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Here’s what the inside of my brain looks like right now:
Prequel:
Since I originally wrote and published this column last Tuesday, November 12, 2024, our new (old) President-elect has started nominating people for cabinet positions. A few of them make sense, but:
A Faux Gnus weekend anchor to lead the Department of Defense?
An accused sex offender and one of the least liked members of the House for Attorney General?
An inexperienced House member who used to be Vice Chair of the Democratic Party with, shall we say, an unusual view of the world, for Director of National Intelligence?
A multi-billionaire with no government experience to head up a so-far non-existent Government Efficiency department? I read somewhere today that it should be named the Department of Redundancy Department because we already have the Government Accountability Office for that.
And finally, so far, a guy from a political dynasty who has some good ideas (reduce chemical additives in our food and improve nutrition in the food schools feed our kids), and some that are completely whacko, i.e. there are no safe and effective vaccines. AND, he has a dead worm in his brain.
Last week’s election did not go the way I’d hoped, to put it mildly.
It turns out that, in spite of the fact that I get my news and information from a variety if sources, including some I rarely agree with, I’ve been living in a liberal bubble.
I do NOT watch Faux Gnus.
The folks I watch and listen to still live on Earth One but interpret things differently than I do. People like Justin Robert Young, who tries to analyse the balls and strikes of the horserace (to mix a metaphor), Andrew Heaton, who is way more libertarian than I am, but admits that he’s sure he’s wrong about a lot of things, he’s just not sure which things (me too) and Jennifer Briney, who’s Congressional Dish podcast digs deep into important legislation passed by the US Congress. Together the three of them have a podcast called “We’re Not Wrong”
Even with the polls showing a very close race it never occured to me that an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon who can barely put an English sentence together and has the vocabulary and temperament of an 8-year-old boy with ADHD would not only be elected, but also win the popular vote.
And it’s beginning to look like the GOP will have control of both the House and the Senate, and thanks to the MAGA Supreme Court, he will be immune from prosecution, so he will have absolutely no guard-rails this time around.
Scares the crap out of me.
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I've been reading, listening to and watching all kinds of post mortems.
Jeff Maurer (a liberal who I agree with more often than not) thinks Liberal Elites completely misunderstand what the majority of the electorate wants and keeps running the same old playbook hoping for a different result.
Others say that Harris should have pushed a Pro-choice agenda harder.
Still others say she should have moved farther to the left, supporting price controls and a soak-the-rich tax plan.
I am all for taxing the super-rich. How many billion dollars does one person need? More on this in a future column, so maybe you should subscribe.
Then there are those who say Harris should have moved closer to the center, de-emphasizing DEA, LBGTQ+ rights and support of organized labor.
I’d give you links, but I’ve been reading a lot of columns, watching a lot of TV and listening to a lot of podcasts in the last week and I can’t remember who said what. My point is that there’s a lot of Monday Morning quarterbacks out there and no two of them seem to agree.
I don’t know what the answer is.
All-in-all I’ve lead a pretty privileged life. And yet, even after Deb and I both set aside money for retirement in 401Ks and IRAs and managed to buy a house in Gardena, CA, then a nicer house in Lake Forest, CA, we’re struggling to stay within our means.
I get a pretty good benefit from Social Security, and Deb gets a spousal benefit that’s half of what I get.
Then we have what I would have thought would be a more-than-sufficient amount of money invested in some annuities that pay us us a regular monthly income.
We’re not exactly living extravagantly. We rarely go out to eat and almost never go to a movie. Yet we’re burning through savings and trying to figure out how to live within our means. This is not what I expected in retirement.
Our one luxury is a subscription to a playhouse in San Clemente. We attend plays there with another couple we’ve known for a couple of decades.
There’s a Mexican restaurant a block from the playhouse so we usually have a good dinner and split a couple of pitchers of Margaritas between the four of us. But that’s only every six weeks or so during the season from early autumn to late spring.
There are a lot of folks that are in much worse financial shape than we are, and I feel for them. I know a lot of them have to leave coastal Southern California because it’s so expensive.
But we like where we are and really don’t want to leave.
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The point is, I have very little in common with a farmworker in Iowa or a factory worker in Ohio. Or Tennessee. Or a coal miner in Kentucky.
I’m not sure what they’re looking for.
And, starting about the time Trump rode down that golden escalator, Deb and I have become politics junkies. We are amazed at the things people we know don’t know.
For instance, Deb spent the day with a friend last week who says she and her husband have stopped watching the news entirely.
This is the couple we go to the playhouse with.
They are way more religious and way more conservative than we are, but I know that in 2016 they hated Hillary and Trump both, so they just didn’t vote.
Deb and I are very open about our politics, but they seem to prefer to stay mum, which is their prerogative.
Deb thinks they’ve sat out the last three elections. And even if they did vote for Trump, at this point in time California is always going to go Democratic in a presidential election.
It’s an interesting relationship.
He was raised Seventh Day Adventist and is convinced that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. He also thinks undocumented immigrants voted in the last election. I briefly called him on that as we were walking from the restaurant to the playhouse, but Deb told me to Knock It Off and I suspect his wife said the same to him.
In spite of our differences we all get along famously and genuinely like each other.
The point is, I think that one of the reasons people voted for Donald Trump is that they remember a good economy leading up to Covid.
My feeling is that Trump was riding the good Obama economy and was lucky enough that the effects of his regressive, inflationary tax cuts for the super rich hadn’t kicked in before Covid basically shot the world’s economy in the head.
Then he completely mismanaged the pandemic, almost certainly causing excess deaths in the 10s or 100s of thousands.
From my point of view, once again a Democratic President had to clean up after a Republican administration screwed the economy.
It seemed like everyone, including me, expected that there would be a recession right about now after the world-wide inflation caused by Covid supply chain problems, a war in Ukraine and another war in the Middle East.
Instead, the US has an economy that’s the envy of the rest of the world. But, as near as I can tell, the majority of the electorate doesn’t know that.
Yes, prices went up due inflation, but so did wages, largely at the lower end of the wage scale.
Housing costs are unsustainable. Something needs to be done about that. I don’t think Trump’s plan to decrease demand for housing by deporting people will affect housing costs much.
I didn’t like all of Harris’ policies, some of them verged on price controls. I’d rather see more competition and less regulation in housing to bring prices down.
One of the biggest things Biden and Harris brag about is putting a price cap on Insulin for seniors on Medicare. If it’s true that a vial of insulin only costs $5 to make, open up licensing for multiple manufacturers and let them compete for people’s business rather than put an arbitrary cap on the price. You see, you can be a liberal AND a capitalist.
If President Elect Trump actually implements the policies he’s proposed, high tariffs, deporting all undocumented immigrants, etc., I predict massive inflation by this time next year followed by a recession caused by a vastly depleted workforce.
This country needs construction and farm workers. The vast majority of these workers have payroll and income taxes taken out of their paychecks to help keep this country afloat.
Despite Trump’s lies, immigrants commit way less crime than US Born residents.
Rather than kick them out, we should be giving them a path to citizenship so they can stay in this country and actually make America even more great than it is already.
Once again, this column went off in directions I didn’t intend when I first sat down and started writing. I’ve got more to say, but not today.
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