Kevin Williamson is obviously short on the empathy. He’s also completely clueless. What he and the rest of the Washington crowd fail to understand is that the entire country may, more or less be Garbutt.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434100/white-working-class-donald
The people in Washington should ask themselves why not only did PA go for Trump but so did CT, by wide margins. Including places such as Norwalk, New Milford and Greenwich which you would think would go more for Kasich as the establishment type.
A look at the map shows something strange. Trump, by ridiculous margins, all over the state. Now let’s look at who the Republican Part mostly consists of here in CT. By and large the Republicans in CT are the party of small business and educated workers, along with some country club types like Mr. Foley who spend their own money on campaigns. This is a party that is very sensitive to economic conditions. And what actions the Party in Washington is likely to do to change things. If nothing else this is a clear vote of no confidence in the party leadership. It’s also the inevitable consequence of the Party’s failures.
Those failures come from a distinct lack of vision on the part of the Party leadership. They don’t seem to be able to grasp the consequences of what’s happening to the country and why. It’s become all too easy to just say that crap happens and ignore why all that crap is happening at the same time and who the crap is dumping on.
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/missing-the-point/
It’s all too easy to get into intellectual arguments in the halls of the think tanks in DC and produce interesting policy papers that don’t say very much, but the real world has been hammered by a combination of stupid Keynesian thinking, socialist style planning, outright cronyism and malinvestment.
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/why-keynesian-stimulus-doesnt-work/
Frankly that’s something that ‘s become all too obvious to people all over the country. The thing is that the people in charge don’t seem to see what’s happening. Maybe Rush can tell them.
The 160,000 new jobs supposedly created in April is the fewest announced created jobs in seven months. The labor force participation rate plummeted yet again. The number of Americans not working is 94.04 million. I don’t know what the adult population of the country is. I guess 210, 220 million. Forty percent of them are not working. You cannot have economic growth with that. You can’t have economic growth, and you can’t have rising productivity.
Without rising productivity, you can’t have rising wages, increased salaries. You just can’t have it. Ninety-four million Americans! Somebody has to buy their food. Somebody has to pay for them to eat. Somebody has to pay for them to get in their cars. Somebody has to pay for them to use their cell phones. Somebody has to pay for when they get sick. Speaking of when you get sick, the government has purloined one-sixth of the US economy in the terms of Obamacare. So not only is the government spending more and choking more, it is making the economy where the American dream languishes, smaller…
Every primary — Republican, Democrat — the most important issue is the economy, ’cause nobody is getting ahead, and nobody feels confident that the pieces are in place to get ahead. Where’s the anger over that? Where’s the panic about that? Where’s the all-is-lost attitude about that? Where has it been for the 7-1/2 years? “JCPenney ‘Taking Emergency Measures to Stay Afloat.'” I didn’t click the link. It’s just another American corporation in trouble for all kinds of reasons that you can trace back to, in part, the United States government. Not every business would be doing great.
Some of them are run by people that don’t know what they’re doing. Some have made mistakes. I don’t try to lay it all off on the government. But the government’s become one of the biggest impediments to corporate success because of crony capitalism. The government’s sidling up and making deals with certain CEOs, certain industries, and certain businesses. The biggest result of that is a company in order to grow no longer has to innovate. A company doesn’t have to come up with a better product. Company doesn’t have to come up with a better service ’cause the government’s got their back.
And when the government’s got their back, the government doesn’t have the backs of their competitors. Competitors take it in the shorts, and the corporation CEO that sidled up to Obama — you crony socialism or capitalism or what you want — they’re protected. But the main thing is they don’t have to defeat their competitors in order to grow. The government’s taken care that. They don’t have to innovate. They don’t have to come up with better products. They don’t have to produce better services and people. So when you see “JCPenney ‘Taking Emergency Measures to Stay Afloat…'”
I doubt that Obama has any special arrangement with JCPenney — and then, of course, one of the big headlines here: “Record Americans Renounce Citizenship.” That’s something… I don’t know what the numbers are. I didn’t click on the link again. All I know is this is not the kind of new stories that you saw every day 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 25 years ago. But you do see it in the latest last five to eight years. You see a lot of it. Americans are renouncing their citizenship. So that’s the real world. That’s what’s happening now. On the Democrat side, we got Hillary Rodham Clinton, a woman who has lied to people about the way she got her name….
Here’s what JCPenney is doing. They’re reducing both full- and part-time employees. They’re reducing their hours, both sides. Those who typically work 25 hours a week are being cut to 10 or 15 hours a week — and, of course, there won’t be any health care benefits. Then we’re gonna turn around, and we’re gonna listen to Obama, Hillary, the Democrats… Well, not Hillary. Not Hillary, and not Bernie. We’re gonna listen to Obama and other Democrats tell us what great recovery we’ve got! “Well, yeah, this economy is just trucking along!”
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/05/06/my_rebuttal_to_obama_s_economic_lies
I’m going to point out that the troubles aren’t just in retail. They reach across just about every industry and every level of income. Things are Going South ins so many ways that people don’t understand even when it’s happening right in front of them. Especially in fundamental industries. When you see news about one steel mill closing it may not seem like a big deal, but when you start looking at ALL of them closing or in distress, followed by Aluminum smelters, lead smelters, copper and just about every other primary industry. The country has become not only the “you didn’t build that” country, it’s become the “we won’t let you build that” country.
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/what-happened-to-us-and-the-american-dream/
The deep state created and enabled by the Democrats and other progressives has reached down to the smallest businesses with it’s ever increasing binding worm of red tape. The consequence has been a steep drop in the number of new businesses being created and an essentially dead economic growth. The more red tape and rules, the harder it is for businesses to even start. Make it harder to employ people and those businesses that do get started never grow.
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/george-mcgovern-learns-why-small-businesses-fail/
That’s good if your goal is to Cloward Piven the country, but not so good if you need money to fund future commitments that you have bet your political future on. Which leads to Steve Den Beste’s rather dismal prognosis.
Obama’s real goal in his presidency was to end the “American Century”. The goal was to reduce the United States from being “the last remaining super power” to being just one nation among many, no more important or influential (or rich!) than any other. His foreign policy has been to damage our allies and build up our enemies, to try to level the playing field, and let the world know they cannot rely on us for anything from now on. His domestic policy has been to weaken our economy so that we are no longer the 600 pound canary in world trade.
And though he hasn’t totally succeeded at this, he’s left behind a huge time bomb that’s going to finish the job in one year or ten or twenty: a $20 trillion national debt.
Debt service is no joke. Right now it’s affordable but only because the Fed is keeping interest rates at 0%. If interest rates return to something like historical norms, say about 5%, the US Government will owe a trillion dollars a year just on debt service, before it does anything else.
That isn’t economically possible on a balanced budget without ridiculous tax hikes beyond even the dreams of the most avaricious socialist, so it means that immense budget deficits will never end, which itself is a cascading failure since increasing the total debt in turn increases each year’s debt service payments. And there will come a time when that is also no longer possible because no one will bid at the T-bill auctions. So the Fed will have to run the printing presses — which in fact they’re already doing, calling it “quantitative easing”.
The Fed has actually been doing some of this for decades. When the board of governors think they need to increase the money supply, the way they do it is to create new money out of thin air, and use it to buy T-bills on the open market. But starting with the Great Recession, the rate at which they’ve been doing this has drastically increased. Part of the reason they did that was that they were trying to prevent Deflation, and they mostly succeeded. But now they can’t stop or even crank back on doing this, and it’s going to backfire eventually.
In the long run what this means is that the US dollar will collapse. The only question is how long it’s going to take. And when it happens, it will complete the job Obama has begun, no matter who is president or which party is in power or what they think their foreign and domestic policy should be. America will suffer runaway inflation, and nothing can prevent it.
http://chizumatic.mee.nu/warm_and_fuzzy_feelings
Steve’s warm and fuzzy feelings notwithstanding, the problem is this. The growth that doesn’t happen means that wealth that’s essential to go forward does not exist. When you are trying to keep above water compound interest is not your friend and unless you keep ahead of it with growth the end is inevitable. The country has already lost a HUGE chunk of growth already.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2014/09/30/americas-missing-wealth/#404444c66777
The post from Captain Capitalism has a very scary chart. If the growth path follows the trend it’s followed during the Obama administration the country will NOT meet the debt and other commitments that it has committed itself to and will go broke, probably quicker than anybody thinks. If growth returns to historical norms the country survives.
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2016/05/who-will-pay-for-everything-when-white.html
One thing I don’t agree with in this post is the division of White, Asian or Black. I think it comes down to the producers and the non producers. If too many producers don’t see any future in it for them, or are unable to do the jobs that they know how to do, or go Galt the entire country is Garbutt forever. Game over, the whole welfare state eats the country and the US become Venezuela. Which makes this election absolutely crucial. I’m sorry, but I cannot, based on twenty five years of exposure to the Clinton and their greedy self centered actions, believe that Mrs. Clinton will do anything that is not in some way able to get her money and power regardless of what happens to the country as a whole. Nor do I see economic growth increasing in yet another Democrat Administration. What I do see in a Clinton administration is more of the same kinds of things that the current Administration is doing. With similar consequences.
I’m also going to add, that the country may not have four more years of the status quo. Right now every minute, every second that growth does not increase is compound time lost and brings the death spiral closer. We need growth and time is running out.
With that in mind I’m going to say this. Whatever you may think of Mr. Trump, It’s unlikely that he would create the corrupt activities and lethal regulation structure that currently exists. So in the end it comes down to this. If Mrs. Clinton is elected, the country is more than likely going into an irreversible death spiral and everybody better stock up on cartridges. If you can live with that on your conscience by all means stay home. If you see that Mr. Johnson has a very good chance of beating both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, then Mr. Johnson is the much better choice. Unfortunately if, as likely, it comes down to Clinton and Trump and you don’t vote for Mr. Trump then what happens in the next four years and after will be your responsibility.
I don’t have kids, but do you really want to give the Democrats and their rent seeking buddies the chance to do THIS or worse to your kids?
Update: A facebook friend put this in the comments.
There is exactly ONE way out of the conflict trap: Grow your economy at a minimum of five percent a year for a minimum of ten years.
The United States economy has not grown like that since before the Great Depression. We’ve forgotten how.
Five percent GDP growth is a harsh and terrifying taskmaster. It requires us to accept and constantly adapt to rapid and accelerating churn and change. In all the economic literature on the subject, we know of only one path there. It is comprised of several parts.
1. A market economy. That means that people have to be able to come together and decide how they arranging to buy and sell goods on their own terms. To do this, they need rules which enforce three things: freedom of entry, freedom of exit, and the free flow of information.
2. Government and the costs of regulatory compliance must be limited to 15 – 18% of the total economy. This includes all levels of government and debt service. This is why representative, federal governments are highly preferable.
3. A functional system of non-violent conflict resolution must exist and people need to be able to predict and have faith in the outcomes. That is, you have to have working courts. Also, before the courts, you need a way for people to talk to each other.
4. A stable currency of predictable value needs to exist. Meaning you need money whose value the people have confidence in so don’t monkey with it.
5. The trade must flow. No, really. It must really flow and that means that good people will be displaced from jobs and that we will have to help them retool with that 15 – 18% of the total economy.
Research I did as an undergraduate showed that civil unrest is an inferior good. As incomes drop, we are likely to consume more of it. Average incomes are not doing happy things in this economy. The Political Class doesn’t recognize this basic fact and is unwilling to do the raw minimum needed to fix it
This last is, I believe, the impetus behind Senator Sanders’ support and the success of the Trump campaign to date.
Does it look like the people in Washington are doing any of this?
For more on the dysfunctional economy click Here or on the tag below.
The Arts Mechanical 
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