A significant number of Donald Trump’s supporters cite the state of the economy and the need for fiscal sanity. I understand the concern about fiscal sanity. But for the last twenty years or so, regardless of which political party has controlled the Legislative Branch, Congress has continued to spend more than it receives in tax and tariff revenues.

However, in recent years, the Republicans have actually spent more than the Democrats, astounding as that sounds. Both Harris and Trump have promised more “tax relief,” but Harris has actually promised far less than Trump and her promises are targeted more at the middle and working classes, while Trump offers far more “tax relief” for the wealthy.

Prior to this past week, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that the costs of Vice President Harris’s plan could range from having no significant fiscal impact to a debt increase debt of $8.10 trillion through 2035, while Trump’s plan could increase debt by between $1.45 and $15.15 trillion. In other words, Trump’s plan is far worse than that of Harris.

The Washington Post just ran an analysis of Trump’s plans for Social Security, which shows that under Trump’s plan, in six years Social Security would be unable to pay full benefits.

And those costs don’t include Trump’s newest proposed tax cuts — to make car loan interest fully tax-deductible and an additional tax cut for Americans who live abroad.

Now… some will say, “That’s just Trump’s rhetoric. He won’t or can’t do all of that.” And they’re probably right. But if that’s the case, attacking Harris’s spending plans is not only hypocritical, but also deceptive and lying, because Trump again won’t keep his word while attacking someone whose plans are more fiscally sound than his are… and yet almost half of the United States feels (I can’t say “think” here, for obvious reasons) Trump is more financially sound, despite all the calculations to the contrary.

The latest tactic by the Republicans is, whenever Kamala Harris proposes something, especially something that makes obvious sense, to say, “You had four years. Why didn’t you do this already?”

Unfortunately, this simplistic question resounds well with simplistic minds, who don’t seem to understand either the Constitution or the structural limitations of the office of the vice-president.

The simple and accurate answer is: Because the Vice President has NO power to do anything like that. The President is in charge, not the vice-president.

Harris is in the difficult position of wanting to change things, but if she says that she in any way disagrees with the Biden Administration, then she’ll be attacked as ungrateful and a traitor of sorts.

All she can do is to present her plans and let people see what they are and decide on them.

She can present an immigration reform plan, as she has, but the Republicans immediately shout, “Why didn’t you do that already? You had four years.” Of course, that ignores the fact that Donald Trump scuttled immigration reform, by persuading Republicans in the House and Senate to kill the reform plan so that Trump could run on that issue. Trump already had four years and couldn’t get an immigration law passed when he was in charge, but that’s conveniently overlooked.

Blaming Harris for problems in the Biden administration is like blaming Mike Pence for Trump’s flaws and failures or pinning on Dick Cheney the blame for the sub-prime mortgage financial crisis that occurred in the second Bush administration.

Not that the far right has much acquaintance with either logic or facts.

According to scientists, human beings are genetically programmed to home in on the worst possible news in the present, but to primarily recall the best aspects of our past, barring of course massive trauma or PTSD-causing events.

The reasons for this are obvious, if one thinks about it. In most of human history, failing to pick up on even the smallest hints of danger could be injurious, if not fatal. Likewise, remembering everything negative in the past would likely drive one to self-destruction over time.

Unfortunately, at present, those primordial traits have some distinctly negative implications, particularly when dealing with the media and elections. Right now, a huge number of Americans are recalling, quite favorably, the Trump years, and comparing them to the present, which they regard less favorably.

But the figures show that since 2019 until now, while prices are up 19%, wages are up 21%. If one looks at the yearly figures, the greatest increase in prices started in the years when Trump was President, yet Biden is blamed for the inflation?

Currently, according to Gallup polls, 85% of Americans feel that they’re doing well financially, but only 17% of Americans believe the economy as a whole is doing well. Rationally, that makes no sense.

So why do Americans believe the economy is doing so poorly? Might it be because the media algorithms are directing the media to emphasize the negative to get better ratings, by appealing to our genetic predilections?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wage of employees was $26.00 when Trump took office in January 2017, and $29.90 when he left office. Currently, that figure is $35.00. While that increase hasn’t yet covered the price spike of 2022-23, inflation is moderating, and wages are continuing to increase.

What’s also forgotten is that, from April to September 2023, corporate profits drove 53% of inflation. Historically, for the 40 years prior to the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of inflation. While prices for consumers have risen by 3.4% over the past year, material/input costs for producers have risen by just 1%. Corporate profits as a share of national income have skyrocketed by almost 30% since the start of the pandemic.

Yet, somehow, these figures get buried, and instead of reporting a more accurate and balanced view, the media emphasizes the negative to boost ratings, and the Republicans emphasize the negatives to gain votes, while ignoring the sizable impact of corporate greed and capitalizing on all too human nostalgia.

The other day, Donald Trump falsely charged Kamala Harris with transferring funds from FEMA to fund aid to illegal immigrants.

Not only was this false, but as president, in 2017,Trump delayed disaster aid for hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico and diverted money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in order to finance an effort to return undocumented migrants to Mexico. Then just weeks before the 2020 election, the Trump administration released $13 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, which triggered an investigation about why the funds had been delayed for years.

In essence, Trump falsely charged Harris with (1) doing something that she did not do and could not have done even if she’d wanted to (since the vice-president doesn’t have that authority) and (2) doing exactly what he did when he was President.

Last week Trump also charged the White House with not giving aid to North Carolina because the state voted Republican didn’t support the Democrats.

That was also false, so false that the governors of the impacted states, including senators and congressmen, have stated publicly that they are getting aid and that any delays are because roads have to be cleared to reach some areas.

But again, the past reflects Trump’s charges. Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings. Trump only changed his mind when his staff pulled voting results to show Trump that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa. So… once again Trump charged his opponents – falsely – with what he tried to do for real.

So… not only is Trump spewing more blatant falsehoods, but he’s also revealing how he thinks and falsely projecting his own vindictive behavior on others.

We have an acquaintance whom everyone would call a good person, and he is. He and his wife are retired, and they live comfortably, but not extravagantly. They’re churchgoers, and are very supportive of the community initiatives, not only those religious and charitable, but also those involving education and other fields.

But what I couldn’t understand was how someone like him could support all the lies, misinformation, and corruption coming from Trump and his campaign. That is, until I recalled that our acquaintance had been a very effective and successful salesman and sales executive… and then the pieces fell into place.

Good salespeople believe in the product, and to be good, they have to believe in the product. Therefore, almost anything that sells the product is useful, and if they believe in the end product, the end justifies the means.

The problem that “good” salespeople tend to forget is that, especially in the political field, lies, misinformation, and corruption have side effects, often disastrous ones. J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, resulted in bomb threats and more unrest that continues to unsettle every facet of civic life there. Trump’s latest lie, about Kamala Harris’s purported misuse of FEMA funds (to which NO vice president has access to, directly or indirectly) vilifies FEMA and makes its mission even harder at the time of one of the greatest natural disasters in the south, particularly when FEMA is already short of funds (thanks to Trump’s Republican supporters in the House). Trump’s lies and misinformation on January 6th resulted in not only a riot, but police deaths and injuries to hundreds of people. Trump’s encouragement of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville led to more unrest and death.

What all the “good” salespeople who believe in what Trump promises, and more often than not fails to deliver, do not seem to understand is that, especially in politics, you cannot separate the ends from the means, and inciting violence through ever more blatant falsehoods foreshadows exactly how Trump will govern. Equally important, he’s made no secret of it – he’s said that he’ll govern like a dictator and seek revenge on his political opponents by all possible means as President.

I just wish those with the “sales” mindset would take a closer look at the “product,” the real product and not all the deceptive promises and “sales brochures.”

As I’ve written before, technology effectively multiplies everything where it’s applied. The first automobiles were painstakingly hand-assembled, and only the wealthy could afford them. That was also true for a vast array of consumer goods and machines, so that a middleclass American lives in greater personal luxury (except for vast grounds and huge cold or too hot palaces and being able to order people around) than did Louis XIV of France (the Sun King).

We take much of this for granted, and many seek even more in the way of comforts, goods, and conveniences. That, after all, is a supremely human trait.

But there’s one application of technology that human beings handle supremely well, alas, and that’s the development and application of weapons. There are more than a hundred commercial small arms manufacturers in the world, and more than fifty of them are located in the U.S. According to the 2017 Small Arms Survey, there are more than one billion firearms in the world, with almost four hundred million held by civilians in the United States. Most “standard” AR-15 type rifles can take magazines holding up to 100 rounds.

As mass shootings in the U.S. have demonstrated, weapons light enough for 14-year-olds and those even younger can wreak havoc in seconds. And on the military level, the President of the United States and the President of the Russian Federation can, at least theoretically, each launch up to 5,000 nuclear warheads within a matter of minutes, which in practical terms would effectively destroy civilization on the planet, along with the vast majority of human beings.

Not content with creating these weapons, “creative” geniuses are working on ways to weaponize our communications systems, improve autonomous weapons systems through AI, and investigate biological weapons of various sorts.

Is the culmination of human evolution and creativity to come up with weapons effective enough that a single individual can destroy the entire human race (or most of it) with one push of a button, one release of software, or the creation of one killer virus? Possibly without even a human being directly involved?

And if we survive that, will the next step be to invent a way to pulverize the planet?

These questions aren’t quite facetious; human beings are awfully good at weaponization of almost anything, and we’re getting better by the year.

There have been more than a few articles about how rigid anti-abortion laws have increased the medical and health problems or pregnant women. For instance, the maternal death rate in Texas surged 60% as a result of the Texas anti-abortion legislation. And we’re seeing horror story after horror story about women dying or losing the ability to have children when a normal pregnancy goes wrong, and doctors won’t give them treatment because they fear losing their licenses and/or going to jail.

Bad as that is, there’s another negative aspect of those laws that’s only mentioned occasionally in national media, and that’s the adverse economic impact on women and their families. Denying access to abortion and reproductive health care places the greatest economic burden and significant health risks on low-income, often minority women, increasing both poverty and inequality. Interesting enough, allowing freedom of reproductive care decreases poverty… and also lowers the tax burden on both states and the federal government.

But the economic impact goes beyond poor women. It affects all women and their spouses and children, in ways that often aren’t recognized. If a working woman wants to live and work in a state where she has control of her own body, that can limit her economic opportunities, because there are at least eight states where she cannot work without putting her own health at risk. Men don’t have to choose between giving up bodily autonomy and economic opportunity; why should women?

This also has a familial impact, because two thirds of all children live in households where all available parents work.

In states like Idaho, obstetricians are leaving the state because they fear that giving necessary care to pregnant woman could land them in jail. Those leaving Idaho, Texas, or elsewhere aren’t being replaced. In addition, fewer medical school students are choosing the obstetrics field. This not only has a negative impact on individual doctors, but on communities and states as a whole, particularly in economically depressed areas, at a time when we already have a national shortage of physicians.

Yet all the downsides of thoughtless anti-abortion legislation, including the negative economics, are ignored or brushed aside by banner-waving pro-lifers who only consider the “unborn,” who, for them, are sacred and inviolate, while ignoring women who will die without proper medical care, girls raped incestuously, and women forced to bear children, often as a result of spousal abuse, children they do not want and cannot properly care for (and whom the right-to-lifers won’t care for, either).

There have been more than a few articles about how rigid anti-abortion laws have increased the medical and health problems for pregnant women. For instance, the maternal death rate in Texas surged 60% as a result of the Texas anti-abortion legislation. And we’re seeing horror story after horror story about women dying or losing the ability to have children when a normal pregnancy goes wrong, and doctors won’t give them treatment because they fear losing their licenses and/or going to jail.

Bad as that is, there’s another negative aspect of those laws that’s only mentioned occasionally in national media, and that’s the adverse economic impact on women and their families. Denying access to abortion and reproductive health care places the greatest economic burden and significant health risks on low-income, often minority women, increasing both poverty and inequality. Interesting enough, allowing freedom of reproductive care decreases poverty… and also lowers the tax burden on both states and the federal government.

But the economic impact goes beyond poor women. It affects all women and their spouses and children, in ways that often aren’t recognized. If a working woman wants to live and work in a state where she has control of her own body, that can limit her economic opportunities, because there are at least eight states where she cannot work without putting her own health at risk. Men don’t have to choose between giving up bodily autonomy and economic opportunity; why should women?

This also has a familial impact, because two thirds of all children live in households where all available parents work.

In states like Idaho, obstetricians are leaving the state because they fear that giving necessary care to pregnant woman could land them in jail. Those leaving Idaho, Texas, or elsewhere aren’t being replaced. In addition, fewer medical school students are choosing the obstetrics field. This not only has a negative impact on individual doctors, but on communities and states as a whole, particularly in economically depressed areas, at a time when we already have a national shortage of physicians.

Donald Trump is apparently now saying that the attempted assassinations directed at him occurred because Democrats have labeled him a threat to democracy, and that Democrats should tone down their rhetoric.

Given what Trump has done and said already, his own words and actions demonstrate that he is a threat to democracy. The Democrats didn’t incite the January 6th attempted coup. Trump’s lies and acts did. Then he compounded those acts by failing to call off his supporters for hours, and when he did, he said he loved those who created the uprising.

In the meantime, just in the last week, Trump and Vance’s bald-faced and totally refuted lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, have spurred bomb threats, as well as forced the closure of two colleges and several schools, and created wide-spread and still on-going disruption for the entire town. Yet Vance went on to say that he’d continue to lie if those lies brought issues to public attention

Trump doesn’t give a damn about what happens to others so long as he gets his way. He incited the January 6th insurgency, but walked away from the situation and the ensuing carnage that not only injured 140 police, but hundreds of his own followers. That kind of single-minded narcissism is more like Hamas than traditional U.S. Republican behavior.

And that behavior identifies Vance and Trump as threats to democracy.

One of the great weaknesses of democracies is that they too often fail to restrict the unchecked flow of falsehoods from demagogues and would-be dictators, largely because restricting speech on any grounds is the beginning of a slippery slope that can lead to tyranny. The problem, unfortunately, is that not restricting blatantly false assertions can also bring down democratic government – and has done so time and time again, because those who lie blatantly and repeatedly to gain power won’t stop there.

And people who will willingly accept lie after lie because those lies reinforce their beliefs deserve the hell that will ensue if those fallacy-followers become the majority. Unhappily, the rest of us will suffer the same fate, if not worse, given what “true believers” usually do to non-believers.

Recent comments (and I won’t say “the latest,” because there’s always something else) from Donald Trump include the discredited statements that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio, a comment later changed to eating geese from the parks, and that Kamala Harris had tiny receivers in her earrings at the debate. Both claims are preposterous, for differing reasons, but they illustrate Trump’s mentality.

In his mind, he’s the greatest, no one greater, and what he says is the “gospel truth,” even if actual facts refute his words. If he doesn’t come out on top, whether in crowd size, funds raised, poll results, or actual ballots cast, that’s because someone else played unfair or cheated. And of course, when he wins, it’s a legitimate result.

Corporations and corporate types have spent millions on his behalf, perfectly legally, as a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, but now that Harris has raised more money, her fundraising is “dirty money,” obviously because Trump believes that no one else could honestly raise that kind of funding, and that must be because his opponents are somehow cheating.

He’s been found guilty of business fraud in a state court, one that has no legal ties to the federal judiciary, yet he claims that the present Administration in Washington, D.C., “weaponized” the state legal system against him, despite the total lack of evidence, because he couldn’t possibly be guilty, and the fact that he was found guilty proves the state was doing something illegal.

He been found guilty of sexual assault and defamation – twice – again by a state court, and he claims that he never knew the woman. And then he has the nerve to say that the women he assaulted weren’t his type, that they couldn’t be the “chosen one” (his words, not mine), as if being chosen to be sexually assaulted by Donald Trump was some great honor, like Zeus defiling Leda. Not that honor has ever been reliably associated with Trump.

Donald Trump has touted his tariffs as making foreign nations and manufacturers pay billions. The fact is that tariffs are and were paid by the importer of the goods, the eventual U.S. consumer.

According to the Tax Foundation, “his proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs.”

“A worldwide 10 percent tariff and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods proposed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would lower average after-tax incomes of US households in 2025 by about $1,800, or 1.8 percent, according to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center.”

The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated that Trump’s “tariff proposals would cost the typical American household over $2,600 a year.”

Trump claims that his income tax cuts benefitted the average family, and they did slightly, but not so much as the very well-off. While the top 1% of households received on average a $61,000 tax cut, the top 0.1% each got $252,000, the bottom 60% of families benefitted by less than $1.25 per day.

And his new proposals will repeat the same pattern, where households with incomes in the top 1 percent will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.

So, if you put the figures together, Trump’s proposals will give average families a tax reduction of $500-600 and cost them between $1,800 and $2,600 in the higher price of goods, and, of course, the well-off will pay a lot less in taxes, $60,000 to $250,000 less.

All that doesn’t take into account that, since the government is already running massive deficits, those millionaire tax cuts will also lead to increased inflationary pressures, which will erode the purchasing power of all Americans, except the top one percent, whose tax cut savings will outweigh the inflationary costs.

Although most observers believe that Kamala Harris “won” the debate with Donald Trump, she never answered one of the key questions: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago.”

One of the reasons she likely didn’t is because the question is, underneath the simple words, a variation on the old trope question, “Have you stopped beating your spouse?”

Another reason is that no matter what the nostalgia buffs think, we can’t go back to the situation of four years ago, when what worked economically then would have different impacts now.

But Harris missed a great opportunity to defuse the whole “better off then” conceit, because most people regard the past as somehow better, except for the few times of world-changing disasters.

The answer Harris should have given is:

That’s the wrong question. What matters is what policies will make your life better from here on out, not what happened four years ago. The United States needs a leader and policies that address today’s challenges, not selective memories of the past. Here are my policies to improve life for all Americans, not just the wealthiest Americans, but all Americans.

From there she could have launched into her listing of policy proposals.

The state of the economy is one of the great worries for most Americans, and until she addresses it head-on, she’s going to have trouble beating Trump, and the fact that she’s only slightly ahead illustrates the lack of faith in her ability to handle the economy, despite the fact that Trump is a lying, misogynistic, bigoted, hate-mongering, and often incompetent bully.

And like Harris, we all need to ask the right questions for today and tomorrow.

Donald Trump has nasty nicknames for almost everyone. Why hasn’t anyone come up with one that sticks to him? After all, he’s lied about everything, and his supporters not only don’t care, but many of them revel in his various “capers,” from stiffing workers and contractors, to conviction of sexual assault and character defamation (twice, no less), and conviction on thirty-four counts of business fraud.

Donald, aka Boy Orange and pseudo-billionaire, already has multiple crime convictions, and that doesn’t count all the other charges, including an attempted coup, and continuous out-and-out lies (not exaggerations or misstatements, but bald-faced lies), not to mention even implying that his vice-president ought to have been hung by the mob that Trump unleashed on the U.S. Capitol, a mob he left to its own devices and violence for hours while gloating in the White House. But none of these seem to stick in the public memory, which means people don’t even seem to understand the extent of his cons and crimes.

So little sticks to him that he almost seems to be made of Teflon, but calling him that would be so unfair to Teflon, because it has honest uses and practical purposes… and yet he needs a suitable nickname that sticks to him.

The best I can do is MultiCon Don.

What about you?

Now that Kamala Harris is officially the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, both the Republicans and the media are hounding her to provide specific detailed policy proposals. My advice to Harris and her campaign is simple.

DON’T DO IT!!!

First, despite all their claims to the contrary, neither Trump nor his campaign have come up with much in detail. Saying that you’ll Make America Great Again, deport illegal immigrants, stand up to Putin, and stop taxing income from tips are hardly a policy framework. They’re campaign slogans, and that’s about all anyone will get from Trump. More slogans, if that.

Now, there was a detailed Republican plan – Project 2025 – and, once leaked, Trump immediately claimed he never heard of it, and that should tell anyone that you shouldn’t believe any policy suggestion from Trump. As for deporting all illegal immigrants… anyone who does will destroy the American economy, because those illegal immigrants comprise an estimated 20% of the U.S. construction industry, doing dirty jobs that most Americans won’t or can’t do, at a time when we’re already short of housing that costs too much.

Second, the media only wants those detailed policy plans so that they can nitpick and criticize them to death, finding fault in every phrase. Such plans are just red meat to the media wolverines, no matter how much they claim they’re only seeking the truth. The truth is in fourth place behind audience support, advertising revenue, and newscasters’ egos.

Third, no detailed campaign policy proposal ever survives intact after contact with reality and economics. No economist can predict accurately what the economy—or the world political situation – will be five months plus from now. It’s fine to say that the U.S. needs to restructure homebuilding and home-buying to deal with high prices and inadequate supplies of shelter, or to restore bodily legal rights removed by state laws, but leave the details to the time when the new president actually has the power to do something. Because, if you don’t, the media – and the other side – will trash all too many good proposals in their attack to gain a few more percentage points of audience approval.

Being detailed in a campaign is one of those ideas that sounds wonderful… and can only lead to disaster, in all too many ways.

While all political figures have a tendency to overstate their “case” and to take liberties with facts, I find that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are the greatest misstaters/liars of any major party presidential candidates I’ve seen in the fifty years I’ve been in and followed U.S. politics.

Unlike Trump, who’s an outright liar, Vance is a cunning misstater, often using actual and largely accurate facts to paint a seemingly convincing picture that’s primarily inaccurate, and he and a number of other very articulate right-wing Republicans are succeeding in convincing people in large part because of the ignorance of the American people.

For example, take the “comparison” between how people feel about their economic position in the Trump years to their economic position now. Of course, many people are unhappy at present. Prices and interest rates are much higher. But very few people ask why or look into the reasons. They just blame the incumbent – and they’ve been suckers that way for years.

Economic policies and laws are like a ship. It takes a long time to implement policies and laws. It takes months if not years to get legislation reforming or creating programs. After passing such legislation, it usually takes well over a year to write and even begin to implement the regulations and procedures to put a law into effect (and those procedures are required by law!). Even Executive Orders of the President can take months or longer, depending on what’s involved. The full impact of Biden’s medical and drug price reforms won’t begin to take effect until next year and later. The chip and microchip factories created by Biden’s initiative are barely under construction.

This applies to Trump as well. All the “good times” in the first years of Trump’s administration were created by the policies of previous administrations. The greatest impetus for inflation began with the reaction of the Trump administration’s massive spending on Covid and Trump’s enormous tax cuts, but the full impact didn’t occur until Biden was in office.

So, Trump and Vance are taking credit for the policies of their predecessors and blaming the inflation and economic problems that Trump caused on Biden. Just as Bill Clinton took advantage of the stable economic conditions and balanced budget handed to him by the unpopular tax increases of the first President Bush, which contributed to Bush’s defeat.

And, by the way, more than a few economic studies have pointed out that the massive increases in corporate profits were a significant factor in creating higher inflation, yet very few politicians bring this up, and fewer news media sources report on it.

So… it might be wise to look at the assumptions of who’s really to blame and who’s really the one to praise before jumping to conclusions. Not that many people will because it upsets their preconceived views.

Over the past several years, but especially over the past few months, I’ve noticed a growing trend in advertising, one which amounts to “insuring” everything.

The most obvious example is that of CarShield, which bills itself as the answer to unexpected car repair bills. But there are other examples, from pet insurance to appliance insurance (in addition to warranty coverage). A month or so I was asked if I wanted insurance for a replacement coffeemaker that I was buying.

Now… some forms of additional insurance are likely worth the price, such as a homeowners’ policy or supplemental health insurance, because most people can’t afford major structural repairs from weather or fire damage and because most health insurance doesn’t cover everything by a longshot.

But replacement insurance for a $35 coffeemaker?

What troubles me most about this is the idea that people need insurance for everything. Perhaps I’m old school, but when I was a child and a young adult, my parents emphasized that life was uncertain and that everyone needed to set aside money for expected events or the so-called “rainy day.”

While most Americans offer lip service to the need for a rainy day fund or emergency savings, according to a July 2024 survey by Empower research, some 37% of Americans can’t afford an unexpected expense over $400, and almost a quarter (21%) have no emergency savings at all. And one in four Americans dipped into emergency savings last year, not for emergencies, but to cover basic living expenses, while sixty percent of Millennials are stressed about a financial emergency striking.

Part of me wonders about whether this is really all about economic deprivation, but when I look at the student parking lot at the local high school or the local state university and see that most of the cars are newer than my 15 year old SUV, I have certain doubts. These doubts are bolstered when I see brand-new twenty-foot powerboats in the driveways of the most modest homes in town, or when students who protest that they can’t afford textbooks drive late model cars, presumably without CarShield insurance.

The guiding principle of the Founding Fathers was to maximize freedom within a framework of ordered secular laws and to keep religion out of the Constitution except to allow people to believe as they wished within that framework of secular laws.

That’s why the Constitution plainly states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Unfortunately, too many Americans don’t seem to understand that. Nor do they understand or want to understand what the word “secular” means, which is “having to do with attitudes, activities, or other matters that have no religious or spiritual basis.”

Secular laws are a system of rules that a government or society creates to address issues such as business agreements, crime, and social relationships. Secular laws are created by non-religious institutions, such as popular assemblies or governments, and the purpose of secular law is to create a framework that allows people to live peaceful and orderly lives.

Now, if one looks around the world, it seems that a great number of conflicts, including here in the United States, center on groups wanting to impose their religious or faith-based beliefs on others.

Most of the conflict over abortion lies in belief, whether “life” begins with separate sperm and egg, at conception, at the time a fetus can survive outside the womb, or at actual birth. There’s also the basic conceptual question of whose rights are paramount and when, those of the mother or those of the fetus. People with different faiths/beliefs have different – and strong – opinions about each of those points.

They will never agree. Yet the right-to-life group insists on legally codifying its beliefs and imposing it on others, even when that imposition will kill other women, all too often totally needlessly, as recent events throughout the United States have shown.

Allowing women to choose when and if they have children does not preclude the right-to-lifers from following their beliefs as those beliefs affect their own lives. That removes religion and belief from the law, but the right-to-lifers want their religious beliefs imposed on others.

This only creates more conflict.

Look at the internal conflict in Iran, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, where male religious zealots insist on imposing all manner of religious requirements by law and force, not by personal choice. Or Sudan. Or in all too many other Middle Eastern countries. In the past, wars over religion decimated nation after nation. The Thirty Years War in northern Europe killed roughly eight million people and fifty percent of the population in some parts of Germany.

Yet… for some insane reason, all too many human beings feel that they have to mandate religious beliefs on others by force of law, because only they have the “right” beliefs.

The Founding Fathers understood this all too well, unlike far too many Americans today.

J.D. Vance’s has attacked Tim Walz’s military record as misrepresentative, but, like most political attacks by the Trumpists, Vance’s charges do have a few grains of truth in them.

Vance charged Walz with resigning from the National Guard when Walz learned that his unit would be deployed to Iraq.

The actual facts tell a somewhat different story. By early 2005, Walz had served twenty-four years in the Minnesota National Guard, including a disaster deployment in the U.S. and an Iraq support deployment to Italy in 2003, and he could have retired at any time. In February 2005, Walz filed the paperwork to run for Congress. A month later, Walz’s battalion was informed that it might be deployed to Iraq at some time within the next two years. After considerable self-debate, Walz put in his retirement papers. The actual orders for the battalion to deploy were not issued until August, and the battalion did not leave on that deployment until March of 2006. Basically, Walz chose to try to serve Minnesota as a congressman, rather than continue in the Minnesota National Guard, since he couldn’t do both.

J.D. Vance enlisted in the Marines and did four years of active duty. He also recently made the statement that when his country asked him to go to Iraq, he did it, but that Walz “dropped out.” What Vance conveniently ignores is that he was on active duty with the Marine Corps, and it wasn’t a choice – unless Vance went, he’d face desertion charges, and his time in Iraq was as non-combat press specialist with a Marine air wing.

After his time in the Marines, Vance completed college and Yale law school, followed by two clerkships and a brief stint in corporate law. Then he began working in venture capital, including Mithril Capital, a firm backed by Paypal founder Peter Thiel. Along the way, he married a law school classmate who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and who remains a well-paid corporate attorney. Yet, as a product of “the establishment,” and someone who was once a “never Trumper,” Vance brands himself as “anti-establishment” and trades on his Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of his Appalachian younger years and tends to forget his entire post-graduate corporate law/Wall Street/Silicon Valley career .

Just who is doing the misrepresenting?

My previous post seemed to ignite a small controversy over whether smart phones were the principal cause of the growing problem of students who seem unable/unwilling to learn and/or think/work hard.

That controversy illustrates a longstanding problem with human beings, what I’d call the reliance on single-factor analysis – the attribution of the cause of something to a single factor. Over the years, I’ve observed that most outcomes – good or bad – are based on more than one factor.

In the case of students, there are more factors in play than smart phones, including the parental background, the genetic background, the educational system, the local environment, and social media, just for starters.

Admittedly, smart phones enable social media and create isolation while amplifying the impact of negative social pressures (bullying) and increasing distractibility.

Then there’s the impact of an educational system which increasingly focuses on teaching to the test (usually multiple choice) rather than on analytical thought. Also, the use of computers has lessened reliance on memory-based mathematical skills, which has weakened the ability of many students to accurately estimate quantities, make change, or mentally project future trends with any degree of overall accuracy.

There’s also ever-increasing parental pressure on teachers not to criticize students for bad behavior or poor educational performance.

The increasing reliance of some parents on technology as a babysitter also reinforces the idea that everything, including education, should be entertaining and easy.

This tendency to limit causal factors goes beyond education. As a naval aviator, I came to realize that aircraft disasters almost always involved multiple factors, and that was the reason behind standardizing procedures based on experience, i.e., to limit contributing factors and thus reduce multiple-cause incidents or accidents.

The ATR 72 crash in Brazil last week is a good example. The ATR has a good overall safety record, but the aircraft has some weaknesses, as do many aircraft. Its de-icing equipment can be overloaded in extreme icing conditions, and this has led to at least several fatal crashes. The aircraft was also close to its load limit, according to early reports, because a number of passengers were denied boarding, even though the aircraft was certified to carry more passengers than were aboard.

The Brazilian pilots knowingly flew into extreme icing conditions with a fully-loaded aircraft, then went into a flat spin, and crashed. While the exact causes haven’t been firmly established, what we do know suggests that the pilot(s) were either unaware of the danger of icing with that aircraft or chose to proceed anyway and could not recover from what appeared from the video to be a stall/flat spin. Prior to the crash, there was no evidence that the pilots attempted to descend or otherwise avoid the icing conditions.

Obviously, multiple factors led to the crash, and that’s usually the case with most disasters, including students who cannot or will not learn.

In another week or so, my wife the professor will return to work full-time, and she’ll be faced with the often blank faces of students who are or who think they want to be voice majors, either as teachers or performers. Of course, what few of them comprehend is that all successful voice major graduates will end up both performing and teaching. The only question is what percentage of their careers is spent performing and what percentage is spent teaching.

Unfortunately, despite “good grades” and standardized test scores, far too many of the students she teaches:

Cannot or will not read, especially textbooks, unless forced, and often not then.
Have great difficulty concentrating enough to be able to listen.
Have great difficulty actually thinking.
Expect to be spoon-fed knowledge rather than actually learning it.
Want everything in education to be interesting and entertaining.
Don’t have the faintest idea of how to work intellectually or vocally.

The students with these difficulties also generally are wed to their cellphones.

Students like these used to be a small minority, but every year for roughly the last fifteen years, the percentage of students with these difficulties has increased. These are not stupid young people. They just haven’t developed the skills of reading, writing, listening, concentrating, problem-solving, and working hard, and by the time they reach college it’s too late for most of them to do so.

And they wonder why they’re struggling, and often blame their difficulties on their professors, the school, and/or their classmates. Some go into deep depressions. Some drop out, and some muddle through, and the university categorizes them as successful graduates.