We were suckered!

My favorite picture was not so telling after all.

The picture below was taken just a couple of seconds after that great picture of Trump looking into space



Everybody is laughing above.  She was apparently telling a joke.

At least Trump was still the centre of attention.

*******************************

Wow: Supreme Court Delivers Huge Ruling On Dem Governor’s Order Giving Felons Voting Rights

The Supreme Court of Virginia has ruled that Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s executive order restoring the “right to vote” of more than 200,000 felons was illegal and unconstitutional.

According to Fox News, Virginia’s highest court ruled on Friday that the Democrat governor overstepped his authority and should not have allowed tens of thousands of felons the right to vote.

In a 4-3 decision, the high court ordered the state to cancel the registration of roughly 11,300 felons who signed up to vote after McAuliffe’s April 2016 executive order. His ruling allowed many felons to vote in the 2016 presidential election, which happened to be a state Hillary Clinton won.

McAuliffe, a top ally to Clinton who campaigned with her in the 2016 presidential election, came under fire last month when an admitted pedophile and convicted felon announced that he would be running for state office. The felon was legally eligible to run for public office because of McAuliffe’s order.

SOURCE 

*********************************

Study: Immigration Costs GOP 5 States, 11 House Seats

Business donors’ demands for mass immigration have cost the GOP five states in presidential elections and 11 House seats in congressional elections, according to a new study by pro-immigration economists.

“In House elections, 11 congressional districts and 5 states in presidential elections switched to a Democrat majority” between 1990 and 2010, says the April 2018 study, titled “The Political Impact of Immigration.”

“No state and no congressional district switched from a Democrat majority to a Republican majority as a consequence of immigration,” said the report, authored by pro-migration economist Giovanni Peri, Anna Maria Mayda, a Georgetown University professor now at the U.S. State Department, and Walter Steingress, an economist at the Bank of Canada.

“If the study’s results are correct, it is very difficult to imagine the Republican Party will remain viable nationally if immigration continues at the current level,” said Steve Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. Currently, the federal government welcomes one legal immigrant for every four Americans who turn 18 as it tries to spur business activity via mass immigration.

The study comes out as business lobbyists use a group of almost 25 GOP legislators to push GOP leaders in the House towards another huge no-strings amnesty for more than 2 million young ‘DACA’ illegals.

The GOP leaders — led by House Speaker Paul Ryan — are signaling their support for the amnesty and their opposition to an immigration compromise developed by Rep. Bob Goodlatte. Very few of the ‘DACA’ migrants are likely to vote Republican, and they are likely to bring in several million additional chain-migration relatives to vote for Democratic Party candidates by 2040. But Ryan has long been an advocate of greater immigration and he opposed the 1994 effort to curb illegal immigration in California via Prop. 187. California was once dominated by the middle-class voters, but is now dominated by a high/low alliance of wealthy progressive leaders and many low-wage voters, leaving the GOP powerless.

The study also argues that high-skill migrants — including the roughly 1.5 million white-collar guest-workers in the United States — push GOP-leaning college graduates to vote for the Democratic Party. The GOP’s loss of college-grad votes exceeds the GOP’s gain in blue-collar voters, says the report:

Our strongest and most significant finding is that an increase in high-skilled immigrants as a share of the local population is associated with a strong and significant decrease in the vote share for the Republican Party …

The first is Gwinnet County in Georgia, which saw its share of immigrants increase by 26 percentage points over 20 years. Immigration was mainly high-skilled (two-thirds of immigrants were high-skilled). In addition, the native population in 1980 was rather skilled. The county is part of a commuting zone that ranks at the 26th percentile of the unskilled-to-skilled distribution of natives in 1980.16 According to the coefficients in Table 7, column 1, the implied decrease in the Republican vote share is 10.2 percentage points …

The immigration patterns have also polarized the United States by geography, the report says:

It increased political polarization in the United States. Large urban areas, already exhibiting a Democratic majority, are those where the pro-Democrat effect of immigrants was stronger, but those counties were already leaning Democrat before. Similarly, the effect of new immigrants increased the Republican vote share in some less-urban and low-skilled counties that already exhibited a Republican majority in 1990.

This fall, President Donald Trump may test the study’s claim that high-skill immigration reduces the GOP’s vote share among college graduates.

His deputies are planning to reform of the H-1B program, which has ceded a huge slice of the U.S. information-technology sector to lower-wage guest-workers and immigrants from India. The program — which now keeps a population of at least 460,000 non-immigrant foreign graduates in U.S. professional jobs — would be reformed and shrunk by narrowing the law’s definition of “specialty occupations,” according to the deputies’ planning document provided to Breitbart News.

Unlike prior GOP leaders, Trump has periodically blasted and praised the H-1B program. In March 2016, f0r example, Trump issued a statement saying:

 The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.

If Trump promotes the planned H-1B reform, he would be effectively promising to raise salaries for white-collar voters, giving college-graduate Americans a pocketbook incentive to vote against the Democrats’ policy of encouraging immigration.

Amid the economic boom, white-collar wages have remained almost flat, according to Korn Ferry, a recruitment agency. The agency reported May 14 that:

while the job market is at the hottest it’s been this century, salaries for newly minted college graduates are virtually flat [in 2018] from 2017.

In the study, researchers analyzed salaries of 310,000 entry-level positions from nearly 1,000 organizations across the United States. Based on the analysis, 2018 college grads in the United States will make on average $50,390 annually. That is 2.8 percent more than the 2017 average ($49,000).

“With the 2018 U.S. inflation rate hovering just over 2 percent, real wages for this year’s grads are virtually flat,” said Korn Ferry Senior Client Partner Maryam Morse. “

But Trump only “flirts with” urging CEOs to raise white-collar and blue-collar wages, said Camarota. “For reasons that make no sense to me, he can’t bring himself to say ‘Higher wages and a tight labor market are my goal.'”

Polls suggest the H-1B program is very unpopular. An August 2017 poll reported that 68 percent of Americans oppose companies’ use of H-1Bs to outsource U.S.-based jobs that could be held by Americans.

Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants” push-polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.

But “choice” polls reveal most voters’ often-ignored preference that CEOs should hire Americans at decent wages before hiring migrants. Those Americans include many blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and people who hide their opinions from pollsters. Similarly, the 2018 polls show that GOP voters are far more concerned about migration — more properly, the economics of migration — than they are concerned about illegal migration and MS-13, taxes, or the return of Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

SOURCE 

************************************

Illegal Immigration Is a Major Crime Problem

A new DOJ report reveals that one out of five individuals in federal prisons is an illegal alien. 

A recently released Justice Department report reveals that an astonishing one in five individuals incarcerated in federal prisons is an illegal alien, which amounts to a $1.5 million bill every day to the American taxpayer. However, the greater expense of illegal immigration is not measured in dollars. The report notes illegal alien crime statistics from the state of Texas alone between 2001 and 2018 — more than 663,000 offenses were committed, including 1,351 homicides, 7,156 sexual assaults, 79,049 assaults and 44,882 thefts, to name but a few. Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan also said this week that “nine out of 10” illegal immigrants arrested have criminal records.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions responded to the report, stating, “The illegal immigrant crime rate in this country should be zero. Every crime committed by an illegal alien is, by definition, a crime that should have been prevented. It is outrageous that tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year because of the drugs and violence brought over our borders illegally and that taxpayers have been forced, year after year, to pay millions of dollars to incarcerate tens of thousands of illegal aliens. … Today’s report is yet another reminder that we must continue this [zero tolerance] policy and help fulfill President Trump’s goals of restoring lawfulness to our immigration system and ensure that immigration serves the good of this country.”

But despite President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration via his “zero tolerance” policy, the number of illegal alien border crossings has steadily climbed. And one of the primary culprits for this increase can be attributed to Democrats and their huge push for lawless “sanctuary cities” that essentially act as giant magnets attracting greater numbers of illegal aliens.

While Democrats and much of the mainstream media like to play up the plight of these illegal aliens as a justification for ignoring U.S. immigration laws, the undeniable fact is that major criminal syndicates have taken advantage of these sentiments to further their criminal enterprises. The drug trade and other nefarious criminal activity such as human trafficking exploit many migrants, often making them the biggest victims of illegal immigration. And sanctuary cities are only proving to supply these criminal organizations with more individuals to exploit — by falsely advertising protection to people who willfully break U.S. immigration law.

Regardless of how Democrats and the Leftmedia portray the issue of illegal immigration, it is first and foremost a crime problem. And the fact is that Democrats, with their sanctuary city policies, are guilty of aiding and abetting criminals. And as this DOJ report demonstrates, Trump’s rhetoric on the problem is much closer to reality on the ground than that of the MSM and Democrats.

SOURCE 

*****************************

Putin’s Success Masks Russian Weakness

Things are breaking his way. But if China is a tiger, Russia is a pussycat on stilts

By Walter Russell Mead

Vladimir Putin’s foreign-policy flair has both electrified and horrified the world for a full decade. Since 2008, Mr. Putin has partitioned Georgia, invaded Ukraine, and annexed Crimea. He has raised Russian power and prestige to their highest levels since the Cold War. He has muscled Russia back into the Middle East while inserting himself into America’s 2016 presidential election. He has also demonstrated an unequaled ability to weaponize information and bolster Russian power on the cheap.

Breaking the rules, in other words, is Mr. Putin’s specialty. But this year he seems to be taking a more laid-back approach. The Kremlin continues to spread disinformation, and its political opponents still occasionally turn up poisoned or dead. But as U.S. policy has become more frenetic under President Trump, Russian foreign policy has become more restrained.

In February a U.S. air and artillery assault killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria, but Mr. Putin’s response was low-key. In March he announced the first cuts to Russian military spending since 1998. In April he reacted with patience and calm when a popular revolution arose in Armenia against the pro-Russian government. And in May Russia stepped back as Israel bombed Iranian military installations across Syria, suggesting Mr. Putin agreed at least partly with the U.S. about the future of Iran’s presence there. As if that weren’t enough, Russia has joined Iran’s archnemesis, Saudi Arabia, in boosting oil production. This will help stabilize emerging economies that have been hurt by rising interest rates.

Don’t misunderstand: Mr. Putin hasn’t had a change of heart or decided to mend fences with the West. He is toning down his foreign policy simply because so many of his key objectives have been accomplished that his best option now is to consolidate his gains.

Ten years ago, the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were on offense in Eastern Europe. Mr. Putin feared that the spread of Western ideas into Russia would challenge his rule. Those worries are gone: A divided and confused West has given up its dream of pushing eastward, and both the EU and NATO are less confident and less effective than they were a decade ago. The West no longer endangers Russia. The real question is how much Russia endangers the West.

Mr. Putin is no Stalin ; he seeks to weaken the West rather than destroy it. From his point of view, the current situation in Europe looks promising: The U.S. and Europe are drifting apart. The gap within the Continent also continues to grow, as discontent mounts between Germany and many of its southern and eastern partners. Italy’s new government is likely to push to end sanctions against Russia, while forcing Europe into a new bout of navel gazing over the euro. All this favors Moscow without requiring Mr. Putin to do much of anything.

In the Middle East, Russia would profit similarly from a period of relative inaction. Mr. Putin cannot realistically expect to make Russia a hegemonic power there, but he hopes to replace the U.S. as the region’s primary balancer and diplomatic power broker. Because the Syrian intervention is unpopular in a Russia that still remembers the Soviet Union’s disastrous march into Afghanistan, Mr. Putin must carry out this mission on the cheap.

For the moment things are breaking Mr. Putin’s way. If Syria is to be a playing field for outside powers, the U.S. and Israel would prefer Russia be the leader rather than Iran. Mr. Putin can tell Benjamin Netanyahu that Russia is the best security against the Iranian forces on Israel’s border. At the same time, Mr. Putin can promise Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Russia will keep Bashar Assad in Damascus and the U.S. out.

Despite Mr. Putin’s successes, Russia remains weak, and its leverage over other nations is limited. China can woo its neighbors with multibillion-dollar projects like its “One Belt, One Road” trade initiative. Russia has much less to offer: If China is a tiger, Russia is a pussycat on stilts. Mr. Putin can obstruct Germany’s faltering European project, but he lacks the resources to offer an alternative. In the Middle East, the Kremlin’s position depends on American forbearance. If President Trump decides to make opposing the Assad regime a crucial part of his anti-Iran strategy, Mr. Putin may have to stand by and watch his client fall.

Meanwhile, developments at home counsel restraint as well. While Mr. Putin’s string of dramatic foreign-policy successes has shored up his domestic popularity, Russia’s sclerotic economy and corrupt social order ensure that the foundations of his power remain weak. Mr. Putin has made Russia great again on the international stage, but the Russian people would rather see him use that daring and finesse to improve the situation at home

SOURCE 

*********************************

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)

***************************

Our military: The greatest social engineering machine ever built

DAVID SCHARFENBERG seems well-informed and interesting in what he writes below but there are some important things he misses. The first is that the military overwhelmingly like Mr Trump. They have little disagreement with his policies and they greatly appreciate his support for what they do. And his patriotism mirrors theirs. So if the army has any social role it will be to amplify support for Mr Trump -- which is about opposite to reconciling blue-staters with red-staters.

And the enthusiasm for Mr Trump is part of a world-wide phenomenon: Armies worldwide tend to be conservative. Army men are practical men. They have little time for the airy-fairly and often perverse theories that drive Leftists. The great Leftist conviction that all men are equal is idiotic in an army context. So when the votes come in from military bases the balance is in favor of conservative candidates by about 2 to 1.

But most pertinent of all, it has all been said and tested before. Mr Scharfenberg is not as sharp as his Ashkenazi surname suggests. He has not delved into the history of his ideas.

In the aftermath of WWII, in 1949, a book appeared called "The American soldier", by Samuel Stouffer. It appears now to be out of print but you can get secondhand copies on Amazon. Something in it attracted widespread attention among psychologists and sociologists. It reported that blacks and whites got on a lot better in the army than they did in society at large.

With stars in their eyes, social scientists drew the wonderful conclusion from this that "contact" was the solution to good race relations. The fact that the army was a very different environment from other environments and the fact that blacks and whites were forced to get on by military requirements were generally dismissed. So a whole series of studies were done in an effort to confirm the "contact hypothesis" -- that blacks and whites just had to get to know one-another better in order to like one-another.

It all seems rather silly in retrospect and the results of the research showed that. Despite the best that statistical trickery could do, the hypothesis got only the weakest support and, indeed, the results sometimes showed that contact made the two groups like one-another LESS! I summarized a lot of that research here

But the most spectacular finding on the question eventually came from Australia, using not a survey but the entire national population. In 1967 Australia had a constitutional referendum designed to give blacks a better deal. And the results differed a lot according to what geographical area the answers came from. In parts of the country where there were a lot of blacks, there were far more "No" votes than in parts of the country where blacks were rarely seen. So, overall, the correlation between vote and contact was .90 -- which is about as high as you get in the social sciences. The more Australians saw of blacks, the LESS they liked them! I have covered that finding in more detail here

So Scharfenberg's hopes are not borne out by the evidence. What he proposes in his last sentence below will not work. And it is clear on general principles why. As we have seen from Robert Putnam's well-known findings (particularly as seen in his book "Bowling alone"), homogeneity in human groups promotes solidarity while diversity promotes mistrust and fear. So mixing people from different backgrounds together will in general simply create mistrust -- the opposite of what Mr Scharfenberg hopes for.


The military may, actually, be the best hope we've got for mending the cultural and regional divisions the president has exploited politically.

For generations now, the armed forces have provided an opportunity - unmatched in American life - to put very different people in close proximity, and force an explicit reckoning with our most urgent social questions.

Racial integration, women's equality, the role of gay and lesbian Americans in public life - time and again, the military has played an important, if often reluctant, role in tackling the country's biggest challenges.

Now, with Trump and the GOP Congress looking to dramatically expand the military, could the armed forces be on the leading edge of the next great reckoning in American life? Could the military help us close the worrisome gap between red and blue?

THE UNITED STATES of the early 20th century was a nation stewing in bigotry.

In the South, lynch mobs enforced a dehumanizing racial caste system. Black people who escaped to the North as a part of the "Great Migration" confronted another kind of racial animus. And waves of immigration from new parts of Europe and Asia only added to Anglo America's anxiety - layering an ugly nativism on top of the country's white-black tensions.

But then, World War I arrived. And the country was forced to sideline the hate - at least for a time. An army of millions had to be raised. Quickly. And it couldn't be assembled without substantial numbers of African Americans and immigrants.

"It was in this crisis," writes Richard Slotkin, author of "Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality," "that American leaders rediscovered the ideals of civil equality."

But if the military offers a rare opportunity to lower the temperature - to ease the red state-blue state divide - it succeeds only as long as it can attract recruits from both parts of the country.

The Committee on Public Information declared the country a "vast, polyglot community" that aspired to something "higher than race loyalty, transcend[ing] mere ethnic prejudices, more binding than the call of a common ancestry." And some 350,000 black soldiers went on to serve with the American Expeditionary Forces in France.

Those soldiers faced discrimination on the battlefield. And their service hardly meant the end of racial strife at home. Competition for jobs and housing among returning veterans led to a series of race riots in the "Red Summer" of 1919 that left hundreds of blacks dead.

But the war, as Slotkin writes, aroused an activist spirit among minority groups, who pressed for an end to Jim Crow and challenged the real estate "covenants" that locked Jews and other ethnic groups out of the most desirable neighborhoods.

After World War II, President Truman moved to racially integrate the armed forces in 1948. And while the military responded slowly - there were still segregated units at the start of the Korean War - it did integrate, in time.

Generations of black people and white people worked in close proximity. And over time, a quiet revolution in race relations took hold. Enmity between black and white didn't disappear entirely. Far from it. But it dissipated. And the military moved closer to racial equality than, perhaps, any major institution in American life.

The late Northwestern University military sociologist Charles Moskos may have distilled it best: The military, he used to say, is the one place in American society where black people routinely boss white people around.

And it's hard to pin down what we mean, even, when we talk about the divide between the "South" and the "Northeast," says Meredith Kleykamp, a University of Maryland sociologist who studies the military.

But, she suggests, we seem to be talking about politics and class. The South is more conservative and blue-collar, the Northeast more progressive and better-off.

Nothing that happens in the military is going to change that basic dynamic; no one expects anything like the flattening of racial hierarchies that's occurred in the barracks and on the front lines.

What's required - what's already happening on a small scale - is something far more modest. The day-to-day, humanizing chatter of co-workers. The red state-blue state banter that happens almost nowhere else in the country.

After all, cohesion is something like the guiding principle of the military.

When Marine recruits first step off the bus at boot camp in the wee hours of the night on Parris Island, S.C., they are immediately put in formation - a drill instructor screaming them into a unified whole. And not once, during their 13 weeks of training, are they allowed to say the word "I."

There is a sublimation of self - and an allegiance to the group - that's difficult to describe to anyone who hasn't seen it up close.

Over in the Army, says retired Brigadier General Jack Hammond of Reading, Mass., the mantra is "cooperate and graduate." And the bonds that form in training allow for the sort of civil conversations about hot-button issues like gun control and immigration that are so absent from our politics.

It's not that minds are changed, says Hammond, it's that "the temperature comes down"; soldiers recognize that people from different places, with different points of view, aren't out to get them.

But if the military offers a rare opportunity to lower the temperature - to ease the red state-blue state divide - it succeeds only as long as it can attract recruits from both parts of the country.

And over the last few decades, it has struggled to maintain that balance. In 2016, just 12.7 percent of new military accessions came from the New England and Middle Atlantic states. That's just over half the Northeast's tally from the late1970s.

The South, meanwhile, accounts for some 44 percent of accessions. And conservative states in the western part of the country, like Nevada and Arizona, are sending among the largest proportions of their 18 to 24-year-old populations to the military.

The shift is, in part, about larger patterns of migration to the American Sun Belt. But there are other factors at play, too.

There is also the matter of cultural and political opposition to the military. Recruiters all over New England have stories - of parents who hang up on them, or tell their children they're too good for the armed forces. One group recently tailed Army recruiters at a South Shore track meet, monitoring their interactions with students.

As journalist and veteran Jacob Siegel put it in a piece in the Daily Beast a few years ago, "the military is a socialist paradise!" There's far less income inequality between a private and a general than there is between a worker and a CEO, he notes, and there's greater social mobility, too.

Kleyman, the military sociologist, says there are significant psychic benefits, too. "When people leave the military - sure, they miss having a housing allowance - but what they really miss is that sense of purpose, that sense of meaningfulness of your work," she says.

Service that tilts to the red states, Kleyman says, isn't just a burden unevenly shared, but a benefit unequally shared.

Still, recruiters have flogged those benefits for years, with little to show for it. And it's not just about blue-state culture.

Consider the role of population density. Members of the military disproportionately hail from sparsely populated areas, where there aren't a lot of other employment options. And the blue states tend to be more densely populated. Indeed, the most rural blue state in the Northeast - Maine - has substantially higher accession rates than its neighbors.

The geography of military installations is also a significant force. The outposts that survived the budget-driven base closure process of the last several decades are heavily clustered in the South and West. "Think of it like a smile," says Major General Jeffrey Snow, commanding general of the US Army Recruiting Command. "You could put your hand on North Carolina and draw a smiley face that goes down through Texas and up halfway through California."

Many have grown to a massive size - three mega-bases in North Carolina, Texas, and Kentucky have populations of more than 200,000 each.

If a child lives near a base - especially one of that scale - he is far more likely to know adults who serve in the armed forces: a friend's mother or a baseball coach. And children's career choices are powerfully influenced by the choices of adults around them: Nearly half of all Army recruits, for instance, come from military families.

Of course, building new installations in the Northeast would be a challenge. Land costs are significant,. Political opposition would probably be substantial, too. But if the nation wants to build a more diverse military, it could invest. It could bring the armed forces directly to blue-state America.

Ramping up recruitment from that part of the country could, ultimately, be a matter of military readiness. As war-fighting becomes a more technologically sophisticated exercise, the armed forces will need more - not fewer - soldiers, sailors, and Marines from the best-educated parts of the country.

If the military can't stitch the country together by itself, though, it can play a leading role. It can be an important model for a larger effort.

If we truly want to heal our fractured republic, we'll have to build a system that consciously emulates the military - pulling together people from all its disparate parts and putting them side by side.

More HERE

**********************************

You Don’t Get to Rewrite the Constitution Because You Dislike Donald Trump

David Harsanyi

If your contention is that President Donald Trump has the propensity to sound like a bully and an authoritarian, I’m with you. If you’re arguing that Trump’s rhetoric is sometimes coarse and unpresidential, I can’t disagree.

Yet the ubiquitous claim that Trump acts in a way that uniquely undermines the rule of law is, to this point, simply untrue.

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson has it right when he argues that “elites” often seem more concerned about the “mellifluous” tone of leaders rather than their abuse of power. “Obama defies the Constitution but sounds ‘presidential,'” he writes. “Trump follows it but sounds like a loudmouth from Queens.”

But while former President Barack Obama’s agreeable tone had plenty to do with his lack of media scrutiny, many largely justified, and even cheered, his abuses because they furthered progressive causes. Not only did liberals often ignore the rule of law when it was ideologically convenient for them; they now want the new president to play by a set of rules that doesn’t even exist.

Partisans tend to conflate their own policy preferences with the rule of law, or democracy or patriotism. But the pervasive claim that the Trump administration has uniquely undermined the law, a claim that dominates coverage, typically amounts to concerns regarding how he comports himself.

For example, entering into international treaties without the Senate or creating fiscal subsidizes without Congress are the types of things that corrode the rule of law. Firing (or threatening to fire) your subordinates at the Justice Department, on the other hand, is well within the purview of presidential powers.

Trump, as far as I know, hasn’t shut down a single investigation into himself or anyone in his administration or campaign, despite evidence that a special counsel’s creation was based on politically motivated information.

Though he may be wrong, it’s not an attack on the rule of law for the president to claim privilege. Nor is a president undermining the rule of law if he pushes back against an investigation into Russian collusion.

The intelligence community is not sacred. Americans have no patriotic duty to respect former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper or former CIA Director John Brennan. The president is free to accuse them of partisanship. Doing so is not an attack on the rule of law any more than the reverse.

Nor does Trump undermine the rule of law when offering presidential commutations and pardons (nor would he even, perhaps, if he were to pardon himself).

Nor does Trump undermine the rule of law when he rolls back the previous administration’s unilateral abuses on immigration and bogus treaties. In many ways, Trump has strengthened the checks and balances that were broken by the rhetorically soothing President Obama. Mock it if you like, “but Gorsuch” will likely do more to curb the state’s overreach than any justice the left would ever put on any bench.

You don’t get to fabricate a new Constitution every time there’s a president you dislike. American patriotism isn’t predicated on pretending that Russia can flip our election with some Facebook ads, but it is certainly grounded in the idea that we all hold consistent constitutional principles.

More HERE

*********************************

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)

***************************

Trump is a free trader after all

I have often noted that he has an economics degree -- from the prestigious Wharton school -- and he now shows that he remembers it

President Donald Trump on Saturday called for the G-7 countries to wipe out all trade barriers among them, but vowed that until that happens, he will fight tooth and nail against any nation trying to take advantage of the U.S.

“We’re talking to all countries, and it’s going to stop, or we’ll stop trading with them. And that’s a very profitable answer if we have to do it,” Trump said, according to CNBC. “We’re like the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing, and that ends.”

“We can’t have an example where we’re paying, the United States is paying, 270 percent — just can’t have it — and when they send things into us you don’t have that,” he said.

Trump noted that American farmers have been affected by past trade policies that make it hard for them to sell goods abroad, The New York Times reported.

“You look at our farmers. For 15 years, the graph has gone just like this, down,” he said.

“I blame our leaders. In fact, I congratulate the leaders of other countries for so crazily being able to make these trade deals that were so good for their country and so bad for the United States. But those days are over,” Trump said.

The president said he would prefer a world in which there were no trade barriers. “No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be. And no subsidies. I even said, ‘No tariffs,'” Trump said, according to France 24.

He recently imposed stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum coming into the U.S. from European Union, Canada and Mexico. That followed a similar action in March applying to many other nations.

Trump has said that as long as he believes other nations are unfair to the United States, he will fight back with every tool at his disposal. That has caused friction between Trump and the other G-7 nations — France, Britain, Canada, Japan, Germany and Italy.

Trump downplayed those differences Saturday in a press conference that came at the conclusion of the G-7 summit. “We had extremely productive discussions on the need to have fair and reciprocal” trade, he said.

“We want and expect other nations to provide fair market access to American exports and that we will take whatever steps are necessary to (protect) industry and workers from unfair practices, of which there are many. But we’re getting them worked out, slowly but surely.”

Trump said he would prefer a completely level playing field among all the G-7 partners. “Ultimately that’s what you want, you want tariff free, no barriers, and you want no subsides because you have some countries subsidizing industries and that’s not fair,” Trump said, according to Business Insider. “So you go tariff free, you go barrier free, you go subsidy free, that’s the way you learned at the Wharton School of Finance.”

Trump left the G-7 summit ahead of everyone else due to his Tuesday summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. During his solo press conference, he alluded to media reports that his call for a no-tariff zone took other nations by surprise.

“People were … I guess they gotta go back to drawing board and check it out,” Trump said.

“I don’t know if they were surprised with President Trump’s free trade proclamation, but they certainly listened to it and we had lengthy discussions about that,” said Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, who appeared with Trump. “As the president said, reduce these barriers, in fact go to zero, zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, zero subsidies, and along the way we’re going to have to clean up the international trading system.”

SOURCE 

*********************************

Trump tells it straight

President Trump was asked by A reporter about recent remarks made by Lebron James, who both said his team would refuse to go to the White House if they won the NBA championship.

Trump’s response is priceless:

“I didn’t invite them. No, I didn’t invite Lebron James and I didn’t invite Steph Curry. We’re not going to invite either team. But we have other teams that are coming. You know, if you look, we had Alabama, national champion. We had Clemson, national champion. We had the New England Patriots. We had the Pittsburgh Penguins last year.”

Trump then mentioned that the Stanley Cup winners the Washington Capitals would be invited to the White House!

“You know, my attitude: If they want to be here, it’s the greatest place on Earth, I’m here. If they don’t want to be here, I don’t want them.”

SOURCE 

*******************************

Trump roasts hypocritical Trudeau

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he has asked U.S. representatives not to endorse the joint communique put out by the Group of Seven leaders after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's "false statements" at a news conference.

After departing from the Quebec summit for Singapore, Trump tweeted that Trudeau's remarks at a news conference, where he said Canada would not be pushed around, "were very dishonest and weak".

"PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, 'US Tariffs were kind of insulting' and he 'will not be pushed around.' Very dishonest & weak. Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!" the U.S. president tweeted.

SOURCE 

******************************

One Magnificent Photo Sums Up Donald Trump's G-7 Visit



A Picture is worth a thousand words

Tense and confrontational, it appears to sum up President Donald Trump’s entire trip, which highlighted divisions among the global powers.

The image dramatically depicts the German leader in an assertive pose, planting both hands firmly on a crisp tablecloth as she addresses President Donald Trump, who is seated before her with his arms crossed wearing a dispassionate expression.

The picture was released by the office of German Chancellor

SOURCE 

*************************************

From statewide contests to local races, all politics are about Trump
     
Report from Boston

Donald J. Trump has never campaigned in Hatfield. The president is not calling for cuts to school funding in Southampton or denying new liquor licenses in Northampton. But in the race for the First Hampshire District’s state representative seat, where the East-West railway and dairy farming are campaign fodder, so is Trump.

“He’s kind of like that figure — he who shall not be named — who sort of looms above all things,” said Lindsay Sabadosa, who is vying against fellow Democrat Diana Szynal for the open House seat. “Even at my campaign kickoff, I was asked: ‘What can you do, as a state representative, about Trump?’ ”

For local and statewide campaigns normally walled off from Washington, Trump has loomed large across the ballot in Massachusetts this year, permeating the dialogue and campaign messaging in races that are usually dominated by local, not federal, issue

In the race for governor, Trump is wielded as a political cudgel. For secretary of state, he’s a call to action. In the attorney general’s race, he’s both.

If all politics was local in the era of Tip O’Neill, the reverse may be true under Trump.

“It’s Trump 24/7, and it’s very hard for the Democrats to get through the wall of noise,” said Phil Johnston, a former chair of the state Democratic Party.

“People are very strongly with him or very strongly against him, and the country is terribly divided in unprecedented ways,” he added. “Those emotions, which those divisions stir up, will be very important factors in November.”

The prevalence of Trump shifts from race to race, but his specter has undoubtedly permeated the campaign trail, sometimes in surprising places.

Secretary of State William F. Galvin, facing his most serious primary fight in two decades in office, hung his pitch at the party’s convention, in part, on telling Democratic activists that he’s the best defense against any Russian or Trump election meddling in 2020. Supporters of his opponent, Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim, have made a similar pitch in endorsing him.

In her reelection bid, Attorney General Maura T. Healey has punctuated her term by pointing to the dozens of lawsuits she has brought or been party to against the Trump administration.

Yet, the Republicans running against her have sought to turn the tables. Healey, they argue, is actually too focused on Trump, to the detriment of the state. Jay McMahon, in winning the GOP endorsement in April, called the lawsuits “frivolous.” His primary opponent, Dan Shores, contends that for every lawsuit Healey files against the Trump administration, “that’s one more drug dealer that goes free.”

Perhaps nowhere, however, has Trump been cited more often than in the governor’s race. Jay Gonzalez and Robert K. Massie, the two Democrats vying for their party’s nomination, have repeatedly sought to tie the president to Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016.

Gonzalez, in criticizing the decision to send a National Guard helicopter and a two-person crew to the southern border, charged that Baker is “helping Donald Trump enforce his hateful policies.” Massie has argued that Baker hasn’t done enough to criticize the administration.

Meanwhile, buffeting Baker’s right flank is Scott Lively, a conservative antigay pastor who has called himself “100 percent pro-Trump” in their Republican primary.

Baker has responded by saying his focus remains on the state, making him one of the few this election cycle trying hard to keep Trump talk off the campaign trail.

“[Baker] will continue to vocally disagree with and advocate against federal policies misaligned with the best interests of the Commonwealth on issues like health care, climate change, and immigration,” said Jim Conroy, a senior adviser to Baker.

The focus on Trump has, in recent months, seeped into local races, where an array of candidates have pointed to his election as a catalyst for them launching their first political campaign. That includes Sabadosa, the First Hampshire candidate, and Chelsea S. Kline, who launched an activist group in early 2017 and is now the only Democrat on the ballot for the state Senate seat previously held by former Senate president Stanley C. Rosenberg.

“I hear these concerns from constituents,” Kline said. “I can ensure them I am looking out for all of them on the local level.”

Some have directly made Trump a campaign issue. Tram Nguyen, an Andover Democrat challenging state Representative Jim Lyons, said she’s compared the Republican incumbent and president to voters in her argument for a more collaborative lawmaker.

“He is a Trump supporter, and the public knows about it,” she said.

Lyons, who voted for Trump but backed Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 presidential primary, said he’s never hid his views since first winning the seat in 2010. But the conservative also put daylight between himself and the president. “There’s no relationship to Donald Trump’s positions,” he said.

In Lexington, Michelle Ciccolo, a candidate in a five-way Democratic primary for a House seat, touts on her campaign website the need to “push back on the regressive efforts coming out of Washington” — amid discussions about local transportation and school funding.

“I don’t think we get to pretend that what’s happening on the national level isn’t affecting us on the local level,” Ciccolo said in an interview.

But wielding anti-Trump rhetoric can mean walking a fine line for Democrats, especially in local races where it’s harder to draw a direct line between Main Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I think that every campaign is considering what Trump means to their election cycle,” said Jay Cincotti, a Democratic campaign operative. “If your opponent is an unabashed Trump supporter, that’s an easier tie to make. If your opponent has supported positions that the president has supported, like immigration, that’s easy to make.

“But if I’m running for state rep,” he said, “and I’m using Trump for the sake of Trump, it could have voters scratching their heads.”

SOURCE 

**************************************

OBAMA’S TREASON: EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT

But Leftist Privilege will prevent him from ever being held accountable

The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday that “the Obama administration skirted key U.S. sanctions to grant Iran access to billions in hard currency despite public assurances the administration was engaged in no such action, according to a new congressional investigation.”

And it gets even worse: “The investigation, published Wednesday by the House Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, further discloses secret efforts by top Obama administration officials to assure European countries they would receive a pass from U.S. sanctions if they engaged in business with Iran.”

This revelation comes after the news that came to light in February, that, according to Bill Gertz in the Washington Times, “the U.S. government has traced some of the $1.7 billion released to Iran by the Obama administration to Iranian-backed terrorists in the two years since the cash was transferred.”

There is a law that applies to this situation. U.S. Code 2381 says: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

In a sane political environment, Barack Obama would be tried for treason.

He showered hundreds of billions of dollars on the Islamic Republic of Iran. There are those who say, “It was their money. It belonged to the Iranian government but was frozen and not paid since 1979.” Indeed, and there was a reason for that: not even Jimmy Carter, who made the Islamic Republic of Iran possible, thought that money, which had been paid by the Shah’s government in a canceled arms deal, belonged to the mullahs who overthrew the Shah. Likewise Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush all thought that the Islamic Republic was not due money that was owed to the Shah.

Only Barack Obama did.

The definition of treason is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran order their people to chant “Death to America” in mosques every Friday, and repeatedly vow that they will ultimately destroy the United States of America and the state of Israel. How was giving them billions and helping them skirt sanctions applied by the U.S. government not treason?

Other Presidents have been incompetent, corrupt, dishonest, but which has committed treason on a scale to rival the treason of Barack Obama?

However this catastrophe plays out, there is one man who will suffer no consequences whatsoever: Barack Obama. That’s Leftist Privilege. It’s good to be a powerful Leftist in Washington nowadays. Laws? Pah! Laws are for conservatives.

SOURCE

***********************************

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)

***************************

A significant letter

Below is a letter from Charles Krauthammer which is fully self explanatory.  What I want to draw attention to is the gratitude expressed in it.  It is not the letter of complaint that it well could have been. So why, amid very distressing circumstances, is it a letter of gratitude rather than complaint?

It's because Krauthammer is a conservative.  We all have our ups and downs but conservatives are dispositionally happy people.  The surveys always confirm greater happiness among conservatives.  And gratitude comes from being happy with your life.  If you are a committed Christian, as many conservatives are, you give thanks daily.

Leftists, on the other hand are dissatisfied with the world in which they live so have little cause to be thankful.  They are miserable complainers instead. I sometimes feel sorry for them. I particularly feel sorry for them when I see the mental gymnastics they have to undertake to deny all sorts of realities, such as the absence of global warming or the real differences between men and women.  In the past, in the 19th and early 20th century, Leftists would frequently proclaim that "All men are brothers".  Fortunately, you don't hear that bit of lunacy very often these days.

"I have been uncharacteristically silent these past ten months. I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I’m afraid I must tell you now that fate has decided on a different course for me.

In August of last year, I underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in my abdomen. That operation was thought to have been a success, but it caused a cascade of secondary complications –  which I have been fighting in hospital ever since. It was a long and hard fight with many setbacks, but I was steadily, if slowly, overcoming each obstacle along the way and gradually making my way back to health.

However, recent tests have revealed that the cancer has returned. There was no sign of it as recently as a month ago, which means it is aggressive and spreading rapidly. My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live. This is the final verdict. My fight is over.

I wish to thank my doctors and caregivers, whose efforts have been magnificent. My dear friends, who have given me a lifetime of memories and whose support has sustained me through these difficult months.

And all of my partners at The Washington Post, Fox News, and Crown Publishing. Lastly, I thank my colleagues, my readers, and my viewers, who have made my career possible and given consequence to my life’s work.

I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny.

 I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life –  full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended"

Note that in addition to the matters Krauthammer raises above he in his youth became permanently paralyzed from the neck down after a diving board accident that severed his spinal cord.  He has spent his whole adult life in a wheelchair.  So his gratitude is truly heroic

SOURCE

I would like to add another instance of conservative gratitude by reproducing something I wrote a few years ago:

Is a grateful heart the mark of a conservative?

I think it is. Prayers of thanks are routine for Christians but I think it extends beyond Christians.

I was moved to that thought by the case of conservative Australian cartoonist  ZEG, who is a former member of the armed forces, a former policeman and a very conservative man.  Zeg (Steven Gunnell) undoubtedly has a grateful heart.  At age 48 he has discovered that he has a dangerous vascular formation in his brain that could kill him at any time.  And it is very nearly inoperable. It is probably as I write this that he is undergoing the risky surgery involved. He will probably survive but runs a big risk of being destroyed as a person.

So is Zeg bitter, angry and resentful?  Far from it.  I reproduce on AUSTRALIAN POLITICS the email he sent to people he knows before he went into hospital.  It is one long note of gratitude and thanks to his many friends.  I am proud to be among them. There are even some politicians he praises!

But what struck me particularly was this paragraph:

"Remember always that we inherited this great gift of freedom and democracy from the generations before us -- thus it is our responsibility, NAY,  our duty to ensure that the next and future generations inherit not only what we have now but an even better and more secure freedom"

Could any Leftist write that?  I can't see it.  They HATE what they have inherited.  That we feel a connection with our forefathers and an appreciation of what they worked -- often very hard -- to achieve is a large part of what makes us conservative.  We are connected to our past.  Leftists are not.  Or if they do feel a connection, they despise it.  What sad people!

And as Zeg says, in appreciating the blessings that we have been given through no work of our own, we feel an obligation at least to preserve it.  Most of us would rather just get on with our own lives rather than bothering with politics but, when there are so many twisted and relentless enemies of what is dear to us, we have to fight.


A great Christian song of gratitude and appreciation

SOURCE

****************************

Conservatives saw this coming

Leftist vileness knows no limits

If you listen to the liberal media, Donald Trump is a terrible racist and misogynist who hates minorities and women.

He apparently isn’t very good at it, however. On Wednesday, the president officially commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, an African-American woman who was sentenced to life in prison for a non-violent drug crime.

You might think that liberals, who have made drug legalization and criminal justice reform two of their banner issues, would be elated. You would be wrong.

As Johnson was freed after spending 21 years in prison, many bitter leftists chose not to celebrate her release or acknowledge Trump’s decision, but instead they chose to backhandedly bash the president.

“The View” host Joy Behar led the charge, declaring that the reason Trump had freed the black grandmother was so that he could boost his Twitter following.

Yes, really.

Pointing out the fact that Trump met with Kim Kardashian West, the celebrity wife of Kanye West, before making his decision, Behar decided that her fame, not the extreme sentence for a non-violent elderly woman, was the reason the president commuted the sentence.

“Kim also has 112 million followers on Instagram and 60 million on Twitter. So, you know, if he is thinking of running again, he’s got that nice little constituency over there, so that is not a coincidence. … He has motives,” the television host declared, according to The Daily Caller.

Other liberals were equally ungracious. Democrat Rep. Ted Lieu also bashed the meeting with Kim Kardashian West that led to the woman’s release. He bitterly said to CNN that the criteria by which people are pardoned “shouldn’t be based on which celebrities have access to the president.”

Somehow it’s now a bad thing that someone used his position for a good purpose. Apparently in Lieu’s mind, the president was supposed to let Johnson rot in jail after Kardashian West brought up her plight.

Another liberal lawmaker, Congressman Adam Schiff, joined in the whining over justice for an elderly black woman.

“Good news! Convicted of a serious crime? Serving a long sentence? Now, you too can get a pardon. No more lengthy delays while DOJ reviews your case. You can be out in days!*” he posted on Twitter, clearly upset that Johnson was being released.

“*Offer only valid if recommended by friends or family of (Donald Trump) or you appeared on Celebrity Apprentice,” he continued.

It should be noted that Johnson wasn’t out in “days.” She was in prison for over two decades and may have died there — until Trump intervened.

Vox, a news outlet with a well-known liberal slant, couldn’t even report the story without whining about Trump’s decision.

“Trump wants to execute drug dealers,” the news group posted on Twitter. “But he granted commutation to one because Kim Kardashian asked.”

Again, Donald Trump listening to a woman and freeing another is now apparently a bad thing. So much for the “misogynist” narrative.

A powerful female using her meeting with the president to enact change and right a wrong is now off limits, because it destroyed the left’s false narrative about Trump being a female-hating racist.

That’s exactly the phenomenon that Twitter user Makada, herself being a black woman, pointed out on Wednesday.

“I see a lot of liberals on social media attacking Kim Kardashian and President Trump for freeing Alice Johnson,” she wrote.

“Has Trump Derangement Syndrome gotten so bad that the left is against freeing an elderly black woman who was serving a life sentence for a non-violent crime?” she wondered. Over ten thousand people “liked” her post.

The answer to Makada’s question is “yes.”

Yes, so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome really is that bad. Liberals will now defend brutal murderers and rapists like MS-13, side with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and bash the release of a harshly-sentenced black woman, all because attacking Trump is more important to them.

That’s truly pathetic, but many Americans are starting to realize that the president is not the evil monster liberals have made him out to be after all.

SOURCE

********************************

My take on Kardashian/Trump

Lets's not kid ourselves. A large factor in Kim Kardashian getting personal access to the President was the fact that she is a good-looking lady. Trump's liking for good-looking ladies is well-known.  And the picture below shows Trump grinning from ear to ear when he had her beside him, which confirms rather well his motivation.

So you might think that the picture was circulated by Leftists to discredit Trump.  In fact he himself tweeted it.  He is not embarrassed to be himself, which is usually a major indicator of psychological good health.



******************************

For 'SNAP' to Work, It Must Emphasize More Work

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) has a significant flaw: It does not sufficiently emphasize work. The program does a good job helping America’s poor afford food for their families, but up until recently SNAP administrators’ principal aim has been to add recipients to its rolls rather than help them find employment. As a result, many recipients could be working but are not, despite the fact that recipients who can and do work even a little are far less likely to be poor or live in households reporting difficulty affording food.

Several elements within House Republicans’ pending Farm Bill would help improve SNAP by encouraging work and earnings to fight poverty at its roots.

When we talk about increasing work among SNAP recipients, we must be clear about who we are not talking about. We are not talking about children, the elderly, adults with disabilities, or those taking care of young children or disabled relatives.

Even narrowing down the target demographic to healthy adults on SNAP who are not working leaves a significant number of Americans -- roughly 9.5 million -- who could work but do not. The problem begins in Washington: I know from my time as New York’s administrator of SNAP that everyone from case managers to administrators has been told that increasing employment is not their job. So SNAP is helpful, but it is not a road out of poverty. One quote from a SNAP enrollee has resonated with me: “That program is great at getting me an EBT card [electronic food stamps benefits] but does nothing to get me a job.”

So how does the proposed Farm Bill achieve this objective? A modest activity requirement for SNAP recipients ages 18 to 59 who are not caretakers of young children or disabled in any way. The requirement can be fulfilled by spending twenty hours each week in activities as diverse as volunteering, workforce training, education, or community service. For those currently out of work, the bill also expands training programs to give them skills to reenter the workforce, committing an additional $1 billion to make that happen. Importantly, states would not be allowed to sanction recipients for noncompliance without offering an available activity. For households with school-age children, the sanction for noncompliance would be restricted to a reduction in benefits — not a termination.

Few who assess SNAP think that an activity requirement is categorically wrong, and the modest terms of this proposal should allow for a consensus that reflects the opinions of Americans broadly. Eighty-seven percent of Americans — including eighty-one percent of people in poverty — agree that welfare programs should nudge the poor to work or participate in a training program (if they are physically able to do so) in return for benefits. Nearly everyone recognizes that the purpose of antipoverty programs such as SNAP should be to help people get back on their feet, earn their own livelihoods, and stay out of poverty for good.

The Farm Bill would also encourage earning and saving by improving the policy of “asset testing.” Households would now be able to own assets up to $7,000 (and more for homes with elderly or disabled people) without the risk of losing benefits. But in setting a firm asset limit, the bill would not allow states to waive the test. This prevents people with substantial assets from taking advantage of the program.

One last way SNAP can be more than just a benefit card is by helping to obtain child support from noncustodial parents of children receiving SNAP benefits. This Farm Bill would require states to ensure that children in single-parent families receive the child support they deserve by mandating that custodial parents seeking SNAP benefits cooperate in establishing child support orders. Less than half of poor single-parent families — many of whom are SNAP recipients — currently have formal child support orders in place, which leaves poor custodial parents without the money they need to support their children.

I have found the rhetoric surrounding work requirements from some who ostensibly want to help the poor to be baffling. For some reason we keep hearing about how entry-level jobs are not worth poor Americans’ time, that government aid is a fundamental right that comes with no responsibility, or even that having some earnings won’t make SNAP recipients better off, all of which flies in the face of everything we have learned about poverty, responsibility, and mobility. To me -- someone who administered social services programs for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- this rhetoric is more harmful to the poor than the modest work requirements proposed in this bill.

Over the years SNAP has reduced hunger for poor Americans, but has been less successful in helping them escape poverty for good. The Farm Bill’s reforms are a good way to help people in need find and retain employment. They are an important step toward realizing SNAP’s proper mission as an antipoverty program.

Robert Doar is the Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. From 2007 to 2013, he was the commissioner of the New York City Human Resources Administration, the city agency responsible for the cash welfare, food stamp and Medicaid programs.

SOURCE

***********************************

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)

***************************

$119,050,900,000: Merchandise Trade Deficit With China Hit Record Through April


President Xi is sitting pretty

These figures are not as alarming as they seem. They are part of a triangular trade flow that includes Australia. To make all the gadgets they sell to Americans China needs a lot of raw materials, particularly iron ore, aluminium oxide and metallurgical coal. And Australia has heaps of them all -- sometimes just sitting on the ground just waiting to be scooped up

So China buys heaps of those things using the surplus dollars that they get from trading with America. And Australia in turn buys heaps from America using the greenbacks they got from China. Australia doesn't make much. It is overflowing with natural resources that other countries buy. So it makes sense to buy in manufactured goods with the easy dollars Australia gets from exporting commodities. And Australia buys in lots of stuff from America. So Australia has a big trade deficit with America. In other words, some of those greenbacks that flow to China come back to America via Australia. It doesn't all balance out exactly but the balance is not as bad as it looks at first.

So what does China do with its great hoard (trillions) of greenbacks? It sends a lot of them straight back to America as investments. It uses them to buy American companies and American real estate. That sounds bad to a lot of people but again it is not as bad as you think. China is in fact very trusting in doing so.

Say they buy an American farm. Does that deprive America of anything? Hardly. They cannot pick the farm up and take it back to China can they? They just take it on faith that America will let them keep and use it. They make themselves hostage to America. And whether they buy farms or companies it will usually be something that they already know about -- something in which they have expertise. So they will combine their expertise with American expertise to create a better business

Let me give a theoretical example: Say they buy up a soy bean farm. Chinese eat a lot of soy beans. The American farmer will probably be left in charge of the farm because he knows best how to farm in America. What the Chinese know about in great detail will be what cultivar of the beans is most popular in China and how best to market the beans. So the new Chinese owner will guide the American farmer on what beans to plant, when to plant them and how to prepare them for export. Result: more exports of beans from America to China -- thus helping to reduce that trade imbalance.

It's not always as simple and as balanced as that but something like that does often happen. So again, the imbalances are not as bad as they look at first. There is still a lot of work for Mr Trump to do, however. There is a real imbalance in America's trade with China and one part of the reason for that is that China put up barriers to imports from America. Mr Trump has already got some of those barriers pulled down but there is still more to be done

And as every economist will tell you, there are "invisible" exports -- for instance the financial services of Wall St and patent rights. China buys a lot of them. Americans hold a lot of patents and charge people to use them.  China is often slack in buying patents it uses but when they want to export something they have to have the patent rights that thing uses.  So America has a big surplus with China on "invisibles". There is still not an overall balance but Mr Trump has less work to do to get fair trade than it at first appears


The U.S. merchandise trade deficit with China set a record through April, hitting $119,050,900,000 for the first four months of 2018, according to data released today by the Census Bureau.

From January through April, the Census Bureau reports, the United States exported $42,291,500,000 in goods to China while importing $161,342,400,000.

In other words, when measured by dollar value, the United States bought about 3.8 times as much in goods from China as China bought from the United States.

Prior to this year, the record for the highest trade deficit with China in the first four months of the year came in 2015, when it hit $115,320,000,000 in constant April 2018 dollars (adjusted using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator).

The last time the U.S. ran a merchandise trade surplus with China in any given month, according to the Census Bureau data, was in April 1986, when the U.S. ran a $54,000,000 trade surplus with China. In every month since then, the U.S. has run a merchandise trade deficit with China.

In 2017, according to the Census Bureau, the top products the U.S. imported from China (by dollar value) were cell phones and other household goods ($70,359,818,000); computers ($45,515,206,000); telecommunications equipment ($33,490,521,000); computer accessories ($31,648,577,000); toys, games and sporting goods ($26,751,412,000); apparel, textiles, nonwool or cotton ($24,137,388,000); furniture, household goods ($20,669,126,000); other parts and accessories of vehicles ($14,406,417,000); household appliances ($14,138,581,000); and electric apparatus ($14,080,858,000).

The top products the U.S. exported to China in 2017, according to the Census Bureau, were civilian aircraft, engines, equipment and parts ($16,264,533,000); soybeans ($12,258,835,000); passenger cars, new and used ($10,211,268,000); semiconductors ($6,076,509,000); industrial machines, other ($5,447,303,000); crude oil ($4,400,921,000); plastic materials ($4,002,797,000); medicinal equipment ($3,453,343,000); pulpwood and woodpulp ($3,359,165,000); and logs and lumber ($3,177,402,000).

SOURCE

*******************************

Fish oil won't help your heart

That's what the study below tells you.  I give the full abstract for those who might want to evaluate the study for themselves but it a pretty good demolition of the fish oil religion.  There were a couple of published replies trying to save the religion but the authors below gave them a pretty good rejoinder here

Associations of Omega-3 Fatty Acid Supplement Use With Cardiovascular Disease Risks; Meta-analysis of 10 Trials Involving 77 917 Individuals

Theingi Aung ET AL.

Abstract

Importance:  Current guidelines advocate the use of marine-derived omega-3 fatty acids supplements for the prevention of coronary heart disease and major vascular events in people with prior coronary heart disease, but large trials of omega-3 fatty acids have produced conflicting results.

Objective:  To conduct a meta-analysis of all large trials assessing the associations of omega-3 fatty acid supplements with the risk of fatal and nonfatal coronary heart disease and major vascular events in the full study population and prespecified subgroups.

Data Sources and Study Selection:  This meta-analysis included randomized trials that involved at least 500 participants and a treatment duration of at least 1 year and that assessed associations of omega-3 fatty acids with the risk of vascular events.

Data Extraction and Synthesis:  Aggregated study-level data were obtained from 10 large randomized clinical trials. Rate ratios for each trial were synthesized using observed minus expected statistics and variances. Summary rate ratios were estimated by a fixed-effects meta-analysis using 95% confidence intervals for major diseases and 99% confidence intervals for all subgroups.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The main outcomes included fatal coronary heart disease, nonfatal myocardial infarction, stroke, major vascular events, and all-cause mortality, as well as major vascular events in study population subgroups.

Results:  Of the 77 917 high-risk individuals participating in the 10 trials, 47 803 (61.4%) were men, and the mean age at entry was 64.0 years; the trials lasted a mean of 4.4 years. The associations of treatment with outcomes were assessed on 6273 coronary heart disease events (2695 coronary heart disease deaths and 2276 nonfatal myocardial infarctions) and 12 001 major vascular events. Randomization to omega-3 fatty acid supplementation (eicosapentaenoic acid dose range, 226-1800 mg/d) had no significant associations with coronary heart disease death (rate ratio [RR], 0.93; 99% CI, 0.83-1.03; P = .05), nonfatal myocardial infarction (RR, 0.97; 99% CI, 0.87-1.08; P = .43) or any coronary heart disease events (RR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.90-1.01; P = .12). Neither did randomization to omega-3 fatty acid supplementation have any significant associations with major vascular events (RR, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.93-1.01; P = .10), overall or in any subgroups, including subgroups composed of persons with prior coronary heart disease, diabetes, lipid levels greater than a given cutoff level, or statin use.

Conclusions and Relevance:  This meta-analysis demonstrated that omega-3 fatty acids had no significant association with fatal or nonfatal coronary heart disease or any major vascular events. It provides no support for current recommendations for the use of such supplements in people with a history of coronary heart disease.

SOURCE

********************************

Food for thought

Dr Madsen Pirie explains



********************************

An elegant proof of why planned economies don't work: the efficient markets hypothesis

The efficient markets hypothesis tells us that it's not possible to regularly beat the market. For information about what prices should be is already incorporated into those prices. Sure, some beat it for some period of time because that's just the way statistical variability works. Some, like Warren Buffett, beat it for a long time but then his cost of funds is lower than the market's.

We also have all sorts of people out there who insist that the use or markets to allocate economic resources is the wrong way to be doing it. That the wise people in government should be doing this for us instead perhaps.

At which point, an interesting comparison:

"The message is clear: the beat-the-market efforts of professionals are impressively and overwhelmingly negative. In any asset class, the only consistently superior performer is the market itself. It is well to consider, briefly, the connection between the socialists and the active managers. I believe they are cut from the same cloth. What links them is a disbelief or skepticism about the efficacy of market prices in gathering and conveying information."

Odd to equate socialists and money managers, true. But the underlying point does stand. If we had evidence from our unfettered (no, don't titter at the back there) financial markets that they could consistently be beaten by good planners, then it's possible that good planners with adequate powers could improve upon a market economy.

We don't see that market outperformance - thus the planning part isn't going to work either, is it? For all the evidence we have is insisting that we cannot beat the market.

SOURCE

**********************************

The balance of old and young

There is much current comment about an alleged imbalance between addressing the problems faced by young people today and attending to those bearing more upon older people. Some analysts claim that too much emphasis has been placed on meeting the problems of the elderly, and not enough on those of the young.

Older people [in Britain] have a triple-lock pension, rising with inflation or wages, or at 2.5%, whichever is the largest. They have free travel passes, a Christmas bonus, and a winter fuel allowance. Those over 75 have free TV licences, plus free or reduced admission to many attractions and services. Many are home-owners, free of mortgages, with private pensions to supplement the state’s provision.

Young people, by contrast, find it difficult to become home-owners with an inadequate housing stock, rising prices, fairly static incomes, and difficulty in saving enough for a deposit. Many graduates face tuition fee debts of nearly fifty thousand pounds. They face increased taxes and National Insurance, and many lack the comfort of an adequate private pension to support them in retirement.

This has created a political tension between young and old, a tension that comes out at the ballot box. Some of this showed in the 2017 UK general election, when the Labour Party offered to cancel tuition debt and help young people with social housing and a minimum wage increase. The Conservatives, by contrast, offered little to young people, and threatened the elderly with the confiscation of their homes to defray social care costs.  In that election Labour did better than expected or predicted.

The elderly are more numerous than the young, and historically more likely to vote, although this may have been less true than usual in the 2017 election. Some political observers see the prospect of a bidding war at general elections, with parties bidding for the votes of these two divergent constituencies. Should the young be taxed to fund benefits for the elderly, or should cuts in benefits for the old finance tax cuts for the young? Someone has to pay for the benefits.

There is a way to avoid having today’s young funding today’s old. It can be done by having yesterday’s young funding today’s old. This involves young people building up savings funds while they are earning, and using those funds to support themselves when old. It still involves the young funding the old, but removes the bidding war by having the elderly pay for their own benefits from savings when younger, accumulated over their working lives.

This personal fund, dubbed a “Fortune Account” by the ASI, would be the property of the individual, with any money remaining at death forming part of a person’s estate, to be inherited by heirs.

The Treasury fears that some people would not save enough, but dump themselves onto a state unable to let them starve, people the Treasury calls “freeloaders.” This is a valid concern, and one reason why people would be required to pay into such funds. There would be no net gain in compulsion, since National Insurance is not voluntary either.

The transition itself presents a major problem. One generation has to save for their own retirement, while simultaneously funding the commitments made to today's elderly. It might involve some one-off source of finance to fund the changeover, perhaps by a sale of remaining state assets such as land and buildings.

People would choose between competing providers to handle their Fortune Accounts, as happened when Sweden privatized its state pension scheme. The state would provide funds on behalf of those unable to earn enough to finance their own savings.

The change would be disruptive, without doubt, but it would prove a massive source of future investment as the providers put the funds to good use, investment that would augment economic growth.

Above all, it would end the divisiveness caused by the political struggle between young and old as each group sought to benefit itself at the other’s expense. And it would end the imbalance between them.

SOURCE

***********************************

Kathy Griffin Launches Vile Attack on Ivanka over Kate Spade’s Suicide

I thought Ivanka's comment was very well judged but I think what we see below is Leftist envy.  Ivanka has got it all and Griffin is just an unfunny comedian

Washed-up “entertainer” Kathy Griffin is best known to the American public for the incredibly distasteful picture she posted of herself last year holding a mock severed head representing President Donald Trump

She has also insinuated the president’s sons are rapists, and supported Canadian comedian Samantha Bee’s vile insult of Ivanka Trump while chatting with the harpies on ABC’s “The View.”

But Griffin’s own attack on Ivanka this week – in response to the first daughter’s thoughtful Twitter post on the suicide of fashion designer Kate Spade — was beyond the bounds of rational behavior. Even for a nut job like Griffin, it was way too far.

As word of the death spread, Ivanka Trump – who has built her own brand of success in the fashion world — took to Twitter to express her sadness, and urge any readers who might be in danger of harming themselves to seek help.

“Kate Spade’s tragic passing is a painful reminder that we never truly know another’s pain or the burden they carry,” she wrote. “If you are struggling with depression and contemplating suicide, please, please seek help.”

That’s about as unobjectionable a tweet as has even been posted. But for a borderline-lunatic like Griffin, it was a red flag to charge.

"You're all talk feckless, you're all talk."

Using the word “feckless” no doubt to bring to mind Bee’s vicious words last week

In another tweet she expanded on that: “If someone is feckless does that mean they have no feck? So when it comes to Ivanka can I say she’s all talk and no feck?”

But other than using a tragic death as an opportunity to exercise some mean-girl bullying muscles, and opportunistically try to boost her own sagging career, it was difficult to understand what Griffin might have been talking about.

Griffin is clearly not someone playing with a full deck, so it’s understandable that she would be sensitive to mental health issues. But even with that, the idea of attacking Ivanka doesn’t make sense.

In any case, lashing out at Ivanka Trump for apparently heartfelt advice to those suffering from depression is simply unhinged. Maybe Griffin’s the one who should be seeking help. Before it’s too late.

SOURCE

***********************************

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)

***************************

Kate Spade found dead by hanging at her Upper East Side home after telling her daughter it's not her fault in suicide note



For some reason this news really upset me. I had never heard of her before and what I know about fashion could be written on the head of a pin, but the thought this news brought to me was:  "What does it take to be happy?"  By most criteria she was a good woman who had it all but she had been depressed for a long time.  How come she couldn't find a way out of her problems?  How fragile many of us are and how  little we understand about ourselves and about human relationships.  Given that she had a 13 year old daughter, how much pain she must have felt to take that way out

Putting my psychologoist's hat on, however, I think I can venture an explanation of what she did.  For a start, she apparently had endogenous depression -- depression that came from within her rather than being a response to external stresses.  Her friends  tried for years to get her to seek help with it.  But she refused treatment in case news of the treatment leaked out and damaged the cheerful image of her brand.  She herself described herself as a worrier. So she had  anxious depression.  Although depression and anxiety are traditionally conceptualized as two independent disorders, they are highly co-morbid.

But she had a good marriage and a young daughter she loved.  So that kept her going.  But there is some hint that strains had developed in her marriage and the daughter had just turned 13.  And a 13 year old daughter can be a problem. I took two step-daughters through that age so I know a little about it.  It is the time of daughters finding their individuality, the time when they separate theselves from their parents.  So a little darling can suddenly become a little critic.

And that is exactly what happened to Kate in a rather big way.  She recently commented about her dauighter saying that whatever she wanted and valued, her daughter would want the opposite.  She who could least bear it encountered a strong case of daughterly rejection.  And that pushed her over the edge.  Hence it was to her daughter that she left her suicide note, which was loving to the end. I feel so sorry for her

UPDATE:  Since I wrote the above ,more information has come to light.  It has been confirmed that Kate was having difficulties with her marriage.  I took account of that but considered it only a contributing factor, though undoubtedly an important one  But one claim that I don't credit is that she was manic depressive.  There is NO record of manic behavior on her part but plenty of evidence of chronic anxiety.  So I stick with my diagnosis of anxious depression, aggravated by her daughter's transition to a teenager,


Iconic designer Kate Spade hanged herself with a scarf in the bedroom of her Upper East Side home — and left a note telling her daughter it wasn’t her fault, sources said.

A housekeeper found the body of the 55-year-old fashion maven inside her Park Avenue apartment about 10:10 a.m. Tuesday, police said.

Spade’s husband Andy, the brother of comedian David Spade, was home at the time. But the couple’s 13-year-old daughter Frances was at school, sources said.

The note left by Kate Spade, in addition to absolving her daughter of responsibility, instructed the teen to seek answers from her father.

Spade was upset over “problems at home,” said a source. The source did not elaborate.

Spade was a 30-year-old former magazine editor in 1993 when she launched a line of sleek handbags that grew into a $2.4 billion global empire.

SOURCE

*******************************

Patrick Buchanan: Boehner's Right – It's Trump's Party Now,/b>

"There is no Republican Party. There's a Trump party," John Boehner told a Mackinac, Michigan, gathering of the GOP faithful last week. "The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere."

Ex-Speaker Boehner should probably re-check the old party's pulse, for the Bush-Boehner GOP may not just be napping. It could be comatose.

Consider. That GOP was dedicated to free trade, open borders, amnesty and using U.S. power to punish aggressors and "end tyranny in our world." That GOP set out to create a new world order where dictatorships were threatened with "regime change," and democratic capitalism was the new order of the ages.

Yet, Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination and won the presidency — by saying goodbye to all that.

How probable is it that a future GOP presidential candidate will revive the Bush-Boehner agenda the party rejected in 2016, run on it, win, and impose it on the party and nation?

Bush-Boehner Republicanism appears to be as dead today as was Harding-Coolidge Republicanism after 1933. And if Trumpism is not the future of the GOP, it is hard to see what a promising GOP agenda might look like.

A brief history: In seven elections starting in 1992, Republicans won the presidency three times, but the popular vote only once, in 2004, when George W. was still basking in his "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

What fractured and overwhelmed the Bush-Boehner Republican Party?

First, demography. The mass immigration of Third World peoples that began with the 1965 immigration act, and the decline in the birth rate of native-born Americans, began to swamp the Nixon-Reagan New Majority.

Second, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and USSR removed the party's great unifying cause from Eisenhower to Bush I — the Cold War. After the Red Army went home, "America First" had a new appeal!

Third, faithful to the free trade cult in which they were raised, Republicans championed NAFTA, the WTO, and MFN for China.

Historians will look back in amazement at how America's free trade zealots gave away the greatest manufacturing base the world had ever seen, as they quoted approvingly 18th- and 19th-century scribblers whose ideas had done so much to bring down their own country, Great Britain.

Between 1997 and 2017, the EU ran up, at America's expense, trade surpluses in goods in excess of $2 trillion, while we also picked up the bill for Europe's defense.

Between 1992 and 2016, China was allowed to run $4 trillion in trade surpluses at our expense, converting herself into the world's first manufacturing power and denuding America of tens of thousands of factories and millions of manufacturing jobs.

In Trump's first year, China's trade surplus with the United States hit $375 billion. From January to March of this year, our trade deficit with China was running at close to the same astronomical rate.

"Trade deficits do not matter," we hear from the economists.

They might explain that to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

And perhaps someone can explain the wisdom of handing 4 percent of our GDP each year to an adversary nation, as U.S. admirals talk tough about confronting that adversary nation over islets and reefs in the South China Sea.

Why are we enriching and empowering so exorbitantly those whom we are told we may have to fight?

Fourth, under Bush II and Obama, the U.S. intervened massively in the Near and Middle East — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen. And the forces that pushed up into those conflicts, and so disillusioned the nation that it elected Barack Obama, are back, pushing for a new war, on Iran. They may get this war, too.

Yet, given the anti-interventionist and anti-war stance of Trump's winning campaign, and of the Bernie Sanders campaign, U.S. involvement in Middle East wars seems less America's future than it does her past.

After his 16 months in office, it appears as though the Trump presidency, no matter how brief, is going to be a watershed moment in U.S. and world history, and in the future of the GOP.

The world is changing. NATO and the EU are showing their age. Nationalism, populism and tribalism are pervasive on the Old Continent. And America's willingness to bear the burden of Europe's defense, as they ride virtually free, is visibly waning.

It is hard to see why or how Republicans are ever again going to be the Bush-Boehner party that preceded the rise of Trump. What would be the argument for returning to a repudiated platform?

Trump not only defeated 16 Bush Republicans, he presented an agenda on immigration, border security, amnesty, intervention abroad, the Middle East, NAFTA, free trade, Putin and Russia that was a rejection of what the Bush-Boehner Party had stood for and what its presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012, John McCain and Mitt Romney, had run on.

If the Republican Party is "napping," let it slumber on, undisturbed, for its time has come and gone. We are in a new world now.

SOURCE

**********************************

Cut the Red Tape to Get More Affordable Housing

“I’d love to live in San Francisco, but I don’t want to pay $750,000 to live in a closet.” That’s what I tell my introductory economics students when I discuss housing prices. I probably need to update it to $2 million or something like that.

Why? Why is housing so expensive in cities like San Francisco, Boston, New York? It’s expensive because demand is high and rising. It’s insanely expensive to live in San Francisco because practically everyone wants to live in San Francisco.

But that’s only half the story. Housing is also insanely expensive because supply isn’t rising very quickly.

When you have demand rising quickly and supply changing slowly, you get rising prices. So how do we fix it?

First, we need to take a very hard look at the rules making it very hard to supply new housing. As Thomas Sowell points out in a Hoover Institution interview, land-use restrictions make it “prohibitively expensive” to build new housing in a lot of places.

In a 2008 paper in the Southern Economic Journal, the economists Edward Glaeser and Kristina Tobio argue that since 1970, the ease of increasing the housing supply explains the explosive growth of “Sunbelt” cities like Houston, Atlanta, and Dallas (their published paper is here, an ungated policy brief explaining their finding is here).

Second, we need to take a very hard look at how our moral intuitions might cloud our judgment. Trade-offs are everywhere, and by forcing housing to be safer and more comfortable we necessarily make it more expensive. Just as people are willing to live in a mediocre school district or high-crime area to get cheaper housing, they might be willing to accept the risks associated with less-safe housing if it means cheaper housing. This is a hard pill to swallow, but it’s important to respect that choice.

Consider the “lodger evil” of the Progressive Era. According to the historians David T. and Linda Royster Beito, the term “referred to the practice of many urban families...to double up through subletting” so that they could “save on rent and earn extra income.” As the Beitos put it, “(t)he lodger evil was very much the trial-and-error creation of ordinary people and clashed head-on with the top-down approach of Progressive Era political elites.”

A tragic reality? Of course, but paraphrasing something I once heard from the economist David Henderson, we don’t make people better off by eliminating the choices they actually make.

Third, we need to look at the “rules about the rules,” or the constitutional political economy for which James M. Buchanan won the 1986 Nobel Prize, that makes it possible for people to enrich themselves at others’ expense—in this case, by making it easy for homeowners to increase the value of their own property in desirable areas by making it prohibitively expensive for others to build or move in. This is the NIMBY phenomenon—“not in my backyard”—that leads people to oppose new residential and commercial development.

But if property rights mean anything, they mean that my backyard is not your backyard—nor is your backyard mine.

A literal example illustrates. There’s an empty lot just across the alley from my backyard, situated between two houses the next street over. It’s entirely possible that the owner of that lot might build something I don’t like—a brutalist house painted hot pink, for example, or a halfway house for recovering drug addicts. But My Backyard ends at the property line. If I want a say in what ends up on that lot, I should buy the lot.

One might object that something like a halfway house or a hot pink brutalist monstrosity would generate negative externalities. I’m sympathetic to the argument (believe me: I’m looking at the trees on the lot as I type this). That risk, however, was reflected in the price of the house when we bought it. In that sense, we’ve already been “compensated” for negative spillovers that might emerge. If we’d wanted a lot of control over what our neighbors can do with their property, we could’ve bought a home in a gated community with a powerful Homeowners’ Association and lots of strict rules. We didn’t.

Housing is expensive for two basic reasons: high demand and low supply. There’s a solution, though: get rid of some of the rules making it so hard for people to supply new housing.

SOURCE

************************************

Golden Deep State

 The surging national economy has given California a budget surplus by some accounts of more than $5 billion, with tax collections up about $3.8 billion above what Governor Jerry Brown anticipated in January. California taxpayers should not expect Brown to return any money to the taxpayers, in the style of governor George Deukmejian, who passed away on May 8. As he said back in 1987, “I think we can be very pleased that we were able to protect this money for the taxpayers and that we have honored the spending limit enacted by the voters through the initiative process.” Outgoing governor Brown has other plans.

He wants to give state prison guards their biggest raise since the recession, a 9.3 percent hike over three years that will cost $114.6 million in the budget year that begins July 1 and $331 million over the next two years. The pact also allows the guards to cash out up to 80 hours of accrued vacation time. Other sweetheart deals are surely set in store, and taxpayers might recall the back story.

On his first watch as governor, Brown made it a priority to expand collective bargaining for government employees. These unions implement government policy and function as a kind of “deep state” that remains in place, whatever the administration. So politicians tend to give the government employee unions what they want.

On Brown’s second watch, the Service Employees International Union demonstrates outside the capitol chanting “this is our house!” That is in fact the case, and the governor has sweetened the deal. He backs measures to boost funding for low-income students and English learners, then under his principle of “subsidiarity,” lets the various districts spend the money on bureaucracy. For example, in 2014 the massive Los Angeles Unified School District gave principals and administrators a pay raise of 6.64 percent, adding a lump-sum bonus equal to 2 percent of salary. And all this comes apart from any hike in student achievement or accountability.

Whatever happens with the Delta tunnels or the bullet-train, Jerry Brown’s legacy is a state where deep-state drones are number one.

SOURCE

********************************

Trump Clips Eagles' Wings
 
No pandering there!  Trump withdraws respect from those who disrespect their country

Donald Trump was elected in large part because normal Americans grew tired of rabid leftists calling them jingoist racists. And even if it means canceling traditional meet-and-greets with sports champions at the White House, Trump is going to stand with the American people — in this case, against the NFL’s kneeling social justice warriors.

With less than 24 hours’ notice, Trump scrapped the planned ceremony to recognize the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles, citing the long-running dispute over the national anthem and the small contingent of Eagles players (fewer than 10) even willing to attend.

“The Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow,” Trump said in a White House statement. “They disagree with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country. The Eagles wanted to send a smaller delegation, but the 1,000 fans planning to attend the event deserve better. These fans are still invited to the White House to be part of a different type of ceremony — one that will honor our great country, pay tribute to the heroes who fight to protect it, and loudly and proudly play the National Anthem.”

For the record, the Eagles released the only player who kneeled during a preseason game. Others stood with power fists during the season. In any case, Trump is making this is a victory lap of sorts after the NFL’s recent policy announcement threatening to fine teams with players who kneel for the anthem.

But Trump isn’t taking guff from any professional sports team. He uninvited the NBA champion Golden State Warriors last year (look for the same thing to happen after they win again this year). In Trump’s estimation, if millionaire celebrity sports stars are going to snub him and the country, why not return the favor? As the Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams put it, “Donald Trump truly is the culture war president.”

SOURCE

***********************************

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)

***************************