What will Democrats do with the U.S. and what should investors do?

by philg

Based on the Georgia Senate races, in which my friends who call themselves “feminist” cheered for the idea of someone identifying as a “woman” losing her important job, it looks as though the Democrats will be in charge of the U.S. (Regarding today’s events at the Capitol, an immigrant friend said “it’s like BLM just with white people.”)

Now that elite insiders are ruling again, what should we do as investors? To answer that question, first we have to try to figure out what the Democrats will do.

Let’s assume the first priority for the Democrats is to stay in power forever. The simplest way for that to happen is by ramping up low-skill immigration, which has been at the rate of more than 1 million low-skill migrants/year for more than 50 years (Pew). A migrant single mom in public housing is not going to vote for a white male Republican empty suit! A 70-year-old chain migrant parent who consumes $40,000/year in Medicare is not going to vote to trim the Federal budget. The procedure for becoming a citizen is not frozen into the Constitution, right? The Democrat-controlled Congress can streamline citizenship into a 1-year web-based process. That will guarantee a ton of new loyal Democrats for the 2022 elections. Ramp up low-skill immigration to 2 million/year to ensure continued power indefinitely.

(How can we be sure that this is the right strategy for Democrats? The Republicans thought it was, which is why they sought to curtail immigration during the dictatorship of the Trumpenfuhrer.)

The American working class will be the biggest losers (Harvard study), paying higher rents and receiving lower wages, with a massive transfer of wealth to upper-income Americans (the transfer was already at $500 billion/year 10 years ago, according to the Harvard eggheads). Life will be good for the rich, who will pay the same prices for Ubers, restaurant meals, etc. that they would pay if they went to some of the world’s poorest countries. The rich will receive higher rents for the urban real estate that they own and pay lower wages to the workers they employ (either directly or through corporations whose shares they own).

Can one trade on this expectation? We can’t short working class people or go long rich people, though.

Similarly, Bigger Government means the biggest enterprises will thrive. Many of the small businesses that accidentally survived 2020 will be destroyed going forward as increased regulation requires companies to “Go Big or Go Home.” But small businesses are not publicly traded, so there is no obvious way to short them.

How about buying a REIT that holds urban apartment houses? My theory for why urban Americans vote for Democrats while rural/suburban Americans vote for Republicans is that Big Government spends most tax dollars in cities: public housing, hospitals, government jobs, etc. In 2016 for example, Donald Trump won only 4 percent of votes in Washington, D.C., the ultimate example of a city that gets richer when government expands. The low-skill migrants will migrate primarily to cities where taxpayers will fund their housing for the next 100+ years (“means-tested” public housing programs of various kinds, not “welfare” when you pay $125/month, including utilities, for a 3BR in Manhattan or San Francisco!). Increased demand and the river of federal cash will drive up rents even for apartments not occupied by migrants.

Bigger Government is good for cronies. Here in Maskachusetts, for example, we are floated on a tide of federal cash subsidizing Big Pharma Big Higher Ed, and Big Health Care. (Where does the money come from? Medicare/Medicaid and tax subsidies for health insurance, $66 billion for the federal Department of Education, most of which ends up subsidizing student loans and grants) We can’t buy stock in universities or hospitals, though, as they are nominally non-profit. How about the companies that give money personally to Democrats, just before and just after they are in office? “Biden’s treasury secretary pick Janet Yellen earned more than $7 MILLION in speaking fees in 2 years from financial firms and tech giants including Goldman Sachs and Google” (Daily Mail) gives some insight into which publicly traded companies might look forward to favorable treatment.

(A neighbor’s house, photographed from the helicopter by my friend Tony, part of my poorly received #InThisTogether series on Facebook:

Note the solar panels that will be funded by middle-class taxpayers in Maskachusetts.)

One of the best features of the U.S., from the point of view of folks in New York, California, and other high-tax states, was that residents of lower-income lower-tax states had to subsidize rich Democrats in higher-tax states via the deductibility of state and local taxes. This program was cruelly ended for 2018 with the Trump tax law. It seems reasonable to expect that one of the first things a Democrat-controlled Congress will do is restore unlimited deductibility for state and local taxes. How to trade based on that expectation, though? Buy the Case-Shiller Index for houses in New York and San Francisco and short the South Florida sub-index? A house in New York should have a higher value if property tax and personal income tax associated with living in that house become deductible once more.

The Democrats are the party of the American rich. From the NYT:

Joe Biden has outraised President Trump on the strength of some of the wealthiest and most educated ZIP codes in the United States, … In ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Mr. Biden smashed Mr. Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million — accounting for almost his entire financial edge.

(see also “Biden is vastly outspending Trump in the final week of the 2020 race” and “Trump spent about half of what Clinton did on his way to the presidency”)

If the Democrats are funded by the rich, presumably the rich will be getting much richer in the coming years under Democratic rule. We can’t short the middle class and buy the rich. But maybe we can buy companies that make the things that the rich want. Let’s consider American cities. They’re on track to have Chinese levels of population density (with all of the new low-skill migrants) combined with Nigerian levels of infrastructure quality. Rich people will be happy to pay to escape these crowded virus breeding grounds. We already saw this to some extent in 2020. Luxury oceanfront real estate boomed. My friend who runs a Gulfstream charter operation had his best year ever. Could we trade on this expectation by purchasing shares in General Dynamics, Gulfstream’s parent company, and in luxury hotel chains?

How about Bitcoin? I personally think that Democrats’ stress on LGBTQIA+ issues is a way of delivering social justice without having to reduce personal spending. What if I’m wrong as usual, though, and President Harris does raise tax rates dramatically? We should expect a big rise in Bitcoin (but maybe this is already priced in via the recent lift? BTC is 3X what it was in October) as Americans try to move money offshore and/or out of reach of the IRS. (I personally know a fair number of folks who have big unrealized gains in BTC that are inherently hidden from government and financial institutions.)

One of my savvier friends (he doubled his wealth during coronashutdown, for example, by betting (with public equities) that Americans would be champions at cowering in place)):

If you hold cash, it’s about 3% value loss per year, accounting for inflation. I want to take out a huge mortgage to lock in a 2.5% 30 year rate. No way inflation stays below 3%.

Maybe this will be an even better strategy if Democrats lift limits on mortgage interest deductibility, which is a question of basic fairness. The current mortgage interest deduction limit is $750,000, which is a 1,200 square-foot apartment in a righteous area and a 4,000 square-foot single-family house among the Deplorables.

How about a simpler strategy of investing in Asia and selling off stocks that are mostly dependent on the U.S. economy. Kids in China spend 2020 in school; kids in the U.S. spent 2020 on Xbox and will probably stick with Xbox/Netflix for 2021. If education drives wealth, we have to expect Asia to perform better than the U.S.

Very loosely related… a 2008 photo of one of the whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium, funded by Trump supporter and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus.

Readers: What are your best ideas to profit from the return to rule by elites?

Related:

  • Programs to raise female wages will secure a voting majority for Democrats? quotes the Economist: “unmarried women are spectacularly loyal to the Democrats … The ‘marriage gap’ dwarfs the sex gap, by which women as a whole have long favoured Democrats.” (if women can earn a lot in the labor market they won’t bother getting married; another way Democrats can benefit is by making divorce lawsuits more lucrative; if more women are divorced that means more votes for Democrats, but this depends on state-by-state initiatives)

50 thoughts on “What will Democrats do with the U.S. and what should investors do?”

  1. With 401k contributions now guaranteed to be taxed as regular income, more people are going to get married to qualify for roth 401k’s or at least self incorporate. The american people are sick of W2 employees stealing from the rich gootube stars.

    The lion kingdom’s biggest memory of the last democrat controlled government was the sequestration of 2013 & the beginning of routine government shutdowns. They were actually pretty conservative in spending, though transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has always been ongoing.

  3. Can you remind me of the ways (any ways) Republicans are in favor of smaller government? I seem to have forgotten.

  4. I’ll revisit this topic in a month or so, because you’ve done a very good introductory job, but the first thing the Democrats are going to do, judging from the abhorrent members of my Facebook feed, is to crush the Deplorables into paste.

    • Can you say more about what they say about deplorables and how they will crush them? I left the US this year and I am just in shock. I regularly read this blog to stay as informed as I can. Philip is so great at keeping me informed on the hypocrisy of the left. I used to be righteous but saw the error of my ways.

    • @Jamie:

      Sure. One Abhorrent statement from a guy who is a corporate lawyer at a big law firm in a very large American city:

      “Every single one of these people should be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Especially the would be fascist dictator who currently occupies the Oval Office. All of these people are treasonous fascists who are attempting to interfere with the democracy of our country. This is beyond disgraceful and disgusting. Words fail me right now. There are none strong enough. If you support this, you support fascism, plain and simple. If you disagree with this, please DON’T comment. Please, please, PLEASE just unfriend me. If you support this, no matter what common bond we have shared in the past, I have no respect for you. I can’t. I am done being even keeled about this. There is a BIG difference between meaningful political discourse and expressing your unwavering support for a fascist dictatorship.”

      That’s the lawyer’s statement – prosecute everyone to the fullest extent of the law. No more “even keel.” He probably didn’t want to say more than that, but there’s going to be a lot more, I’m sure.

    • @Jamie: Just as an aside, I predicted more than a month ago that the Republicans would lose both Senate runoffs races in Georgia. I was right.

    • @Ivan: Here on Philg’s blog I thought the Republicans would hold the Senate 51-49 – at least at the beginning. I was actually wrong about the balance in the House, and I’m still surprised by Collins’ win in Maine. I thought at the time it was flat *impossible* for the Republicans to lose *both* runoffs in Georgia, but privately, to other people, my opinion changed after November 3. It was increasingly clear to me that the Quantity Theory of Insanity was going to claim more people in Georgia and stop them from voting than I had initially forecast. After Trump started attacking and threatening Kemp and Raffensperger and it became clear he was going to continue that unabated, I knew the prospects were going down the drain.

    • @Ivan: And that doesn’t require any special insight or psychological hocus-pocus, either. If you’re a member of the devoted MAGA constituency and for two months you hear the President and his crazy and loosely-affiliated crew of lawyers telling you that the elections are rigged and your vote won’t matter, there are a sizeable percentage of people who will take that to heart and won’t have the the motivation to get out of bed and go to the polls, because you think your vote is doomed. And that’s pretty much what happened. The Republican turnout sucked, the Democrats were super-energized, and both (R) candidates lost – despite their inherent advantages – and a ton of money. You can’t “pre-demoralize” your voters and expect to have a big party.

    • Alex:

      While your points about demoralized conservative voters may be true, in my opinion, they are minor points. Progressives are clear and unambiguous winners in the battle for the hearts and minds of the majority of voters and will remain so for the foreseeable future barring strong systemic shocks like the death of the Sun. Georgia election results might have turned out differently, but that would have been just a minor annoyance in the inexorable march of “the spectre of communism”.

      I just do not see any plausible scenario under which the future voters going through the educational system captured by progressives in arguably every state in this country, from the primary school to universities (especially), would turn out different from what they are now. So, demography is destiny: it is easy to to see by looking at young people voting record. E.g.:

      https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/election-week-2020

    • Ivan: I mostly agree with you. Where I live a family of four can be in taxpayer-subsidized housing up to an income level of $130,000 per year. The 2020 income limit for getting taxpayer-subsidized health insurance was $104,808 per year (see https://www.mass.gov/doc/2020-masshealth-income-standards-and-federal-poverty-guidelines-0/download ). When everything is means-tested, nearly everyone is a ward of the state. If you’re a ward of the state you’d be irrational not to vote for Democrats promising to take care of you better.

      (And, of course, even without means-tested welfare programs, the U.S. already has a large percentage of people who depend on government checks: government workers, government contractors, university employees, health care workers, pharma industry workers, etc.)

    • @Ivan: I’m trying to be upbeat! I know all the rest, also, and the trendlines are all in the wrong direction. From the perspective of Progressives, this is a New Dawn, their new Shining City on the Hill. Please don’t ask me to tell you what I actually think about it, in vivid terms, it’s dismal, and it’s only of respect for decorum on Philg’s blog that I don’t say what I really think, some of the time. Believe you me, you don’t have to convince me: I knew it 20 years ago, probably more like 30 now.

    • Alex: The U.S. has survived these transitions before. FDR expanded Americans’ concept of what the government could and should do for them in the 1930s. Lyndon Johnson brought in the Great Society (Medicare, Medicaid, dozens of new welfare programs) in the 1960s. Now maybe Biden and Harris will re-make the U.S. in the image of France, with a larger role for government and more decisions made centrally (but with a lot less competence, since France has amazing people going into government). Perhaps what isn’t survivable is immigration, but that damage was already done (60+ million mostly low-skill migrants over the past 50+ years). Americans already don’t share any common culture or values. We wouldn’t think it possible to build a cohesive society out of all of the people in the pre-COVID Frankfurt Airport, would we? Everyone in the terminal at any given time does have a common goal of traveling, but nothing else in common. Same deal now in the U.S. People resident in the U.S. have a common goal of making money and consuming like crazy, but otherwise it is tough to think of something that nearly every “American” agrees with. (Which is why so many Facebook posts need the suffix “Unfriend me if you don’t agree!”)

    • @Ivan: We’ve seen it all before, Ivan, just not at this scale. And there’s no place else to go. Recently I’ve developed a close relationship with mortality and I can tell you that I can’t decide what’s “better.” All of this is said with a profound appreciation of what just happened.

    • @Ivan: I’m in favor of removing Trump from office tomorrow, enough damage has been done by this man and his family. Enough is enough.

    • Alex: You can still go to the free state of South Dakota! Even Florida is relatively free, at least at the state level (plenty of Shutdown Karens in local governments so that children are denied education, though). Maybe you’d feel better if you could spend some time in an environment free of “In this house we believe…” signs and free of people who wear masks in their cars when driving alone!

    • Alex: I’m sorry to hear that, but I hope that you can find a way to escape. Maybe a driving/camping trip? I will pay for the tent! We can do a GoFundMe here for the rest of the gear.

    • Philg – What does the skill of immigrants have to do with anything? American’s didn’t mind importing “low skill” immigrants when their skin was black or yellow, and there was cotton to be picked or railways to be built. Common culture or values wasn’t an issue then because the price was right. Further, what does the skill of one generation have to do with the next? By referencing “50+ years” of immigration, you seem to suggest that the entire lineage of one low skill immigrant is doomed to be low skill because they aren’t capable of producing high skilled offspring. That could be construed as racist. Skill is also not the only metric of productivity or virtue. Strong work ethic, good morals, good health, diversity are a few examples of other worthy attributes members of society might poses and contribute. Your sentiment about common values or cultures seems revisionist. The entire country is comprised of disparate immigrants, after perhaps the few few boats unloaded. Just because the initial majority of American immigrants all had the same color skin doesn’t mean they shared any common values, or anything else.

    • Senorpablo: Except for the imported slaves, regarding whom there seems to be agreement today that there was never a successful cultural integration with whites (though of course it is the fault of the whites! See the 2020 mostly peaceful BLM protests, for example), immigrants to the U.S. up through the 1960s were overwhelmingly from Europe. So they actually did share a common culture and value system.

      Do low-skill low-income people have low-skill low-income children? This book by a UC Davis econ professor says that lack of success tends to persist down through multiple generations: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/01/15/son-also-rises/

    • The situation is entirely different now because of the welfare system. To quote Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” (https://www.heritage.org/immigration/commentary/look-milton-open-borders-and-the-welfare-state)

      Without a welfare system, natural selection is in full force. Individuals and families who failed to integrate with society or failed to produce children that were capable of supporting themselves via strong work ethics, etc. as you note simply died off. Being an immigrant in the early U.S. was a tough prospect that required true grit to survive, but offered an opportunity to rise above one’s station in a way that was impossible in most the rest of the world.

      Nowadays the forces behind immigration are entirely different. One does not need to integrate and work hard in order to survive. In fact, working too hard will get you kicked out of your means tested housing, so better not to. No need to integrate into society when you can play Xbox and watch Netflix all day. The best way for the modern low-skill immigrant to improve their station in life is no longer to get an education, but rather to vote Democrat so that their welfare entitlement (and thus their station in life) is improved.

    • YayForImmigrants: Under 19th century immigration, I think Americans had to sponsor immigrants. So if the immigrant didn’t work, the sponsor would have to provide housing, food, health care, etc. (no Obamaphone in those days!) Some immigrants who didn’t thrive in the new environment of the New World would go back to Europe.

      On the “working too hard” point, I wrote about that in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/11/06/fast-food-economics-in-massachusetts-higher-minimum-wage-leads-to-a-shorter-work-week-not-fewer-people-on-welfare/ ; it turns out that low-income people are not as dumb as rich say-gooders imagine!

    • @philg, “@YayForImmigrants: Under 19th century immigration, I think Americans had to sponsor immigrants. So if the immigrant didn’t work, the sponsor would have to provide housing, food, health care, etc …”

      As a legal immigrant myself, back in 1981, this was the case. You would not get a visa to immigrate to the USA without an affidavit of support [1] which is still required today but is never enforced. When my father lost his job, we got zero help from the government, we had to fall back on savings to make ends meet. Because of this, we had to work hard and count our money to make sure it is well spent.

      Furthermore, even when my father was working but not making enough, we could not apply for free food at our public high school for me and my brother. We were not qualified because we were still on temporary green card and not US citizen yet. Imagine the outcry you would get today if an illegal immigrant is rejected free food at a public high school.

      [1] https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-processes-and-procedures/affidavit-of-support

    • Philg – yeah, sure. The Europeans all get along so well the were involved in endless wars, including two world wars, civil wars within the same countries, and many ended up fleeing to America because the religions were so compatible and tolerant.

    • SenorP: How do we know that Europeans fought because of different value systems? Maybe they fought because resources were scarce due to overpopulation. Once they showed up in the U.S. and had vast land and resources (all stolen from Native Americans, of course), there was no longer a reason to fight. (At the same time, look at the U.S. As land and resources get reduced on a per-person basis (due to population growth), Americans fight more and become more resentful of those with fancy beach houses.)

    • Philg – I think it’s safe to say that many of the European wars were precisely over values–you have something of value and we want it. Seriously though, I expect a great deal of them were religious in nature, which again, demonstrates a difference in values. The list of wars is exhaustive though. As for a lack of natural resources in this country causing income disparity, that seems like revisionist economics. Hasn’t most of the land, and therefore resources, been spoken for in this country for a century? Even if not, republicans insist on undoing all the hard fought economic lessons we’ve learning from the industrial revolution and great depression. Through decades of tax cuts, deregulation and union busting, we’re slowly working our way back towards a system where only a few at the top benefit despite constant increases in productivity. Income disparity is accelerating and there’s no sign of that changing now that the GOP has perfected it’s manipulation of a majority of the population, by lashing themselves to single issue voters causes, to vote against their own economic interests. Even if we had more resources to be owned, our economy is a runaway train where all the profits would be soaked up by the top 1%.

    • Senorpablo,
      Are you sure it is anti-unionization and not the connected right people concentrating and reaping benefits of globalization that drives comparative income down? How do you imagine trade unions is start-up and STEM-intensive industries? Have you tried applying for union jobs in already unionized company? Hint: technical part of your interview does not matter but where your dad worked and socialized does.
      If taxation added wealth to those at around 2 standard deviations around mean income we would observe a phenomenon of people leaving Florida to New York, not the other way around.
      Under Trump real work income grew for first time in decades. Not as fast as I would like seeing it grow but it did.

  5. You can bet red, black, or green. The house will win if you play long enough.

    That’s the question, right?

    Les jeux sont fait!

  6. “…The American working class will be the biggest losers (Harvard study), paying higher rents and receiving lower wages, with a massive transfer of wealth to upper-income Americans…”

    I don’t know what fantasy world you’ve been living in for the last four years, but this is exactly what the Republicans have done…it’s what they’ve always done.

  7. Phil, no mention of the first thing the Democrats will do? Universal Masking and Lockdowns!

    • Paul: Well, the masking will no impact in most states, e.g., here in Maskachusetts where we’ve been universally masked since April (cities) and May (everywhere else). (By wearing masks and shutting down we’ve managed to keep the COVID-19-tagged death rate to a number that would be the highest in the world if we were our own country.)

      The shutdown/lockdown is kind of covered in the original post. Investing in Asia or in multinational companies (e.g., Apple) that do a lot of business in Asia would be one way of dealing with the fact that the U.S. will lock itself into mental, educational, and occupational stagnation.

    • Russil: You can go over to the UK and tell them how rich they could be by resuming low-skill immigration and how big a boost wages for low-skilled work would get with a flood of additional supply. The first thing that the UK did when freed from the EU was to shut it down. They’re looking right now for PhDs in STEM: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uks-points-based-immigration-system-policy-statement/the-uks-points-based-immigration-system-policy-statement

      (Separately, since I know you’re in Canada, if Canada could get rich via low-skill immigration, why doesn’t Canada offer to take caravans of Hondurans from the U.S. southern border into Vancouver and Toronto? I am sure that the caravans of asylum-seekers would be delighted to live in Canada rather than the U.S.! I personally offered to pay for the airfare and/or plane charter: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/04/30/can-the-refugee-caravan-at-the-u-s-border-simply-fly-up-to-canada/ ; also see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/11/10/if-the-migrant-caravan-demands-buses-why-not-give-them-plane-tickets-to-canada/)

      Is Democracy supposed to guarantee a peaceful transition? I don’t see why it would. Democracy is all about the majority oppressing one or more minorities, especially once you toss out any written constitution #BecauseCovid.

    • “Is Democracy supposed to guarantee a peaceful transition? I don’t see why it would.”

      The biggest advantage of democracy is being able to transfer power without violence. In a non-democratic system, the transfer of power looks a lot more like Game of Thrones.

      “Democracy is all about the majority oppressing one or more minorities, especially once you toss out any written constitution #BecauseCovid.”

      Protection of minorities (e.g. through laws) and the ability to peacefully coexist despite fundamental disagreements (e.g. on religion) is what the “liberal” in “liberal democracy” refers to. Liberalism arose as a way of resolving the 16th-century wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants (neither side being able to exterminate the heretics on the other side). See Joseph Heath, “The Machinery of Government,” Chapter 3.

      Given that conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, and that any new legislation will require the approval of the median Senator (i.e. Joe Manchin), I wouldn’t be too worried about oppression.

  9. A democrat gets elected and the sky is falling because we are being dragged into communism… same story every time. Interesting to me is that it always seems to be Democratic administrations that seem to have to dig us out of the biggest holes!

    In any case, the fairy tale of Republican “small government” and “fiscal responsibility” is getting VERY tiresome. When it becomes more than a strategy to undermine the opposing party, we can have those discussions.

    What I see is two parties that like big government. The only difference is where the money is flowing.

    • @LinePilot, in my opinion, there is one significant difference between the two parties.

      Democrats send a message of false positive hope and that a person’s failures is not of their own doing but of someone’s else. Thus, if I accumulated thousands of $$ in student debt or slack at my work, Democrats will say it is not my fault and will give me handouts. We saw this during the coronafear where they wanted to stop and even forgo rent collections for those who are paying rent. We also saw it when they wanted to forgo with student debt and offer free education, healthcare, etc. to anyone. They do this to get more votes, not to get you out of your miserable life. Phil and others have demonstrated this over and over in this blog. For example, why doesn’t Elizabeth Warren or any well off person with plenty of space at their home or backyard open their homes for those who need it?

    • Right – we all have the same opportunities and if we are not successful it is entirely our own fault… Look, the world is complicated and made up of shades of grey rather than black and white. All the statements that get made about how Democrats drive us to “socialism” apply to Republicans when it comes to “corporate socialism.” I stand by my comment that the difference is only where the money flows. In my mind the issues you raise about forgoing student debt etc. are not any different from the concepts of moral hazard when it comes to corporations.

    • LP: Does “politicians are all the same” make sense in the Age of Coronapanic? There isn’t a perfect correlation with party affiliation, but certainly different governors have reacted differently (see https://wallethub.com/edu/states-coronavirus-restrictions/73818 ). In California it was and is illegal to walk down the street with a friend. In South Dakota, at least from the state law/order level, nearly every freedom that people had in 2019 they continued to have in 2020.

      You could be right regarding money, but there is more to life than money. Humans also care about whether their children can go to school, whether they can walk outside their homes and socialize, whether they can legally operate a business into which they’ve invested 20 years of time, effort, and money, etc.

    • Philg – You keep citing South Dakota as the spiritual sister city to your esteemed covid contrarians, Sweden. Not sure why you constantly crow about it, compared to CA, South Dakota has 2.5x the death rate to date. I guess the residents are as free to die there as they are to not wear a mask or take any other precautions. Maybe some of the folks who took a walk with their friends will infect them so they can be together in the afterlife.

      Also, all of the other things you list that humans supposedly care about besides money, are in the pursuit of money, are they not? Why do you send kids to school or socialize them–so they can make money some day. Operating a business is obvious. It all boils down to money.

      As a side note, extroverts can suffer for a change. Introverts are forced to endure society their entire lives so I have little sympathy for extroverts that have had to adapt for a short time.

  11. I think it’s silly to advocate policies that might lead us toward zero population growth. Under current economic rules, that leads to a lack of productivity and innovation. We need immigrants, especially Asians educated in engineering. Many American kids don’t want to be pharmacists or engineers, they want to be in entertainment or marketing. Their loss.

  12. I learned one thing from the Clinton/Bush back-and-forth years: the government will never run out of money, and either party is quite capable of pissing it away. As to what they waste it on, I prefer the Democrats as I’m on the last lap AND it’s hard to sympathize with what I saw at the Capitol yesterday. I was lifelong GOP until Nov 2016 when the party put a gun to its head and pulled the trigger. After Jan 20, I will pick a new handle; even though it is my own name I don’t want to see it in public any more.

    • The other Donald, had you been life-long Republican in Massachusetts, New York or California? If yes you are good to stay life-long Republican: it will have no effect on US governing similarly how it did not have any effect in the states that I mentioned. Just out of interest, to better understand mystery of presumably American soul, what kept you being Republican back than since you lump Republican Bushes and Democrat Clinton rules into “Clinton/Bush back-and-forth years”. And what did you find the most outrageous of Trump’s accomplishment (let’s say up to November 3rd 2020): lowering taxes and re-importation of capital and creation of new jobs where talent is available as promised by all Republicans before they get elected, not entering into new military conflicts and nation building as promised by all Republicans before they get elected, peace on Mid East as promised by all Republicans before they get elected? Something else? After 30 years in this country I am still lost in mysteries of complex American soul. Interesting to see lifelong anti_Trump Republican aspect of it.

  13. Now that Twitter and other big tech platforms are deplatforming wrong think in earnest, will their stocks rise or fall?

  14. From an outsider, Orange man was the most pro-American president in recent history. It’s kind of sad to see the treatment he has been given.
    In the next 10/20/30 years when America has slipped to 3rd or 4th in the global economies, maybe then ppl might ponder why!

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