Category: Politics

How was Trump’s State of the Union speech?

by philg

I had to attend an aviation event this evening and then proceed to the gym for my annual workout. So I missed the Trumpenfuhrer’s speech at the Reichstag. How was it?

Are people who didn’t vote for Trump shocked and horrified by his continuing failure to do the stuff that they want him to do? I found that in Manhattan last week. My elite (either through wealth or education) friends there continued to express their shock that Trump was doing X, Y, or Z. I would point out that they hadn’t voted for him and therefore wouldn’t it make more sense for Trump to instead do the stuff that he promised to the people who did vote for him? Answer: NO! The elite point of view is so obviously correct that they expect Trump by now to have come around to adopting it!

Update: Boston Sports Club was showing professional wrestling and State of the Union on adjacent TVs (a friend pointed out that Trump has a history with WWE).

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Fahrenheit 11/9

by philg

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 is streaming on Amazon Prime right now.

It’s worth watching, even if you don’t advocate for abandoning capitalism in favor of socialism, as Mr. Moore does.

The first section is about the 2016 election. Moore says that Trump didn’t want to run for president, but only staged a couple of fake rallies to show NBC that he should be paid more. Only when Trump saw how voters loved him did he decide to run in earnest. The presentation of footage from the respective campaigns on the night of the election is dramatic even though we know the outcome.

The next section is about the incompetence, insincerity, and mendacity of establishment Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and the officials who suppressed votes for beloved Bernie Sanders at the convention, even from states that Mr. Sanders had won (but what difference would it have made? Hillary did win more votes).

Moore doesn’t waste too much time trashing establishment Republicans, whom his audience presumably already associate with being on the payroll of the rich. In fact, he says that, starting with Bill Clinton, most Democrats are also on this payroll and there is little to distinguish non-socialist Democrats from Republicans.

Moore covers the Flint, Michigan water situation in detail (it was all caused by Republicans and cronies who wanted to make big $$; simple incompetence was not a factor), but the relevance to Donald Trump is never clear. Everything significant happened prior to Trump taking office (though Trump was the only candidate from either party to visit Flint during the campaign, according to Moore). There is footage of Obama lying to citizens about drinking the water. He is shown asking for a glass and just wetting his lips with the potentially tainted water, but not sipping any. Hidden below the podium is a glass of the actual water that he is consuming.

Another theme that keeps coming up is the Parkland shooting, but Donald Trump’s involvement is not explained.

There is a lot of footage of Adolf Hitler. Trump’s voice is synced up with Hitler’s lips moving. (Those who are passionate about women in aviation will be disappointed that Hannah Reitsch isn’t shown or quoted (“It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side.”))

Yale History professor Timothy Snyder is quoted saying that the comparison of Trump to Hitler isn’t perfect, but only because no comparison ever is. A 99-year-old Nuremberg prosecutor is interviewed saying that what Trump is doing by separating children from migrant parents at the border is as bad as the crimes he was prosecuting, e.g., killing 90,000 Jews. (Michael Moore has experience with U.S. family court litigation, but not a custody lawsuit that separated a child from a parent. All of the fighting has been over cash and real estate. The litigation has stretched over most of this decade and a new lawsuit was filed a few months ago (Daily Mail).)

The Reichstag fire is compared to 9/11 in terms of providing the would-be dictator an excuse to seize power, but it is unclear how Trump could have engineered an emergency 15+ years prior to taking office.

Moore and Professor Snyder seem pretty sure that Trump is on track to be the next Hitler, but they don’t say how it can be accomplished.

I had never seen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on video before (we are not TV news watchers), so it was interesting to see footage of her campaigning. Moore expresses enthusiasm about young female socialists, preferably immigrants and/or Muslim, taking over the Democratic Party.

The documentary footage closes with the Hawaii mistaken missile alert (all done by state officials in a state that last voted for a Republican in 1984) and with a student from Parkland speaking dramatically about the school shooting (but, again, why is Trump to blame for these unfortunate events?).

So Fahrenheit 11/9 is worth seeing both for how Michael Moore weaves together familiar topics and also to try to understand how young Americans who call themselves “socialist” think.

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Why aren’t the payday loan companies getting rich off the shutdown?

by philg

There is turmoil in our land:

Where there is turmoil, however, there is often opportunity. Neither article includes the word “loan”. Yet the U.S. is packed with payday loan companies. Federal workers have been guaranteed to receive back pay, even for weeks or months in which they did no work, as soon as the government reopens (“Trump signs law guaranteeing back pay for federal workers”).

How much credit risk could there be in lending money to someone whose paycheck is guaranteed by an entity with a printing press for dollars?

Readers: What do you think? Shouldn’t it be possible to lend money to furloughed or working-but-not-yet-paid workers at a 1% per month interest rate (12%/year) and make a substantial profit? One-month LIBOR is roughly 0.2% (2.5%/year). That’s a slightly thinner profit margin than a bank gets on a typical credit card, I think, but federal workers should be a better-than-average risk, no?

Is the problem competition from existing credit unions to which federal workers belong? This credit union offers 0% interest for 60 days to furloughed workers. Tough to compete with 0%!

Related:

  • NASA employee credit union: “Our special Furlough Relief Loan will allow you to access up to $10,000 for up to a 60-month term – interest free and payment free for 60 days.”
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Why do people who hate Trump want the U.S. government shutdown to end?

by philg

My Facebook feed is packed with demands that the government be reopened from people who previously compared Donald Trump unfavorably with Adolf Hitler.

Why do they want a government run by NeuHitler to be reopened? If a government is committing evil acts, wouldn’t it be better to minimize the number of acts that the government can commit, e.g., by sending some employees home for a paid vacation? If they weren’t catching up on Netflix series, some of these folks might be making repairs, for example, to the existing 580-mile U.S.-Mexico border fence, recently declared “immoral” by the Democrats.

(The folks who are home on Xbox or sipping drinks on a Caribbean beach are actually “unpaid” in New York Times parlance, because the paychecks will arrive a few weeks after the time off; how many private sector workers would be willing to tolerate the horrors of a paid month off work in exchange for waiting a few extra weeks for the cash?).

[Vaguely similar issue: my friends in Berkeley said they believed that the U.S. government was committing crimes comparable to what Germans and Japanese did during World War II. (Most heinous: separating children at the border from migrant parents, something that happens every few minutes in the nearby California family court without attracting their attention) Yet despite having ample resources and the prospect of a good job for the husband in France or Switzerland (the wife does not work), they had no plans to renounce their citizenship and stop paying taxes to fund this as-bad-as-the-Nazis evil enterprise.]

Finally, I learned from a patent litigator (one of the perks of being an expert witness is talking to these smart folks!) that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is going full steam ahead. They have money left over from the previous fiscal year so they’re good through February and, should those funds run out, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board will declare that the folks who accept filings are “essential”.

Ergo, we live in a country where we can still fight about patents, but we can’t visit the Smithsonian exhibits that celebrate our patent system. 

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Michel Houellebecq: Donald Trump Is a Good President

by philg

“Officials Say Trump Has Ordered Full Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Syria” (nytimes) is welcome news for me. One of my hopes in voting for Obama was that he would be able to say “These foreign wars haven’t worked out as planned so I’m ordering everyone home from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Maybe Trump will get a Nobel Peace Prize too? Even more shocking than that would be some of my Facebook friends giving King Donald some credit for this peace action!

Along the same lines: “Donald Trump Is a Good President” (Harpers) says Michel Houellebecq, the French guy who remains a sourpuss despite having spent years in tax-free (for authors) Ireland. Some excerpts:

The United States of America is no longer the world’s leading power. It was for a long time, for almost the entire course of the twentieth century. It isn’t anymore. It remains a major power, one among several. This isn’t necessarily bad news for Americans. It’s very good news for the rest of the world.

The United States is still the world’s leading military power and unfortunately has yet to break its habit of mounting interventions beyond its borders. I’m not a historian, and I don’t know much about ancient history—for example, I couldn’t say whether Kennedy or Johnson was more to blame for the dismal Vietnam affair—but I have the impression that it’s been a good long time since the United States last won a war, and that for at least fifty years its foreign military interventions, whether acknowledged or clandestine, have been nothing but a succession of disgraces culminating in failures.

Trump is pursuing and amplifying the policy of disengagement initiated by Obama; this is very good news for the rest of the world. The Americans are getting off our backs. The Americans are letting us exist.

The Americans have stopped trying to spread democracy to the four corners of the globe. Besides, what democracy? Voting every four years to elect a head of state—is that democracy? In my view, there’s one country in the world (one country, not two) that enjoys partially democratic institutions, and that country isn’t the United States of America; it’s Switzerland. A country otherwise notable for its laudable policy of neutrality.

The Americans are no longer prepared to die for the freedom of the press. Besides, what freedom of the press? Ever since I was twelve years old, I’ve watched the range of opinions permissible in the press steadily shrinking (I write this shortly after a new hunting expedition has been launched in France against the notoriously anti-liberal writer Éric Zemmour).

The Americans are relying more and more on drones, which—if they knew how to use these weapons—could have allowed them to reduce the number of civilian casualties (but the fact is that Americans have always been incapable, practically since aviation began, of carrying out a proper bombing).

President Trump was elected to safeguard the interests of American workers; he’s safeguarding the interests of American workers. During the past fifty years in France, one would have wished to come upon this sort of attitude more often.

In short, Europe is just a dumb idea that has gradually turned into a bad dream, from which we shall eventually wake up.

Related regarding Houellebecq:

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Folks who vote for a larger Welfare State should also discourage the teaching of evolution?

by philg

I’ve been enjoying The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law.

One of the trials covered is the familiar Scopes Trial, in which ignorance is pitted against Science.

Professor Linder highlights that one of the reasons William Jennings Bryan was against the teaching of evolution in schools, however, is that he was an advocate for equality and was fighting against attempts to discourage unsuccessful Americans from breeding, e.g., in the Eugenics movement.

I wonder if Jennings Bryan would be perplexed by the situation today in which advocates for a larger Welfare State, which encourages maximum reproduction by the least successful Americans (by providing free housing, health care, food, and smartphones on condition that they have children), are simultaneously loud advocates in favor of teaching evolution in schools.

Readers: Why do people who advocate for maximizing the percentage of Americans who are descended from those who never worked also enjoy rooting out the handful of American Creationists and calling them stupid? Shouldn’t folks who advocate maximum fertility among those on Welfare want to downplay a biological theory that says children will closely resemble their parents?

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Amazon settles into low-tax New York City

by philg

“Amazon Announces New York and Virginia as HQ2 Picks” (nytimes):

Amazon could receive more than $2 billion in tax incentives across the two top locations, the company said in its announcement. Up to $1.2 billion of that will come from New York state’s Excelsior program, a discretionary tax credit. In Virginia, the company could receive up to $550 million in cash incentives from the state.

Plainly both New York and Virginia will be low-tax environments for Amazon (not for small competitors, though! The Tax Foundation ranks New York almost dead last in business tax climate; only California and New Jersey are more punishing places to have a company), but how exactly are the “tax incentives” ladled out?

Amazon will pay less in state income tax? In payroll taxes? In property taxes? A combination of these taxes? 

“The mystery tax breaks bringing Amazon to LIC; New York has an incentives package for Amazon, but taxpayers may never know what’s in it” talks about “tax credits,” but doesn’t say if these are credits against state income tax or local property tax or what.

[Separately, anyone planning to sue an Amazon employee for child support or alimony should probably wait for the lawsuit target to be transferred from Washington (capped child support and limited alimony) to New York ($100,000 per year in tax-free child support readily obtainable and far longer taxable alimony duration). New York enables child support profits to be collected through age 21, while Washington cuts them off at age 18. New York is also more favorable for plaintiffs seeking to obtain sole custody of a child (see TMZ for why it was smart for Katie Holmes to sue Tom Cruise in New York rather than in California). For plaintiffs suing the very highest Amazon earners, the Virginia location offers unlimited child support by formula, but a child stops yielding cash at age 18.]

I wonder if the Amazon New York location will end up presenting the nation’s largest contrast in leisure time. “Amazon’s New Neighbor: The Nation’s Largest Housing Project” (nytimes) says that 6,000 people who have no financial incentive to work (they may actually suffer reduced spending power by working due to the welfare system structure) will live right next to people that the same newspaper says are essentially slaves (see “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace; The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.”: “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.)

Readers: What do you think of New York residents paying the nation’s highest tax rates (tied with California?) so that Amazon can be in NYC but be taxed more like a business in Florida or Nevada?

Also, does this mean that the New York transportation system will melt down? How can it handle 25,000 more commutes per day via subway, Uber, private car, train, etc.? Every mode of transit in NYC (even walking in Midtown!) seems to be gridlocked and/or overburdened currently.

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Veterans Day Observed (F-35)

by philg

Today we observe Veterans Day.

In addition to remembering those who died in previous wars, let’s consider our arsenal for the next ones.

The F-35 was used in combat by the US for the first time in September (Reuters story on attacking a ground target in Afghanistan; maybe a drone could have done this?). Wikipedia says that taxpayers began funding this program in 1992 and that the plane first flew in 2000 (prototype) and 2006 (production version). So it was 26 years from the start of development to the first military use, longer than the interval between World War I and World War II.

Comparison: The B-29, the most technologically advanced plane that we had in World War II, was requested by the Air Corps in December 1939, first flew in 1942, and was used in combat in June 1944 (5.5 years after the start of the program).

Should we be happy with Donald Trump for not starting any new wars? Or unhappy with him for not disentangling us from places where we apparently can’t win (or even define “win”)? See “Who Is Winning the War in Afghanistan? Depends on Which One” (nytimes, August 18), for example.

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Aspiration for Democrats: a government voted into office by people who can’t find the Post Office

by philg

A California Democrat on Facebook posted a link to “College students say they can’t send in their absentee ballots because they don’t know where to buy stamps” (Business Insider) and added the following:

Post Office policy is to deliver your ballot whether it’s stamped or not – so don’t let your lack of a stamp stop you from voting.

He is well beyond college age so I’m not sure how many of these stamp-ignorant Millennials might be reached by his post.

My response:

It will be awesome to see these folks, who are unable to find a post office, denounce Trump voters as “stupid.”

Happy Election Day to everyone! My ballot here in Massachusetts is nearly all candidates running unopposed, but I would be interested to hear from readers in states where not everyone agrees on the One True Path.

[My Facebook feed today is filled with friends bragging that they voted, often complete with a photo of an “I voted” sticker as proof. Most of these folks live in states such as Massachusetts or California where the outcome of the election is not in doubt, but these folks often describe their actions in heroic terms and add some trash talk about how people in other countries don’t get to vote (where is that true?). My Facebook friends are living through (and heroically acting in) dramatic times:

It is not the Democratic Party on the ballot today, but democracy itself.

More than perhaps ever before, your vote matters a great deal

Probably more is at stake, then, than during the 1860 election in which Abraham Lincoln ran as an anti-slavery Republican?]

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