I am 82 and have decided to run for president. Since you no longer need qualifications I should attract a large group of the disgruntled and since I have never been elected to any political office that should also prove appealing. I have served on a few boards but I have no personal wealth of significance so that is a downer - more ways than one. I am conservative and that no longer counts for much either since anything goes.
That said, please send me an e mail that you will consider my candidacy because I will do great things for this nation but please do not ask me what they are or how I will accomplish them.
If you disparage my effort or me I will strike back and trash you so be forewarned. I am a great counter puncher!!!!
Just know, like a previous president "I feel your pain." but if you attack me you will feel mine.
Thanks.
===
Responses to my previous memo:
"I hate to disagree with a misguided friend, but I do disagree wholeheartedly, Donald is the only man on the stage that can possible return America back to where it was when it was in it's greatness and move ahead of all the horrific damage done by the incompetent, traitor, liar, con man Obama. No other candidate has the balls to do it fully! He is the best man for the job, he has the huts-bah to do what is necessary! I totally disagree with you and most of my friends agree with me, not you. Like you said, "On the other hand God Help America if Bernie or Hillarious are elected to govern." Our standards where as low as they could possible be, he is a breath of fresh air, God help America! All the rest are all talk - No strength or capability behind their words! We had the worst for over 7 years! Get behind a winner, the people of America are speaking out - not more fast talking intelligentsia BS! We have had enough! I have know you for over 70 years, closer to 80 and this is the first time I totally think you are totally wrong! . Get with the program!
Still love you as a friend, but you are just totally misguided. Get out of being a politician! Your Old Friend, T----"
"In today's paper, Bernie's plans would cost 18 trillion over 10 years. Disaster. But I'm not so negative on Trump. He may be a blow hard who is light on details, but nobody "owns" him. Corruption in Washington is a big issue and needs to be fixed. He is not PC. He does love America as opposed to the progressives who apologize for our history. He will be a tough negotiator. Starting to like him a bit more? Trump may not be the answer, but I guarantee you that a professional politician won't fix it. And if you are worried about competence, we can not do worse than Obama.
The other guy to watch is Kasich. Solid. G--"
"Enjoyed reading your blog re: your conversation with your grandson. B----- and I returned late last night from Colorado, leaving right after going to services. On SundayI had my “serious” conversation with my grandson who is also named Elliot. He’s a senior in H.S. and I make it a point every time we are together to carve out some time, usually a long walk, to discuss real issues. My goal on this trip was to get his alignment that no matter what positions he formulates on issues he must take the time to listen and learn the “other side”. For instance, he took an “environmental studies” AP course last semester. Not surprisingly he is a strong advocate for “climate change” after he was indoctrinated with the liberal platform from his teacher. I shared with him an article re: 5 myths re: “ climate change” and showed him other scientists facts that the temp has not increased in 15 years. I made it a point that on that issue and others we discussed that I wasn’t trying to prove him wrong, just reinforcing how important it is not to accept as fact what your teacher or soon to be Professors in college tell you. There will be more discussions with him like this before he heads to universityland. C----"
"You are so right M-----"
"Great synopsis but scary. We discussed this @ tybee. A---"
"Great synopsis but scary. We discussed this @ tybee. A---"
I understand how people feel about Donald and I agree with much of what they say but he is a loose cannon,
he is full of himself, he is vulgar. Should he be nominated and then elected he might pull it off but I also maintain
it would prove my thesis "when all else fails, lower your standards." His election as with Carter' as with Obama, set
a low mark and thus, makes it easier for a repeat performance.
Time will tell.
The lowering your standards virus is also attacking Great Britain. (See 1 below.)
===
Time will tell.
The lowering your standards virus is also attacking Great Britain. (See 1 below.)
===
And then:
Summary by a Notre Dame University engineer.........
Here are the 10,535 pages of Obama Care condensed to 4 simple sentences..
As humorous as it sounds.....every last word is absolutely TRUE!
1. In order to insure the uninsured, we first have to un-insure the insured.
2. Next, we require the newly un-insured to be re-insured.
3. To re-insure the newly un-insured, they are required to pay extra charges to be re-insured.
4. The extra charges are required so that the original insured, who became un-insured, and then became re-insured, can pay enough extra so that the original un- insured can be insured, so it will be ‘free-of-charge’ to them.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is called "redistribution of wealth "or, by its more common name, SOCIALISM, or “PROGRESSIVE”, the politically correct names for COMMUNISM!
===
What's a few trillion more shortfall? (See 2 below.)
===
What's a few trillion more shortfall? (See 2 below.)
===
Dick
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1)
1)
Britain’s Unsettling Omen
What Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party win means for the West.
Jeremy Corbyn answers questions from the media outside King's Cross Station on August 18, 2015 in London, England. PHOTO: DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES
Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of Britain’s Labour Party is being cheered on the right as a gift—as close as you get in politics to a guarantee that your side will win an election that’s still five years out. Mr. Corbyn leans so far left that he might not be able to assemble a parliamentary shadow cabinet, never mind a governing majority.
That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the political ascent of a man who admires Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and keeps company with Holocaust deniers is another milepost in Britain’s long decline amid a broader unraveling in the West.
Last year the United Kingdom nearly came undone after David Cameron’s government misjudged the politics of the Scottish referendum on independence. The Scots voted to stay in the U.K. by a 55%-45% margin, then turned around and rewarded the Scottish National Party—which had led the drive for independence—with a whopping 56 seats in Parliament in May’s general election.
That election was seen as a vindication for Mr. Cameron, who defied the polls to win a slender parliamentary majority—330 of Parliament’s 650 seats. But it was not an overwhelming British vote of confidence in Conservative governance. Even the hapless John Major took 336 seats in his unexpected 1992 victory.
In other words, what separates Britain from the sundry furies of nationalism and nutterism are six seats in Parliament. What happens when there’s the inevitable recession, the inevitable sex scandal, the inevitable Tory ructions over membership in the European Union?
Then there is the wider political context in which Mr. Corbyn now finds his place. We are living through an era of bitter, and usually justified, disillusion with political establishments. In Europe, that establishment trumpeted a new era of multicultural transnational technocracy but hasn’t delivered sustained economic growth or low unemployment for nearly four decades. In the U.S., Barack Obama has presided over a feeble recovery while relying on obedient Democrats and a pliant media to jam through his domestic and foreign policy agendas over broad popular objections.
The response to this political highhandedness on both sides of the Atlantic is rage: the rage of people who sense that they aren’t even being paid lip service by a political class that is as indifferent to public opinion as it is unaccountable to the law.
These are the people flocking to the banners of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders,Marine Le Pen and Jeremy Corbyn—leaders who, either through the consistency of their views or the toughness of their persona, suggest a kind of incorruptibility. They can’t be bought. They’ll never change. They are authentic and pure. What else do you need to govern a country?
Such are the leaders who are coming to the fore in an era in which the worst ideas of the past—protectionism, punitive taxation, isolationism, opposition to immigration, hostility to finance, hatred of Jews in both its anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist variants—are making a political comeback in ways that defy old ideological categories.
Paul Krugman and the Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint unite in opposing a Pacific trade deal. Messrs. Trump and Sanders are as one in their disdain for hedge funds. Mr. Corbyn’s opposition to membership in the EU is only somewhat more latent than Ms. Le Pen’s. Les extrêmes se touchent, they say. Nowadays they touch a lot.
All this ought to unsettle anyone who cares seriously about the health of the West (if that quaint term is still allowed). A single bad election or even primary result in Britain, France, Italy, Spain or the U.S. could tip us into an unmoored—and unhinged—reality. What happens when President Trump meets Prime Minister Corbyn? “You’re Fired” is not an option.
The weakness of the West will be a source of moral comfort and political advantage to its enemies—not only the Iranians and Chinese and Russians and Sunni fanatics, but also domestic ideological entrepreneurs and charismatics peddling repackaged cures for imaginary ills, from income inequality to global warming to the immigration “invasion.” Stopping them is never easy, as anyone who has ever cast doubt on the greatness of El Donaldo and his credulous supporters can tell you. But it’s no less necessary.
It would be nice to think that democracies always manage to recover their common sense and moral balance. Maybe so, but if Mr. Corbyn’s election teaches anything it is that we also have to recover our wisdom. Liberal democracies that fail to educate the public about the institutions, methods and values by which they are sustained put themselves at risk. The task for everyone opposed to the Jeremy Corbyns of the world isn’t to scoff, but to learn.
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2)
Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion
Democratic presidential candidate’s agenda would greatly expand government
Sen. Bernie Sanders is proposing an array of federal government programs to fight poverty and income inequality that amount to at least $18 trillion in new spending over a decade. Photo: Associated Press
WASHINGTON—Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose liberal call to action has propelled his long-shot presidential campaign, is proposing an array of new programs that would amount to the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern American history.
In all, he backs at least $18 trillion in new spending over a decade, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal, a sum that alarms conservatives and gives even many Democrats pause. Mr. Sanders sees the money as going to essential government services at a time of increasing strain on the middle class.
His agenda includes an estimated $15 trillion for a government-run health-care program that covers every American, plus large sums to rebuild roads and bridges, expand Social Security and make tuition free at public colleges.
To pay for it, Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent running for the Democratic nomination, has so far detailed tax increases that could bring in as much as $6.5 trillion over 10 years, according to his staff.
A campaign aide said additional tax proposals would be offered to offset the cost of some, and possibly all, of his health program. A Democratic proposal for such a “single-payer” health plan, now in Congress, would be funded in part through a new payroll tax on employers and workers, with the trade-off being that employers would no longer have to pay for or arrange their workers’ insurance.
Mr. Sanders declined a request for an interview. His campaign referred questions to Warren Gunnels, his policy director, who said the programs would address an array of problems. “Sen. Sanders’s agenda does cost money,” he said. “If you look at the problems that are out there, it’s very reasonable.”
Mr. Sanders has filled arenas with thousands of supporters, where he thunders an unabashedly liberal agenda to tackle pervasive economic inequality through more government services, higher taxes on the wealthy and new constraints on banks and corporations.Calling himself a democratic socialist, Mr. Sanders has long stood to the left of the Democratic Party, and at first he was dismissed as little more than a liberal gadfly to the party’s front-runner, Hillary Clinton. But he is ahead of or tied with the former secretary of state in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and he has gained in national polling. He stands as her most serious challenger for the Democratic nomination.
“One of the demands of my campaign is that we think big and not small,” he said in a recent speech to the Democratic National Committee.
Enacting his program would be difficult, if not impossible, given that Republican control of the House appears secure for the foreseeable future. Some of his program would be too liberal for even some centrist Democrats. Still, his agenda articulates the goals of many liberals and is exerting a leftward pressure on the party’s 2016 field.
The Sanders program amounts to increasing total federal spending by about one-third—to a projected $68 trillion or so over 10 years.
For many years, government spending has equaled about 20% of gross domestic product annually; his proposals would increase that to about 30% in their first year. As a share of the economy, that would represent a bigger increase in government spending than the New Deal or Great Society and is surpassed in modern history only by the World War II military buildup.
By way of comparison, the 2009 economic stimulus program was estimated at $787 billion when it passed Congress, and President George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts were estimated to cost the federal treasury $1.35 trillion over 10 years.
Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke to students at Liberty University on Monday. The hottest topic: birth control. Photo: AP
Mrs. Clinton so far has proposed programs that together would cost an estimated $650 billion over 10 years. Her college-affordability plan is estimated at $350 billion over 10 years, and an expected child-care proposal is estimated to cost at least $200 billion. Those are modest sums next to Mr. Sanders’s agenda.
He proposes $1 trillion to repair roads, bridges and airports. His college-affordability program would cost $750 billion over a decade. Smaller programs would provide youth jobs and prevent cuts to private pension plans. He would raise an additional $1.2 trillion in Social Security taxes in order to increase benefits and pay those already promised for 50 years. That would bolster the program but fall short of the 75 years of solvency that is typically what policy makers aim to achieve.
Mr. Sanders says he also would propose an expansion of federal support for child care and preschool, though he hasn’t said how much those programs would cost, and they aren’t included in this total.
His most expensive proposal, by far, is his plan to extend Medicare, the federal health program for seniors, to all Americans.
Mr. Sanders hasn’t released a detailed plan, but a similar proposal in Congress, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), would require $15 trillion in federal spending over 10 years, on top of existing federal health spending, according to an analysis of the plan by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Mr. Conyers’s office referred questions about the plan to Mr. Friedman.
Mr. Gunnels, the Sanders aide, said the campaign hasn’t worked out all details on his plan—for instance, his version might allow each state to run its own single-payer system. But he said the $15 trillion figure was a fair estimate.
Single-payer health care has long been on the liberal wish list, but it has never had sufficient support in Congress. Proponents say it is the best way to guarantee coverage to every American—something that the Affordable Care Act falls short of—and lower overall costs.
The Conyers plan, for instance, assumes significant savings by allowing the government to negotiate for prescription-drug prices, and it would rely on the new payroll taxes for funding.
Mr. Sanders and some Democrats see the 2010 health law as a good first step, but they say more needs to be done. Many other Democrats, scarred from the fight over the ACA and seeing it as a major step forward, are ready to move on to other issues.
So far, the tax increases Mr. Sanders has proposed are concentrated on Americans earning at least $250,000 a year and on corporations. They include increases in the capital-gains tax, the estate tax and personal income-tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. He also would impose a fee on financial transactions, with investment companies taxed on every stock they trade.
Sen. Bernie Sanders shown at a rally to preserve union pensions on Capitol Hill in Washington last week. PHOTO: JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS
Taken together, these proposals are attractive to many Democrats, said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and would transform the U.S. into an economy much more like those in Europe, with a significantly larger share of economic activity in government hands. “It’s not the model we employ [in the U.S.], but it is a viable economic model,” he said. Still, he cautioned the revenue would have to come from the middle class as well as the wealthy.
More-centrist Democrats think it is a bad idea. “We are not a country that has limitless resources. You need to tamp on the brakes somewhere, but he doesn’t,” said Jim Kessler, senior vice president for policy at the Democratic think tank Third Way. “There’s no such thing as free college; somebody is going to be paying for it.”
Conservative economists say higher government spending would hurt long-term economic growth and that this much would stunt it altogether. “If we’re putting our resources into government, that’s a place where you’re not going to get productivity gains,” said Kevin Hassett, an American Enterprise Institute analyst who has advised many GOP presidential candidates but is unaffiliated this year. Mr. Hassett said the tax increases required to pay for the Sanders program would be “massively catastrophic.”
Even many Democrats say such a plan would be politically infeasible. Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago and former adviser to President Barack Obama, recalled the difficulty winning congressional approval for the stimulus and health legislation at a time of large Democratic majorities in Congress.
“Much, much more modest actions than those Bernie Sanders is describing were extremely heavy lifts, and many thought impossible,” he said. “Both of them came down to a single vote.”
Write to Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com
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