THE ENTERPRISE—THE CHANGES HAPPENING THAT YOU DON'T EVEN REALIZE
WHY NOBODY SHOULD VOTE FOR TED CRUZ…AND RELATED TOPICS
NOBODY SHOULD VOTE FOR TED CRUZ BECAUSE HE IS A LIAR WHO CANNOT BE TRUSTED. HE IS PART OF THE BARACK OBAMA, HILLARY CLINTON GENRE OF POLITICIANS WHO SAY WHATEVER CERTAIN PEOPLE WANT TO HEAR, AND THEN DOUBLE-CROSS THOSE PEOPLE. Ask anyone who works with or around him in Congress. To say he is reviled and hated is to understate his peers disrespect for him. It isn’t because of his ideology! it is because of how he behaves. Yes, Trump is a blowhard. But he is what he appears to be. Ben Carson is a mild mannered surgeon, not more suited to be president than Obama was, maybe even less so. Ditto Carly Fiorina, who might govern differently, but being a CEO and being a President are far from the same kind of job.
There are three candidates left to name who can govern America. Two are governors with experience and convictions: Chris Christie and John Kasich The third person is the one who has NOT run all over making impossible promised to every special interest group, who has not insulted or demeaned countless other populations. He has stayed the course: MARCO RUBIO. He continues to say what he has been saying. He’s ready to lead a new American generation with the intellect, the integrity, and the communications skills required to do so. Pair Marco with either Christie (better campaigner) or Kasich (more experienced in governing), and a NEW AMERICAN LEADERSHIP CAN EMERGE. Find cabinet spots of Carson heading HHS, for Fiorina heading Commerce, for Paul overseeing the Federal Reserve, for Graham to run DOD, and so on.
DO NOT BUY WHAT CRUZ IS SELLING. 1) HE CANNOT BEAT HILLARY (Too far right for most of America), 2) HE CANNOT BE TRUSTED (Just like Hillary)
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I DON’T GET TO NYC MUCH ANY MORE—MAYBE THAT’S A GOOD THING
I used to be in NYC at least every few months and sometimes more often than that. It has always represented a contrast in appearances and reality to me—but then I’m a mid-westerner, and not a big city boy, at heart. NYC is both exciting and debilitating. It is entrancing in its beauty and appalling in its ugliness—and it all matters when you look where and what you see. NYC is a heart of finance and media, two industries occupied by a strange mix of liberals (media) and fiscal conservatives (many of which are still political liberals—I guess). I am both excited to be going to NYC and delighted to be leaving to go home. Perhaps the grasp of politically correct multiculturalism and the liberal/secular influence are threatening the heart of one of America’s great cities. That’s why I am posting Dan Henninger’s fine—but depressing—column from last week’s WSJ “THE YEAR CHRISTMAS DIED,” at the end of this edition in ATTACHMENTS.
See how you react to it. iS NYC CITY GOING FROM A “GREAT MELTING POT” TO A LARGE "SLUDGE POT," BEING FILLED WITH MISGUIDED BELIEFS AND THE PEOPLE WHO WOULD PROMOTE THEM?
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THE FIRST THING THAT GOES IN A GREAT COUNTRY IS ITS RESPECT FOR WHAT MADE IT GREAT
I am so tired of hearing our over-exposed president preach about what is “fair” in his socialist/secular/reverse-rascist ideology, that I even hesitated to post the second WSJ article. Martin Feldstein, who wrote it, served on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, and thus, he has credentials that earn respect. The irony about the second piece—and I urge you to “slog through it,” is that it paints a very different picture about who actually holds what share of the wealth in the USA. I highlighted a few sections of it to make them stand out. It is in ATTACHMENTS that follow this edition.
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OUR MEDIA DARLING PRESIDENT TALKS ABOUT “FAIRNESS:" PERHAPS HE NEEDS TO PROPERLY ACCOUNT FOR THE VALUE/COSTS OF ALL HIS PROGRAMS IN REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH. Only then will he see that the “rich” really no longer hold the largest share of wealth in the USA. It is the government with its welfare programs and entitlements (and the people who are their beneficiaries), who hold the largest share of the US wealth. See the longer explanation in ATTACHMENTS.
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COAL WILL BE HARD TO REPLACE AS THE MAJOR FOSSIL FUEL CREATOR OF ATMOSPHERIC POLLUTION
Why? NOT because President Obama has dealt a death blow to the US coal industry. That is just another of his mismanaged, unintended consequences of a foolish, myopic president. Until the SE Asian—China, India, VietNam, Indonesia, et. al. nothing global climate conferences can agree to do will change the buildup of greenhouse gases. Not until these aspiring, rapidly growing industrial nations stop building more and more coal fired power plants to generate electricity (so their economies can grow) will the climate effect lessen. The USA has made many changes—costly ones that have hurts its global competitiveness—to reduct its emissions.
IT IS TIME TO STOP. If our president had his head screwed on straight instead of volunteering the USA to “go first” over and over, the US policy should be: UNTIL WE SEE YOU—INDIA, CHINA, ET. AL.—MAKE MEANINGFUL CHANGES THAT REDUCE YOUR CO2 EMISSIONS, THE US WILL DO NOTHING MORE. ONCE WE SEE A MEASURABLE REDUCTION FROM YOUR SMOKESTACKS, THEN WE WILL REVISIT WHERE US POLICIES SHOULD BE CHANGED.
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SHUT UP AL GORE and HARRY REID—ENABLE THE NEW, CLEAN NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY TO THRIVE
While the alarmists throw up Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island and Fukuyama disasters, they totally omit—ignore or don’t know—that none of those causes a fraction of the health issues and harm that traditional coal fired plants of the old (dirty) style caused. As these plants are cleaned up, converted to natural gas (abundant now) and most of all, replaced by new design, clean and safe nuclear plants, America’s environment will improve. Stop Harry Reid’s stupid, selfish opposition to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository on which the US spent billions. Provide as safe a place as imaginable for storing spend nuclear waste (instead of leaving it exposed all over the country). Expedite the permits for a new generation of hundreds of smaller, cleaner and more localized nuclear plants to replace older, dirtier and worn out coal fired plants. (FYI—France is 20th in the world in per capital income, but is 50th in the world in greenhouse emissions, and gets 75% of its power from nuclear plants.
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TIME TO SEND THIS ONE…
THINK HARD, SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH ME….AND MOST OF ALL WITH THOSE YOU INFLUENCE. SPEAK UP.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
JOHN
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THE ATTACHMENTS:
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THIS ONE WILL MAKE YOU GRIMACE AS YOU READ IT. I COULDN’T MAKE THESE UP…GEORGE WILL JUST FOUND THEM.
It’s little wonder that voters are perplexed about who can reverse this overwhelming upside down plague of government stupidity at all levels….including in our schools, too many of which are run by tenured tyrants who are immune to being replaced for simple being stupid. The good teachers—and there are a lot of them—are all that’s keeping things together at all. We much respect and reward them.
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George F. Will commentary: 2015 was year of stupid
government tricks
E.B. White reportedly said “the most beautiful sound in America” is “the tinkle of ice at twilight.” In 2015’s
twilight, fortify yourself with something 90 proof as you remember this year in which:
We learned that a dismal threshold has been passed. The value of property that police departments seized
through civil-asset forfeiture — usually without accusing, let alone convicting, the property owners of a crime —
exceeded the value of property stolen by nongovernment burglars. The attorney general of New York, which
reaps billions from gambling — casinos, off-track betting, the state lottery — moved to extinguish (competition
from) fantasy football because it is gambling.
Florida police raided a mahjong game played by four women between the ages of 87 and 95 because their game’s
stakes allegedly exceeded the $10 limit set by state law.
A Michigan woman was fingerprinted, her mug shot was
taken and she was jailed until released on bond because she was late in renewing the $10 license for her dog.
New Jersey police arrested a 72-year-old retired teacher, chained his hands and feet to a bench and charged him
with illegally carrying a firearm — a 300-year-old flintlock pistol (with no powder, flint or ball) he purchased
from an antique dealer.
The University of Georgia said sexual consent must be “voluntary, sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative,
wanted, informed, mutual, honest.” Imaginative consent? Connecting climate change to sex, the National
Bureau of Economic Research warned that hot weather leads to diminished sexual activity.
Elsewhere in “settled science,” the government’s dietary rules were revised, somewhat rehabilitating red meat,
sodium, eggs and other good stuff. Undaunted, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee produced a 571-page
report calling for “bold actions” and “dramatic paradigm shifts” until mother-hen government yet again says,
“Well, never mind.”
Since federal food police dictated changes in school lunch programs, food tossed in the
trash is up 56 percent, salt shakers are being smuggled into schools and there are black markets in potato chips.
The IRS persecutes conservative advocacy groups but does not prosecute IRS employees who are tax cheats: An
audit revealed that over the past decade, the IRS fired only 400 of the 1,580 employees who deliberately violated
tax laws, rather than the 100 percent required by law.
New York’s City Council honored the “bravery” of Ethel Rosenberg, the executed traitor who spied for Josef
Stalin.
Declaring her candidacy, Hillary Clinton said she will fight for, among many others, “truckers who drive
for hours.” Yes, hours. Elsewhere, she rejected the presumption of innocence, aka due process: Those alleging
sexual assault have “the right to be believed,” which she did not believe when her husband was the accused.
A 9-year-old Florida fourth-grader was threatened with sexual harassment charges if he continued to write love
notes telling the apple of his eye that her eyes sparkle “like diamonds.”
A Texas 9-year-old was suspended for saying his magic ring could make people disappear.
A young girl was sent home with a censorious note from her school because her Wonder Woman lunchbox violated the school ban on depictions of “violent characters.”
An Oregon eighth-grader, whose brother served in Iraq, was suspended for wearing a T-shirt that depicted an
empty pair of boots representing soldiers killed in action. The school said the shirt was “not appropriate.”
A Tennessee boy was threatened with suspension from elementary school because he came to school with a
military-style haircut like that of his stepbrother, a soldier.
A government arbitrator prevented the firing of a New Jersey elementary-school teacher who was late to school 111 times in two years.
A suburban Washington high school promoted self-esteem by naming 117 valedictorians out of a class of 457.
Two Edina, Minn., elementary schools hired “recess consultants” to minimize “conflict” — children saying “Hey,
you’re out!” rather than “Nice try!”
The principal of a San Francisco middle school withheld the results of student elections that did not produce properly “diverse” results.
When some deep thinkers in academia decided that yoga, like ethnic food, constitutes “cultural appropriation,”
a clear thinker wondered whether offended cultures would send back our polio vaccines.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni reported that 48 of the top 52 liberal arts colleges and universities do not require
English majors to take a Shakespeare course.
This list of 2015 ludicrousness could be lengthened indefinitely, but enough already. The common thread is the
collapse of judgment in, and the infantilization of society by, government. Happier New Year.
George F. Will writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.
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IF YOU WONDER WHY OUR COUNTRY SEEMS TO BE HEADING BACKWARD UNDER BARACK OBAMA’S LEADERSHIP—HERE IS SOME EVIDENCE OF WHY:
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ONLY IN AMERICA This is so sad; from a proud, strong country to a laughing stock of the world in just seven short years. Canadian Version of David Letterman’s Top 10. (Just makes you want to shake your head in disbelief, and, just maybe choke someone in charge.) This is Canada’s Top Ten List of America’s Stupidity. # 10 Only in America… could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000.00 per plate Obama campaign fund-raising event # 09 Only in America… could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and 20%+/- of the federal workforce is black while only 14% of the population is black, and 40+% of all federal entitlements go to black Americans - 3X the rate that go to whites, 5X the rate that go to Hispanics! # 08 Only in America… could they have had the two people most responsible for our tax code in recent years, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats—who are in favor of higher taxes. # 07 Only in America… can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash. # 06 Only in America… would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become American citizens. (probably should be number one) # 05 Only in America… could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country’s Constitution be called EXTREMISTS. # 04 Only in America… could you need to present a photo ID to drive, to cash a check or to buy alcohol—but not to vote. # 03 Only in America… could people demand the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. Oil company (MarathonOil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike). # 02 Only in America… could you collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it has per year - for total spending of $7 Million PER MINUTE, and complain that it doesn’t have nearly enough money. # 01 Only in America…. could the rich people - who pay 86% of all income taxes - be accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who don't pay any income taxes at all.
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The Year Christmas Died New York’s Fifth Avenue is a celebration of pretty much nothing—or worse.
by Daniel Henninger
As we moved into December and what for some time has been called “the holiday season,” the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee issued a “best practices” directive for the campus to “ensure your holiday party is not a Christmas party in disguise.” A Christmas party in disguise? Has it come to this?
Aghast state legislators got the directive rescinded, but the Christmas killers will get the last laugh. In fact, they’ve already won. This is the year Christmas died as a public event in the United States. We know this after touring the historic heart of public Christmas—Fifth Avenue in New York City.
For generations, American families have come to New York in December to swaddle themselves in the glow and spirit of Christmas—shops, restaurants, brownstones, the evergreen trees along Park Avenue, bar mirrors and, most of all, Fifth Avenue’s department-store windows. You couldn’t escape it, and why would you want to?
A friend, an ardent atheist, would be inconsolable if he couldn’t sing Handel’s entire “Messiah” with 3,000 other revelers this month at Lincoln Center. Even if the only god you worship is yourself, December in New York has always been about the bustling good cheer flowing from the Christian holiday.
For many, December required a pilgrimage to Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor and Bergdorf Goodman. No matter the weather, people walked the mile from 38th Street to 59th Street and jammed sidewalks to see these stores’ joyful Christmas windows. Stay home. This year Fifth Avenue in December is about . . . pretty much nothing, or worse.
To be sure, the magnificent Rockefeller Center Christmas tree still stands, and directly across on Fifth Avenue is St. Patrick’s Cathedral, its facade washed and hung with a big green wreath. But walk up or down the famous avenue this week and what you and your children will see is not merely Christmas scrubbed, but what one can only describe as the anti-Christmas.
Forget public Nativity scenes, as court fiat commanded us to do years ago. On Fifth Avenue this year you can’t even find dear old Santa Claus. Or his elves. Christmas past has become Christmas gone. The scenes inside Saks Fifth Avenue’s many windows aren’t easy to describe. Saks calls it “The Winter Palace.” I would call it Prelude to an Orgy done in vampire white and amphetamine blue.
A luxuriating woman lies on a table, her legs in the air. Saks’ executives, who bear responsibility for this travesty, did have the good taste to confine to a side street the display of a passed-out man on his back (at least he’s wearing a tux), spilling his martini, beneath a moose head dripping with pearls. Adeste Gomorrah.
But you haven’t seen the anti-Christmas yet. It’s up at 59th Street in the “holiday” windows of Bergdorf Goodman. In place of anything Christmas, Bergdorf offers “The Frosty Taj Mahal,” a palm-reading fortune teller—and King Neptune, the pagan Roman god, seated with his concubine. (One Saks window features the Roman Colosseum, the historic site of Christian annihilation.)
I thought: Lord & Taylor! Surely the iconic Christmas windows on 38th Street won’t shelve St. Nick. They did. He’s gone, replaced by little bears and cupcakes, gingerbread men and Canada geese.
There is one holdout to the de-Santification of America: In Macy’swindows at Sixth Avenue and 34th Street—as in “Miracle on 34th Street”—the characters of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” frolic in Yuletide splendor. The Christmas-less feeling along once-famous Fifth Avenue this year is similar to the loss one feels reading the last lines of “Casey at the Bat”—a shattering, historic strikeout.
The erasure of Christmas between the grinding stones of secular fanaticism will persist. Eventually the holiday will be forbidden, forgotten and filed away in attic boxes. But maybe God, in His usual mysterious way, is nudging us back toward the beginning.
Once the inevitable Federal Office of Diversity and Inclusion has joined with the commercial cynics at Saks and Bergdorf’s to suppress even Santa, what pretext will parents have to give gifts to their Christmas-cleansed children? Amazon Day?
In the post-Christmas era, the infant Jesus and Santa Claus will go back to the catacombs of early Christian life, where you won’t have to say happy holidays to anyone. Christmas as we know it will die off, and what will be left on December 25th will look a lot like Thanksgiving, but smaller.
Unless celebrating Christmas in America becomes a prosecutable crime, as it was in the Soviet Union, families will go to church in the morning to renew the beginnings of their faith and then spend the day at home listening to pirated copies of the carols and hymns on Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” album. For radical refuseniks, I recommend playing, at the highest possible volume, “The Bells of St. Mary’s” on Phil Spector’s “A Christmas Gift for You.” As for Saks and the other Fifth-Avenue sellouts, I have two words this season. They aren’t Merry Christmas. Write to [email protected]
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The Uncounted Trillions in the Inequality Debate Wealth isn’t so highly concentrated if you take into account Medicare and Social Security benefits. By
MARTIN FELDSTEIN\
The Federal Reserve recently estimated total household net worth in the U.S. to be about $80 trillion, including real estate and financial assets. And data from the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances imply that the top 10% of households by net worth hold about 75%—or $60 trillion—of this total. The bottom 90% of households therefore have a net worth of about $20 trillion.
These data seem to show a country whose wealth is highly concentrated. But the true picture is hardly as stark as critics of inequality claim, because it leaves out the large amount of wealth held in the form of future retirement benefits from Social Security and Medicare. Moreover, the public’s traditional financial wealth is depressed because the current entitlement programs lower people’s real incomes and deny them the higher returns available through investment-based retirement savings like IRAs or 401(k)s.
Wealth is the ability to spend more than one’s income. After a retirement or job loss, a household with financial wealth can maintain its standard of living. Wealth also allows people to make bequests and gifts to help children or grandchildren at early stages in their lives.
Most Americans count on Social Security to finance their consumption in retirement. The Social Security trustees estimate that Social Security “wealth”—the present actuarial value of the future benefits that current workers and retirees are projected to receive—is $59 trillion. Excluding the top 10% of households reduces the amount to about $50 trillion.
However, to qualify for those benefits, current workers must pay future payroll taxes with a present actuarial value of about $25 trillion. So you have to subtract these taxes from the $50 trillion, leaving a net Social Security “wealth” of $25 trillion for the bottom 90% of households. Adding this to the $20 trillion of their conventionally measured net worth, and these households have total wealth of $45 trillion.Yet this figure leaves out the very large transfers that retirees receive from Medicare and Medicaid. Government actuaries don’t estimate the amount of “wealth” implied by these two programs. But we can get an indication of how much is at stake by looking at the benefits paid out under them.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade total Social Security retiree benefits will be $10.2 trillion, while the benefits for Medicare will be $9.0 trillion and those for Medicaid will be $4.6 trillion (about half of Medicaid benefits are for retirees in nursing homes). In short, the benefits for these two government health programs exceed the amount Social Security will pay out to retirees in cash.
But unlike Social Security, receiving government health benefits does not depend on current workers continuing to pay taxes. This suggests that the net “Medicare and Medicaid wealth” implied by current law is probably about as large as these households’ “gross Social Security wealth” of $50 trillion.
So what is the grand total? Add the $50 trillion for Medicare and Medicaid wealth to the $25 trillion for net Social Security wealth and the $20 trillion in conventionally measured net worth, and the lower 90% of households have more than $95 trillion that should be reckoned as wealth. This is substantially more than the $60 trillion in conventional net worth of the top 10%. And this $95 trillion doesn’t count the value of unemployment benefits, veterans benefits, and other government programs that substitute for conventional financial wealth.
Critics of inequality fail to recognize this wealth and that it represents a poor return. Individuals pay high payroll taxes—directly and through foregone wages—to finance the current system of pay-as-you-go retiree benefits. By my calculations, the implicit real rate of return on those payroll taxes will be less than 3%. That is substantially less than the 5.5% real return earned historically by contributions over a working life to an individual IRA or 401(k) plan invested in a balanced combination of stocks and high-quality bonds.
A wise approach would be to slim down today’s Social Security pay-as-you-go system and supplement it with universal investment-based personal retirement accounts. This would reduce the tax burden on workers and raise the national savings rate, thus increasing the rate of economic growth and the future levels of real wages. Those individual accounts would also provide funds that could be bequeathed to the next generation or transferred for special purposes like education.
The apparent inequality of wealth in the U.S. in reality reflects the government’s out-of-date way of financing retirement. Politicians worried about inequality should start by fixing the inefficient programs they directly control.
Mr. Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan, is a professor at Harvard and a member of the Journal’s board of contributors.
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