;
National Debt: Who Cares?
The U.S. national debt is massive—so massive that most Americans cannot comprehend it, much less solve it. But a crisis is looming, and a day of reckoning that will affect every American is coming. The Manhattan Institute's Brian Riedl explains how we got here and what you can do about it.
We just returned from meeting our new little grandson genius. He is a keeper. Perfectly formed and ready for college. We got in late last night and drove the entire day some 13 hours straight (720 miles.) Max has some crazy grandparents.
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This memo is a compendium of e mails received while I was away that I thought interesting. See 1-5 below.)
I will end with some observations of my own
As always I am catching up so probably sporadic memos for a few days.
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Trump and the Democrat Party:
Trump wants to protect our borders. Democrats will not join him.
Trump wants to improve our healthcare. Democrats will not join him.
Trump wants favorable trade agreements. Democrats may not approve the agreement with Canada and Mexico because they do not want Trump to have a victory before the 2020 election.
Trump wants to return America to being a nation that enforces the rule of law. Democrats would rather ignore enforcing laws they passed and which no longer serve their purpose. If you want to get rid of bad legislation enforce it. That has always been the American way. Otherwise black Americans would still be segregated against by The Democrat Party which perpetuated this amoral position.
Trump does not want to fund sanctuary cities etc. Democrats want to protect illegal immigration because it increases their potential voters.
Trump was not found guilty of collusion nor were any Americans. Democrats want to impeach Trump because they allege he engaged in obstruction where there was no guilt.
Democrats are unwilling to address and disavow the issue of anti-Semitism within their party yet, accuse Trump of hatred. Trump, is the only president in modern history to decry anti-Semitism in his State of The Union Speech.
The Democrat Party is consumed by hatred of a duly elected president and want to eliminate The Electoral College which has served us will for hundred of years because they cannot swallow their defeat like adults.
Democrats are running scared because Attorney General Barr wants to allow the American people to learn the facts that formed the basis of The Mueller Investigation. They are doing everything they can to undermine Barr's legitimacy.
Based on what is now known it appears the stench emanating with The Steele Memorandum reaches way into the Obama Administration.
Virtually every Democrat candidate is seeking to embrace some form of socialism to replace capitalism.
Yesterday, candidate Booker attacked candidate Biden for his recent comments and, in essence, basically accused Obama of selecting a segregationist for his Vice President.
The Democrat Party does seem to be suffering from a derangement syndrome and are embracing policies and taking a stance that is not only deceitful but downright anti-American.
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Dick
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1)
Why senators who lobby for eliminating the Electoral College should worry
By Phil D'Agostino
Recently, there has been renewed activism to eliminate the Electoral College. The argument over its need to exist seems to be almost perennial. I say almost, because it really gets made only when Democrats lose elections. The problem is that the arguments they make are specious and their premises fallacious, and senators who support this move undermine their own standing in the Senate.
If the Electoral College were to be abolished, either through Democrat collusion among certain states or a constitutional amendment (which would never happen), this would effectively put an end to federalism. There would no longer be a logical need for or a way to protect the interests of any state. The point of a state governor or legislature would seem archaic and a throwback to the founding. States themselves would be mere markings on the map, while large metropolitan areas would become the new centers of power, with a handful of mayors becoming the new American lords. These metropolitan areas would then likely compete for power and create coalitions, further dividing the USA into city-states like Italy of the 1700s.
If the Electoral College were to be abolished, either through Democrat collusion among certain states or a constitutional amendment (which would never happen), this would effectively put an end to federalism. There would no longer be a logical need for or a way to protect the interests of any state. The point of a state governor or legislature would seem archaic and a throwback to the founding. States themselves would be mere markings on the map, while large metropolitan areas would become the new centers of power, with a handful of mayors becoming the new American lords. These metropolitan areas would then likely compete for power and create coalitions, further dividing the USA into city-states like Italy of the 1700s.
Some have a problem understanding that we are not only not a democracy, but not really a republic, either...not for the people. Our republicanism rests with the idea of representing the states and the people. Treaties are approved by the states through their representatives in the Senate, for example. Presidents, who preside over the corporation or federation of states, are not elected by the people; they are elected by the states. The size of each state's population is part of the calculation, but it's the state that is electing the president, not the people at large.
"But that was then. Today, we are a democracy, and the people should speak louder than the states, and so the 'popular vote' should count more!" If we were to do just a bit of mind-bending and apply this across the board to all the nooks and crannies of our government, it would then certainly apply to the Senate, for it, too, doesn't represent the people as it is structured now. It represents the states. So, applying that same concept to the voting value of any one senator versus another, it seems that a senator from a large state like California or Texas would certainly have more to say about an issue than a senator from say, Vermont.
If we use the same argument that the vapid empty suits and would-be presidents use to press their case, we would want to be sure that the 100 senators' votes would represent the popular vote. I suggest the following.
If we take the USA's population to be about 324 million, we now have a basis for a little simple math. Let's begin with the value of one senator from the least populated state and use it as our basis for a single vote. The least populated state is Wyoming. It has about 580,000 people. Since there are two senators, we divide by two to get about 290,000 as the base count for one vote for a senator. So we would say each senator from Wyoming votes with the value of one vote in the Senate, which is also approximately the same for Vermont. Texas, on the other hand, has more than 28 million residents, so each of its senators would have the vote value of 49 times the value of a vote from Vermont or Wyoming. A vote by Ted Cruz, for example, would count 49 times that of Bernie Sanders. Each of N.C.'s senators, my state's Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, would cast about 18 votes each...or 18 times the vote value as Mr. Sanders and almost twice the vote value as Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar. Oh, wow...and both Dianne Feinstein's and Kamala Harris's votes would count 68 times as much as Mr. Bernie's one little ol' vote. Even Dick Durbin's vote would count 22 times as much as Bernie's and less than half as much as Ted Cruz's.
The point is simple. The Electoral College is a brilliant solution for protecting the rights of each state in the Senate while accounting for the differences in population in the House of Representatives. To abolish it, either literally or effectively through collusion, is to completely change not just the way we vote for the president, but the entire structure of the federal government of the United States of America.
"But that was then. Today, we are a democracy, and the people should speak louder than the states, and so the 'popular vote' should count more!" If we were to do just a bit of mind-bending and apply this across the board to all the nooks and crannies of our government, it would then certainly apply to the Senate, for it, too, doesn't represent the people as it is structured now. It represents the states. So, applying that same concept to the voting value of any one senator versus another, it seems that a senator from a large state like California or Texas would certainly have more to say about an issue than a senator from say, Vermont.
If we use the same argument that the vapid empty suits and would-be presidents use to press their case, we would want to be sure that the 100 senators' votes would represent the popular vote. I suggest the following.
If we take the USA's population to be about 324 million, we now have a basis for a little simple math. Let's begin with the value of one senator from the least populated state and use it as our basis for a single vote. The least populated state is Wyoming. It has about 580,000 people. Since there are two senators, we divide by two to get about 290,000 as the base count for one vote for a senator. So we would say each senator from Wyoming votes with the value of one vote in the Senate, which is also approximately the same for Vermont. Texas, on the other hand, has more than 28 million residents, so each of its senators would have the vote value of 49 times the value of a vote from Vermont or Wyoming. A vote by Ted Cruz, for example, would count 49 times that of Bernie Sanders. Each of N.C.'s senators, my state's Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, would cast about 18 votes each...or 18 times the vote value as Mr. Sanders and almost twice the vote value as Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar. Oh, wow...and both Dianne Feinstein's and Kamala Harris's votes would count 68 times as much as Mr. Bernie's one little ol' vote. Even Dick Durbin's vote would count 22 times as much as Bernie's and less than half as much as Ted Cruz's.
The point is simple. The Electoral College is a brilliant solution for protecting the rights of each state in the Senate while accounting for the differences in population in the House of Representatives. To abolish it, either literally or effectively through collusion, is to completely change not just the way we vote for the president, but the entire structure of the federal government of the United States of America.
Recently, there has been renewed activism to eliminate the Electoral College. The argument over its need to exist seems to be almost perennial. I say almost, because it really gets made only when Democrats lose elections. The problem is that the arguments they make are specious and their premises fallacious, and senators who support this move undermine their own standing in the Senate.
If the Electoral College were to be abolished, either through Democrat collusion among certain states or a constitutional amendment (which would never happen), this would effectively put an end to federalism. There would no longer be a logical need for or a way to protect the interests of any state. The point of a state governor or legislature would seem archaic and a throwback to the founding. States themselves would be mere markings on the map, while large metropolitan areas would become the new centers of power, with a handful of mayors becoming the new American lords. These metropolitan areas would then likely compete for power and create coalitions, further dividing the USA into city-states like Italy of the 1700s.
Some have a problem understanding that we are not only not a democracy, but not really a republic, either...not for the people. Our republicanism rests with the idea of representing the states and the people. Treaties are approved by the states through their representatives in the Senate, for example. Presidents, who preside over the corporation or federation of states, are not elected by the people; they are elected by the states. The size of each state's population is part of the calculation, but it's the state that is electing the president, not the people at large.
"But that was then. Today, we are a democracy, and the people should speak louder than the states, and so the 'popular vote' should count more!" If we were to do just a bit of mind-bending and apply this across the board to all the nooks and crannies of our government, it would then certainly apply to the Senate, for it, too, doesn't represent the people as it is structured now. It represents the states. So, applying that same concept to the voting value of any one senator versus another, it seems that a senator from a large state like California or Texas would certainly have more to say about an issue than a senator from say, Vermont.
If we use the same argument that the vapid empty suits and would-be presidents use to press their case, we would want to be sure that the 100 senators' votes would represent the popular vote. I suggest the following.
If we take the USA's population to be about 324 million, we now have a basis for a little simple math. Let's begin with the value of one senator from the least populated state and use it as our basis for a single vote. The least populated state is Wyoming. It has about 580,000 people. Since there are two senators, we divide by two to get about 290,000 as the base count for one vote for a senator. So we would say each senator from Wyoming votes with the value of one vote in the Senate, which is also approximately the same for Vermont. Texas, on the other hand, has more than 28 million residents, so each of its senators would have the vote value of 49 times the value of a vote from Vermont or Wyoming. A vote by Ted Cruz, for example, would count 49 times that of Bernie Sanders. Each of N.C.'s senators, my state's Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, would cast about 18 votes each...or 18 times the vote value as Mr. Sanders and almost twice the vote value as Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar. Oh, wow...and both Dianne Feinstein's and Kamala Harris's votes would count 68 times as much as Mr. Bernie's one little ol' vote. Even Dick Durbin's vote would count 22 times as much as Bernie's and less than half as much as Ted Cruz's.
The point is simple. The Electoral College is a brilliant solution for protecting the rights of each state in the Senate while accounting for the differences in population in the House of Representatives. To abolish it, either literally or effectively through collusion, is to completely change not just the way we vote for the president, but the entire structure of the federal government of the United States of America.
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2) Defining Socialism Down
The Vermont Senator presents himself as the ideological descendant of FDR, whom many seniors still revere and millennials incorrectly believe rescued America from the Great Depression. Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee and energy-industry takeover? Mr. Sanders says they are merely an extension of New Deal programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
If the Electoral College were to be abolished, either through Democrat collusion among certain states or a constitutional amendment (which would never happen), this would effectively put an end to federalism. There would no longer be a logical need for or a way to protect the interests of any state. The point of a state governor or legislature would seem archaic and a throwback to the founding. States themselves would be mere markings on the map, while large metropolitan areas would become the new centers of power, with a handful of mayors becoming the new American lords. These metropolitan areas would then likely compete for power and create coalitions, further dividing the USA into city-states like Italy of the 1700s.
Some have a problem understanding that we are not only not a democracy, but not really a republic, either...not for the people. Our republicanism rests with the idea of representing the states and the people. Treaties are approved by the states through their representatives in the Senate, for example. Presidents, who preside over the corporation or federation of states, are not elected by the people; they are elected by the states. The size of each state's population is part of the calculation, but it's the state that is electing the president, not the people at large.
"But that was then. Today, we are a democracy, and the people should speak louder than the states, and so the 'popular vote' should count more!" If we were to do just a bit of mind-bending and apply this across the board to all the nooks and crannies of our government, it would then certainly apply to the Senate, for it, too, doesn't represent the people as it is structured now. It represents the states. So, applying that same concept to the voting value of any one senator versus another, it seems that a senator from a large state like California or Texas would certainly have more to say about an issue than a senator from say, Vermont.
If we use the same argument that the vapid empty suits and would-be presidents use to press their case, we would want to be sure that the 100 senators' votes would represent the popular vote. I suggest the following.
The point is simple. The Electoral College is a brilliant solution for protecting the rights of each state in the Senate while accounting for the differences in population in the House of Representatives. To abolish it, either literally or effectively through collusion, is to completely change not just the way we vote for the president, but the entire structure of the federal government of the United States of America.
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2) Defining Socialism Down
Bernie Sanders left out a few details about his political creed.
The Vermont Senator presents himself as the ideological descendant of FDR, whom many seniors still revere and millennials incorrectly believe rescued America from the Great Depression. Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee and energy-industry takeover? Mr. Sanders says they are merely an extension of New Deal programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
“Like today, the quest for transformative change was opposed by big business, Wall Street, the political establishment, by the Republican Party and by the conservative wing of FDR’s own Democratic Party,” the Democratic Socialist declared. “While he stood up for the working families of our country, we can never forget that President Roosevelt was reviled by the oligarchs of his time, who berated these extremely popular programs as ‘socialism.’”
We can understand why Mr. Sanders wants to define socialism in this way, since the polls show the word is politically toxic for most Americans. But he’s underselling his own contributions. FDR’s social programs were based on the principle of work in return for benefits. Workers chipped in part of their payroll to finance their own retirement many years hence. The benefits are unsustainable now, but at least they require someone to work.
Mr. Sanders pitches Medicare for All as an income transfer program. Take from “billionaires” like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and give to everyone else. But there aren’t enough Bezoses to finance government health care for everyone, so Bernie will eventually have to go after the middle class. This did not show up in his Introduction to Socialism lecture.
As striking was his failure even to mention some of the world’s leading exemplars of socialism. Venezuela and Cuba made no appearance. You’d think a candidate pitching “democratic socialism” would at least want to distance himself politically from those socialist failures—if only as self-protection.
The oversight was especially notable because Mr. Sanders went out of his way to label American capitalists like Mr. Bezos (and of course) Donald Trump as “oligarchs” and “authoritarians.” Most of Venezuela’s wealth is generated from petrodollars and skimmed off by President Nicolas Maduro, his cronies and top government brass. Why not condemn them as oligarchs who don’t represent socialism?
Mr. Sanders also left out any comparisons to the Nordic European states, which he has praised in the past. Perhaps this is because his endorsement has caused journalists and others to point out that Sweden isn’t all that socialist anymore. Sweden’s corporate tax rate is 21.4%—close to the U.S. rate of 21% that Mr. Sanders calls an abomination and wants to raise.
Sweden has no inheritance tax, while Mr. Sanders wants government to tax just about everything you have at death. Or perhaps Mr. Sanders doesn’t want voters to figure out that Sweden, like most European cradle-to-grave welfare states, imposes a 25% VAT that soaks the middle class.
Like other universal government-run health care systems, Sweden rations care. But at least people can utilize private care if they choose. Mr. Sanders recently said there would be no exceptions for Americans to his Medicare for All plan. Sweden also offers universal school vouchers, which may be why its students outperform those in the U.S. Mr. Sanders wants to ban charter schools and force kids into union-run public schools.
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Mr. Sanders’s socialism was a political novelty in 2016, in part because so few took his campaign seriously. His challenge now that he’s a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination is that his ideas will get a more thorough vetting. Maybe this is why he’s decided to define his brand of socialism down.
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3)Oberlin College had an admirable liberal
past. Now, it’s a disgrace.
Oberlin College has an admirable liberal past and a contemptible progressive present that will devalue its degrees far into the future. This is condign punishment for the college’s mendacity about helping to incite a mob mentality and collective bullying in response to “racist” behavior that never happened.
3)Oberlin College had an admirable liberal
past. Now, it’s a disgrace.
Oberlin College has an admirable liberal past and a contemptible progressive present that will devalue its degrees far into the future. This is condign punishment for the college’s mendacity about helping to incite a mob mentality and collective bullying in response to “racist” behavior that never happened.
Founded in 1833, Oberlin became one of the nation’s first colleges to admit African Americans, and its first coeducational liberal arts college. It has, however, long since become a byword for academic self-caricature, where students protest, among many microaggressions, the food service’s insensitive cultural appropriation of banh mi sandwiches, sushi and General Tso’s chicken. Oberlin could have been Randall Jarrell’s model for his fictional Benton College, where people “would have swallowed a porcupine, if you had dyed its quills and called it Modern Art; they longed for men to be discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren’t prejudiced toward moon men.”
In November 2016, a clerk in Gibson’s Bakery, having seen a black Oberlin student shoplifting bottles of wine, pursued the thief. The thief and two female friends were, according to the police report, kicking and punching the clerk on the ground when the police arrived. Some social-justice warriors — they evidently cut class the day critical thinking was taught, if it is taught at Oberlin — instantly accused the bakery of racially profiling the shoplifter, an accusation complicated by the fact that the shoplifter and his partners in assault pleaded guilty.
The warriors mounted a protracted campaign against the bakery’s reputation and solvency. But with the cowardice characteristic of bullies, Oberlinclaimed in court that it had nothing to do with what its students did when they acted on the progressive righteousness that they imbibe at the school. However, at an anti-bakery protest, according to a complaint filed by the bakery, the dean of students helped distribute fliers, produced on college machines, urging a boycott because “this is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION.” (There is no record of any such complaints against the bakery, from which Oberlin bought goods until the hysteria began.) According to court documents, the administration purchased pizza for the protesters and authorized the use of student funds to buy gloves for protesters. The college also signaled support for the protests by suspending college purchases from the bakery for two months.
A jury in the defamation trial awarded the bakery $11 million from Oberlin, and $33 million more in punitive damages. The $44 million probably will be reduced because, under Ohio law, punitive damages cannot exceed double the amount of compensatory damages. The combination of malice and mendacity precluded a free-speech defense , and the jury accepted the obvious: The college’s supposed adults were complicit in this protracted smear. Such complicity is a familiar phenomenon.
As Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson demonstrated in their meticulous 2007 book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,” Duke University’s administration and a large swath of the faculty incited hysteria against a few young men accused of a rape that never happened. The University of Virginia’s administration similarly rushed to indignant judgment in response to a facially preposterous magazine story about another fictitious rape.
The shoplifting incident occurred the day after the 2016 presidential election, which Oberlin’s president, vice president and dean of students partially blamed for students’ “pain and sadness” and “fears and concerns” during the “difficult few days” after the “events” at the bakery. From Oberlin’s despisers of President Trump, the events elicited lies and, in effect, cries of “fake news,” the brazenness of which the master in the White House might admire. Oberlin alumni who are exhorted to contribute to this college, which has been made stupid and mendacious by politics, should ponder where at least $33 million is going.
Continuing to do what it denies ever doing — siding against the bakery — Oberlin, in impeccable progressive-speak, accuses the bakery of an “archaic chase-and-detain” policy regarding shoplifters and insists that “the guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant” to the — of course — “root cause” of the protests against the bakery.
Oberlin’s president defiantly says “none of this will sway us from our core values.” Those values — moral arrogance, ideology-induced prejudgments, indifference to evidence — are, to continue using the progressive patois, the root causes of Oberlin’s descent beyond caricature and into disgrace.
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4)America’s First Third-World State
Medieval diseases, gangs, corruption, crime, crumbling infrastructure, out-of-touch wealthy elites …
‘Third World” is now an anachronistic geographical term of the old Cold War. But after 1989, “Third World” was reinvented from a political noun into an adjective to mean more than just Asian, African, and Latin American nations nonaligned with either the West or the Soviet bloc.
Rather, the current modifier “Third World” has come to transcend geography, politics, and ethnicity. It simply denotes poor failed states all over the globe of all races and religions.
Third World symptomologies are predictably corrupt government, unequal or nonexistent applicability of the law, two rather than three classes, and the return of medieval diseases.
Third World nations suffer from high taxes and poor social services, premodern infrastructure and utilities, poor transportation, tribalism, gangs, and lack of security.
Another chief characteristic of a Third World society is the official denial of all of the above, and a vindictive, almost hysterical state response to anyone who points out those obvious tragedies. Another is massive out-migration. Residents prefer almost any country other than their own. Think Somalia, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, or Guatemala.
Does 21st-century California increasingly fit that definition — despite having the nation’s most amenable climate and most beautiful and diverse geography, with major natural ports facing the dynamic Asian economies, and being naturally rich in timber, agriculture, mining, and energy, and blessed with a prior century’s inheritance of effective local and state government?
By many criteria, 21st-century California is both the poorest and the richest state in the union. Almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Another fifth is categorized as near the poverty level — facts not true during the latter 20th century. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients now live in California. The state has the highest homeless population in the nation (135,000). About 22 percent of the nation’s total homeless population reside in the state — whose economy is the largest in the U.S., fueling the greatest numbers of American billionaires and high-income zip codes.
But by some indicators, the California middle class is shrinking — because of massive regulation, high taxation, green zoning, and accompanying high housing prices.
Out-migration from the state remains largely a phenomenon of the middle and upper-middle classes. Millions have left California in the past 30 years, replaced by indigent and often illegal immigrants, often along with the young, affluent, and single.
If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been considered unhinged. After all, the city that gave us the modern freeway system is not supposed to resemble Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople.
Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse. Hygienists warn that permissive municipal governments are setting the stage — through spiking populations of history’s banes of fleas, lice, and rats — for possible dark-age outbreaks of plague or worse.
High tech does its part not to clean the streets but to create defecation apps that electronically warn tourists and hoi polloi how to avoid walking blindly into piles of sidewalk excrement.
In Californian logic, public defecation butts up against progressive tolerance, so it is exempt from the law. Yet for a suburbanite to build a patio without a permit, for example, costs one dearly in fines.
Indeed, a new patio without a permit can be deemed more dangerous to the public health than piles of excrement in the public workplace.
One out of three Californians who enters a hospital for any cause is now found to be suffering from either diabetes or pre-diabetes, an epidemic that hits the Hispanic community especially hard but for a variety of reasons has not led to effective public-health efforts and sufficient publicity.
State-run dialysis clinics now dot the towns and communities of the Central Valley — a tragic symptom of dietary culture, massive illegal immigration, and poor public-health education.
Infrastructure Is for the Unwoke
California’s transportation system, to be honest, remains in near ruins. Despite the highest gas taxes in the nation, none of its major trans-state freeways — not the 99, not I-5, not the 101 — after 70 years off use, are yet completed with six lanes, resulting in dangerous bottlenecks and wrecks. Driving the 99 south of Visalia, or the 101 near Paso Robles, or the 5 north of Coalinga is right out of Road Warrior — but not as dangerous as the fossilized two-line feeder lines such as 152 into Gilroy, or the 41 west of Kettleman City. The unspoken transportation credo of Jerry Brown’s aggregate 16 years as governor apparently was “If you don’t build it, maybe they won’t need it.”
Meanwhile the concrete carcass of the recently cancelled multibillion-dollar high-speed rail system dots the skyline over Fresno.
Bureaucrats now insist that more billions must be spent to ensure that a short segment of the least traveled route will be finished, though they obviously do not anticipate spurring a new tourist or commercial corridor between Merced and Bakersfield.
High-speed-rail gurus insist on salvaging something of the boondoggle not because they have an economic rationale justifying more dollars — they would be far better invested in improving freeways, airports, and rails — but largely out of pride and shame that demand some small token rescued from a very bad pipe dream.
In 1973, when I first visited and lived in Greece, the roads were medieval. The old Hellinikon Airport was dysfunctional, if not creepy.
Highway rest stops were filthy. I have lived in or visited Greece in the ensuing 45 years since, including occasionally after the 2008 meltdown and European Union standoff. And yet today, the freeways, chief airport, and rest stops of relatively poor Greece are in far better shape than are California’s. LAX’s poor road access, traffic, uncleanness, crowds, and chaos seem premodern compared with the current Athenian airport.
It is an eerie experience to see America’s once premier state, currently at its supposed acme, now resemble Greece of the colonels a half-century ago, while 2019 Greece seems more like a functioning 1973 California. Athens and Thessaloniki are still dirty in a few places, and there are homeless and illegal immigrants. But one does not see needles and feces on the sidewalks, and it is safe to walk in the evening. Greek public restrooms, once notorious, are far more sanitary than those at rest stops in Fresno, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.
Power outrages are characteristic of Third World countries. Here in California we are advised to brace for lots of them, given that our antiquated grid apparently contributes to brush fires on hot days. As a native, I do not remember a single instance of our 20th-century state utilities shutting down service in the manner that they now routinely promise.
California for Others
Crime the last three years has increased. It is epidemic in local jails.
San Francisco has the highest property-crime rate per capita of any major city. The California prison system is a mess, and sanctuary cities ensure that illegal aliens charged with crimes will not be deported.
Pick up a McClatchy paper and you’ll see that the day’s fare of Central Valley criminality, even after sanitization and editorialization, is mind-boggling.
California’s cycles of wet boom years and dry bust years continue because the state refuses to build three or four additional large reservoirs that have been planned for more than a half-century, and that would store enough water to keep California functional through even the worst drought. The rationale is either that it is more sophisticated to allow millions of acre-feet of melted snow to run into the sea, or it is better to have a high-speed-rail line from Merced to Bakersfield than an additional 10 million acre-feet of water storage, or droughts ensure more state control through rationing and green social-policy remedies.
Twenty-seven percent of Californians were not born in the United States, a large minority of them residing in the United States illegally.
Yet California’s universities and popular culture are at the forefront of salad-bowl and identity-politics policies that obstruct assimilation, integration, and intermarriage — the historical remedies for the natural tensions that arise within multiracial and multiethnic societies. In this perfect storm, at the very moment the world’s poorest citizens from Oaxaca and Central America flooded into America, de facto rejecting the protocols of their home, their hosts’ messaging to them was that they should lodge complaints about the social injustice of their new home and romanticize the culture that they had just forsaken for good cause.
California schools are usually in the bottom decile of national rankings. No one in polite conversation asks why that is so, given that the state’s K–12 schools used to be among the most competitive in the United States.
Yet, again in medieval fashion, the professional schools and science and technology departments of California’s premier research universities — Cal Tech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC — are among the highest-rated in the world. Imagine something like the scribal oases of Padua, Oxford, or Paris in an otherwise frightening 13th century.
If one wishes to be schooled as an electrical engineer or cancer researcher, California is an attractive place; if one wishes to be a knowledgeable graduate of a public elementary and high school, it most certainly is not.
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles is perhaps the worst public-service entity in the United States. To enter any branch office is to venture into a Dante’s Inferno of huge lines, chaos, unkept rest rooms, and rude and often incompetent unionized employees. The only efficient DMV office in the state is the unmarked and secret branch in Sacramento reserved for state legislators and grandee insiders who oversee the DMV for the rest of the population. For a fee, concierge private auto clubs and firms often duplicate some DMV services, a de facto admission that the state needs something else besides itself to offer basic services. I once asked a DMV clerk, after a long wait in line, if it was right to be wearing a purple SEIU organizing T-shirt; she replied, “Do you still want to be served?”
The DMV scandals are multifarious: Thousands of motor-voter registrations sent to the wrong people, including illegal aliens supposedly ineligible to vote; corrupt employees who sell commercial truck driver’s licenses to the unqualified; and private corporations and occasionally individuals selling hard-to-obtain reservations and appointments.
California now has the nation’s highest basket of sales, gas, and income taxes. With a state surplus, and a slowing economy, one would think that the legislature and governor would pause before even considering raising more taxes. After all, new federal tax law limits write-offs of state and local taxes to $10,000 — radically spiking upper-bracket Californians’ federal tax liabilities.
Yet the rule in California is to punish the upper middle class while pandering to the rich and romanticizing the poor. Thus, the legislature is now considering a punitive new inheritance tax, and it just imposed an Internet sales tax.
Again, the message is that if Californians can survive a recent 13.3 percent top state-income-tax rate, and a vast increase in their federal tax liability, then certainly they can be easily squeezed further after death to pony up 40 percent of their already taxed estates that are over $3 million in value.
Translated, that can mean that a tract house in Los Angeles or the Bay Area and a modest 401K are proof that you did not build your wealth on your own, so the state has a second shot at appropriating your postmortem capital, to ensure that your children will see no benefit from your parsimony and thrift.
California’s apocalyptic present has created an alternate universe, in good Third World style, of pay-for-play services. To avoid the emergency room (the last time I used one, two gangs squared off in the waiting room, to continue what their wounded members were under treatment for), progressive Californians often pay for concierge medicine and anything private to avoid at all costs using any state services.
The coastal corridor elite often put their kids in tony prep schools that have sprung up or vastly expanded, in the fashion of the 1960s white Southern academies that were designed to circumvent federal desegregation edicts. Elite progressives mimic old-style, 1960s segregationists but feel that their children’s green and multicultural curricula offer enough penance to assuage their guilt over abandoning the state’s much praised “diverse” schools.
Our Dreams, Your Nightmares
What caused this lunacy?
A polarity of importing massive poverty from south of the border while pandering to those who control unprecedented wealth in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the tourism industry, and the marquee universities. Massive green regulations and boutique zoning, soaring taxes, increasing crime, identity politics and tribalism, and radical one-party progressive government were force multipliers. It is common to blame California Republicans for their own demise. They have much to account for, but in some sense, the state simply deported conservative voters and imported their left-wing replacements.
In a reductionist sense, perhaps if former governor Jerry Brown knew that he would one day retire to Delano and drive the 99 daily, rather than to Grass Valley, with several state pensions in his bank account, or if Dianne Feinstein dwelled in an East Palo Alto or Redwood City residence rather than in Pacific Heights, or if all the Pelosi grandchildren had to attend state public schools, then the architects of 21st-century California might have had to live with the consequences of their own dreams and been less eager to inflict their nightmares on the other 40 million Californians.
But then again, such a radical divergence between a few insider elites and a massive underclass, with little in between, is perhaps what best defines “Third World.”
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5) China has about 50% of the world's population and consumes the following:
53% of the world's cement, 48% of the world's iron ore, 47% of the world's coal.
And the majority of just about every other major commodity.
In 2010, China produced 11 times more steel than the United States .
New World Record: China made and sold 18 million vehicles in 2Ø1Ø.
There are more pigs in China than in the next 43 pork producing nations combined.
China currently has the world's fastest train and the world's largest high-speed rail network.
China is currently the number one producer in the world of wind and solar power, but don't use it themselves.While they manufacture 80% of the world's solar panels, they install less than 5% and build a new coal fired power station every week. In one year they turn on more new coal powered electricity than Australia's total output. China currently controls more than 90% of the total global supply of rare earth elements. In the past 15 years, China has moved from 14th place to 2nd place in the world in published scientific research articles. China now possesses the fastest supercomputer on the entire globe.At the end of March 2011, China has accumulated $3.04 trillion in US foreign currency reserves! -- the largest stockpile on the entire globe
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