Author: admin

“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.”

Simone Weil – 20th Century Educator and Philosopher

Today I began the next phase of my education. I thought I would try out a new school and I thought I should try to keep up the standards that we had at the University of Minnesota. So, I found this little school in Connecticut called Yale – sorry Hohenstein no Harvard. So how did an old guy like me with a questionable track record get into this prestigious university? Well I didn’t exactly “get in”, I sort of just sneaked in via a MOOC – a massive open online course. A MOOC is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web, according to Wikipedia. All I know is that I found it on iTunes U and started by attending a lecture from a world-renowned scholar on the American Revolution. Apparently, a lot of us freshmen at Yale take this class.

Traditional educators are not so sure what to make of MOOC’s. A few years ago, I was on an advisory panel for the University of Minnesota School of Civil and Geotechnical Engineering – an extremely enlightening opportunity. At one of our meetings the head of the department noted that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had just made EVERY lecture needed for a civil engineering degree on line and available to the public. He posed the question – what does this mean to US? Lively discussion followed. I am not sure what this means for traditional education either. I think dramatic changes must and will eventually come.

This whole MOOC experience reminded me about my junior year at Minnesota. One of the world’s most respected economists, a guy by the name of Dr. Walter Heller, returned to the university after a stint as the Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. He taught a course in macroeconomics for one lecture session each week. I heard about it and I crashed the lectures for about six weeks. The problem was that word spread and pretty soon it was standing room only in a lecture hall of about five hundred and they put the kibosh on it – you had to show a registration card at the door. This ended my career with Dr. Heller but he made those lectures absolutely enthralling – which is a hard thing to do for the “Dismal Science”. Of course, I was getting no credit but I went just for the joy of learning.

I had the same feeling today. What a joy it is to be able to learn just for the sake of learning. And what a great opportunity to be able to learn from the best for free!!!!! Let me tell you I had a blast today and I am already wading into one of our first assigned readings – “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine. What a great book – what a great title. I am mostly through it already – I got it online from the library. I feel another post coming on.

“Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, right up there with Comey, Warner, Brennan and Clapper! Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!”
President Donald Trump describing Representative Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.

“Impeach the mother—-er.”
Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib

“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

President John F. Kennedy

House Speaker Pelosi has suggested to President Trump that he not deliver the State of the Union speech until later or perhaps not to Congress at all, instead just issuing some sort of written report, citing “security” issues. REALLY? Does the Speaker REALLY fear for the safety of the President because security has been compromised because of the shutdown?!?! I doubt it. I don’t believe that the State of the Union message is enshrined in law but it certainly is enshrined in tradition. Why would Speaker Pelosi do such a thing – such a partisan thing? Because she fears that President Trump will use the platform to advocate HIS partisan position, belittling the Democrats, blaming them for the government shutdown and all the ills of humanity. He might get an upper-hand for a few moments. And she is probably right – that is probably exactly what President Trump will do. After all, he just reciprocated by revoking the Speaker’s military air transportation for an important tour of Afghanistan and then outing her intention to utilize alternate commercial aviation. Is the leading country in the free world being run by four-graders?!?! It’s all just another tit-for-tat episode in the toxic environment that is our nation’s capital. Above, I cited just a couple of examples of the rhetoric that passes for normal these days. Representative Tlaib’s quote is cruder but I wouldn’t have to look very far to find a Trump-quote that would make that one pale by comparison.

My Pop was hardly a liberal but he consistently voted Democrat. He revered FDR and that carried over for a long time. That is until 1960 – “I mean Kennedy IS a Democrat but he is …. well, you know he IS a Catholic and you know that they are told what to do by the Pope.” This might be hard to comprehend in 2019 but it was an issue for some Protestants in 1960. But then on the morning of October 25, 1962 I listened while my parents debated if they would send us to school because they thought a nuclear bomb might be dropped that day. The compromise was that they would send us because they thought they would have time to get us from school before the mushroom cloud overtook us. Imagine how much greater their fears would have been if they had known that at the same time their 18-year old son was confined to barracks at Fort Sam Houston preparing for a possible transport to Cuba. They were ultimately ordered to stand down. Let me tell you, Pop was 1,000% behind President Kennedy.

So, what is my point? After Kennedy was elected, he was criticized by the media and roasted by comedians and his actions were questioned. But he stayed the course and maintained enough bipartisanship to get things done. In JFK’s day and others, when we were in trouble and needed to act, we circled the wagons. When things HAD TO BE DONE, we didn’t care who was a Republican and who was a Democrat and who got the credit or who got the blame. We don’t have the immediate threat of nuclear war that we had in October,1962. But we may be approaching an existential crisis that is also threatening the Union – the paralysis of our elected federal officials. And it is all because our elected representatives – Congress AND the President – STILL REALLY DO CARE who gets the credit and who gets the blame. In fact, I think that is ALL many of them care about.

The Washington Post’s Bob Costa sent out this tweet earlier this week speaking of the governmental “shutdown”:

“Couple senior Republican lawmakers tell me the only way this breaks open is if TSA employees stay home and Americans get furious about their flights. That’s the only out, they say. And they’re close to the WH.”

This underscores what I have been feeling over the last few years – MY representatives are willing to INJURE ME AND MY FELLOW CITIZENS to the point at which we cry out before they will be willing go to work with each other to find a compromise – this, all in the interest of making their political opponents look bad. They are apparently powerless to act until we reach a point of induced national crisis – totally avoidable national crisis. This infuriates me and this very much concerns me, because I fear THIS is the sad State of the Union.

They are toying with my day-to-day life and the lives of those that I love. The national and world economies tremble and waffle while they watch these shenanigans play out, with the welfare of ALL our citizens hanging in the balance while these people PLAY their political games. STOP IT!!! Get to work. You say you don’t think a wall is worth the money, propose paying for HALF of it and swallow your pride. You say you made a campaign promise to build a wall and have somebody else pay for it, compromise for half of what you asked for, declare victory and move along. After all, none of this really is about saving money OR for that matter having the best border security. Seriously, you have already done a lot more damage than $5 billion. I don’t want to hear any more of your rhetoric. A pock on both of your houses. Just get it done and move along to working on our country’s other real problems. There has been precious little of that going on for the last several months.

“What do you know about war? You never fired a cannon!”
 – Les Ebeling

In several previous posts I have nibbled around the immigration issues. This is very complex and of course now is interwoven with the budget making process in Washington. I apologize in advance for the length of my comments. There are lots of valid perspectives here that sometimes conflict with each other. Geez, that sounded like a politician. If you say something about this you KNOW you are going to be criticized – called a racist or a flaming liberal. But what the heck, I am old and don’t have a lot to lose so I am going to tell them how to move this issue forward.

A big part of my work career was spent working as a local government bureaucrat. That automatically casts my opinions into disrepute for many. One of the principals that our best elected local officials subscribed to was to hire good professionals, give them some policy guidance and then let them do their job. I can tell you from repeated first-hand experience, when non-professionals attempt to work at professional tasks, the results are not good. Just ask my kids about how my plumbing worked out.

So, what is my point? Does anyone think that Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer are experts at border security? How would they know if a wall is a good thing? It seems to me that the Democrats position on this is that they are against whatever President Trump wants. And let’s be balanced here – is President Trump an expert on border security? I don’t think so. I think he has just boxed himself into a corner over a campaign promise that he made shooting from the hip as he is prone to do. Or as my brother Les would say – they don’t really know what they are talking about – they are not border security “cannoneers”  – not experts. But based on what I know about the Federal government, we have LOTS of professionals who have totally informed and valid opinions on border security. We rarely hear from them and if we do their opinions are usually being bent to support the goals of one of the two warring parties.

When two parties are in dispute experts say that they should try to pull back to a point to where they can agree on SOMETHING. These days in the toxic environment that is our elected federal government that may be pretty far back. But do you think we could start here?
• Our present system is a mess. Oops, too strong – Our present system could be improved.
• Asylum seekers and other potential immigrants are human beings. (Too strong? I don’t think so.) They take the risks that they do because they feel that it is their best or perhaps only chance for survival and a better life. Is this hard to understand? Aren’t we ALL seeking a better life?
• They are not leaving their homelands because they want to. Their first choice would be to achieve that better life where they live.
• Whatever the number of immigrants admitted – Whatever the qualifications that we are going to require of them – Whatever the way we are going to evaluate asylum requests, etc. etc. – we should have facilities, staffing and processes to make certain that we KNOW what we are doing and what is actually going on. And we should handle these processes expeditiously and efficiently. This may cost more than what we are presently spending.
• Border security is a field of expertise just like any other complex undertaking. We would all be well-served to engage professionals to make certain that we don’t spend a lot of money on systems that don’t accomplish the desired outcome.
If we can agree on these basic precepts, here is what we should do:

• The House and the Senate should each appoint no more than 4-6 members to a joint committee. The balance between Democrats and Republicans must be even. Leadership should resist the urge to appoint fire-brands from the left or the right. If the Republican controlled Senate can’t live with not having a greater number of their party appointed from the Senate to the joint committee, then they should agree that the Democratically controlled House would be able to reciprocate in order to preserve the balance.
• The charter for the joint committee is to first devise a proposal for border security that would break the budget impasse. The proposal must be adopted by a majority of the committee members and subsequently sponsored for consideration by their respective Houses of Congress. The joint committee should be staffed by border security experts from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). And these staffers must NOT be political appointees. These need to be the most senior, qualified, non-political people in the Department. The staffers from DHS, without influence from politicians, should prepare proposals for improvements to border security and immigration processes for consideration by the joint committee.
• The Administration should be consulted along the way, but the Administration would NOT have veto power over the work of the joint committee. Of course, the President can veto any bill that comes out of Congress but let’s keep our powder dry for at least a little bit to let this process play out.
• These improvements will be in two areas – “unlawful entry deterrents” – UED’s and “immigration request expeditors” – IRE’s. (You gotta have some acronyms or it’s not really a governmental committee.) The UED’s may or may not include physical elements (like concrete walls, steel slats etc.) They may or may not include electronic or other devices or processes or personnel to better accomplish the tasks. Both sides need to be ready to respectfully consider what the professionals recommend. The aim of the UED’s is for us to gain some control over what is occurring. This does NOT mean the aim is to cut off all immigration or for that matter to allow everyone who wants to come, permission to do so. We can’t work on the issue of how many immigrants we should have until we know that this discussion is not moot because people are bypassing our systems. The aim of the IRE’s is to avoid the chaos that we presently have at our major border crossing locations. Even if the result of the processes is to deny asylum or other immigration, the evaluation process should be swift and efficient. I think we OWE potential immigrants that.

Here are the areas where the joint committee is NOT going to work.

• Status and ultimate handling of “Dreamers” – Don’t try to make this a part of the grand bargain. The bargain will be so grand that it will never be achieved. If they are successful the joint committee could stay in business and make a recommendation on this later.
• Immigration levels. Again DHS, the Commerce Department and the Department of Health and Human services experts should weigh in on this decision. How many new citizens do we need? How many can we realistically assimilate? What tools do we need to assimilate new arrivals?
• What fields of expertise do we need from our new immigrants? (I am not suggesting that we admit only PHD’s – we need ALL kinds of worker/citizens to make our economy and our society work.)
We have responsibilities as the wealthiest country in the world. One of them is to play a part in humanitarian crises wherever they occur. However, these responsibilities do NOT include bringing every distressed person in the world into our country. Rather we must engage policies that will make it MORE LIKELY that as many people as possible in the world have a chance for a better life – WHERE THEY LIVE. This should be a significant part our foreign policy. We have a responsibility to make the world a better place but we can’t realistically do that by admitting every person in the world who would like to live here.

STILL, we need MORE people to fuel our economy than we are raising through the biological growth of our existing citizenry. We need to make OUR economic need one of the parameters in establishing what our immigration quotas should be, of course along with an allowance to admit TRUE VALID asylum seekers. This may seem too crass and mercenary to some. My point is that there is a limit to the rate at which we can assimilate new people into our society. That rate is clearly higher than the rabid anti-immigration advocates would say, but also is clearly lower than the rate that results from simply admitting everyone who arrives at our border or even that is able to bypass our system entering illegally. As Thomas Freidman says, we need high barriers and wide gates.

Of course, a concept like this is FAR too simplistic. I am NOT a seasoned politician and probably can’t understand. Both warring factions will have reasons it won’t work.

• The Democrats can’t bear to see this brash, abrasive President get his way. They fear they might alienate their far-left base. President Trump IS brash and abrasive. He DOES play fast and loose with the truth. I am not defending most of his behaviors. But that doesn’t mean he can’t have an idea that is good for the country. Don’t throw away a good idea just because it comes from him. We expect you to be FOR US not AGAINST HIM. Those are NOT automatically mutually exclusive.
• Republicans fear being seen as weak and of losing support from their far-right base. Many privately fear what the President sometimes advocates but fear being ostracized by him more. Your first responsibility is to US. If you see an idea that is in our best interest that he opposes, your first responsibility is to your constituents, NOT to your party and NOT to the President.

This situation is only going to get worse the longer it goes. We are already seeing the toll in personal lives AND in the national and the world economy. Senators – don’t waste time waiting for the President to work something out with the House Democrats. Aren’t you duly elected to fulfil YOUR purpose under the Constitution? House Members – don’t waste time adopting bills that won’t ever make it though the Senate to even get vetoed by the President. This reminds me of the last Republican House passing umpteen Obamacare repeal bills knowing that they would not get through the Senate. And ALL OF YOU, cut the CRAP! I am sick and tired of your rhetoric – it’s nothing more than propaganda. Yours is a difficult job, I realize that, but you need to GET TO WORK.

 

“Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”
– Herbert Hoover
“You can’t borrow and spend your way to prosperity”
– Wiard B. Ebeling

I am amazed at the current standoff in the “budget” negotiations. These “negotiations” don’t really have anything to do with the budget AT ALL. We can all see that this is just theater about who gets their way on the immigration issues that the country is struggling with. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to minimize how thorny this issue is. I don’t want to minimize how important it is to restore order to our immigration processes. This is a whole different discussion for another day. What frustrates me is that the concept of MONEY really isn’t germane to their discussions even though this IS a budget question. Do the Democrats REALLY care about $5 Billion for the wall? Heck no, Congress spills that much every morning that they are in session!! They just don’t want to see the President get his way. And does the President REALLY care about $5 Billion? Heck no, his budget is the biggest in history. He is just trying to keep a campaign promise to build a facility that he promised Mexico was going to pay for. Nobody cares about $5 Billion. But even though it is a small part of the Federal Budget – I CARE and I think most Americans do too.

Both parties have abandoned fiscal reality. The budget is just an arena for them to have their ideological fights. Meanwhile our deficits are ballooning to unheard-of dimensions. Learned economists and just plain folks like me are becoming more and more alarmed at what we are going to leave to our children and grandchildren and what we are going to do to our economy and the world economy if we don’t address the ongoing budget deficit problem.

I am most disappointed in the Republican Party. There was a time when I was a Republican that our party was one who favored limited government and PAYING our bills. Democrats were the social conscience that provided balance to this although in our opinion, too often their plans were unmoored by financial realities. But now it seems that even Republicans have abandoned the concept of paying for what we do. Politics in Washington are so toxic today that they really can’t even talk to each other. Democrats couldn’t possibly stomach the idea that some program might need to be pared back or eliminated. Republicans couldn’t possibly stomach the idea of an increase in taxes even if that is what is needed to balance the budget that includes the programs that THEY want.

The only things that these two groups CAN apparently agree on is to increase our national debt. And that is what has been happening at record levels under both Republican and Democratic control for the last twenty years. I might throw up my hands in despair and say that a balanced budget is not possible were it not for a bit of history that we have forgotten. The budget WAS balanced for several years in the 1990’s. Our Democratic President and our Republican Congressmen laid down their weapons long enough to do something that had eluded those before and after.

Here is my appeal to my national representatives – Could you at least TALK about this a little bit? Could you not automatically revert to an unbalanced budget? If you can’t balance the budget could you at least REDUCE the deficit? I don’t want to hear from the Democrats about how the present needs are historically critical – I have been hearing that for years. I don’t want to hear from Republicans about some voodoo economic theory that tax cuts are going to power us through the deficits by generating new revenues – I have been hearing that for years too. Even if I believed that theory, tax cuts don’t HAVE to be done at the expense of a balanced budget. Sorry if this is too demanding but I think this is your JOB. I know it will be difficult but we need your fiscal courage now more than ever.

“I’m not just a whimsical figure who wears a charming suit and affects a jolly demeanor. You know, I’m a symbol. I’m a symbol of the human ability to be able to suppress the selfish and hateful tendencies that rule the major part of our lives. If you can’t believe, if you can’t accept anything on faith, then you’re doomed for a life dominated by doubt.”

Kris Kringle in the movie “Miracle on 34th Street – 1994 Edition”

Have you been reading about the national government “shutdown”? Let me tell you I have a rant all prepared about this and was ready to post it. Then I remembered our little grandson singing in church yesterday, and another of our little grandsons putting cookies out for Santa two days ahead of Christmas – JUST IN CASE. And I remembered our little granddaughter ringing handbells in church concentrating so hard and later telling me about what she has asked Santa for. It gave me pause and then I remembered the above movie quote and why I love the Christmas season and why I need to ease up a little bit.

Ohhh, there is a lot to NOT like about the season. It has become only a commercial event for many. We get so caught up in the business and the busy-ness of it all that sometimes we forget what it is all about. But kids believe – they really believe. Do we adults believe in anything? While I sometimes don’t act like it – I believe – I believe in the Biblical Christmas story – that God became incarnate and dwelled among us. But what charms me about the season is that many if not most of us DO TRY to “suppress those selfish and hateful tendencies” if only for a few days. So, we pick up little notes from Christmas trees at the local McDonald’s restaurant and bring things for the Ronald McDonald House or wrap gifts for farm families caught up in the bad farm economy or bring toys to the Toys-for-Tots locations etc.

And I believe that we need to believe and have faith in some things. The Bible says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). I am not insisting that everyone believe in Christianity as I do or to convert my friends who are of different faiths. But I think that as humans we need to believe in some things not seen – that we can’t prove. I don’t think that is crazy, I think it is healthy. This might seem a little hypocritical from someone who has devoted a good part of their life to science. But I think people sense this need and that is why they find themselves doing things, good things, at Christmas that they don’t do the rest of the year. They are trying to escape our selfish and hateful tendencies for at least just a little while.

May you find some escape, some faith, some hope, some happiness, some belief in this season and for the rest of the year.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today. ” – Evan Esar

OR

“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” – Wiard B. Ebeling

In a couple of earlier posts, I alluded to the question posed above. Earlier this year I read the best seller by Thomas Friedman – “Thank You for Being Late”. I so much admire Mr. Friedman and respect his opinions. Not-by-design, I subsequently read a book by Dr. Robert Gordon, a renowned economist from Northwestern University entitled “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”. By the way, neither book is a “quick read”. But I found them both fascinating. While not posing this question, it occurred to me that both authors were really addressing the issue. Dr. Gordon’s book is really an economics treatise, but even a layman can appreciate the wealth of historical data and can gain a general understanding of his conclusions. Both authors clearly convey their “world-view” or as Mr. Friedman calls it how  “The Machine” – “the world’s big gears and pulleys” – work. Both write about how they interpret what has happened in the past and how the world works now.

These two learned men certainly do not share the same view of how the Machine works. I think Dr. Gordon might include Mr. Friedman in a group that he calls “techno-optimists”. Friedman clearly has a great respect and hope for our technological advances, especially the latest advances in artificial intelligence, big-data and other information technology and communication advances. He believes they will propel us into the future. Dr. Gordon acknowledges these marvels as well, but the authors diverge in terms of what they mean to our economy now and what they will mean going forward.

I think it sells these scholars short to say that one is an optimist and one is a pessimist. Clearly, they see different roads ahead for us. Friedman believes that technology can play a large part in improving our economy and our lot in life. Gordon acknowledges the upsides of technology but feels that there are “headwinds” in our future that will more-than-offset what technology can do for us. Gordon does not predict doom and gloom, but the overall conclusion of his work is that our economy has come through a period in the twentieth century that can’t be replicated. He believes that going forward we need to reconcile ourselves to a lower rate of economic growth – our children may NOT be better off than we are and have been.

These excellent books have so much terribly interesting information that anything short of reading them could not capture it, and I won’t try. But of extreme interest to me is that BOTH authors see many of the same issues that need to be addressed going forward and surprisingly they largely agree on what should be done in problem areas such as rising income inequality and fairness in taxation, educational achievement and other opportunity improvements and demography and immigration. I have a too-long alternate version of this article that compares their approaches if anyone is interested. They have lots of other proposals and of course their ideas are much more nuanced that I can capture in a sentence. But it astounded me to see how many commonalities there are from these two very intelligent men who often see things quite differently.

SO, WHAT IS MY POINT? Here are two pretty bright guys – and they see the SAME REAL PROBLEMS in our country. Yes, they disagree on some things, but they have a lot in common too. Why can’t we get past some of differences we have in America and get something done about the areas in which we mostly agree? These problems are real and are not getting any better. Our political leaders seem to be more committed to the blame game than they are to solving our problems. I sometimes feel they will do things that are NOT in our best interest, if it will make the “other side” look bad. Clearly, I don’t have all the answers but I sincerely believe that if we continue down the paths of extremism and paralysis (on both the right and the left) our children WON’T be better off than us. I am not fatalistic. The future CAN be bright – but only if we stop wasting our energy in conflict and redirect that energy to achieving positive outcomes.

My life didn’t turn out like I expected.”
– Roy Hobbs in the movie “The Natural”

When our oldest daughter was in sixth grade, I walked past her room and was jolted by the blaring sound of a Madonna song. In a near subconscious reflex I said – “Turn that crap down!!” I took one more step and nearly fell to my knees as I recalled those EXACT words coming from my Pop as I grooved out on a song from the Beatles “Abbey Road”. I had become my father. How could this be? How CAN this be?

In my youth, especially in high school and college, I KNEW, we ALL knew, that if only we could gain control, we would straighten things out in this world. Racism, poverty, pollution and other problems were simply symptoms of our parents’ and grandparents’ failed efforts to lead the world. When WE gained control – you know like the song from the musical “Hair” – “When the moon is in the Seventh House, And Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars “.

SOOO, how did all of that work out? Well I am sixty-eight now and I am forced to realize that in so many different ways, I am really not much different, WE, are not really so much different than the generations that preceded us. We yearn for progress. We have doubts as to how to achieve it. We want a better life for our children and grandchildren. We worry about the “next generation” and their ability and willingness to shoulder the burdens – just like our parents worried about us. And things weren’t like they thought they were going to be. Problems are a little more difficult than we thought too.

Let’s be fair we haven’t been total failures. We HAVE made astounding technological advances. And despite the concern for international competition our economy is still the engine that drives world commerce. And we HAVE reduced discrimination in many areas although racism, sexism and classism are still alive and thriving. But elimination of poverty? I don’t think so. Elimination of pollution – haven’t got there either. I guess that some of the problems that our elders struggled with are just as intractable to us. But is it true that there really is “nothing new under the sun” – that we didn’t move the needle at all? This might be just more aging boomer dribble, but I DO see some things that have changed – some for the better and some NOT for the better.

• We HAVE made gains in pollution – especially in water pollution – not that we have conquered that by any stretch. But if we are fair, we have to admit that there was a time in the 1970’s that our bodies of water were much lower quality than they are now. Now there IS the whole issue of climate change – I think everyone will agree that the climate is changing, but there are widely divergent views about what to do about that IF anything. There are many who are saying that we are nearing a tipping point in climate change – an existential tipping point. (I am starting to feel another blog post.)

• Elimination of poverty – Census data for 1972 – the year that I graduated – indicates that 8.8% of people age 18 to 64 lived in poverty – 15.1% of those under 18. The same data for 2017 indicates that 11.2% of people aged 18-64 lived in poverty and 17.5% of those under 18. This is a complex issue but it certainly doesn’t seem that we have eliminated poverty or even that we are going in the right direction. Whether one accepts that or not, there is firmer data that indicates that there is an ever-widening chasm between the rich and the poor. A Congressional Budget Office Study completed in 2011 showed that in stark contrast to earlier periods, in the period between 1979 and 2011, income growth for the top 1% of American earners grew at a rate of almost four times the rates seen in lower percentiles. The so-called middle class is fading from our society. I am sure that the reasons for that are many and varied and probably too complex for an old engineer like me. But I have a sense that this is not good – and more ominously, that this will not last. There is going to be some sort of correction – hopefully through peaceful and constructive dialog – that will change this balance. My Pop used to say: “Never do business with someone who has nothing to lose.” I fear that too many of us are approaching that kind of despair and are behaving accordingly.

• Our children will be better off than we were – This was a bedrock belief of our parent’s generation. My parents KNEW it. We would be better educated – go to college. We would get “big jobs” and live a much more affluent life than them. I am not sure that my children WILL be better off than we were – oh, oh, feels like another blog post.

So, what am I saying? I am saying that things are COMPLICATED – not at all like I thought they would be in 1972. I wish that weren’t so. People WANT simplicity – in politics we DEMAND simple answers. Nowadays any politician that talks about policy too much is unelectable. We need to resist the urge to generalize – we need to study complicated issues – to understand them and then apply our own best judgment as to what we think is right. And we need to resist the urge to be discouraged or cynical. We DO have problems, but we CAN work through them if we recognize that there are two sides to every story and that despite what we may think, we may not have all the wisdom on every issue. I guess it is clear that I didn’t have it in 1972 and I don’t have it now.

“To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

J.D. Vance – Best Selling Author and Yale Law School Graduate

It is continually surprising to me how I see things differently now than I did in my youth. I am 68 years old, not exactly at death’s door, but it now matters to me where I will be buried. I first moved from Rushmore in Nobles County, Minnesota where I was born, in 1970. I returned in 1975 and left again in 1983. I have lived in the Minneapolis – St. Paul metropolitan area since, a period of over 35 years, 40 years if you count the years between 1970 and 1975. I have lived in the house that I live in now longer than any other place in my life. I am anchored to this community. I know thousands of people here – co-workers, members of my church, neighbors, service club members, business people, government officials and so on. I graduated from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. This is where we raised our children. Why do I have this irrational sense that I need to be buried in a little cemetery east of Rushmore, Minnesota – to go back to where I came from?
In his New York Times best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance talks at length about his ties to his hillbilly roots. The book is widely thought to be a descriptor of the angst being experienced by working class white people and as a partial explanation of the election of President Trump. (This is a related but separate discussion.) Vance’s grandparents were part of the migration from the rural South to northern industrial centers. In Vance’s case, the move wasn’t geographically far from his native Kentucky, only to Middletown, Ohio. The cultural distance was much further. Vance’s family’s jobs at Armco Steel gave them economic gains that they could only dream of in Kentucky. But their second-generation family’s American Dream has been shattered. The loss of American manufacturing jobs and the downturn of local economies in the Rust Belt have been a big part of this. But there is more afoot than economic woes – Vance articulates it by telling his life’s story.
The “more” still is with Vance, even in his life as a successful investment banker living in San Francisco with a Yale law degree, a beautiful wife, a New York Times best-seller and more money that he could have ever imagined. The “more” relates to the feelings within him (and in me) that question whether we will, or CAN ever be more than where we come from. Will he always be a hillbilly? Will I ever be more than a poor farmer’s kid from the wind-swept prairies of Southwest Minnesota? Will the part of me that is inextricably tied to where I came from ever allow me to be a part of another world? But it goes beyond that – do I WANT to be a part of another world?
It is easy for me to not-miss some of what my first home has become. There are NO family farms like the one on which I was raised. Agriculture has become corporate, high tech and competitive. Huge livestock confinement factories foul the air for miles around with a stench that I never smelled growing up on our farm. Small towns like Rushmore are dying and children still leave for better opportunities elsewhere. The closely-knit churches where every mother felt entitled and responsible to take care of and discipline every other mother’s kid are getting to be few and far between. Backfilling the losses are problems we normally associate with large cities – drugs and violence. The culture there will evolve, and no doubt survive, but it is a different culture than I grew up with. So, what is the allure?
I suppose my family growing up was like most families – a mixture of positives and negatives. I am sure my vision is clouded by time, but my family was still the source of my core values:
• Hard work is a virtue – anyone who works hard is inherently valuable and anyone who doesn’t is not respected and of diminished value. For whatever other flaws they may have had, my people worked hard. They were industrious and fiercely independent.
• Family is first – friends are wonderful, but they may come and go. Your family is always your family.
• We live in the best country in the world. We can complain and criticize, but we wouldn’t trade it for ANYWHERE.
• Our children will be better off than we are. They will be richer, smarter and more successful than we are.
• We trust in God. To us that means that we go to church and support the church. Sometimes we fall away for a time, but we ALWAYS come back because our belief in God makes everything else make sense.
• When friends or neighbors are in need, helping them is not optional, it is required.
• We are common people – we are nothing special – we are of value only because we adhere to our other values. We never should think highly of ourselves.
• We are frugal people – waste is inherently bad, no matter what the situation. Fix it – don’t throw it away until it CAN’T be fixed.
• Its OK to not be financially successful as long as you were honest in your dealings with everyone. My Pop said, “the first law of business is that the other guy has to make a buck too”.
I think maybe what bothers me is that because I cling to these values that I don’t “fit in” here. I am too unsophisticated – I haven’t achieved much status and, in many ways, I haven’t tried. My values are not in keeping with what it takes today.
• Take care of Number One, no one else will.
• Work smart, not hard.
• Get ahead no matter what it takes.
• Your ARE something special (whether or not you have ever done one thing that is worthwhile) and people need to treat you that way.
• My country OWES me things and I am angry when I don’t think the government has treated me well enough.
Things aren’t all that bad and I might just be a cranky old man. And it is probably irrational and things might change, but something inside of me says I need to be laid to rest next to people who saw the world in the same way as I do and lived their lives in that manner.

“A ship is always safe at the shore – but that is NOT what it is built for.”
― Albert Einstein

Or: “Take a chance – Columbus did.”
– Les Ebeling

Virtually all Americans are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. My father’s family came from Germany in the early 1890’s. My great grandfather owned a commercial ship. One of his jobs was to ferry produce from the fertile plains of Friesland to markets in England. His older sons came to Chicago, America earlier in the decade. He and his wife planned to bring the younger children (one of which was my Grandfather) later. They planned to leave after the completion of his last voyage which was a mission to bring a load of peas to London. Unfortunately, the ship was lost at sea. (I always believed that Great-grandfather was lost in great sea-battle, valiantly going down with the ship. Reality can really be downer sometimes can’t it?) So, my Great-grandmother was faced with the prospect of traveling to the New World on her own, transporting several small children while grieving the loss of her husband.
A portion my Mother’s family emigrated from London after the Great Fire of 1666. He was a vicar whose church was burned to the ground. He struck out on his own heading for Massachusetts and settled on the banks of the Charles River. I have often wondered how all of those “vicar-skills” applied to that wild part of the world once he arrived. But apparently, he survived or else I would not be here.
It would have been so much safer for them to stay home. I am certain that somehow, they would have gotten by. Travel was so risky, there were so many unknowns, and how would they live in this new country called America?
American’s are inherently risk-takers. That is our genetic make-up. If courage and risk-taking weren’t in our blood, we wouldn’t be here – our ancestors would have stayed in their homelands where it was safe. How did all this work out? How did they overcome the odds to make it here? How did they make America great? I think that these factors were critical:
• They came to a land truly laden with milk and honey. The natural resources compared to where they were staggering – timber, minerals, and the most fertile farmland in the world. But those natural resources still had to be captured and utilized by PEOPLE – hardy, industrious, optimistic people who worked hard and sacrificed to make their dreams come to fruition.
• They came to a land with a system that made it possible for us to become the richest and most powerful country in the world. This was a system that rewarded risk takers but preserved order by the force of reasonable laws. By the way, I don’t think that this was the system glamourized by the “Tales of the Old West” – fierce, unyielding cowboys who single-handedly carved out a living with their six-shooters. I’m not anti-cowboys; I just think that our real heroes are shop keepers who invested their last resources to set up shop and then patiently worked long and hard to make their risky adventure have a successful end. Or homesteaders who set out to till the land on the prairies that had never been cultivated braving the dangers of weather and starvation.
So, what is my point? These people who are coming to America now – are they vastly different than us and our ancestors? I would argue that the vast majority of them are not. (I am not naïve – I believe there are some who come here with ill intentions. We MUST vet our new citizens to separate this pernicious minority.) But the vast majority is coming from poverty and war and discrimination just like our ancestors. And by the way some are coming with the idea that they will return to “the Old Country” as my Grandfather and many other immigrants thought. And let’s be clear about this. We NEED them just as the land needed our ancestors. Simple demographics tell us that our birthrates will not supply the human resources needed to power our economy in the future. But beyond that we need their spirt – the willingness to risk EVERYTHING – their fortunes and their very lives – to have a chance to live in this country. And when they are here, they will invest their sweat and blood to make their way here as our ancestors did. And then they will never leave as I will never leave, because America is the greatest country in the world.

This nation was built by men who took risks — pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, business men who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.
– Brooks Atkinson

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O’Connor

This is the first entry to my “blog”. I hear about people writing blogs and wonder why. How do they find the time to do this? Why do they think anybody cares? And yet I feel compelled to write. Why????????? It is amazing how over life’s span you learn some things about yourself. Maybe those are the most important things we ever learn. One of the things that I have learned about myself is contained in the quote from the novelist Flannery O’Connor. I love her quotations. This one hits me dead-on. “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Or as I rephrase it for my own use: “I don’t know what I think until I read what I wrote.” Of course, that is paradoxical and leaves people sometimes shaking their heads. That has happened to me a lot in life – people shaking their heads at me. Writing forces me to sort out my thoughts. It tests me. And to be honest it often times indicts me, because I don’t live up to my own ideals and some of my thoughts are not valid. So, I am going to write – from time to time – when I think there is something to be said and can’t figure out what it is that needs to be said. And this might be the weirdest blog that there ever has been. I am not seeking any sponsors. I am not necessarily worried if anyone in the world reads it. I am writing for me. I need to do it – for me.