Author: admin

“Three quarters of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world would finish if people were to put on the shoes of their adversaries and understood their points of view”

Mahatma Gandhi

This blog thing is so liberating. You can talk about anything you want, even things you know nothing about!! Today your sewer engineer will delve into the area of psychology. My brother-in-law Ken who is a licensed psychologist is probably cringing. This foray is motivated by my experiences this week. I found myself in bed with the flu. As I was lying in bed moaning and groaning, I was once again reminded how quickly we can be reduced. Life really is fragile. And believe it or not, it brought to mind Maslov’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.

For those of you who have forgotten, failed or never took Psychology 101, Maslov was a psychologist who developed a theory way back in the early 1940s that attempted to at least in some ways explain human behavior and what is important to humans. He articulated it in a pyramid diagram separated into five “strata”. Starting from the bottom there were:

Physiological Needs – like breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis (the need for constancy and sustainability), excretion

Safety Needs – like the security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of the family, of health, of property

The Need for Love and Belonging – like friendship, family, sexual intimacy

The Need for Esteem – like self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect OF others, respect BY others

The Need for Self-Actualization – like morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

Maslov maintained that one can’t achieve the upper levels in the pyramid before he/she has met the needs in the lower levels and may not even aspire to them. This week I found myself sinking into the bottom stratum, the physiological level – really fast!! One of my physiological needs, the absence of pain, was missing. This caused me to not be able to consider any of the other levels. In other words, I really didn’t care about Brexit or the Green New Deal at all!! I wasn’t worried about how our 401K was doing. I didn’t think about what the neighbors or people in our church thought about me. I wore the same ratty night shirt for two days and didn’t care who knew it. Oops TMI.

Now, there have been other psychologists and just people in general that question Maslov’s underlying research and criticize the concept. But to someone with no knowledge of psychology like me, it kinda makes sense. I might add that any theory that’s been batted around since 1943 and is still widely accepted, probably has some validity. Maslov also said that depending on circumstances there can be different times in our life when we operate on different levels. That explains my sinking into the physiological stratum this week.

So, what is my point in all of this other than to tell you I had the flu? As people like me yak and yak about some of the abstractions in the upper levels of the pyramid, how easy it is to forget that in our country, the richest country in the world, there are SO many who are stuck in those lower levels of the pyramid. They are not involved in the dialogues about public policy, haute couture or the latest movies. They are working two or three minimum wage jobs, trying to put food on the table and keeping the wolf from the door – or perhaps ill, unemployed, just laid-off, estranged from family, disabled or otherwise disadvantaged. How unfair it is for those of us who are blessed to have those bases covered to criticize others who do not, for not achieving more in the layers above. Indeed, so many of us have no concept of what it would be like to experience some of the issues in the physiological stratum. How do you “self -actualize” when you are hungry? And by the way, after a few days of the flu I am reminded of how quickly we can slip to other levels in the pyramid. Maybe when we shake our heads at what “some people” do, we should think about where in the pyramid they are operating.

“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to John Taylor, November 26, 1798

“You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.”
Vice President Dick Cheney – Remarks to Paul H. O’Neill – Treasury Secretary (January 9, 2004)

Last week President Trump issued his proposed FY 2020 budget. It was an all-time record $4.75 T proposal (that is $4.75 TRILLION dollars – or $4,750 BILLION dollars). There wasn’t much talk about it but the budget predicts at least four more years of $1T deficits. In 2015 as a presidential candidate, Donald Trump tweeted that if the debt topped $21 trillion, “Obama will have effectively bankrupted our country.” In March 2016, Mr. Trump told the Washington Post that he could eliminate the federal debt within eight years. The federal debt recently ticked past $22 trillion, an all-time high and based on what is proposed for 2020 and beyond it will go significantly higher. Uhhh, what happened there?!?!?! We really haven’t heard a lot of budget talk since. But was the record budget and the deficit the leading story on the 6:00 PM news? Not really – if the deficit was reported at all it was probably down the list. As Vice President Cheney maintained, apparently it doesn’t matter, once you have been elected. In fairness to Mr. Cheney I think he was saying that it didn’t matter POLITICALLY, but then again that doesn’t make me feel any better. Is the measure of political expediency how decisions get made these days? It makes me shiver but I think that is true.

As noted before in this blog, neither political party seems to care about debt reduction, except to bludgeon the other party when they are not in power. President Trump certainly didn’t address it in the State of the Union address. During the first two years of the Trump administration, the debt increased by more than $2 trillion, in part because of the $1.5 trillion tax cut and large spending increases the president has signed into law. But Democrats left the issue largely untouched too. In her State of the Union speech response, Stacey Abrams made no mention of debt. Several of the NUMEROUS Democratic presidential candidates have proposed tax increases, but not to reduce the deficit – but instead to come up with new programs which won’t be funded with revenues but simply added to the ballooning debt.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the “power of the purse” that Congress has. Indeed, spending must for the most part be authorized by spending bills that come from Congress to the President. But to hear some of our congressman talk you would think that these massive debts have been foisted upon us by the Kremlin!! Hopefully, perhaps, some members of Congress now feel the need to at least talk about this. Sen. David Perdue (R) Ga. and Rep. Andy Biggs (R) Ariz. and others, have introduced resolutions declaring the national debt a “national security crisis” and called for stern measures. Funny – this has been the position of many in the national intelligence community for several years. I’m sorry, I have become too much of a cynic, but this makes me laugh. Doesn’t Congress HAVE the power of the purse? Aren’t they in charge of how much money is authorized for spending and the amount of taxes that we raise? This strikes me as a hapless cry to “protect us from ourselves”!!

Where I came from, debt was inherently to be avoided to the extent it could be. I transfer this principal to how we run government. (My friend Tom Jefferson and I agree on that). But is that right? Maybe I am getting all cranked up for nothing.
• After all, Trump administration officials said that while the president was “concerned” about the rise of the debt, the debt level was not a concern. They are going to get tough on NEXT year’s budget. And MAYBE in ten years or so we may actually achieve a balanced budget.
• And along with their supply-side friends, they argue that tax cuts and spending increases will lift economic growth which will in turn result in more revenues.
• Democrats come at if from a different angle but they don’t think federal debt is an urgent problem either – except that those darn Republicans are hypocritical in not reducing the debt.
• While we are borrowing more and more, some “experts” say that we just need to measure the debt as a share of the nation’s economic output – the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). And it’s true by most measures the economy is doing well so presumably we can afford to borrow more.
• All this federal borrowing might drive rates up, but interest is still relatively low.
• China still seems to be ready to lend money to the United States. They are not worried about our debt.
• Its true that our debt has grown but interest payments as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have actually declined.
• And then there is the line of reasoning that says that our national debt is for the most part an “internal” debt. That is, we owe it to ourselves. Our bond holders count their US Savings bonds and T-Bills as valuable assets. So, we are just moving assets around, I guess the thinking goes.

But somehow all of this just doesn’t make me feel any better. And by the way there ARE some opposing view-points.
• Using that percentage-of-the-GDP metric, total federal debt has climbed from 31 percent of the GDP in 2001 to 76 percent this year. And the fact that the interest cost percentage of the GDP is low relates to low interest rates. As I recall from personal experience, sometimes interest rates go up – sometimes a lot. What if people start to think that those T-Bills are NOT such a solid investment and they refuse to buy them at low rates?
• Some economists warn that all this federal borrowing WILL limit private sector borrowing, constraining economic growth.
• The government’s borrowing is not FREE!! We still need to make interest payments to investors. And that is getting more and more expensive – interest payments now exceed $1 billion a day.
• With the amount of the budget committed to debt, defense and other “entitlements”, budget cutting is very difficult. Discretionary, non-military spending is not a big part of the budget – around $500 – $600 billion. So even significant decreases to these categories do NOT provide huge opportunities for debt reduction.
• Borrowing costs HAVE increased because of raising interest rates. Ten-year Treasury notes, which reached a low of 1.38 percent in July 2016, have nearly doubled since then. They are 2.61% today and I notice that they have been over 3% within the last few months. And there was a time in the bad old days when they were way over 10%.
• The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that if we don’t do something the debt will rise to 93 percent of the GDP within the next decade.
• China might like our debt but apparently not ALL foreigners do. The share of federal debt held by foreign investors has declined from 49 percent in 2008 to just 39 percent last year.
• A few years ago, the CBO predicted that by fiscal year 2022 the deficit would exceed $1 trillion – but as noted above we have already hit that!! Amazingly to me, this level HAS been hit before, but only in catastrophic economic times, not in times of a robust economy as we now have. What will we do if the economy cools, as it inevitably will?
• The CBO says that the fastest-growing component of federal spending is interest on the debt.
• And because of our reduced corporate and other reduced rates our tax receipts are down. In fairness some other receipts like excise taxes and tariffs helped to offset some of the losses.
• The CBO really never bought into the viability of the reduced tax scheme and unfortunately based on the early returns it appears that they were right.

So, what is my point? Authority and Responsibility go together. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t be held responsible for an outcome if you haven’t been delegated the power to address the root-causes of the outcome. But conversely IF YOU HAVE THAT POWER, you ARE RESPONSIBLE for the outcome. Congress has the power of the purse. Congress has AUTHORITY to control spending and revenues and it has the RESPONSIBILITY to control spending and revenues. For a whole bunch of reasons, it has failed miserably to meet its responsibilities in this regard and I swear sometimes it wishes it didn’t have the authority or the responsibility. And by the way, the Executive branch of government plays right along. In the end the taxpayers are left holding the bag.

Try to realize it’s all within yourself no one else can make you change, and to see you’re only very small and life flows on within you and without you.

George Harrison

All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust.

Ecclesiastes 3:20

We went to church on Wednesday night – it was Ash Wednesday. This is not one of my more favorite church services of the year, because its intention is to remind us that we are mortal and that while God has breathed the breath of life into us, this mortal life will inevitably come to an end. Well geez I know that but I don’t see the upsides of dwelling on it. Well maybe there is this. Maybe I can take from this that as agitated as I can sometimes get about things, it will all work out as it should. Chilllax!

We moved to a new house when Rebecca our youngest was about seven or eight. In all the hub-bub of moving things get lost. One of the things that was lost was the “bill-book”. The bill book had thirty-one pages in it, one page for each of the bills that were due on each day of the month. When the bills came in the mail, I would insert them in the book and pay them when due. Of course, without the book I had no idea of who we owed money to, how much we owed and when it was due. Being the anally-retentive person that I am this drove me crazy. I stormed through the house ripping open boxes, throwing things in the air and raging about where in the world the bill-book could be. After days of this I resorted to offering a bounty for its location to everyone in the house. As we heard Macbeth say in Ms. Holland’s twelfth grade English class – I strutted and fretted my hour on the stage – all to no avail – the bill book remained missing.

One night as we tucked Rebecca into bed, she looked at me with those big innocent eyes with genuine concern and said “Dad, what are we going to do if we can’t find the bill book?” My wife Janice gave me a withering glance and I melted. This poor little girl was worried sick about this problem whose scope she thought was really threatening our welfare. I got down on the floor beside her bed and said “Becky, don’t you worry about a thing. We will find the bill book and even if we don’t, we are going to be just fine.”

How much unnecessary angst and stress do we place on ourselves and others, especially those that we love? My good friend Judy Tschumper once had to remind me that our employees often took on my mood, if I was downcast, they were too. If I was upbeat, they were too. Of course, we all have problems, and they are sometimes serious problems. We need to work at them as diligently as we can, to do everything that we can to overcome them. And then we need to let it go. Letting go can be so difficult because we never know WHEN we have pushed enough and when we need to stop pushing.

Many years ago, my family started a business. We all invested our sweat and our blood and our fortunes in this endeavor. We worked so hard and so long, sometimes for twenty to thirty hours in a row without rest. We had so much riding on it. But it was not to be. With each set-back we looked at each other in despair and wondered if this would be the end. Was now the time to cut our losses? Along the way we had a fire at the facility we were trying to build. We were all able to escape but it was a significant setback in time and money. I called my Dad who was one of our major investors to tell him the bad news. He said that he and my Mom would come over for dinner and we would talk about it. When he came in the door, knowing how much money he was going to lose I said, “Dad, this must be the lowest point of your life, isn’t it?” He looked at me incredulously, laughed and said – “One night your Mom and I were sleeping in the car, in the middle of the night, in the street outside of the University of Minnesota Hospital where your brother had just been admitted because he had polio – THAT was the lowest point in my life. This is nothing, nobody got hurt – it will all work out”.

A few months later at the end of an eighteen-hour day at about 9:00 PM on a summer night, as I drove from our parking lot the sun caught the intersection street sign at just the right angle and its message GLARED at me – STOP!!!! I stopped and something inside of me said – it’s OKAY to stop, you NEED to stop, the more you persist the more you are going to hurt the ones you love. We stopped. And then we started – started to figure out how to pay off our debt, how to start again, how to start living a new life. The denouement of that failed effort is a painful memory for me and my family. We lost everything – our savings, our homes and our reputations in a small town. We had debts that took me more than a decade to pay off. We had to pick up our little girls and move to another community to find work. We sold everything we could to pay our debts down. And in the end, we took the last small amounts of cash – about $500 – and kept it in a metal box in the trunk of our car because our creditors were levying on our bank accounts. I was thirty-five years old, with three kids and a wife without a penny to our names.

So where is the good news in all of this? The good news was that I was thirty-five years old with three beautiful kids and a beautiful wife. And we started over and little by little we got on our feet again. That was almost forty years ago. Sometimes it still hurts but so much good has happened since then – some bad too. But life flows on within and without you – it all worked out.

“So, take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”

Jesus – Matthew 25: 28-29 (NIV)

It is a dangerous thing when a poor-excuse-for-a-Christian like me quotes scripture. But you know just because I’m not wise doesn’t mean that Jesus wasn’t. So, bear with me while I make a case for the relevance of this passage in today’s political world. This passage was confusing to me as a kid. You know it really doesn’t seem fair. But my Pop said: “You have to read the entire passage for this to make sense”. The “passage” is the famous parable of the talents. And the gist of it is that we are charged with using what we have for good, whatever it is that we have. But there is more, the parable says that if we don’t do our duty, someone else WILL.

There is great wailing and gnashing of teeth these days by Democrats and some Republicans that the President’s Emergency Declaration on illegal immigration on our southern border is an attack on the balance of powers envisioned in the Constitution. This is actually kind of funny – this is hardly the first emergency declaration. I think I read some place that there have been over fifty since the 1976 legislation providing for these actions – PASSED BY CONGRESS and signed by the President. President Clinton declared seventeen, President George W. Bush, thirteen, and President Barack Obama, twelve. President Trump has declared three himself, before this one. President Obama’s declarations were relatively mundane. What really infuriated his opponents were his executive actions, especially those relating to immigration and health care. And executive orders are really just another form of the issue here – are Presidents circumventing the Constitution to get their way?

The shoe is on the other foot now and Democrats are howling. Many Republicans in the Senate are hiding in the weeds hoping they don’t have to cast a deciding vote to oppose the declaration. Now there are those around who say that this declaration is different than those that preceded it since it coopts funding that Congress had dedicated for other purposes and facilitates an undertaking that they specifically refused to fund. Maybe, but like most things in Washington these days it smacks of politics, not anything so lofty as statesmanship or respect for the Constitution. Hypocrisy is totally an acceptable thing these days on both sides of the aisle. Criticizing a member of the opposite party for doing the same thing that someone in my party has done or is doing is routine. I heard former New Jersey Governor Christie say that this began when Democrats failed to call out President Clinton for his lies during the Monica Lewinski affair. That was a stark example but hardly the only one or the first one in my opinion.

Given the lawsuits that are already flying, I would guess that the Supreme Court will have to sort this out at some point since coordination by the executive and legislative branches never works these days. Maybe not. But unless my engineer’s understanding of how things work in passing laws, I think that if Congress is REALLY concerned about this egregious act, they are NOT powerless. All they need to do is to pass an act prohibiting the usurpation of the dollars already budgeted for other purposes and THEN TO BE READY TO OVERRIDE THE PRESIDENTIAL VETO that will automatically be applied. Vetoes are a part of the Constitution too. And I say this to Democrats (of course you think this is a good idea) AND to wavering Republicans. Can you get past your partisanship just once to protect the Constitution if you think it is at risk? If you wonder why the executive branch seems to be gaining power while the legislative branch seems to be withering into weakness or even irrelevance, maybe we need to think about the parable of the talents. In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama laid down an ultimatum for Congress: “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” he said with respect to climate change. Republicans were aghast while Democrats were quiet. But in the end Congress did what it seems to be predisposed to do these days – it held hearings, it complained, it commented to CNN, Fox and CBS, and then it did NOTHING.

So, if Congress thinks that the President is overstepping his authority, do your duty. Don’t wait for some lower court or the Supreme Court to tell you what to do. Your oath is NOT to the President or to the Speaker of the House or to your party caucus. Your oath is to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America and to represent your people. Do it or shut up and let the President act.

“Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented.”
Encyclopedia Britannica

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
Thomas Paine – in his book Common Sense

Apparently, we have staved off another Federal governmental shutdown. When this governmental inaction will be weaponized again is unknown, but I fear that it will be. I don’t know about anybody else but apart from the morbid fascination of seeing all of this play out, my most dominant feeling is exhaustion. Don’t get me wrong – I have railed in this forum on more than one occasion about how there is no willingness in our government to compromise on ANYTHING. It is always: “We will shove it down their throats”. Here was a case where the two houses of Congress sat down, rolled up their sleeves and hammered something out. I doubt that either political party was all that happy with the product but that is how our system works – NOBODY gets everything they want. I applaud their work. I might add that the process that was followed was suggested in this little rag that I call my blog many weeks ago. Of course, now the President seeks to go around the Congress with his emergency declaration. “I will shove it down their throats”. I don’t know how that will all work out, it will no doubt be tested in the Courts and if this action is unconstitutional, hopefully our Supreme Court will do their duty and say so. If it IS constitutional, it still doesn’t seem like a good thing to do, but so-be-it.

So, what’s my beef now? I talked about my exhaustion above. I think what makes me sick of all this is that there is this seemingly endless drumbeat from both warring factions “spinning” every development to their advantage. Adding a “spin” to any piece of information or news is really propaganda. As I grew up in the 60’s, we learned that propaganda was the misinformation sent out by Tass in the Soviet Union or by Chairman Mao in Red China – and it was an EVIL thing. Of course, politicians in every country in every age including the US have used propaganda to varying degrees. Its usage today seems to have reached proportions that I don’t really remember. Adding to all of this is that we now have “news” organizations that engage in it every bit as much as the politicians – think MSNBC, Fox News or the Huffington Post.

Well if propaganda has always been around what’s the problem? I think that given its dimensions and ubiquity now, that we run the risk that Thomas Paine saw in 1775. We hear this stuff so much that we start accepting it as fact. Or we get confused and don’t really know what the facts really are. Of course, that is part the desired effect. This then results in acceptance of biased facts, which can also be called half-truths or half-lies, as absolute truths. This makes compromise all but impossible to achieve. Just once, for just a little while I wish that politicians would just tone it down a little bit and affirm that there can be TWO or more positions on an issue that are not crazy. And I wish that they wouldn’t promise things that they really can’t deliver on their own. When they can’t, they try to find a way out of their predicament by “spinning” the news.

Trying to find the truth these days seems a lot harder than it used to be. About a year ago, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the news source that was felt to be the most unbiased. Sadly, I learned that the most respected news source in America is the BBC!! That’s right, Americans trust the BRITISH BROADCASTING COMPANY more than any of our American sources. That seems like a sad commentary. Well I couldn’t really live with that, so my compromise was to subscribe to a service that provides stories from up to ten different news sources. When I chose my ten, I intentionally included Fox News and Huffington Post. I can just about always count on them to contain bias. But I still find them to be of value, because they cause me to test the meddle of the other sources and to question what I am reading. And in the end, I do what everybody else does – we do the best we can with what we have heard.

“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!!!