Duty Interview On CNN

 I just watched an interview on CNN about the Duty on China.  It inspired me to write this blog.

The interviewer was talking to a furniture store owner and was asking very simple questions about the impact of the Trump Duties on his business.  At this point it sounded very normal, but it started to get biased a little later.  The furniture story owner started answering about the fact that many of the traditional US furniture manufacturers from the Carolinas had gone out of business and could not, thus supply him with furniture now.  The interviewer then tried to make a big deal of this point, without commenting that the Duty may be what is needed to revie the lost jobs in the Carolinas.  It got worse.

A key point, in my opinion, was when the interviewer failed to ask about how he was selling furniture to those who had been laid off from the furniture factories.  It seemed that the total focus of the interview was on cheap furniture made in China, not the ability of US workers to buy the furniture if they were out  of work.  There was no mention of where the US citizens got the money to buy the furniture from China.  I think we all know that the furniture was being purchased on "credit" in the form of National Debit" that is at record levels and will have to be paid back by our children.

My basic concern is why don't people look ahead more than a single move to see and understand the impact of stopping the trillion dollar screw job that most countries have been doing to us for years.

Import Duties

 Right now Trump is proposing all kinds of duties that he hopes will help our enonomy long term. In this blog I will give you a different slant on why that may work.

If you recall, back in the mid 1930's, the USA was in a very serious depression.  How did we get out of that?   I think the biggest reason is due to WWII.  How can that be, you may ask.  Europe started purchasing all kinds of things from the US to fight the war.  Here we took all kinds of people who were out of work of work and drafted them into the army.  We also spent more money than we had, buying materials for war.  That pulled the US out of the depression.

After the war Europe was totally damaged while the US was not damaged, but full of factories that could produce things that Europe needed to buy.  The US had the best ana latest equipment and tools to produce things, and we did.  We were the biggest exporter in the world at the end of WWII and we remained that way for many years.  Many people here in the US thought our successes was only the result of our skill and hard work.  Many thought we were smasrter than the rest of the world.

What we did not understand or appreciate was the fact that both Europe and Japan had to rebuild their economies. At the time it was clear to all that the US had the biggest economy, but much of it was dated. Places like Europe and Japan retooled their economies with, at the time, was the most modern tools and equipment.  It took a while to do that, so the net impact was not apparent until years latter.  I would say that it was in about the 1970's or 1980's that they started to have their impact on the world's economy.  The us economy was the largest, but its growth started to slow.

What the US economy started to do was to look around the world for cheaper labor to make many products.  That worked for a while, while the US lived off our rich resources and did a little borrowing and thus spending more than we actually had. We had a good credit rating so we could borrow and spend today forgetting that our children would have to pay it back.  The impact of all of this was to cause the closing down of many plants and factories here in the US.  Now, we are starting to see the error in our ways.

About the 1980's we started to see our error and we reacted by shifting to high tech.  I lived in Santa Clara valley and people from Wall Street started calling it Silicone Valley.  I always resented that name. For a time things worked out.  There  was a fload of tech people into Santa Clara valley and most of the rest of the US was envious. About the time things started to roll, people realized that they could ship the high tech to low priced labor areas like China and still make money even if it would only last a few years.

Given that high tech was the wealth of the future, the US expanded their brain drain from the rest of the world, but there was a leak in the dyke and many hard working low labor countries started getting on the band wagon.  Now there was a shift to home grown tech and that meant better and better schools and more focus on technology.  How did the US do in this last chapter?  Not well.  We now rank 35th in the world in quality of our work force (students) while we spend the most.  Isn't it efficiency that drives competitiveness? If that is the case, the US is dead last.  Focus on duties does not address future does it?

If the US people and our education system does not get its act together and fast, we are dead and our quality of life will continue to go down.  Our wealth of natural resources will not be enough if we do not control the population growth of the US and it does not look like we have the stomach to do either.The most significant factor ln our low score in education is the out of wedlock births.  We are also dead last on this factor and it is directly related to education.  Throw in grade inflation and our shift away form the hard stuff, like technology and you have the perfect storm.  We may actually be the walking dead and we don/t know it.

Free Body and Duties

 Most people when they look at duties only look a very short distance ahead.  I will look farther ahead in this blog.

There is an important principle used in engineering called "the free body diagram".  It has application far beyond engineering.  The point of the concept is to draw a circle around the idea and account for all flows into and out of that circle.  This assures that no factor is left out.  Most people do not do this and often leave out factors that have a significant impact on the item that they are basing their opinions on.

Here is how it applies to the duties that Trump is proposing to put on cars imported into the USA. Most of what I see and hear on the news is that cars are going to increase in price and people are not going to afford to buy cars.  Here is what is going to happen when you apply the free body concept.  It is true that imported cars are going to cost more, but.  Some thing else that is also going to happen is that taxes or duties are going to be collected that approximately equal the car's price increase.  This means that the same people who pay for those imported cars will "not" have to pay as much in regular taxes, 

 The other thing is that people who are now out of work are going to get jobs making cars here in the USA. The USA will be able to utilize the natural resources that we have here in the USA, like coal and iron ore.  The people who get new jobs will spend their new money supporting businesses.

I think that you can see there are many ways that the USA will gain from duties.  Just stopping countries from screwing us is a benefit too.   Currently we are buying foreign cars on credit,   That is demonstrated by the fact that the USA has such a large deficit or borrowed money that our kids are going to have to pay back, if we do not go bankrupt before that. The duties mean that USA citizen have a way to be more productive, while those countries who have been screwing USA citizens are going to end up less productive!

 

How About Sugar?

 The story of sugar is very interesting as is what the USA has done with our sugar.

I think that sugar as we know it was introduced to Europe about 400 years ago, about the time that Columbus discovered what is now the USA.  Before that if people wanted something sweet, they used honey.  If you notice most Chinese cooking calls for honey, not sugar.  It was not until Columbus discovered America did Europe discovered that they could get sugar from the New World from sugar cane.  It was their desire for sugar that they started importing Blacks from Africa to work in the sugar cane fields.  Only a small percentage of Blacks were imported into what is now the USA and it was for the sugar cane, not cotton.

From 1492 to 1881, the Europeans controlled what is now the USA.  If you can do 4th grade math, that works out to nearly 400 years.  I think that it was about 1730 that the British controlled the growing of sugar cane and thus sugar in North America and wanted to protect their monopoly and passed a duty or embargo on sugar.  When the colonist took over and formed the USA in 1781, it was only a few years before they also passed a duty or embargo on sugar.  That meant that the colonists had to pay more for their sugar to protect farmers who could not compete against farmers of the world.  I think the date was about 1804 that all this happened and nothing has changed since.

The sugar cane farmers from the East coast found that they could make more money growing cotton and they shifted their Black slaves from harvesting sugar cane to cotton.  It was also about 1804 that the USA passed a law against importing Black slaves.  That means the USA only imported Black slaves for just over 10 years.  Some one figured out that it was possible to make sugar from sugar beets, but it cost more than from sugar cane that farmers outside the USA were able to grow.  That was not a problem for USA farmers, because Washington DC passed their embargo against the importation of sugar.  To give you an idea of how big the impact on USA citizens is, the world price for sugar is 20 cents a pound while it costs three times or 60 cents a pound in the USA.

Some where along the way the corn farmers in the USA figured out that they could make a near equivalent, high fructose corn syrup for just less than 60 cent a pound, but it took more of it to get the equivalent sweetness of sugar.  Now, 40% of the USA corn crop goes for making HFCS that we all have been eating for years.  Notice that only the USA eats HFCS, because the rest of the world can buy sugar for much less.

I am not going to get into the corn that goes into ethanol for your car, but only want to point out how stupid we are in the USA.  At most gas stations, you can buy gas that does not have any ethanol.  Why is that when many people want to save the world from global warming.  If you have a chainsaw or a lawn mower, it is recommended that you "not" use gas with ethanol in it.  Why do you think that is?

So far Trump seems to be doing what 80% or 90% want, so how long before he gets onto "sugar"?  My guess is that it will be before he leaves office.  The screw job has been on the USA people for over 200 years with the sugar embargo and it is time to expose the fraud and clean up the situation.  I just thought that my audience needed to know the facts on sugar.  Maybe you will tell your friends.

 

DOGE Teeter Tauter

 I don't know if you look at eliminating Government workers the same way I do or not, so I am going to go a little deeper in to the impact of what DOGE is doing in this blog.

Here is how I look at it.  Just imagine a teeter tauter where we take one Government employee off one end.  It not only impacts that side of the teeter tauter if we put that same person back on the other side?  It turns out to be "double:.  We are talking about taking a person who is eating the out put of a real worker on the other side. but what if we put that same government worker to work in the private economy producing some thing?  Isn't it clear that we are talking about a double impact.

Even our GNP figure is a phony number.  It is made up of what is  produced by the private sector, but on the companies and workers who are being paid with your tax money.  When the government spends money that they do not have to give incentives for all kinds of green stuff, that is not real GNP.  It may make the phony GNP number go up, but it is not real GNP.  Are you starting to get the message?

Tell your friends this simple fact so that they can get their eyes open on the very critical factor.  If we let our government keep doing this, it can only end one way and that is the bankruptcy of the USA,  I do not think anyone really wants that.

Engineering Degrees

 I was checking thru AI what percentage of degrees are granted in the USA v China and I was very surprised to find out that in the USA 6% of our degrees earned are Engineering while in China the number is 33%.

You have to ask why us taxpayers are supporting our colleges, university and student loans with our tax money when our support needs to focus more on Engineering and Technology?  What is wrong with us for allowing this?

Urbanization

 I did some research on "urbanization" and found that it is highly correlated with Democratic states.  I will explore this further in the following blog.

I was surprised that California is the "most" urbanized state.  Further, I feel that is the reason that California is so liberal and Democratic.  I thought that next door Nevada, since it was so aparly populated that it had a low rate of urbanization, but I was wrong.  Only a very small percentage of the population lives in small towns or out in the desert, most live in the larger cities.

Even New York is just behind California in terms of urbanization.  West Virginia is actually one of the lowest in terms of urbanization. Montana actually has a high rate of urbanization than many states like Missouri.  You can look this stuff on the internet and you will see what I am talking about.  The bottom line is to understand why states with high rates of urbanization tend to be liberal or Democratic.

One state that we should all be watching is Florida which has one of the highest rate of urbanization, but is still conservative and Republican.  I am going to end this blog and do some more research on the urbanization rate so that I can better understand the impact of the factor, 

Error

 I think you all know that we make"errors" all the time when we want to make the right decision or the exactly right answer.  In school you take tests that are a choice between "right" and "wrong".  We need a strategy about "errors"  This blog will show you a strategy.

We all have to admit that we make errors all the time, so the big question we should be thinking about is "Which side of the decision is it best to error on?" Did you ever think about that?  I first started thinking about the subject when I was in high school.  I was into deer hunting and in California we had to make some very long shots.  Back in those days, we did not have any laser range finders, so we had to estimate the range.  Once we had made our estimate, we had to think about how much off it might be.  We also had to think about if it was too short or too long.  If that was not complicated or not, we still had to estimate if it was better to error high or too low with our shot.  My big question for you is, "What decision you would make regarding the height of your shot?  What would you do?

Back when I was in high school, I will tell you what I decided and why.  I decided to aim my rifle at the deer's top of their back.  The reason was that the deer normally looked closer than it really was, plus if my shot went over the deer's back the deer would not be scared off and I might get a second shot.  Now what was your logic?

As it turns out, all of our decisions are subject too errors and we need to think about how we deal with that error.  Perfect in decision making is just not possible even if we try to convince ourselves that it is. How about a sex change because you are 12 years old and you think you are mentally the opposite sec? Now you have to make a decision on how you are going to deal with your mental concern,  It is common knowledge that young people go thru a major hormone change between about 12 and 21.  This impacts all kinds of things in your body and mind that you have never experienced before.  That means it is a totally "new" are for the individual.  Now, how do you deal with the error that any decision contains?

You have to think about which side of the decision is it the most wise to error on?  Those are (1) Decide on making the decision for a sex change "now" that is irreversible. (2) Wait for more information and hormone impact on your mind and body and make the decision later.  Notice if you take option (1)  that you can never take option (2), but it you take option (2) later you have the option of picking option (1). Isn't it clear that selecting option (2) is the right option?

You can apply this concept to most all decision just like I applied it to deer hunting when I was a teenager.

Complaint

 I do not often voice a complaint, but this time I have had it.  I watch TV and the News as well as a few talk shows and all seem to omit what I feel is their most serious problems.  You have to guess what my beef is.

We all face the same problems each day, but we don't seem to know what it is. The first point is the "Objective".  Think about it?  When you and your wife go out to dinner, what was your "Objective"?  You must have had one.  What about this?  Your objective is to enjoy and evening out, eating a good meal and not having to cook at home.  Seems simple doesn't it? Just like Sir Issac Newton, before you do anything, you first need an "Objective".  With me so far?

Now, you use that "Objective" to guide you to making the best decision, and how do you do that?  You and your wife come together with a list of "Alternatives".  You might not write down that list, but you have as many places to eat on this list as possible. The actual decision is when you pick one of the places on that list.  It might be a  place that you have eaten before or it might be an experiment.  Later, you might talk to a friend who tells you about a great place that was not on your list. This is key factor in that your list was not complete.  One of the biggest errors in decision making is the omission of some alternate on your list.  Why is it that the people on TV never talk about "Alternatives".  They just jump into a decision by only considering a single alternate.

The final point is to explain how they "Evaluated" the alternative they selected.  They never explain "Why" they picked the alternative they did.  Wouldn't you like to know that?  If one of our politicians was really honest with us, wouldn't they try to explain why they chose this or that alternative out of the many possible? The least they could do would be to share their list of alternatives with us.  

I am going to explore just one example and that is the "Green Movement" that has plagued the USA and caused Trump to be elected for the second time.  Do you have a problem with the "Objective" of saving the human race or maintaining the current quality of life for us?  I don't, but I do with their list of alternatives and the way they have selected alternatives off their list.  I am not going to go into any more detail, I would expect that, if you understand the above, you would see where many of our politicians went wrong.  What alternatives did they leave off the list and why didn't they select better alternatives?  That is your home work.