Death Of Obamacare

It is going to happen, so we all have to get used to it.  Obamacare will be dead in a few more weeks.  This blog is about what and why this is all going to happen.

Here is the back side of Obamacare.  I said back in the beginning that Obama is a Judas who wants to destroy the USA from the inside and I still hold that same view.  I have a round about argument for my position so hear me out.  Look at two countries, Greece and Argentina.  These two countries lived well beyond their means for several generations and when it came time to pay the piper, look what happened?  Their people go used to living high on the hog and when reality kicked in, they revolted and tried to continue living beyond their mean until both their countries were total messes.  Simple minded and gutless politicians kept the party going on "credit".  Are you following all this?  Does it smell like Obamacare?

What Trump has inherited is a country like Greece and Argentina in their early days.  If Trump really has the guts and true love for this country, he will not buckle under pressure from almost every quarter.  I think that if you have read my older blogs that you know that believe in "tough love" and that is exactly what we need now.  I know from experience that very few people have the strength of character to follow thru with "tough love" when "tough love" is called for.

Another thing that is lost in the discussion is the fact that if more people have jobs that many will get health care paid for by their employer.  Here is another point that I have pointed out in the past and that is that many of these programs have "double" impact.  Think of it this way.  If we have 10 families and only 5 have jobs, it means that those 5 who have jobs will have to pay the health care for the 5 that do not.  Every worked pays one for one.  Now if one of the families with out a job gets a job due to programs by Trump, the figures will look like this.  6 families with jobs will have to pay for the health care of 4 families.  Rather than one of the ones with a job paying for one family without a job, his equivalence now is to pay for 2/3 of a family.  See how big that double impact is?  I pointed out before that government has a multiplier impact when it comes to killing jobs and increasing tax on those that do end up with jobs.

Are you ready for "tough love" to save the USA for our children and grand children?

PS--Here  is another slant on why Obamacare is bad.  How much does it really cost to give free "first class" health care to 5% of our population who do not now have "first class" health hare?  This is all 4th grade math.  The 5% of our population who did not have health insurance really did  have "some" health care.  Let's say that their health care had a cost for tax payers of about $500 a month.  The other 95% of the population who had regular health care thru their companies or that they paid for with their own money. was worth about $1,000 per month.  That was before Obamacare.  Now, with Obamacare if the cost for the 95% went up by just $100 too $1,100 it would mean that they would be paying $1,900 additionally for "each" of the 5% of the population for "first class" health care!   That mean that, in the end under Obamacare, it will cost $2,400 per month from our GNP to add those people.  One might argue that it is "good", but it is clear that it is "not worth it"!!  Notice how the true cost is hidden?  Finally, Obamacare and the people who created it are dishonest!  They lied to you and most of you did not even know it!!

Vote Recount And Voter Fraud

While listening to all the talk on the News about "voter fraud", you would think that someone with a brain would show up and set the record straight?  Why not?  That is the point of this blog.

What percentage of our population knows anything about "statistics"?  Almost zero!  What needs to happen is go get someone in here who knows something about quality control and particularly "statistical" quality control.  I had the good fortune of working under Phil Crosby while he was the World Wider Manager of Quality Control for ITT.  Some of what he had to say rubbed off.  For the record, you don't need to recount a total state to determine if there is voter fraud or not.  All you need to do is to take a reasonable size random sample.  This could be done over the whole USA for the less than the cost of recounting one state like Wisconsin and do it faster.

If the purpose is to determine the extent of possible voter fraud, you have to ask why three of the closest margin states were selected?  If you look at the possible types of voter fraud that are possible, one of the greatest is voting by non-citizens.  In the case of Wisconsin, I think that they have a much lower percentage than do states like California and states that have sanctuary cities.  I think that states that have more absentee votes or internet voting are much more likely to have voter fraud too.  If there is such a concern about voter fraud, why are not these same people in favor of some kind of voter ID?  You need a picture ID to by beer in my local grocery.  I have joked that every voter should have to show a receipt that they have purchased beer at my local grocery.

I don't know who sold the USA on these low tech voting machines that only get used two or three times a year.  Their problem is that there is no audit trail with them, so how do you do a meaningful recount?  I heard that Canada does their voting 100% on paper ballots and they get their official results faster than we do.  I would prefer paper ballots just so that there is an audit trail.

I heard that there was a survey of illegal aliens where a very large percentage stated that they had voted here in the USA.  Given that places like California will issue a drivers license with a picture tells me that is probably true.

A final point about random sampling,  The degree of accuracy of the results is only a function of the sample size, not the size of the total population.  This means that the same size sample would be needed for both California and Wisconsin to have the same confidence in the results even thought California has several times as many people as Wisconsin.  I have seen that in some countries the voting has to occur on a single day and each voter has to put their finger into a container of ink to show that they voted and thus can not vote twice.  I know for a fact that with many early voting systems and absentee voting that someone other than the legal voters often fills out the voting forms.  Have you ever seen what goes on in some of our nursing homes?  Often many of these people don't know their own names or are blind.  There are a lot of holes in our system and sampling would show us where to plug the holes!!!

Ohio State And Bayes Theorem

Have you noticed that the politicians can't seem to come to an agreement about whether or not the Somali who tried to kill students at Ohio State is a "terrorist" or not?  What we need is a better understanding about basic English and Bayes Theorem.  We have to figure out how to communicate where everything is not "exact".  I have blogged before that it is almost impossible to be exact about anything.  Ask yourself, "How sure do you have to be to call this Somali a terrorist"?  Is it 90% or 99% or 100%?

I think that we should use the same criteria that we now use for "Global Warming" for terrorism.  How sure do you think these same politicians are when they claim that "Global Warming" is the most serious problem facing the world?  I am not sure that it is even 50%-50%, but see how they climb onto the bandwagon?  Our legal system with our jury system has convicted a small percentage innocent people to death and we don't complain about that as much as we wring our hands over calling "terrorists" "Radical Islamist Terrorists".

If you read my prior blogs on Bayes Theorem then you know that it takes into account "prior" knowledge about the world rather than taking on every decision like it is the very first one that has ever occurred.  What do you think are the chances that this Somali is a "Radical Muslim Terrorist" given the facts that he is a Somali, a Muslim, drove his car into a crowd and slashed many with a knife.  Just based on these facts and prior history of events like this, my estimate is 99% that he is a "Radical Muslim Terrorist".  I know that it is not 100% like most political liberals would want.

Do me a favor and take into account your prior knowledge about the world when you have to judge events like this.  If you do, you will be using Bayes Theorem!!!

School Choice Vouchers

People have been talking about "school choice vouchers" for some time, but few really get down into the facts.  The purpose of this blog is to point out some important facts.

The teachers union, who was in the pocket of Clinton from the very beginning, are against any type of vouchers.  They claim that it will hurt normal public schools by taking needed money away from them.  On the surface this sounds like a good argument, but when one applies basic 4th grade math, it turns out actually be an advantage for public schools.  Here are the numbers.  The national average cost per public school student is about $12,000 per year.  Think of how much it costs for a typical 3rd grade class of 25 kids,  Would you believe that it costs $300,000?  A typical 3rd grade school teacher only makes about $50,000, so where does the other $250,000 go?

I blogged in the past that home schooled kids do better on average than the kids in our public schools and it does not cost tax payers a single dime.  The more kids that are home schooled the more money that public schools have "per student".  In my area just over 10% of our kids are home schooled.  That means that rather than having $12,000 per average public school kid, we end up with $13,333 per public school kid.  It is the same for kids who go to religious schools.  Rather than having less money for public schools, the public schools actually have more money per student.

We know that these new charter schools cost "less" per student than the public schools who have unionized school teachers.  The more of these charter schools we have the lower the cost is going to be for tax payers.  You have to think about exactly what the purpose is for education money.  Is it to provide high paying jobs for as many unionized school teachers as possible or give our kids a good education for the least tax money?

Remember a few years ago when the unionized public school teachers pushed for smaller class sizes under the curtain that it would improve out comes?  Well, the actual out come was that kids did not do as well as they did before while the cost per student went up and more unionized public school teachers had jobs.  With more teachers, the unions collected more dues!!!  That was the only gain!!

I favor vouchers for charter schools and home schools but not religious based schools.  The vouchers should be some percentage of the $12,000 average cost per student.  I would be very satisfied with a voucher worth about $6,000 per student.  It would mean that students would have a better out come and there would be fewer unionized public school teachers with jobs.  I think that it is amazing that most parents who home school are not college graduates, yet their kids have better out comes!

When you hear some unionized school teacher arguing against vouchers, step forward and enlighten them with the facts.

PS--When I talk to public school teachers I notice that they take a lot of pride in their exceptional students but don't talk much about how they brought marginal students up to standard.  The fact is that many of the kids who go to charter schools or who are home schooled are basically smarter than the average student.  If these kids were taken away from the public schools, it would allow the unionized teachers to do a better job on the marginal students that they have left.  It would give a true measure of just how good these unionized school teachers really are.

What Are You Really Worth?

You never hear any discussion about what someone is worth except in sports.  A great quarterback is worth several time what an average quarterback is worth.  We all understand this logic, but when it comes to one's self, it can get real messy.  That is the idea behind this blog.

First, a little story.  Back in 1949 when I was just a young kid, I used to pick cotton every chance that I could.  I always put most of my earnings in my savings account at Bank of America.  On one Saturday back in 1949 I picked 200# of cotton.  That was my record.  The farmer was paying 3-1/2 cents a pound and paid you in cash each time you brought your sack to the trailer to be weighed.  This was real "piece work" where you were paid based on how much cotton you picked.  With this plan, there was no question about "what you were worth".  I could out pick all my friends and thus, I was "worth" more than any of them.  On that Saturday back in 1949, I earned $7.00 in one day.  That was what I was "worth" back then.  Not bad for a 9 year old kid!!!

The next year some of the farmers had automatic mechanical cotton pickers where one person with the new automatic cotton picker could pick more cotton than 10 kids like me.  Contractors came along with these new automatic cotton pickers and could pick cotton for 2 cents a pound and still make a profit.  As a result, the farmer would only pay kids like me 2 cents a pound rather than the old 3-1/2 cents a pound.  Rather than me being "worth" $7.00 a day, I was now only worth $4.00 a day.  At my young age, that was a great awakening and a lesson that I have never forgotten.

Now, how much are you really worth?  Years ago loggers felled trees with an ax and a two man cross cut saw.  They could earn enough in those days to feed and house their family.  When chainsaws came along the "worth" of a strong man with only an ax went down to the point that he could no longer feed and house his family.  He was "worth" less!  Further, before the chain saw it took 10 men to do what one man could do with the chainsaw.  This meant that 90% of loggers using axes were out of jobs.  Now, how do they feed their families?  This has been the problem with the human race since the beginning of time.  It is not a new thing.

The simple lesson from the above is that your "worth" changes over time and you have to change if you want to stay even or become "worth"more.  You can't stop the world though many have tried.  Look at this example.  If you have a job that requires you to drill holes very accurately by measuring and laying out exactly where the holes are to be drilled and you are one of the few who can do this, you would be like the great quarterback and could be "worth" a lot.  What if the company owner was able to purchase a machine that could drill the holes just as accurately and almost anyone could operate the new machine, how much would you now be "worth"?   Clearly, not as much as before.

Isn't it clear that if you want to maintain your "worth" or increase your "worth" that you have to gain new skills to a level that not all other workers can attain.  The net affect is that those who are able to gain the new skills are "worth" more while those who only have the old skills are "worth" less.  In the big picture, what we have is a situation where a few get richer by being "worth" more while many get poorer.  The bottom line is that those who have less ability have to work harder or they will fall behind.  As jobs get more complex or difficult this trend will continue.  If you look deeper into the figures, what you will see is that workers with more intellectual ability will mostly be the ones who advance while those with less intellectual ability will fall farther and farther behind.  For the most part intellectual ability is something that one is born with and which can only be marginally off set with education.  Education has its limits and it is not for free.  It costs in terms of years in class or school and shortens the number of working years the individual has to pay back the cost of education.

I have set the stage for a situation where there appears not to be a solution and that is right.  The only solution is to mitigate the affects.  That means we have to minimize the waste of intellect since it is clear that we have a limited amount in the human race.  Further, those who lack the necessary intellect can not be allowed to waste the wealth produced by those who are able to contribute by being socially irresponsible requiring more and more resources to be allocated to law and order or avoidable health costs.  Unionization that ignores the basic facts of life related to what one is "worth" are not solutions, but tend to only make things worse.  Like unions, manipulation of free markets is not a solution either.  In prior blogs, I pointed out that, so called free trade, is not a free market because individual countries manipulate the markets for their individual advantage.  Where a foreign country clearly manipulates their markets, we have to protect ours.  Your "worth" is continually under attack from foreign countries as well as technical progress here.  We can do something about the foreign part and we should.

The bottom line in all this is that you are the only one who is in control of your "worth".  It is a complex world that we have little control over and don't expect government to make you "worth" more.  At it best, government can only help to prevent others from making you "worth" less!!

Trump's Version Of Obamacare

There are several key items that should have been part of Obamacare which were not considered.  That is the idea for this blog.

First, all decisions need an objective and it appears that Obamacare never had a clear objective.  Was it to provide "better" health care to those who could not afford "better" care?  I am not sure.  Was it to make health care less expensive so that more people could afford "better" health care?  I don't know.  Was it to increase our capacity to provide "good" health care so that wait times could be reduced?  Was it to reduce the percentage of our GNP that was devoted to health care from its current 17%?  Was it to get our citizens to live healthier life styles, thus to reduce the cost of health care?  Doesn't look like it.  Was it to increase the life expectancy of the citizens of the USA compared to the rest of the world?  Was it to be the first step by a Judas to destroy the USA from within by squandering our national wealth and create an entitlement that would be difficult to undo in the future?  I think that I may be getting close to the answer.

 Rather than focus on real health care, Obamacare focuses on "insurance" when the ideal medical system would be a "distributed" system where everyone paid with there own cash for their medical services.  Do you have medical insurance for your dog or cat?  Why not?  Would it save you money or actually cost more?  Easy question!  Do you think that we need someone in Washington DC telling us how to care for out dog or cat?   Then why do we need anyone to tell us how to take care of our own health?  We don't.

Have you ever heard anyone from Washington DC explaining why people in Japan tend to live almost 10 years longer than we do here in the USA and spend far less on medical?  Why not?  Did you know that when President Lincoln was shot that the doctors actually "bleed" him as a cure for his gun shot wound?  That was not that long ago!  China has a herbal tradition in their medicine and they spend far less than we do and get almost as good of results.  Anyone in Washington DC talking about China's medical system?  Didn't think so.

All we seem to talk about is "insurance".  Trump appears to want to keep kids up to 26 years old on the health policy of the company where their parents work.  Notice how they say, "on their parents policy"?  It is not the parents policy, it is paid for by the person's employer and the cost is added onto the cost of the product or service that their employer provides.  It is not magic. We all pay the cost of this "so call" free bee and most are not aware of it.  There is no free lunch, but there are fewer jobs as result of this "mandate".  Even Trump seems to be falling for the scam!

How about "pre-existing conditions"?  It would be like not having insurance on you car and then when you wreck it, you buy Obamacare for your car!  As in Obamacare, it is against the law for an insurance company to sell you health insurance that does not cover your kids upto age 26 or cover pre-existing conditions.  What if you were in perfect health as a result of your long term responsible efforts to eat right and exercise regularly and wanted a policy that just covered major items with a big deductible?  It would be against the law under Obamacare.  You don't have a free choice to spend your own money the way you want.  I think that Trump is going to have to rethink this one too.

The bottom line is that I don't think that there is anything in Obamacare that is worth keeping and the first thing Trump needs to do is to fire the 40,000 unionized government employees who were hired to force Obamacare down our throats.  That is almost 1,000 per state to administer the plan, not counting all the ones the insurance companies hired and the medical community to administer their share of the program.  In the case of Obamacare "more" is not better.

Since states control the doctors, hospitals and the insurance companies, they should run what ever kind of program the voters in their state want.  If they come up with bad plans, the people can always move to another state.  That is not possible under Obamacare.  You are just screwed.

Remember when doctors made "house calls"?  In that model, you paid the doctor in cash with no middle man taking a cut.  That is how most of the world still does it and it is the least cost model.

Economics Lesson 101

I may not be the greatest authority on economics, but I can tell you that 90% of those who claim to be experts are not either!  This blog is a simple lesson in Economics 101.

I have been involved in business decisions for over 50 years and know how the rubber meets the road.  I have administered multi million dollar capital budgets for some of the largest companies in the USA and there are some simple lesson that can be learned.  I want to take just two.  (1) What and how much should we spend our capital budget on?  (2) What products should we make that we can make a profit on?

When it comes to capital spending we have a choice between various projects and each has some kind of rate of return.  Remember that an investment is one that "pays off" and you measure that with the rate of return.  It is like putting money in the bank.  You want to put your money in the bank that pays the most interest.  Right now the interests rates are very low so in many cases it is not that you can not find the money.  The problem is that many investments don't yield a profit.  Why is that?  Let's say that the potential investment is for more sewing machines to make shirts.  If it costs more for fabric and labor than it does to buy the shirt from China, it does not matter how cheap the sewing machine is or how low the interest rate is for money borrowed from the bank.  An investment in more sewing machines is a "bad" investment.  Every company has many proposals like this that are just below the cut-off line for being acceptable investments.  This is an important part of the critical economic lesson.

In many cases, it does not take much of a change in fabric an labor cost to make a marginal investment a very good investment and vise-versive.  Obamacare added extra cost to making a shirt by mandating that additional items be added to the companies health insurance such as birth control, pre existing conditions and keeping kids on the family health insurance to age 26.  These are not "free" items.  They make the shirt more expensive to manufacture here in the USA while the shirt from China still costs the same. Obamacare, alone, has thus killed a lot of jobs here in the USA.  If it had gone the other way, it would have made a lot of jobs that were slightly none competitive, competitive.Think about it this way.  There are high tech jobs at the top that don't have to compete with cheap labor around the world, but these are limited because there is a limited number of people world wide who have the necessary intellect.  That is not true of lower skilled and lower tech jobs.  Obamacare does not kill these high tech jobs, it kills the jobs of the middle class.  Got it?

The second group is products that companies would like to make, but can't make them at a profit or not at a high enough profit to justify.  GMC just decided to move their small car manufacturing to Mexico for just this reason.  This was a close decision that was decided by a small difference in profitability;  With the high tax rate on GMC, it was enough to swing the decision.  I am sure that GMC was making a small profit on their small cars, but it was just not enough.  With a reduction in the tax rate for companies like GMC, many of these types of close decision would be made in favor of keeping the manufacturing here along with the jobs.

Why people feel that companies should pay so much in taxes is beyond me.  In the end, the people end up paying the tax anyway with higher priced cars from GMC while Toyota does not have to pay the same amount of tax.  It is one thing to have competition between companies here in the USA who all play by the same rules compared to competition with the rest of the world who play by different rules.  It is not the same thing.  To make many of these marginal products profitable here, we need to level the playing field by taking taxes off businesses and putting them on "all" products equally including imported products.  If this is not crystal clear to everyone, I don't know how Trump or any government can help you.

What people need to take away from this blog is that there are many jobs and products that are right on the line between being profitable or justified and it does not take much to push them one way or the other.  Look at buying gas for your car when the average price of gas is $2.00 per gallon.  Which station are you going to fill up at? The one selling gas for $1.98 or the one at $2.03?  We are only talking about 2.5% difference here when we burden manufactures with 7% for social security and another 7% that they pay you that you then pay in!   The Toyota is not burdened by any of this!

That is my economics lesson 101 for today!!!

PS---Here is an example:  Let's say that you are considering investments in stock, real estate or a new product and have a big list of ideas where each yields higher or lower returns.  It would look much like this:

% Return          Number of ideas  Total acceptable ideas
12%                    1                         1
11%                    2                         3
10%                    4                         7
 9%                     8                       15
 8%                    16                      31
 7%                    32                      62
 6%                    64                      96
 5%                  128                     234
 4%                  256                     480

If your criteria was 7% return, you would have 62 acceptable projects or jobs.  If Obama made your cost go up just a little and your new criteria was 8% you would have to cut 31 projects or half your jobs.  If Trump was able to cut costs for businesses so that your new criteria was 6% you would add 64 new projects or jobs.  It cuts both ways and small changes have big impacts as you can see. That is a difference of 95 projects or jobs!!!

PS---Remember your history lessons about the early USA?  Remember the "Customs House"?  There was one at every port of entry.  That was because it was the easiest place to collect sales tax.  There was no income tax back then.  Think how difficult it would have been to let goods come in tax free and then send out thousands of tax collectors to collect the sales tax one dollar at a time?  You have to ask yourself, "Who had the idea to load so much of the taxes onto payroll and business in the first place?"  Did you ever hear the expression, "The authority to tax is the authority to destroy?"  We have to stop shooting ourselves in the foot and correct some of these major errors of the past.

Obama's News Conference 11/14/2016

It looks like Obama is going have a very sore arm after patting himself on the back so much today in his first news conference after the election of Trump as our next President.  The election of Trump is a clear rejection of 99% of what Obama did as President.  If Obama's ego was not so big he would admit that he tried to take the country in the wrong direction and the voters have made a correction with the election of Trump.  Here are some examples of how stupid Obama is.

He is going to help the middle class and those on the lower end of the economic ladder by supporting a higher minimum wage.  I don't know of anything that kills jobs at the bottom faster.  He thinks that this is the way that those on the lower end of the economic ladder get "a bigger piece of the pie".  It sounds like he thinks that businesses run on magic.

He challenged the new Trump administration about taking the insurance away from 20 million people who are now on Obamacare.  Isn't it some kind of "set up" by Obama to make Republicans take the candy away from a child who never deserved the candy in the first place.

Obama claimed that immigrants built this country and that we need more to continue that process.  He seemed to claim that if we have a younger population that it is better for the economy.  I think that the median age in the Gazza Strip is about 13 years and they are one of the poorest group of people in the world.  Japan has some of the oldest people and they have a better quality of life than we do.  I think that you understand from some of my past blogs how stupid Obama is on this point.

How about keeping your kids on your companies health insurance plan until they are 26.  Obama makes it sound like that was for "free" when it adds to the cost of products made here while not affecting the cost of products made outside the USA.  The true cost of this "mandate" is hidden and thus Obama can pull the wool over the eyes of many of our stupid voters.

How about "pre-existing" conditions?  This is not free either.  Healthy responsible people have to pick up the tab for over weight people, smokers and drug users.  We should not spend any more for health care than Japan does where they live almost 10 years longer.

Obama also made claims for how he has helped the environment.  Ask farmers what they think or coal miners.  All this has done is to make our products less competitive and thus has caused the loss of jobs here.  For some reason, Obama did not explain how and why his administration squandered so much of our tax money on uneconomical "clean energy" like wind mills and solar.  He did not acknowledge the extra energy that 25 million illegal aliens use.  It dwarfs any savings that he thinks his administration has made.

Regarding health care.  Obama thinks that the cost of health care goes up by magic when it goes up due to burdensome regulations and throwing more money to drug companies and insurance companies.  He never points out anything that he has done to drive down cost.  Remember that we import over half of our doctors.  I am glad that he did not mention the liberal student loan program that has wasted over a trillion dollars.  We need more doctors, scientists and engineers, not more kids with worthless political science degrees if we are going to compete with the rest of the world.

I did not take notes, so I know I have missed many of Obama's stupid claims.  The question that he should have gotten was, "How did being a community organizer prepare you for the office of President of the USA  compared to Trump's experience?"

PS---Both Obama and Trump need to test their actions against this simple criteria:'
       * Does it raise the median family income?
       * Does it increase our exports and balance of trade?
Notice that Obama has failed on both of the above!

You Can't Have Your Cake And Eat It Too

I did not make this one up.  It is an age old saying that has a lot more meaning than you might think and that is the idea behind this blog.

I was talking to a very disappointed democratic voter today.  He was almost in tears and was difficult to communicate with.  I think that he may be typical of may other disappointed voters.  He was very concerned about the idea of sending back the illegal immigrants and that we should let them stay.  I tried several arguments on him, but to no avail.  I asked him, "What about the USA do you want to give up to allow the illegal immigrants to stay?"  He did not seem to understand the question.  He did not think that he had to give up anything to just let them stay.  This is where the saying in my title comes in.  If you want to eat your cake, then you can't put the cake on the shelf with no bites out of it.  Is this over your head too?

One of the things that makes the USA great is that it is based on the "rule of law" with the understanding that the law will be equally enforced and no one will get special treatment.  If we let a special group of illegal immigrants stay here while we enforce things like the IRS regulations against other people, that is clearly not fair.  Equal means equal and my friend seemed to be willing to give all that up.  He then argued that many of these illegal immigrants have been here for years and have jobs and own homes.  To that I proposed that if someone killed your child 10 or 20 years ago and you finally found them, should they be prosecuted?  Of course!  Isn't that the same thing?  What difference does the number of times the Earth rotates around the Sun matter to equally enforcing the law?

My friend also considered it racist not to let Muslims into the USA.  He was not rational enough on this point to continue the discussion.  Again, like the saying above, my friend only wanted to keep out the "bad" guys.  He wanted to "have his cake and eat it too".  He did not seem to understand that these choices are mutually exclusive.  He wanted to keep the "bad" guys out, but he could not come up with  any way to do that except for keeping out all Muslims.  Like many liberals, they want to hold out for a miracle alternative that does not exist.  To my understanding, only religious people believe in miracles and that is one reason we try to keep religion out of our official government.

I was never able to develop my argument with this person to show that immigration lowers the median income. net worth and quality of life for people here in the USA.  It makes us poorer.  I would like to have gone onto my argument about resource exploitation and value added labor, but I have found my friend, like many liberals, unable to be open minded and objective enough to follow an argument that contained more than 5 words.

Every time you hear some liberal propose that we do something that violates our constitution or the foundation of what makes the USA what it is, ask them, "What do you want to give up/" and I don't just mean for you as an individual, but for your children and all the children of the future.  Remind them that they are dealing with the rights of future generations and that they should rethink their fit of emotion.  If you want to end "rule of law" and allow people to cheat the system and others who are part of the system, OK, but understand what you are doing before you pull that trigger!

PS---There are other ways that a person can help people in places like El Salvador without breaking the law and allowing them to come into the USA illegally.  A very high proportion of the illegal immigrants come from El Salvador which is one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the Western Hemisphere at 785 per sq mile.  Compare that to the USA at only 75 per sq mile and the county that I live in the density is just 18 per sq mile and I want to keep it that way!  The solution is for places like El Salvador to get their population under control rather than to keep breeding like rabbits.  It was the Catholic church that discouraged birth control in South America and who created this problem.  Good intentioned people provided health care to many over populated countries, but ignored birth control and see what problems they created.

Trump, How Could The Poles Be So Wrong?

Many people today are asking, "How could the poles be so wrong?"  I think that I may have part of the answer in this blog.

First off, how do we get our knowledge about things?  We use our brains to observe and based on those observations, we draw conclusions about things.  It works fine if things are not changing very fast, but what happens if things are changing.  Here is an example.

How fast is your car going "right now"?  You look down at your speedometer and it tells you that your car is going 50 mph and then you look up at the road in front of you assuming that you are going 50 mph.  If you were going at a "steady" speed, 50 mph would be the correct answer.  If you had the brakes on, when you looked down at the speedometer, then when you looked up at the road, you would actually be going slower than 50 mph.  In that case 50 mph would be the wrong answer.  I think that something like this is what happened with the poles on the election.

Since Trump was trending up, the poles were always "behind" the true value.  At the exact time people were in he  voting booths, Trump was actually ahead of Clinton.  The purpose of a pole is to first find out where the vote was at the exact time the pole was taken, but by the time the result of the pole was analysed and reported, it was "behind".  The step that was missing from the pole reports was the "prediction" part, or where the voters are at the time the results were reported rather than where they were when the pole was taken.  Any engineer who is knowledgeable in the area of control systems knows this.  The problem is that most of those who were working with the poles were political science majors in college and know little more than 4 th grade math.

The other item is political correctness.  Just like in the poling example above, our problem with political correctness is a lot worse than what your old observations have told you.  Here is how I think that it affected the poles.  Have you ever supervise or participated in a "focus group"?  I have.  It is very difficult to keep the feelings of the person doing the poling or running the focus group out of the data.  I think that most of those doing the poling were liberals and when they asked a question they gave off body language or choice of words that identified what kind of answer they preferred.   It was the same for the person being asked..  Do to political correctness, the person being interviewed wanted to keep the interviewer happy by giving them the answer that they wanted.  In prior blogs, I pointed out that political correctness makes it OK to tell little white lies if it keeps everyone happy.  I think that you can start to see that all this political correctness has created a bunch of voters who are not honest and tell little white lies.

When someone like Trump comes along who is bigger than political correctness it catches most people off guard.  They think it is strange for a person to tell the truth when a little white lie would keep everyone happier.  I think this may be a repeat, but here goes.  I was talking with my father and his older brother about "good friends".  I propose a test to see who was the best friend.  Both claimed that they had lots  of friends and they were "good" friends too.  The test was, "Would you tell your best friend if you knew his wife was running around on him?"  Easy question, right?   My father answered that he was not sure if he would tell his friend or not, but his older brother said, "hell yes!".  Now which do you think was the  better friend and the one less affected by political correctness?

Our schools, colleges and urban areas are knee deep in political correctness while most of our rural areas are not.  Now look at the election results and tell me if you think that political correctness had any thing to do with the results?

PS---For the record.  Females are infected with political correctness to a much greater degree than are men.  That is one of the main reasons that the poles and the votes were so different  between females and males.  Females don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and find political correctness a good cover for telling little white lies.  Further, most of our school teachers are female.  How do you think that affects the attitude of our young people's voting habits?

Hey! Voter, Wake Up

This blog reviews some important points about Obamacare that most voters don't understand.

Prior to Obamacare, we were spending 17% of our GNP on medical.  That means that we spend much more than any other country in the world.  For that money, we do not get better out comes than countries that spend much less.  In terms of life expectancy, we are about 40th.  There is the feeling among the voters that there is no limit to what we could and should spend on medical.  Voters never stop to think that, "we are not rich".  We have financial limits.  We are not the richest country in the world!!

The insurance rates for Obamacare were calculated based on the cost when we were spending 17% of our GNP on medical, but, for some reason, the insurance companies didn't take into account the inflation factor that Obamacare would cause.  Remember what happened to the cost of college when the government poured billions of extra loan dollars into the college system?  College costs went up just like medical cost have.  I worked my way thru college, but I could not do it today given the inflated costs.  My family also paid for their medical care in the past, but with the inflation caused by Obamacare, we can no longer afford to do that.  Interesting isn't it?

The latest news is that the insurance cost for Obamacare are going up by an average of 25%.  That means we will be spending more than the original 17% of GNP for medical.  Using my 4th grade math, I calculate that we will now be sending 21.25% of our GNP on medial.  If you understand this critical point, then we have to cut an equal amount out of what we spend of our GNP on other things.  For the median family, it means that they will have to cut their standard of living cost by $2,125 from their $50,000 income.  If families are spending more for medical, it means they will be spending less of things like new cars, homes, clothing and food.  Obamacare is going to cause a serious decline in our economy.  If the government raises the minimum wage as a solution, it will mean fewer jobs and a downward spiral from there.  With our national debit at 20 trillion dollars, there will be no money for things like infrastructure.  Remember Obama's "shovel ready" projects?

If you look at the basic concept of Obamacare, it was to dictate from Washington DC how we were going to pay for our medical care.  Obamacare only added cost as you can now clearly see.  If we were serious about the cost of medical care, we would have looked at ways to make it cheaper and we did not do that.  The bottom base line on medical is a system where everyone makes their own individual decisions about medical care and pay for it with their own money.  That is the way it worked for thousands of years.  The farther away from that simple model, the more medical care is going to cost and that is Obamacare.

We all know that you can drive down to Mexico and get dental and medical services cheaper than here in the USA.  The same is true for India.  For most serious medical procedures, you can pay the air fare and still come out ahead.  I stayed at the home of the minster of health of Punjab India a few years ago and know this first hand.  You can go into any drug store in India and get a scan to find the sex of your expected baby for less than $10.  Here in the USA, it is going to cost several hundred dollars.  That is just an example and we are not doing anything about it.  In most countries of South America, you don't need a perscription before you buy needed drugs.  Here in the USA it will cost you more for the doctor to write the perscription and it costs for the drugs.  If you watch TV, you will see all the advertisements by Lawyers to save you from bad doctors.  Based on how much money the lawyers extort out of the system, you would think that we have the worst doctors in the world when, in fact, we have most of the best.

Getting a little long.  Wake up!!