune of $700 billion.

Republican critics say Dodd-Frank went too far and curbs banks’ ability to lend, while many Democrats say it provides critical protections for consumers and taxpayers.

The bill, approved 258-159, raises the threshold at which banks are considered systemically risky and subject to stricter oversight to $250 billion from $50 billion. It also eases trading, lending and capital rules for banks with less than $10 billion in assets.

It does not, however, weaken the top U.S. consumer watchdog created by Dodd-Frank that has been consistently attacked by Republicans who say it oversteps its mandate.

But the bill does offer a handful of niche provisions that would help some larger banks, such as allowing custody banks like BNY Mellon and State Street Corp to exempt the customer deposits they place with central banks from a stringent capital calculation requirement.

It also offers more favorable treatment for municipal bonds, a measure that analysts say is likely to help Citigroup Inc's bond-trading business.

But backers of the bill stress that the core Dodd Frank provisions that aimed to shore up the financial system and make banks less risky, remain untouched by this legislation.

The bill also does not alter the so-called "Volcker Rule" banning Wall Street banks from making risky bets with their own money, or limit the ability of regulators to apply stricter rules to large institutions they deem critical to the financial system.

SOURCE

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Former Trump Advisor Says MULTIPLE Spies Embedded Into Campaign, They’ll “Be Wearing Orange Suits”

Former Trump Advisor Michael Caputo unleashed a tsunami on the Obama Administration and Deep State during Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News last night.

After Ingraham aired a clip of Former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, justifying a spy on the Trump campaign. He even called the spying “a good thing.”

Caputo shreddded the United States government for being similar to a Russian spy agency. Hew then went on to say there were multiple spies and multiple agencies involved.

“Let me tell you something that I know for a fact, this informant, this person that planted, that they tried to plant into the campaign and even into the administration, if you believe Axios–he’s not the only person who came into the campaign!” Caputo stated. “And the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came into the campaign.”

Caputo dropped the biggest bomb of all on Clapper. “I know because they came at me. And I’m looking for clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public. This is just the beginning and I’ll tell ya, when we finally find out the truth about this–Director Clapper and the rest of them are gonna be wearing some orange suits,” Michael Caputo added.

It certainly looks like this is just the beginning as more and more is revealed every single day. As we previously reported:

“New revelations from the 2016 campaign have exposed top-secret CIA and FBI source, Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor, for contacting and being in touch with Trump advisers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis.”

Now we’re finding out CNN was even in on it. This is an unbelievable abuse of power in an attempt to take down our President.

SOURCE

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Trump's Not Messing Around With MS-13 'Animals'

He issued a statement titled "What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13."

The Leftmedia went out of its way to peddle a BIG Lie about Donald Trump and immigration last week — that he called all illegal aliens “animals” instead of simply the violent thugs of the MS-13 gang. Never one to shy away from a fight, Trump issued a White House statement yesterday titled “What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13.”

Trump’s statement recounts numerous incidents of “unthinkable violence of MS-13’s animals.” And he’s right — their crimes include decapitation, dismemberment and savage beatings and stabbings. “President Trump’s entire Administration is working tirelessly to bring these violent animals to justice,” the statement concludes.

Politically, this accomplishes two things beyond sending a message of law and order to illegal alien thugs. It reassures Trump’s base that he’s serious about addressing the worst elements among immigrants. And it also fires a shot across the Leftmedia’s bow that Trump won’t be intimidated by lies meant to “prove” his supposed racism. “I referred to them as animals,” he said later, “and guess what? I always will.”

Dennis Prager gets to the bottom of the issue, “Biologically, of course, we are all human. But if ‘human’ is to mean anything moral — anything beyond the purely biological — then some people who have committed particularly heinous acts of evil against other human beings are not to be considered human. Otherwise ‘human’ has no moral being.”

Meanwhile, President Trump is requesting $500 million more for the border wall.

SOURCE

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China Makes Massive Cut to Car Tariffs After Truce With Trump

Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie discusses China’s decision to cut tariffs on imported cars to 15 percent from 25 percent.
China will cut the import duty on passenger cars to 15 percent, further opening up a market that’s been a chief target of the U.S. in its trade fight with the world’s second-largest economy.

The Finance Ministry said Tuesday the levy will be lowered effective July 1 from the current 25 percent that has been in place for more than a decade, boosting shares of automakers from India to Europe. Bloomberg News reported last month that China was weighing proposals to reduce the car import levy to 10 percent or 15 percent.

A reduction in the import duty follows a truce between President Donald Trump’s administration and Chinese officials as they seek to defuse tensions and avert an all-out trade war. While the levy reduction could be claimed in some quarters as a concession to Trump and will be a boon to U.S. carmakers such as Tesla Inc. and Ford Motor Co., the move will also end up benefiting European and Asian manufacturers from Daimler AG to Toyota Motor Corp.

“This is, without a doubt, positive news,” said Juergen Pieper, Frankfurt-based head of automobiles research at Bankhaus Metzler. “You can’t completely disregard the fact that there are certain imbalances in China’s favor. This could be a signal that if one side is making concessions, it could lead to the Americans easing some of their pressure as well.”

Shares of Jaguar Land Rover owner Tata Motors Ltd. and BMW AG posted their biggest intraday gains in more than a month on the news. The Finance Ministry in Beijing said later Tuesday that the step is intended to help reduce prices and aid competition.

The import duty on car parts will be reduced to 6 percent, China’s Finance Ministry said. The shift is significant more for its optics than its potential impact given imported cars made up only about 4.2 percent of the country’s 28.9 million in automobile sales last year.

The latest round of tariff easing is part of a flurry of policy announcements in recent months aimed at demonstrating China’s commitment to opening the economy -- partly in response to the accusations of protectionism leveled by the Trump administration. Beijing has also pledged to cut ownership limits in the auto sector as well as in banking, and last November reduced import tariffs on almost 200 categories of consumer products.

China announced May 18 that it would end its anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation into imports of U.S. sorghum, citing the “public interest.” That move, coupled with recent steps including restarting a review of Qualcomm Inc.’s application to acquire NXP Semiconductors NV, signal a conciliatory stance from the Chinese side.

For his part, President Trump has retreated from imposing tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods because of White House discord over trade strategy and concern about harming negotiations with North Korea, according to people briefed on the administration’s deliberations.

In further evidence of an easing in tensions, China and the U.S. agreed on the “broad outline” of a settlement to the ban on China’s ZTE Corp. buying American technology after alleged sanctions infringements, the Wall Street Journal reported.

At the Boao Forum in April, President Xi Jinping reiterated China’s commitment to reduce import tariffs on vehicles.

Of the $51 billion of vehicle imports in 2017, about $13.5 billion came from North America including sales of models made there by non-U.S. manufacturers like BMW. China imported 280,208 vehicles, or 10 percent of total imported automobiles, from the U.S. last year, according to China’s Passenger Car Association, an industry trade body.

A duty cut would typically benefit luxury carmakers or manufacturers, like Tesla, that don’t have a local production site. Most automakers produce mass-market models in China.

For Tesla, a tariff cut will provide a boon until the company manages to set up local production. The Palo Alto, California-based company has been working with Shanghai’s government since last year to explore assembling cars in China. China saying that it will allow foreign new-energy vehicle makers to fully own auto factories as early as this year removed a primary hurdle for founder and billionaire Elon Musk.

Luxury sales leader Audi, part of Volkswagen, has been making cars in China since 1990s. General Motors Co.’s Cadillac, which has relegated Lexus to fifth in the luxury-car rankings, opened a factory in Shanghai in 2016.

Foreign carmakers have long pleaded for freer access to China’s auto market, while its own manufacturers are expanding abroad. In April, China announced a timetable to permit foreign automakers to own more than 50 percent of local ventures.

SOURCE

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Seattle created its homelessness crisis; now it’s trying to make it worse

Seattle never learns. Seattle says it has a homelessness problem, which it does. The city says the problem is getting out of control and something needs to be done about it. Are the uber-liberal residents and politicians of the city stepping forward to house the unfortunate people? No. Seattle is failing to learn its lesson and is insisting on more bloated government to solve a problem bloated government created.

The housing crisis in Seattle is the fault of the Seattle government. The city has been on a nonstop rampage to declare itself the most progressive society in the world for the last few years. During its crusade to kill jobs and make life miserable in the city it has enacted rules and regulations that make it almost impossible to build housing there.

John Stossel, from Reason Magazine, reported the building code is 745 pages long, and the residential building code is another 685 pages. Jeff Pelletier, of Board and Vellum Architects, points to the permits as one of the main drivers in the rise of housing cost in Seattle stating, “while there is a lot of benefit to a thorough review of your project, we are seeing tremendous cost and schedule increases from local building departments.”

One way to help solve the housing problem would be to build mid and high-rise condominiums. On a plot of land that usually accommodates 3-4 single family homes, the city could allow developers to build projects that house 100+ people, getting much more bang for your buck in land use. But no, this is Seattle. Strict zoning laws have only given multi-family and commercial/mixed-use areas one-third the land use of residential land use, driving up the price of single-family homes.

The city’s recently enacted minimum wage law is also having an impact on the housing problem. On June 2, 2014, Seattle’s extremely progressive city council attempted to regulate prosperity by instituting a $15 minimum wage over time. Business owners warned about the economic impact the move would have, but not one person on the council listened, and all voted for the job-killing regulation, showing no one on the council has a basic understanding of economics.

In 2018, the full $15 per hour minimum wage went into effect, but the impact was felt much earlier. A University of Washington team completed a study of worker pay, hours, and benefits in Seattle in 2017, and found the law was a net loss for workers. The study concluded:

“Our preferred estimates suggest that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance caused hours worked by low-skilled workers (i.e., those earning under $19 per hour) to fall by 9.4% during the three quarters when the minimum wage was $13 per hour, resulting in a loss of 3.5 million hours worked per calendar quarter. Alternative estimates show the number of low-wage jobs declined by 6.8%, which represents a loss of more than 5,000 jobs. These estimates are robust to cutoffs other than $19.45 A 3.1% increase in wages in jobs that paid less than $19 coupled with a 9.4% loss in hours yields a labor demand elasticity of roughly -3.0, and this large elasticity estimate is robust to other cutoffs… The reduction in hours would cost the average employee $179 per month, while the wage increase would recoup only $54 of this loss, leaving a net loss of $125 per month (6.6%), which is sizable for a low-wage worker.”

Keep in mind this was before the full impact of the $15 per hour minimum wage could be felt, as the law only became fully implemented this year, the situation is going to get worse in Seattle.

So now that we know Seattle’s own laws created a shortage of housing in the city while at the same time reducing the amount of take-home pay for lower-income residents, what is the city council’s solution? More government.

In 2017, King County and Seattle spent over $195 million to combat homelessness, which included city, county, state, federal, and charity spending. Surely the massive amount of spending had an impact on the problem? No, homelessness actually increased last year.

But don’t worry, the city council has a plan. All other plans have failed, this one will work. The city council had the great idea to institute another tax, known as a “head tax.” The city is going to tax its largest business $500 for every employee. This money would then be used to build “affordable housing.” It is hard to see how that could be done with the current zoning laws, the laws that helped start the crisis in the first place, still in place.

After the city council voted 9-0 for the ordinance business leaders spoke out, and Amazon paused construction on a project, pitting hard-working construction workers against do nothing, full-time protesters. After some negotiating between the city council and Mayor Jenny Durkan the tax was reduced to $275. This may seem like a win, but like everything in Seattle, all is not as it seems. Along with the lower rate, so far the funds are non-binding. Meaning there is no plan to spend the money and it could easily be spent on non-homelessness issues.

What Seattle has done is so poorly planned, even some of the homeless are calling out the city for its excessive spending. Geno Minetti, currently living out of his car, stated, “They’re wasting the taxpayer’s money. If they get more; they’ll waste more.” It is a shame this man can see the problem and knows government spending is not the answer, but the people in charge only see taxation and spending as an answer to every problem.

Businesses in the Seattle must now ask themselves some important questions, is it worth expanding if the business will get taxed for succeeding? If Seattle doesn’t want a person’s business to grow and expand, why should he or she move or start it there?

The lunacy of Seattle never ceases to amaze. Only the left would watch its taxation, zoning, and employment laws create a crisis, then advocate for more of the same. Every city should pay close attention to what Seattle is doing, and do the opposite. If a city wants to increase its tax base, decrease poverty, and increase the quality of living, don’t be like Seattle.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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