Who left the most debt?

The Congressional Budget Office has produced a graph showing how much debt as a percentage of GDP each American president accumulated while in office. You can see it at the Washington Examiner.

Self-indulgence, self-delusion and, finally, abject paralysis

When interest rates return to more normal historical levels of 4-5% per annum, the costs of servicing the debt—along with unsustainable Social Security and Medicare entitlement costs—will begin to undermine the entire budget.

...Illegal immigration poses a similar dilemma. No nation can remain stable when 10-20 million foreign nationals have crashed through what has become an open border and reside unlawfully in the United States—any more than a homeowner can have neighbors traipsing through and camping in his unfenced yard.

...Race relations pose comparable paradoxes. Inner-city Chicago has turned into a war zone with over 500 murders so far this year alone. As tragic as occasional police shootings are of African-American suspects, they do not occur at an incidence higher than the percentage of African-Americans who come into contact with law enforcement or who commit violent crimes. Yet when an African-American officer, in a department overseen by an African-American police chief, shoots an uncompliant but armed African-American suspect, a full-scale urban riot ensues, well beyond the ability of police to control.

No one would object that Americans need to be engaged in helping the inner-city poor—nor would anyone deny the moral importance of evaluating others by the content of their character, and not by the color of their skin. But Americans also accept society’s obligations to maintain law and order in communities racked by gang violence. The African-American community must, in the fashion of other ethnic communities in the United States, change its cultural norms around masculinity. It should define maleness in terms of a two-parent household and a father’s daily guidance and support of his own children. In a larger sense, the misogynist, anti-police, violent, and often racist lyrics of rap music should be as ostracized as Jim Crow-era stereotypes of blacks eventually were.

The cures for the maladies of the inner city are civic reengagement, honest talk, economic entrepreneurship, self-help, and self-reliance in the black community. Liberal elites who avoid the inner city and send their children to mostly white and Asian prep schools fear honest talk as intensely as they mouth off about racism. But because we do not wish to talk honestly about the absence of parity in racial relations, and the causes for it, we plod on ahead, struggling with a slow wasting away malady rather than the chemotherapy of tough and honest solutions.

Donald Trump, in supposedly reckless fashion, questioned the present status of the seven-decade-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the cornerstone of Western collective security that deterred 500 divisions of the Soviet Red Army from overrunning Europe west of the Elbe River. Trump blasted away at our European Union allies in NATO, the vast majority of which do not contribute their fair share to the alliance. Most forget that the sole obstacle to an outlaw world led by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Iran, ISIS, China, and North Korea is the deterrent ability of the United States.

...The same lose/lose dilemmas plague current foreign policy. Under the Obama administration, the old postwar order led by the security guarantees of the United States abruptly ended—the vacuum filled by ascendant regional (and often nuclear) hegemons. Russia is expanding control, or at least influence, over the old Soviet republics and Eastern Europe. China carves out a new version of the old Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere at the expense of the democracies in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Iran is on the path to be the nuclear adjudicator of the Persian Gulf’s oil depot. Radical Islamic terrorism has made the Middle East a wasteland.

What would once have been seen as radical neglect of our existential problems is now the normal way of getting by one more day. What destroys civilizations are not, as popularly advertised, plagues, global warming, or hostile tribes on the horizon, as much as self-indulgence, self-delusion—and, finally, abject paralysis.

Read more here.

I hope Donald Trump reads this!

With presidential debate number 2 coming up Sunday night, Victor Davis Hanson has some advice for Donald Trump.

In debate No. 2, Trump owes it to the ‘deplorables’ to focus on the issues and exert some self-control. In the first debate, Hillary stuck out her jaw on cybersecurity, the treatment of women, sermons on the need for restrained language, and talk about the shenanigans of the rich — and Trump passed on her e-mail scandals, her denigration of Bill’s women, her reckless smears like “deplorables,” and her pay-for-pay Clinton Foundation enrichment, obsessed instead with the irrelevant and insignificant.

In fact, the first presidential debate resembled the final scene out of the Caine Mutiny. Trump was melting down like the baited Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), in his convoluted wild-goose-chase defenses of his arcane business career. Watching it was as painful as it was for the admiral judges in the movie who saw fellow officer Queeg reduced to empty shouting about strawberries.

...Trump’s detours de nihilo, the constant unanswered race/class/gender jabs by a haughty Hillary, and Trump’s addictions to broken-off phrases, and loud empty superlative adjectives (tremendous, awesome, great, and fantastic) won’t win him the necessary extra 3–4 percent of women, independents, and establishment Never Trump Republicans. Trump’s bragging that he has “properties” in your state or that he found a way to creatively account his way out of income taxes does not come off as synonymous with a plan to make you well off, too.

Moderator Lester Holt did what all mainstream debate moderators of a now corrupt profession customarily do: Before the debate he leaked that they might possibly be conservative, feigned fairness, and then reestablished his left-wing credentials by focusing solely on fact-checking Trump, so that he wouldn’t be targeted later by leftist elites whose pique could lead to temporary ostracism from the people and places Holt values.

So, of course, he audited Trump and exempted Clinton, as if Trump’s businesses were as overtly crooked as the play-for-pay Clinton syndicate, or Trump’s supposed insensitivities to a pampered beauty queen (with a checkered past) were morally equivalent to Hillary’s denigration of Bill’s women who had claimed sexual assault or her eerie post facto chortling over getting a defendant, accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, off with lesser charges.

Most newsreaders know little more than how to news read. So we should not have been surprised that Holt’s audits of Trump on the legality of stop-and-frisk, or Holt’s denial that violent crime was up, was about as accurate as Candy Crowley’s hijacking of the second 2012 debate to rewrite what Barack Obama said into what she thought he should have said. Trump, in fact, was right that his microphone did not work properly and right that the media was biased — but wrong that bringing any of that up mattered in analyses of his debate performance.

The Clinton debate formula should have been clear: Bait and prod Trump to go into egocentric rants about his businesses, or a beauty queen, or another non-story, and then let the moderator massage the playing field, and let Hillary fill in dead time with empty platitudes (we are all racists/we need more solar panels/the wealthy don’t pay their fair share), and unfunded promises, while pandering along race, class, and gender lines.

Trump has to find a way to blow apart that script — largely by repressing his ego and simply not talking about any of his businesses or going down into the Clinton muck. Period.

...He should blunt all Clinton attacks with either an upbeat, simple positive statement (“I built things in Manhattan, where few others on the planet could”), or just offer no more than a ten-second negative joust (“I ran a business that provided jobs and gave people places to live; you, Hillary, helped oversee a foundation syndicate that created nothing really other than cash and free travel for your family and cronies”). Trump should not spend one second beyond that. Any talk about his business or slogging in the mud with Hillary is precious campaign time lost that otherwise could remind the country of her defects and her trite and tired visions as an Obama 2.0.

Otherwise the news cycle should frame the debate. There are about five issues. Trump simply needs to go through them quickly. If he is short, as usual, on specifics, the lack of detail will matter less, the more crises he can cover:
1. Chaos and Change. The world is in chaos — and wants an American leader, not another temporizing college law lecturer or a weak imitation of a tired Angela Merkel. About every week there is either a terrorist attack, news of more scandal, or a riot. The common denominator is that Obama-Hillary lost the country respect and deterrence: No one honors the police and law at home just as no one respects our diplomats and officials abroad. The result is a green light to harm them without expecting consequences. Voters share a collective fear that things of the last Obama-Clinton eight years simply cannot go on as they are.

2. Illegal Immigration. No country can exist without borders. Hillary and Obama have all but destroyed them; Trump must remind us how he will restore them. Walls throughout history have been part of the solution, from Hadrian’s Wall to Israel’s fence with the Palestinians. “Making Mexico pay for the wall” is not empty rhetoric, when $26 billion in remittances go back to Mexico without taxes or fees, largely sent from those here illegally, and it could serve as a source of funding revenue.

Trump can supersede “comprehensive immigration” with a simple program: Secure and fortify the borders first; begin deporting those with a criminal record, and without a work history. Fine employers who hire illegal aliens. Any illegal aliens who choose to stay, must be working, crime-free, and have two years of residence. They can pay a fine for having entered the U.S. illegally, learn English, and stay while applying for a green card — that effort, like all individual applications, may or may not be approved. He should point out that illegal immigrants have cut in line in front of legal applicants, delaying for years any consideration of entry. That is not an act of love. Sanctuary cities are a neo-Confederate idea, and should have their federal funds cut off for undermining U.S. law. The time-tried melting pot of assimilation and integration, not the bankrupt salad bowl of identity politics, hyphenated nomenclature, and newly accented names should be our model of teaching new legal immigrants how to become citizens.

3. Debt and the Economy. Hillary served in an administration that doubled the national debt to $20 trillion and lobbied to keep interest at near zero to finance it. That incomprehensible sum is a prescription for disaster the moment rates rise. She talks grandly of spending, but never of balancing — largely because she has always lived high on someone else’s money. Slashing defense and raising taxes still got us $500 billion in annual deficits — just what we would expect from those who short the military and soak the well-off in order to waste more money on programs with no record of success. No economy can grow with ever more debt, regulations, and higher taxes.

4. Foreign Policy. The world is becoming a mess, beginning with Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. Iraq blew up. Syria is a wasteland. So is Libya. ISIS went from declared “jayvees” to undeclared pros. Iran is a regional bully whose neighbors assume it will be nuclear soon. Russia has contempt for the West — NATO and the EU in particular — and seems to be reassembling the old Soviet empire. China is recreating the old Japanese East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Common denominator? They all figured out Obama-Clinton-Kerry weakness — assured that in any crisis the U.S. would predictably back down from any red line, deadline, or step over a line it so loudly and sanctimoniously set. Talking moralistically and provocatively while carrying a tiny stick is a fatal combination. Electing Hillary Clinton in 2016 is like reelecting Jimmy Carter in 1980. When Obama brags abroad “I don’t bluff,” or Hillary chuckles, “We came, we saw, Qaddafi died,” should we laugh or cry?

5. The deterioration of the middle class. Obamacare is ruining health care for the middle classes, who were asked to pay for the poor while the rich found ways to navigate around the rules they created for others. “Free trade” was certainly not “fair trade,” but it did enrich a global elite at the expense of displaced middle-class workers. Where Obama left off with “clingers,” Hillary has now taken up with “deplorables.” Trump might ask her, “Why do you hate a quarter of the country?”

Trump owes it to these forgotten Deplorables to prepare for the last two debates and to talk about them, and not himself. If he doesn’t, he will wreck their hopes, betray their trust, and walk away a loser as few others in history.

But if Trump fights Hillary with a coherent plan that is the antithesis of the last eight years, rather than harping about his business reputation and obsessing with the trivial, he still might win a conservative Congress, a cadre of loyal conservative cabinet officers, a rare chance to remake the Supreme Court in a fashion not seen since the 1930s — and at 70 years of age make all his prior celebrity achievements of the past seem as nothing in comparison.

Read more here.

Which country has the most sovereign debt?

Jeff Desjardins brings us the answer in visual form at Visual Capitalist.

The numbers that stand out the most, especially when comparing to the previous world economy graphic:

The United States constitutes 23.3% of the world economy but 29.1% of world debt. It’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 103.4% using IMF figures.
Japan makes up only 6.18% of total economic production, but has amounted 19.99% of global debt.

China, the world’s second largest economy (and largest by other measures), accounts for 13.9% of production. They only have 6.25% of world debt and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 39.4%.

7 of the 15 countries with the most total debt are European. Together, excluding Russia, the European continent holds over 26% of total world debt.

Combining the debt of the United States, Japan, and Europe together accounts for 75% of total global debt.

Read more here.

Was Obama a short-sighted incompetent naïf or a mean-spirited and narcissistic nihilist? Or both?

Victor Davis Hanson asks "Is Obamism correctable?"

THE MIDDLE EAST
The policy of “leading from behind” and the crudity of “We came, we saw, he [Qaddafi] died” have left a human tragedy in Libya. Backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was an inexplicable choice, and it almost ruined the country. The United States did not need to hound and jail an innocent video maker in order to concoct a myth to cover up the culpable lax security in Benghazi. Yemen was strangely declared a model of our anti-terrorism efforts — just weeks before it ignited into another Somalia or Congo. ISIS was airily written off as a jayvee bunch as it spread beyond Syria and Iraq. There is little need to do a detailed comparison of Iraq now and Iraq in February 2009 (when it was soon to be the administration’s “greatest achievement,” a “stable” and “self-reliant” nation); the mess in between is attributable to Obama’s use of the aftermath of the Iraq War for pre-election positioning. Ordering Assad to flee while ignoring the violence in Syria and proclaiming a faux red line has now tragically led to a million refugees in Europe (and another 4 million in the neighborhood) and more than 200,000 dead. Israel is now considered not an ally, not even a neutral, but apparently a hostile state worthy of more presidential invective than is Iran. We have few if any reliable friends any more in the Gulf. Iran will become a nuclear power. The only mystery over how that will happen is whether Obama was inept or whether he deliberately sought to make the theocracy some sort of a strategic power and U.S. ally. The Middle East over the next decade may see three or four additional new nuclear powers. The Russia of kleptocrat Vladimir Putin is seen in the region as a better friend than is the U.S. — and certainly a far more dangerous enemy to provoke.

There is no easy cure for all this; it will take years just to sort out the mess.

THE LAW
There will be a temptation for a reform president to use the lawless means that Obama has bequeathed — executive orders to unconstitutionally bypass Congress; arbitrary suspension or simple non-enforcement of laws, depending on where we are in the national election cycle; exemption of party loyalists from legal accountability — to achieve the noble aim of restoring legality. But such short-cuts to reform would be a terrible mistake.

It would be quite illegal to ignore emissions standards the way Obama has ignored the Defense of Marriage Act; or to reduce, by fiat, the EPA to the present toothless status of ICE; or to allow a new sort of “sanctuary city” to refuse to marry gays, in the manner of San Francisco’s refusing to hand over illegal immigrants; or to arbitrarily remove particular owls and newts from the protection of the Endangered Species Act as Obama has picked and chosen which elements of the Affordable Care Act at any particular time he considered legally non-binding. Payback is very tempting, but eight more years of it would ensure that we would become another Zimbabwe or Venezuela. Instead, the next president must, as never before, obey both the spirit and the very letter of the law to restore to us what Obama has almost destroyed.

RACE
Polls and pundits agree that racial relations are now at their worst since the riots of the 1970s. Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign blew long and hard the dog whistle of racial polarization: clingers, the not-to-be-disowned Rev. Jeremiah Wright, typical white person, bring a gun to a knife fight, get in their faces. He has never stopped since. The president kept at it when he intervened in the Skip Gates farce, or editorialized about skin color in the ongoing and volatile Trayvon Martin case, or institutionalized the lies of Ferguson that begat the “Hands up; don’t shoot” mythology — and the tragedies that followed. The message was always that race is still a barrier to success in America and that, logically, only fealty to the Obama administration could improve things for people of color.

Obama did not phone the family of Kate Steinle — murdered as a direct result of sanctuary-city practices approved by his administration — or the families of police officers slain as a result of the hate speech generated by the Black Lives Matter movement. But he has also largely ignored nearly 7,000 blacks whose lives have been taken by other blacks. In some sense, Obama proved a captive of his own political matrix. The Obama election strategy — successful in 2008 and 2012, a failure in 2010 and 2014 — was predicated on upping the polarizing rhetoric, extending social services, and embracing hip popular culture to achieve historic minority voter turnout and unprecedented block-voting patterns.

But in the blowback, the liberal Congress and many of the Democratic state legislatures were wiped out, and the country has been split apart. Obama’s legacy to the Democratic party is the loss of the white working classes, and the permanent need to achieve massive minority turnout and absolute liberal fealty at the polls. To do that will probably require institutionalized open borders, habitual racial haranguing, and the courting of the Al Sharptons of the race industry. Whether Obama knew that such racial voting would not be completely transferrable to his Democratic successors, while the hostility it engendered most certainly would be, remains a mystery. But that paradox raises what is perhaps the central issue of his presidency: whether he was a short-sighted incompetent naïf or a mean-spirited and narcissistic nihilist. Or both?

The next president should take a hiatus from our racial obsessions, and simply try treating Americans as if their race or ethnic background were irrelevant.

DEBT
We will reach $20 trillion in debt on Obama’s watch. He ran on the issue of national debt, blasting George W. Bush for using a “Bank of China” credit card “by his lonesome” to bankrupt the country. Indeed, a penny-pinching Senator Obama had voted to shut down the government rather than raise the debt ceiling. But as president, Obama may well accrue more debt than all previous presidents combined. His legacy will be that he made George W. Bush’s budgetary indulgence look sober and judicious compared with his own. Only the Federal Reserve’s near-zero interest rates for seven years — along with the low energy prices that came despite, not because of, his efforts — have saved Obama, and staved off the stagnation of having well over 90 million able-bodied Americans permanently out of the work force. When interest rates climb to 4 or 5 percent, the next president will face a budgetary crisis, augmented by Obama’s failure to address entitlement spending. We are in for rough times; whether Obama will get out ahead of the reckoning is unknown.

In other areas, the Obama agenda is falling of its own weight. Obamacare is becoming irrelevant, because of both noncompliance and soaring costs. As the poor discover that even with subsidies they have to pony up considerable deductibles and copays, and must actually pay some premiums, they increasingly head for the free clinics or back to the emergency rooms. Even Democrats will not rue too much the spontaneous unwinding of Obamacare, given that much of the public is doing its best to ignore it.

The restoration of defense spending will follow the Carter-to-Reagan pattern, albeit more slowly given the specter of unsustainable national debt. The next president will address the tax code, and the solution won’t be Bernie Sanders’s dream of a 90 percent income-tax rate. Even Joe Biden cannot run on Obama’s stellar economic record — pretending that the middle class has been in ascendance since 2009, extolling the advantages of more debt, or proclaiming the necessity of even stricter environmental regulations or more subsidies to Solyndra-like green companies.

There is not much of an idea any longer of investigative journalism. The press for the last seven years has largely chosen to become a Ministry of Truth. One reason why Donald Trump soars is that, after the press’s canonization of Obama, the public relishes Trump’s contempt for the media — and the latter have now lost the moral credibility to critique any candidate on the grounds of dishonesty, hypocrisy, narcissism, mendacity, or polarization of the electorate.

The tragic mess of 2009–2016 is ending, and soon the cleanup will begin — accompanied by stupefaction as to just how much will have to be thrown away.

Confusing

h/t Darleen Click

Debt

Seth Godin writes today about debt.

Greece. Puerto Rico. Student loans. Mortgages.

The forces of debt are reshaping the world, creating dislocations and crises on a regular basis. And yet, few of us really understand how debt works.

Not the debt of, "can I borrow five dollars?" but the debt of corporations, nations and bureaucratic bodies. What's debt, really? What is money, and which came first?

The most fascinating book I've read all year is Debt, by David Graeber. (The audio is highly recommended).

Debt is older than money, and money was probably invented not to help the imaginary harried merchant who is struggling with barter (what? you want to trade your sheep for my muffins? but I don't need sheep!) but instead to enable nation states to feed their armies, and for individuals to trade debts with one another.

[His army insight: The easiest way to feed an army is to invent a coin, then require all your citizens to pay taxes in that coin, a coin they can only get by trading. Then give a bunch of coins to your soldiers. Bingo.]

From this surprising beginning, Graeber takes us on a tour that covers 10,000 years. He talks about the origins of slavery as well as the inequities caused by the World Bank and the IMF. One simple example: If a dictator runs up a huge debt and then absconds with the money, are the citizens of that nation responsible? For how much? For how long? Should they be put into peonage, they and their children and all of their descendants?

If a mortgage is overdue, is it better to kick people out of the house and watch the neighborhood descend into rubble?

If 10 million Americans are overwhelmed with student debt they can't repay, what should we do then?

If the purpose of inter-country loans is to foster growth as well as international relations and trade, how does bankrupting and isolating an entire country when they can't pay accomplish this?

Or consider a much smaller example of how the world's most profitable profession can change even simple elements of user experience and customer satisfaction: Every time I pay for something with Paypal, I'm interrupted by a window insisting that I should pay for this item on credit, instead of using my balance. And every time, I close this window. Paypal knows this. And yet, they continue to interrupt millions of people a day, intentionally breaking their already weak user experience, because the idea of putting more people into more credit card debt is so financially seductive.

A key tenet of our culture is, "you must pay your debts." Debt makes us think about what this simple sentence means. Even if your instinct is to answer with, "of course everyone should pay their debts," the next question is obvious: How should we deal with nations and peoples who can't? How far do we go?

I can't do Graeber's book justice in a blog post, but I want to point it out to anyone who wants to understand the acceptance and future of bitcoin, the changing wealth of nations or why countries still own tons and tons of gold. Mostly, knowing how we got here makes it a lot easier to figure out where we might head next.

Too much debt is a behavioral problem

Monty at Ace of Spades writes,

People run into problems with debt in the same way they run into problems with food: they eat too much. The problem with debt are not intrinsic to the concept, but in the inability of many human beings to manage it. As in so much else in economics, debt is a behavioral problem.

...Debt is much like any other intoxicant: its usage requires self-control. Lacking that, all the laws and regulations in the world won't stop people from getting into trouble with debt -- as with a habitual drunkard, the only remedy is to cut them off.

Read more here.

Our fixation on frivolous identity culture

V the K writes at Gay Patriot,

If you had to pick a single person to epitomize Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of the USA, you could not do better than Caitlyn Jenner, who once achieved feats that brought the admiration of the entire world, but has chosen to become an emasculated, celebrity-chasing joke.

But Rachel Dolezal (a.k.a ‘Sideshow Flozell’) comes a pretty damn close second. Whether her race-fluidity is a cynical exploitation of an academic and political culture that favors dark skinned people, a reflection of deep mental illness, or just an extreme example of a white person appropriating what respected social anthropologist Cher called “black cool,” it is striking that her effforts to change her identity have been not as universally lauded by the social progressive left as Caitlyn Jenner’s. (Although some leftists are willing to support Dolezal’s delusion.)

...Above all, the fixation on Caitlyn Jenner and Flozell of Spokane at a time when Chinese hackers are stealing state secrets with impunity; when the Chinese, Iranians, and Russians are laughing at our military; when our economy is being sustained only by massive Government borrowing (that can go on forever, right?) shows that, as a culture, we no longer care about Serious Things. We have lost sight of what matters, and instead are locked into a cycle of self-validation through self-gratification and fixation on frivolous identity culture.

Read more here.

The sky's the limit

Did we just get an alpha male into the 2016 GOP presidential race? No, I'm definitely not referring to Jeb Bush. I am referring to "The Donald."


Did you know that Trump got his life plan from a hobo?

Comedy Central Presents
Get More: Watch More Stand-Up.

PJ O'Rourke writes at The Daily Beast,

...During this endless grim, foggy, electoral season with its constant drizzle of wannabes, I intend to make little prose pictures of each candidatural dwarf until we are down to two.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that the two may be “Clinton” and “Bush.” Members of the electorate in their right minds will go into the ballot booth, see the names, think to themselves, “I did this already.” And leave with the ballot unmarked. Voter turn-out will be 6 percent. The shuttle from the local extended care facility will send a few memory-impaired Republicans to the polls. A DNC bus will collect some derelicts from skid row. And we will have the first President of the United States elected by a franchise limited to sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease and drunken bums.

Let us therefore begin at the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, the dross, and the dregs, by which I mean Donald Trump.

Or is Trump just using the garbage of his personality to chum for publicity again? If he isn’t really a candidate, I see no reason to take him at his word, any more than I’d take him at his word about anything else.

...Besides, I, personally, support his candidacy. “Democracy,” said H. L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The American government is of the people, by the people, for the people. And, these days, America is peopled by 320 million Donald Trumps. Donald Trump is representative of all that we hold dear: money. Or, rather, he is representative of greed for money. We common people may not be able to match Trump’s piggy bank, but we can match his piggishness.

...Many a candidate for president has fibbed on the subject of his or her economic circumstances—William Henry “born in a log cabin” Harrison and Hillary “dead broke” Clinton. But Trump will be the first candidate to — like the American legend that he is — tell tall tales about all the money he’s got. Trump is a financial Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and Davey Crockett rolled into one, according to Trump.

If Trump’s critics don’t think this is typical of modern Americans, they haven’t looked at our online dating profiles.

Also typical of modern Americans is Trump’s bad taste. True, he doesn’t dress the way the rest of us do—like a nine-year-old in twee T-shirt, bulbous shorts, boob shoes, and league-skunked sports team cap. And Trump doesn’t weigh 300 pounds or have multiple piercings or visible ink. He puts his own individual stamp on gaucherie. And we like it. We’re a country that cherishes being individuals as much as we cherish being gauche.

We have to consider what kind of president he would make. What would his foreign policy be? What domestic priorities would he favor? How would he handle the economy?

On all three counts he’ll be—just like he says he is already—a big success.

...Imagine the strides Trump will make in American foreign policy. He’s crazier than all the other candidates put together. He’s under the illusion that he’s 20 times richer than he is. He thinks childhood vaccination caused the movie Rain Man. He believes Obama was born to the Queen of Sheba in an H. Rider Haggard novel. Putin, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Khamenei, ISIS, the Taliban, and Hamas will be paralyzed with fear. Who knows what this lunatic will do?

What he’ll do is build thousands of Trump casinos, Trump hotels, and Trump resorts in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Raqqa, Kandahar, and Gaza. Then all of them will go bankrupt the way Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts did. He’ll destroy the power of our foes leaving Russia trying to palm off Eastern Ukraine on angry bond-holders and China auctioning distressed property in the Spratly Islands.

Trump’s chief domestic policy will be to be on TV. That’s one more reason he’ll get elected. We can relate to Trump. The first and foremost goal of all Americans is to be on TV.

As President Trump will be able to be on TV all the time, 24/7. Just doing his hair in the makeup room during commercial breaks should keep him too busy to push other birdbrain domestic policies the way some presidents have. And he can yell “You’re fired!” as much as he wants. It will make for a healthy turnover in cabinet appointees such as Ivanka, Dennis Rodman, Larry King, and Vince McMahon.

And Trump understands the economy. He’ll push America’s economic growth forward the same way he pushed his own—with debt and more debt. Average American household debt is more than $225,000. The average American family’s credit card debt is almost $16,000. Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt between 1991 and 1994. We Americans know a leader when we see one. And we love debt. Otherwise America’s national debt wouldn’t have gone from $15 billion in 1930 to $18 trillion today. Tomorrow, with Trump in the Oval Office, the sky’s the limit.

Read more here.

Who lost America?

Are you following the war between the Wall Street Journal and writer Pat Buchanan? The Journal started it with this lead editorial:

Here we go again. In the 1990s Pat Buchanan launched a civil war within the Republican Party on a platform targeting immigration and trade. Some claimed Pitchfork Pat was the future of the GOP, though in the end he mainly contributed to its presidential defeats.

...This is no way to rebuild a conservative majority. What America’s working families need most after the Obama era is a healthy, vibrant and growing economy that creates more jobs, increases paychecks and expands opportunity. A trade deal that would help open up a market of one billion people to the goods and services produced by the American worker is an excellent place to start.

Pat Buchanan responds by asking, who really lost America?

Now it is true that, while Nixon and Reagan won 49-state landslides and gave the GOP five victories in six presidential contests, the party has fallen upon hard times. Only once since 1988 has a Republican presidential nominee won the popular vote. But was this caused by following this writer’s counsel? Or by the GOP listening to the deceptions of its Davos-Doha-Journal wing?

In the 1990s, this writer and allies in both parties fought NAFTA, GATT, and MFN for China. The Journal and GOP establishment ran with Bill and Hillary and globalization. And the fruits of their victory?

Between 2000 and 2010, 55,000 U.S. factories closed and 5 million to 6 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. Columnist Terry Jeffrey writes that, since 1979, the year of maximum U.S. manufacturing employment, “The number of jobs in manufacturing has declined by 7,231,000 — or 37 percent.”

Does the Journal regard this gutting of the greatest industrial base the world had ever seen, which gave America an independence no republic had ever known, an acceptable price of its New World Order?

Beginning in 1991, traveling the country and visiting plant after plant that was shutting down or moving to Asia or Mexico, some of us warned that this economic treason against America’s workers would bring about political retribution. And so it came to pass. Since 1988, a free-trade Republican Party has not once won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, or Wisconsin in a presidential election. Ohio, the other great Midwest industrial state, is tipping. The Reagan Democrats are gone. Who cast them aside? You or us?

Since the early 1990s, we have run $3 billion to $4 billion in trade deficits with China. Last year’s was $325 billion, or twice China’s defense budget. Are not all those factories, jobs, investment capital, and consumer dollars pouring into China a reason why Beijing has been able to build mighty air and naval fleets, claim sovereignty over the South and East China seas, fortify reefs 1,000 miles south of Hainan Island, and tell the U.S. Navy to back off?

The Journal accuses us of being anti-growth. But as trade surpluses add to a nation’s GDP, trade deficits subtract from it. Does the Journal think our $11 trillion in trade deficits since 1992 represents a pro-growth policy?

On immigration, this writer did campaign on securing the border in 1991-92, when there were 3 million illegal immigrants in the United States. But the Bush Republicans refused to seal the border. Now there are 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants and the issue is tearing the party apart. Now everybody is for “secure borders.”

We did urge a “moratorium” on legal immigration, such as America had from 1924 to 1965, to assimilate and Americanize the millions who had come. The Journal Republicans called that xenophobia. Since then, tens of millions of immigrants, here legally and illegally, mostly from the Third World, have arrived. Economically, they consume more in tax dollars than they contribute. Politically, most belong to ethnic groups that vote between 70 and 90 percent Democratic. Their children will bury the GOP.

Consider California, which voted for Nixon all five times he was on a national ticket and for Reagan in landslides all four times he ran. Since 1988, California has not gone Republican in a single presidential election. No Republican holds statewide office. Both U.S. Senators are Democrats. Democrats have 39 of 53 U.S. House seats. Republican state legislators are outnumbered 2-to-1.

Americans of European descent, who provide the GOP with 90 percent of its presidential vote, are down to 63 percent of the nation and falling. By 2042, they will be a minority. And there goes the GOP.

Lest we forget, the “Buchanan wing” also opposed the invasion of Iraq while the Journal-War Party wing howled, “Onto Baghdad!” ”Unpatriotic Conservatives,” we were called in a cover story by a neocon National Review for saying the war was unnecessary and unwise. Now, a dozen years after the “cakewalk” war, GOP candidates like Marco Rubio and Bush III are trying to figure out what it was all about, Alfie, and what they would have done, had they only known.

Our agenda in that decade was—stay out of wars that are not our business, economic patriotism, secure borders, and America first.

The foreign debt and de-industrialization of America, the trillion-dollar wars and the chaos of the Middle East, the shortened life span of the Party of Reagan, that’s your doing, fellas, not ours.

Speech-making and governing are two different things

When Barack Hussein Obama announced in Springfield, Illinois on February 10, 2007 that he was a candidate for president, he gave a speech. Myra Adams goes back to that speech to read the most salient points of his announced candidacy.

The first was to "build a more perfect union" borrowing a phrase from Springfield's own Abe Lincoln. In fact, according to Gallup, the nation is fifth most polarized now that at any time since 1953.

He also complained about mounting debts. In fact, Adams points out that

it is projected that by the time he leaves office, he will have accumulated debt equal to that of all previous presidents in U.S. history combined.

Adams links to this website to provide a graphic understanding of this debt.

In his speech Obama called for an end to poverty in this generation. In fact, there are five million people in poverty now than when he gave that speech.

When President Obama first stepped into the Oval Office, there were 31,939,110 Americans receiving food stamps. Now that number exceeds 46 million.

In the speech he called for universal health care. In fact,

Americans are stuck with an Obamacare legacy of higher premiums and deductibles for all. His signature program remains highly unpopular among 64 percent of Americans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

What Obama neglected to mention in his 2007 announcement speech was that universal health care, in any form, comes with a sickening price tag.

Equally sickening were a number of politically charged zingers in his speech that were begging to be countered, such as, Let’s be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil. So here is the rational explanation for his refusing to take action on the Keystone XL pipeline while justifying hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on Solyndra and other alternative-energy programs benefiting his political cronies.

Then Obama expresses his patriotism, saying, Most of all, let’s be the generation that never forgets what happened on that September day and confront the terrorists with everything we’ve got. Wouldn’t you love for the Pentagon to render a current opinion on that statement?

Obama ends his announcement speech saying, Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be done, and usher in a new birth of freedom on this earth. To that I say, “Kumbaya, Mr. President!” The potential for ushering in a “new birth of freedom on this earth” has never been less attainable, thanks to your avoiding the traditionally strong U.S. presidential leadership role, leaving a world power vacuum in which bad guys and turmoil have flourished.

So, happy eighth anniversary to a speech that started freshman senator Obama on his excellent adventure of over 215 golf outings (including one immediately after he had described as “appalling” the beheading of American journalist James Foley), non-stop fundraising, exotic vacations, and cavorting with celebrities.

His is a journey that will leave our next president with insurmountable problems at home and abroad.

read more here.

Under Obama our national debt has increased by $7,514,567,086,650.22

Terence P. Jeffrey writes:

When Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt was $10,626,877,048,913.08. Since then, it has increased $7,514,567,086,650.22--which is $65,443 per household, $70,985 per full-time worker and $84,266 per full-time private-sector worker.

Read more here.