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March 5,2016 is my 44th anniversary. We have re-enlisted for another. Best years of my life.
We have five wonderful children, 8 marvelous grandchildren, one great daughter in law , 4 great sons in law and one brilliant grand daughter in law and soon to have another so life is good.
I am a lucky and grateful man.
In addition to family and an extended number of wonderful cousins, brother and sister in law and nephew and niece we are blessed to have a lot of superb friends.
I have always said, you come to The Landings for its beauty and stay for the people.
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Policies that have proven consistently wrong and are being proposed again on the premise that if you keep trying what has not worked things will change. DUH! (See 1 below.)
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Peggy Noonan sees the Republican Party shattering. Perhaps it is and if so I submit it is simply a matter of now or later because when you walk away from your principles, for whatever reason, and/or have proven impotent in accomplishing goals and commitments this eventually nurtures the demise and retreat of your core support and no moss will gather as matters race downhill. Today's discontent started with Goldwater and has been building for decades.
The Republican Party has become unrecognizable. Over the years it morphed into a party mostly indistinguishable from Demwits. Once The Establishment began to go along to get along its days were numbered..
For me the Conservative philosophy and approach to life has proven empirically preferable for maintaining my own independent thinking and ways. I also believe it has helped to inform and create participating citizens who live in accordance with nature's laws. Paying for what you want is a harness, a bridle that restrains open ended demands and needs and avoiding their cost. Conservatism is synonymous with integrity and a more moral way of conducting oneself. It emphasizes moderation. Conservative living embodies a way to resist dependency which ultimately leads to loss of freedom and choice.
Cumulative years of progressiveness brought those who embrace conservatism to the edge and their backlash has led to where we are today. The demonizing of Trump is partly the outgrowth of this reaction, partly the consequence of how we select candidates, a natural response to his own personality and outbursts and the burning desire of The Establishment to maintain power.
It will be interesting to see whether a political Humpty Dumpty can resurrect, if so what shape will it take and can it be effective when it comes to winning future elections?
I believe it can but will take time. As America's progressive decline continues it will remain as Conservatism's greatest ally and benefactor.
Perhaps the Spirit of "We The People" will eventually resurrect itself. This was the hope of "The Tea Party Advocates" which were unable to persevere against the many vicious attacks by those who were threatened by its call to return to our roots and its subtleties.
Time will tell.(See 2 and 2a below.)
And a must listen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=
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Finally, how is this for an inspirational message? https://youtu.be/0t6ybW6NNoc
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Ever since I began using Mail Chimp I now know who looks at my memos and who actually clicks on some of the postings. I truly am amazed because I get a very high percentage of those who both open and read what I post. I assume you do so because you find them informative.
I am sorry that some of the things I post turn out to be false.
Have a nice weekend.
I also always invite responses and will always reply.
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Dick
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How Progressives Drive Income Inequality
The Obama years proved that transfer payments reduce incentives to work and lower incomes. Yet Clinton and Sanders are eager to go the same route.
By Lawrence B. Lindsey
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are promising all types of programs to make America a more equal country. That’s no surprise. But when you look at performance and not rhetoric, the administrations of political progressives have made the distribution of income more unequal than their adversaries, who supposedly favor the wealthy.
The Census Bureau releases annual updates on income distribution in the U.S., publishing three technical statistical measures—the Gini index, the mean logarithmic deviation of income (mean log deviation for short), and the Theil index—each of which represents inequality levels on a scale of 0 to 1 (zero signifies perfect equality and 1 indicates perfect inequality). By all three measures, inequality rose more under Bill Clinton than under Ronald Reagan. And it wasn’t even close. While the inequality increase as measured by the Gini index was only slightly more during Clinton’s two terms, the Theil index and mean log deviation increased two and three times as much, respectively.
Barack Obama’s administration follows this pattern, despite the complaints he and his supporters have made about his predecessor. The mean log deviation increased 37% more under Mr. Obama than under President George W. Bush, although when this statistic was released, Mr. Obama had only six years as president compared with Mr. Bush’s eight. The Gini index rose more than three times as much under Mr. Obama than under Mr. Bush. The Theil index increased sharply during the Obama administration, while it fell slightly under Bush 43.
Sure, no president intends to raise inequality. And the spin doctors for Messrs. Clinton and Obama may insist that it wasn’t their fault.
But consider their policies. Both Democratic presidents presided over bubble economies fueled by easy monetary policy. There is no better way to make the rich richer than to run policies that push up the price of financial assets. Cheap money is a boon to those who have access to it. Interest rates were also too low under Bush 43, but that bubble was in housing, and the effects were therefore more evenly distributed than under Mr. Clinton’s stock-market bubble or Mr. Obama’s credit bubble.
Money matters, but so do other policies, such as the long, historic sweep of the expanding welfare state. In 1968, government transfer payments totaled $53 billion or roughly 7% of personal income. By 2014, these had climbed to $2.5 trillion—about 17% of personal income. Despite the redistribution of a sixth of all income, inequality measured by all three of the Census Bureau’s indexes is far higher today than in 1968.
Transfer payments under Mr. Obama increased by $560 billion. By contrast private-sector wages and salaries grew by $1.1 trillion. So for every $2 in extra wages, about $1 was paid out in extra transfer payments—lowering the relative reward to work. Forty-five million people received food stamps in mid-2015, an increase of 46% since the end of 2008. Similarly, 71.6 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, an increase of 13.3 million since October 2013.
In 2008, during the deepest recession in 75 years, 13.2% of Americans lived below the government’s official poverty line. The Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, but in 2014, after five years of economic expansion, 14.8% of Americans were still in poverty. The economy was better, and there were a lot more handouts, but still poverty rose.
The structure of American households shows how this happened. From 2008 through 2014, the most recent year for which we have data, the number of two-earner households declined. These two-earner households have become the backbone of the American middle class.
Research by the Hamilton Project and the Urban Institute show that when families with children making between $20,000 and $50,000 attempt to have a second earner go back to work, the effective tax rate on the extra earnings—including lost government benefits such as food stamps, the earned-income tax credit, and medical support payments—is between 50% and 80%. This phaseout of the ever increasing array of benefits has created a “working-class trap” instead of a “poverty trap” that is increasing inequality and keeping the income of these households lower than they might otherwise be.
While the number of two-earner households declined during the first six years of the Obama presidency, the number of single-earner households rose by 2.6 million and the number of households with no earners rose by almost five million. In other words, two thirds of the increase in the number of families under Mr. Obama was accounted for by households with no one working. This is the reason the middle class has shrunk, and the reason inequality has increased. And unless we increase the number of people wanting to work and the number of jobs through economic growth, inequality will only increase.
The flip side of the progressive agenda to redistribute income to those with less is to raise taxes on the “rich.” The data show that it is also an ineffective way to reduce inequality.
President Clinton increased the top tax rate on higher earners—yet inequality rose during his administration, and faster than under the tax-cutting Ronald Reagan. The same happened under President Obama. Tax rates went up on upper-income earners. Inequality rose too, and more than under his tax-cutting predecessor.
A recent Brookings Institution study—whose authors include Peter Orszag, President Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget—found that boosting the top tax rates even more, as Sen. Sanders suggests, would have little or no effect on inequality. The paper explored the effects of raising the highest marginal income-tax rate to 50% from 39.6%. Assuming no behavioral effects, the expected revenue was then distributed directly (and in theory costlessly) to the bottom 20% of income earners.
The $95 billion in extra taxes and transfers reduced the Gini Coefficient by only 0.003. To put that in perspective, that reversed only one fifth of the increase in inequality during the Obama presidency.
There was a catch. When the authors assumed that there might be a behavioral response by higher income taxpayers, inequality fell—but for the wrong reasons. Less work, saving, investing and more tax sheltering reduced the taxable income of higher earners and therefore meant less revenue to redistribute. So the rich got poorer, by their own choice, but the poor got less in benefits. A true lose-lose situation.
None of this should really be surprising. If the socialist ideal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” worked in practice, the Berlin Wall might still be standing. Of course, one of the reasons it came down is that a new ruling class emerged to take from the productive and give to those in need, siphoning off a cut of the swag along the way. Ruling classes always have sticky fingers.
Redistribution through the political process is not costless—even in a perfect world there would be a large bureaucracy to feed. Special-interest elites also emerge when so much money is being moved around. They take their cut, introducing even more inefficiency into the system.
Presidential contenders who boast of their plans to reduce inequality might ponder the fact that providing more free things is not the answer. Even free college and free health care are paid with taxes that discourage people from increasing their work, savings and entrepreneurship.
Attacking the rich and running against inequality may be a sensible political strategy. But in the end the programs to implement this strategy make the problem worse. Yet advocates come back and demand the same programs. That is perilously close to the definition of insanity attributed to Einstein: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The repeated failure of political promises has another downside—increasing voter alienation and cynicism. The appeal of redistribution is understandable, but voters who think the progressives running today are going to reduce inequality are falling into the same trap as people entering fifth or sixth marriages—the triumph of hope over experience.
Mr. Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor and assistant to President George W. Bush for economic policy, is president and CEO of the Lindsey Group. He is the author of “Conspiracies of the Ruling Class,” out on March 8 from Simon & Schuster.
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2)
The Republican Party Is Shattering
Stop Trump? Unite behind him? No matter the outcome, nothing will ever be the same.
By Peggy Noonan
I’m interested in where we are. I think we are seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes. I’m not sure I see a way around or through. I said so on TV the other night and got a lot of responses on social media. They said: Good. They said, “They are corrupt,” and “I am through.” Good riddance to bad rubbish. Next.
I am not experiencing it that way. For me the Republican Party was always the vehicle of a philosophy, conservative political thought—no more, no less. I have the past 10 years been its critic on wars and immigration, on the establishment’s self-seeking and failures of imagination. And yet at the prospect of the party’s shattering I feel somewhat shattered too. So many lives, so much effort went into its making. “I am more faithful than I intended to be.”
I knew Tuesday night I was witnessing something grave, something bigger than 1976, that traumatic year when a Republican insurgent almost toppled the incumbent Republican president. Bigger too than 1964, when Goldwater conservatism swept the primaries and convention and lost the country. What is happening now is bigger and less remediable in part because the battles in the past were over conservatism, an actual political philosophy.
And I find myself receiving with some anger, even though I understand, those—especially on the top of the party—who are so blithely declaring the end of things. Do they understand what they’re ending? Did they ever? It started in 1860. Its first great figure was a man called Lincoln. We’ll start a new party and call it Fred, they tweet. We’ll be the party in exile. Implicitly: And I and my friends will run it. Like little boys knocking over building blocks. And they say Donald Trump is careless.
But we are witnessing history. Something important is ending. It is hard to believe what replaces it will be better.
No one knows where this goes. The top of the party and the bottom have split. They disagree on the essentials.
Donald Trump won big Tuesday night, carrying seven states. As others have noted, if it were someone else he’d be called unassailable, the victor—“time to get in line.”
If trends continue—and political trends tend to—Mr. Trump will win or come very close to winning by the convention in July. If party forces succeed in finagling him out of the nomination his supporters will bolt, which will break the party. And it’s hard to see what kind of special sauce, what enduring loyalty would make them come back in the future.
If, on the other hand, Mr. Trump is given the crown in Cleveland, party political figures, operatives, loyalists, journalists and intellectuals, not to mention sophisticated suburbanites and, God knows, donors will themselves bolt. That is a smaller but not insignificant group. And again it’s hard to imagine the special sauce—the shared interests, the basic worldview—that would allow them to reconcile with Trump supporters down the road.
It’s no longer clear what shared principles endure. Everything got stretched to the breaking point the past 15 years.
Party leaders and thinkers should take note: It’s easier for a base to hire or develop a flashy new establishment than it is for an establishment to find itself a new base.
Even if the party stays together with a Trump win, what will it be? It will have been reconstituted. Yes, it will be a formal and proactive foe of illegal immigration, and it will rethink its approach to entitlements, but it will also be other things. What?
We are in uncharted territory. But the point is fissures and tensions simmering and growing for 15 years burst through, erupted.
The establishment was slow to see what was happening, slow to see Mr. Trump coming, in full denial as he continued to win. Their denial is self-indicting. They couldn’t see his appeal because they had no idea how their own people were experiencing America. I have been thinking a lot about establishments and elites. A central purpose of both, a prime responsibility, is to understand those who are not establishment and elite and look out for them, take care of them. Not in a government-from-on-high way, not with an air of noblesse oblige, but in a way that is respectfully attentive to the facts of their lives. You have a responsibility when you lead not to offend needlessly, not to impose realities you yourself can buy your way out of. You don’t privately make fun of people as knuckle-draggers, victims of teachers-union educations, low-information voters.
We had a low-information elite.
This column has been pretty devoted the past nine months to everything that gave rise to this moment, to Mr. Trump. His supporters disrespect the system—fair enough, it’s earned disrespect. They see Washington dysfunction and want to break through it—fair enough. In a world of thugs, they say, he will be our thug. Politics is a freak show? He’s our freak. They know they’re lowering standards by giving the top political job in America to a man who never held office. But they feel Washington lowered all standards first. They hate political correctness—there is no one in the country the past quarter-century who has not been embarrassed or humiliated for using the wrong word or concept or having the wrong thought—and see his rudeness as proof he hates PC too.
“He can think outside the box.” Can he ever.
He is a one-man wrecking crew of all political comportment, and a carrier of that virus. Yet his appeal is not only his outrageousness.
He is a divider of the Republican Party and yet an enlarger of the tent. His candidacy is contributing to record turnouts in primary after primary, and surely bringing in Democrats and independents. But it should concern his supporters that his brain appears to be a grab bag of impulses, and although he has many views and opinions he doesn’t seem to know anything about public policy or the way the White House or the government actually works.
He is unpredictable, which his supporters see as an advantage. But in a harrowing, hair-trigger world it matters that the leaders of other nations be able to calculate with some reasonable certainty what another leader would do under a given set of circumstances.
“He goes with his gut.” Yes. But George W. Bush was a gut player too, and it wasn’t pretty when his gut began to fail.
The GOP elite is about to spend a lot of money and hire a lot of talent, quickly, to try to kill Trump off the next two weeks. There will be speeches, ads—an onslaught. It will no doubt do Mr. Trump some damage, but not much.
It will prove to Trump supporters that what they think is true—their guy is the only one who will stand up to the establishment, so naturally the establishment is trying to kill him. And Trump supporters don’t seem to have that many illusions about various aspects of his essential character. One of them told me he’s “a junkyard dog.”
They think his character is equal to the moment.
2a)The Clinton plan of attack against Trump
2a)The Clinton plan of attack against Trump
The general opinion among soothsayers, poll watchers and pundits is that Donald Trump will have a very good Super Tuesday. But what of the Democrats?
We think Hillary Clinton has, for now, weathered the Bernie Insugency. And so does her team -- which is why they are turning their gaze, and substantial resources, to how they could beat Trump (link is external) if he becomes the Republican nominee:
The plan has three major thrusts: Portray Mr. Trump as a heartless businessman who has worked against the interests of the working-class voters he now appeals to; broadcast the degrading comments he has made against women in order to sway suburban women, who have been reluctant to support Mrs. Clinton; and highlight his brash, explosive temper to show he is unsuited to be commander in chief.
American Bridge, a pro-Clinton “super PAC (link is external),” has formed a “due diligence unit” of tax and business experts who are poring over Securities and Exchange Commission documents and court records related to Mr. Trump’s business career.
A staff member for an affiliated group, Correct the Record (link is external), which coordinates with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, has collected footage of comments that have not hurt Mr. Trump’s standing among Republican primary voters, but that could be stitched together in what the group’s founder, David Brock, described as a montage of hateful speech that would appall a general electorate.
“There is something to this idea that nothing has stuck,” Mr. Brock said, but that, he argued, is because the Republicans have been too restrained to avoid offending Mr. Trump’s supporters.
In the coming weeks, Priorities USA Action, a super PAC (link is external) supporting Mrs. Clinton that effectively portrayed Mitt Romney as a cold corporate titan in the 2012 campaign, will begin scripting and testing ads that use a similar approach against Mr. Trump.
As Mrs. Clinton tries to remain above the fray, Mr. Clinton would be unleashed to respond when Mr. Trump lashed out. Mr. Obama has already argued that Mr. Trump should not be trusted with the job and has told allies he will continue that charge. In February, asked about Mr. Trump, he said the president has “the nuclear codes with them and can order 21-year-olds into a firefight.”
In other words, the Clinton machine will throw everything they can find -- plus a few things they may have to invent -- at Trump.
But let's be clear: they would do the same to any Republican nominee. That's not only how the Clinton's roll, it's also how the national Democratic apparatus functions in presidential election years.
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