Thanks to those who offered wished me well with my health problems. They aren't over, but I think things are looking up…at least that's what the Doc says (after waiting a week to see him!)
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BLACK FRIDAY AND HOLIDAY TRENDS
It appears that the retailers in America capitalized on promotions and succeeded in "selling more goods, to more people, for less money." This is a very real risk in times when there seems to be a contest over who can offer the deepest discounts, the soonest, etc. Bottom line: retail sales will be flat, or slightly down, even though traffic was up. Shoppers are smarter, and with smart phones, they can also shop smarter. Transparency is a powerful tool vs. pricing power. The only possible salvation is that gas prices are also down, putting more disposable income in consumers' pockets to spend for Christmas. Even then, the short shopping season and Christmas on a Wed. doesn't help at all. Add in the confusion and uncertainty about benefit costs and the Obamacare debacle and it won't be a Ho-Ho-Ho Christmas, but rather a Ho-Hum Christmas….
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iS THE NATIONAL DEFICIT A SORT OF PROXY FOR A GOVERNMENT THAT IS "TOO BIG, TOO COSTLY, AND TOO INEFFECTIVE"
Take a look at this graph, and then pause for a moment and consider this question. When did Barack Obama take office as president (2009)? When did the Democratic party capture control of Congress for a two year period (2009-2011). Is it a coincidence that these events match the plunge into enormous deficits? Some would say that this was largely due to the "depression" that occurred in 2008-2009. That is partly true because tax revenue dropped precipitously. What is also true is that spending just kept on climbing regardless of the income. Further, the recovery that has never come is almost totally due to three large problems that are still afflicting America in general, and business/jobs in particular. What recover there has been was in spite of Obama's preaching and actions--not because of them. Congress is gridlocked--which finally ended in the sequester--the first time spending was rein-in since George W. Bush and the GOP Congress's negligent contribution to the deficit. Right--the GOP is far from blameless in this mess. Read on….
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THREE LARGEST PROBLEMS: HOW OVERGROWN GOVERNMENT IS STRANGLING, SMOTHERING AMERICA
(First posted on www.thebrennerbrief.com on Wed. Dec. 4, 2013)
The United States of America is being crippled, strangled and smothered by its overgrown government. The people in government--the elected officials, the staff bureaucrats, and policy makers--all of them have forgotten that government was created to work for the people, not vice versa! At the heart of this tragic scenario are three immense problems: the overgrown government which is strangling America, the total failure of the president as a leader, and the fact that too many government leaders are seeking power and influence, instead of leading the country back to prosperity and freedom.
These are each incredibly hard to fix--some harder than others--and their interrelationship makes the fixes even more difficult. However, as with solving any problem, the first, critical step is to understand and define the problems before attempting solutions. Here are the three biggest problems facing America, spelled out.
1. A government that has grown too big, too costly, too unwieldy, too self-serving, too complex, and seemingly answerable to no one--including the electorate that voted some of them into office. The success thus far of the sequester provides a clue as to how a runaway, too big government can be cut down to a smaller, more focused (still huge) government, and still do its job. More sequester-like solutions are a good way to start down-sizing government.
2. A massive failure of leadership in the White House--Barack Obama. This should not have been a surprise. Elect a masterful orator and voracious campaigner who will (and has, repeatedly) lie, distort the facts, and deceive voters on the issues—until "crunch time" when his true ideological, ethical and competency failures stand out so glaringly that even a biased media can no longer ignore them or cover for him. His socialistic welfare-state ideology has failed time and again around the world. His lying is becoming more and more exposed. Aside from his grossly failed ideologies, the man himself is a hollow center-less shell, driven only by his own self-interest.
This was a man who truly never led anything of consequence--he was simply imbued with the ability to speak fluently, lie glibly and deceive without a shred of conscience. He is by all accounts, detached, distant, arrogant, narcissistic, uninvolved, and generally incompetent in all essential areas of leadership. His idea of success is first to avoid blame for failures, (or point the finger of blame elsewhere) while making excuses and changing the subject--he relishes deniability--whether it is plausible or wildly implausible!
3. A government of elected officials, entrenched staff, and career bureaucrats whose primary goals in their lives and work is the protection of their own positions of power and influence. The government continues to smother American businesses, stifling their growth with countless laws, regulations and arbitrary rulings, often unconstitutional! The overgrown government has grown so large that its tentacles strangle the free enterprise system that made America great and prosperous. It also relies on Obama's henchman attorney general Eric Holder to litigate America entities into submission using the clout and money of the enormous government
There you have the three biggest problems facing America. All of them intractable. All three of these are inter-related, which only makes solving them more difficult. What it will take is a veritable uprising of enough of the anti-Obama, anti-big government American voters to reclaim both chambers of the Congress AND the White House with leaders of great resolve, indomitable will and vision.
America has found them in the past, and we must do so again.
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COMPROMISE ON FOOD STAMP POSITION--TIE IT TO UNEMPLOYMENT & REMOVE FRIVOLOUS ITEMS
As much as I dislike the continued stream of new welfare initiative and recipients, Food Stamps (currently at issue in Farm Bill) is the wrong place to take a stand. The attached OpEd piece by Kathleen Parker states the case for compromise very well. This is just one place where reality trumps ideology in policy making.
I would also suggest that IF there is a chance to release more Food Stamp money but tie it to employment (or rather the unemployment rate) such that the Food Stamp funding is on a sliding scale that drops as employment increases (or unemployment drops)…then that is a reasonable rationale for reducing the Food Stamp funding--more people are working and earning money to pay for food.
Perhaps as important or more so, would be language that curtails the use of Food Stamps for frivolous and unnecessarily expensive "nutrition" purchases. I encourage you to take a leading stance in this…and publicize it.
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WHEN NARROW GROUPS CONTROL THE LARGER PARTS OF THE COUNTRY--BAD THINGS START TO HAPPEN
I originally wrote a column for IndustryWeek magazine in the year 2000, It was entitled "The Coasts and the Chasm." In my original piece (.pdf copy is attached below) I pointed out many of the same points made by Victor Davis Hanson in his recent IBD OpEd piece that follows. (There are unfortunate corollaries that have evolved beyond this premise, but that will be a future piece tentatively entitled The Clusters and the Country.)
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THE COASTS AND THE CHASM--CONTROLLING THE USA'S FUTURE
Download Orig. The_Coasts_and_the_Chasm.d
America's Royalty On Its Coasts Decides How The Rest Live
BY Victor Davis Hanson
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/112913-681180-coastal-elites-dictate-to-rest-of-country.htm#ixzz2mBEC4MDm
The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America's big decisions are made.
They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these coasts and everything else in between. Those in Boston, New York and Washington determine how our government works; what sort of news, books, art and fashion we should consume, and whether our money and investments are worth anything.
The Pacific corridor is just as influential, but in a hipper, cooler fashion. Whether America suffers through another zombie film or one more Lady Gaga video or Kanye West's latest soft-porn rhyme is determined by Hollywood — mostly by executives who live in the la-la land of the thin Pacific strip from Malibu to Palos Verdes.
The next smartphone or search engine 5.0 will arise from the minds of tech geeks who pay $2,000 a month for studio apartments and drive BMWs in Menlo Park, Palo Alto or Mountain View.
The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal privilege.
Fly over or drive across the U.S., and the spatial absurdity of this rather narrow coastal monopoly is immediately apparent to the naked eye. Outside of these power corridors, our vast country appears pretty empty. The nation's muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals and manufactured goods work unnoticed in this sparsely settled fly-over expanse.
People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel and power. They expect service in elevators to limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don't really know — other than to influence through a cable news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate or more phone apps.
In California, whether farms receive contracted irrigation water, whether a billion board feet of burned timber will be salvaged from the recent Sierra Nevada forest fires, whether a high-speed-rail project obliterates thousands of acres of ancestral farms, whether gas will be fracked, or whether granite should be mined to make tony kitchen counters are all determined largely by coastal elites who take these plentiful resources for granted.
Rarely, however, do they see how their own necessities are procured. Instead, they feel deeply ambivalent about the grubbier people and culture that made them.
In Kansas or Utah, people do not pay $1,000 per square foot for their homes as they do on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They do not gossip with the people who write their tax laws, as is common in the Georgetown area of Washington. Those in the empty northern third of California do not see Facebook or Oracle founders at the local Starbucks any more than they bump into the Kardashians at a hip bistro.
The problem is not just that the coasts determine how everyone else is to lead their lives, but that those living in our elite corridors have no idea about how life is lived just a short distance away in the interior — much less about the sometimes tragic consequences of their own therapeutic ideology on the distant, less influential majority.
In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Mo. That transfer would not only make the capital more accessible to the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators, but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its Beltway.
I would transfer the United Nations to Salt Lake City, where foreign diplomats would live in a different sort of cocoon.
I would ask billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the Koch Brothers to endow with their riches a few Midwestern or Southern universities. Perhaps we could create a new Ivy League in the nation's center.
I would suggest to Facebook and Apple that they relocate operations to North Dakota to expose their geeky entrepreneurs to those who drive trucks and plow snow. Who knows — they might be able to afford a house, get married before 35 and have three rather than zero kids.
America is said to be divided by red and blue states, rich and poor, white and non-white, Christian and non-Christian, old and new. I think the real divide is between those who make our decisions on the coasts and the anonymous others who live with the consequences somewhere else.
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Sent from my iPad
ON WED. MORNINGS.
THE ENTERPRISE COMES OUT BI-WEEKLY. Its content can also be found at my personal blog: http://mariotti.blogs.com/my_weblog/
John Mariotti
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