There are myriad reasons why I am voting for Donald Trump

The principal question politically is which candidate is likely to perform better as a protector of my many and broad individual rights to life, liberty, property, freedom of contract, freedom of association, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom to trade, freedom to defend myself from violence, and freedom to my privacy.  I want to be allowed to choose my own values and to be allowed to manage my own life in accordance with my self-chosen values.  I find that present governments are the main threat to my exercise of my rights and the main source of violence and the threat of violence to keep me from rationally managing my own life.  This is not to say that I oppose government in principle.  I do believe that government is necessary to the protection of my individual rights and to a civilized society that will allow me to flourish as the manager of my own life.  However, the federal government and at least almost every state government have taken on many functions that violate my rights and those of others and that do not allow us to rationally manage our own lives.  The governments of the United States of America are badly in need of a massive reduction of their powers.

Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden (Kamala Harris) will provide a legitimate and proper government.  Given the preferences of most Americans, that would be impossible even if one of them were so inclined.  However, there are leagues and leagues of distance between these candidates respecting the exercise of governmental power and the resulting range over which its threats of violence will roam in the lives of the American people.  

The President will bring with him a party, from which he will draw advisors and managers for the exceedingly powerful Executive Branch of the government.  The Democratic Party is the party of greater racism, corruption, demagoguery, contempt for the American citizen, pessimism and fear, anti-business hatred, distrust in freedom of speech and conscience, and lust for power.  It was the party of slavery, of Jim Crow laws, of the KKK, of opposition to ending school segregation, the greater number who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, highly inadequate public schools in the inner cities, inadequate police protection in the inner cities, claims that Black Americans can neither achieve educational success nor financial success in the free market, advocates group identity politics with all of its divisiveness, and has over and over implied that any Black American who is independent minded is not Black and is a sell-out.  The Democrats have long been the kings of voter fraud, violators of the rule of law, more inclined to govern for the sake of special interests, the associates of union thugs who are usually either Mafia or Communists, and the most willing to seek further powers to shake down the American people.  The Democrats think most so-called Blacks and Latinos are incompetent to manage their own lives and that all so-called whites but the college educated are rednecks, or even that every white person is a racist.  The Democrat Party is the party that does not admit that the best way to raise everyone's standard of living is to allow the free market to function and raise our productivity so that the economy grows with a compounded higher growth rate.  It is the party that has the greater fear of every chemical, disease, or human act that has any effect upon the environment, to the point that it has become anti-human in its suppression of our efforts to be productive.  It is the party that has the broader and more intense distrust of businesses and the freedom of association of the free market.  It has become the party most inclined to suppress freedom of speech, as witness its control of college campuses, the elderly media, the Silicon Valley Internet businesses, and the regulations it has imposed on businesses.  It has systematically interfered with individual's freedom of religion by shutting down church operations during the pandemic and with requirements that people support abortions and contraceptives against their will and religious beliefs.

Biden was never very smart to begin with.  He is clearly losing mental capability.  He does not know whether is he is running for the President or the Senate.  He does not know what state he is in.  He is campaigning against someone named George, we do not know whether that George is HW or W.  He cannot remember that thing, you know, who gave us our individual rights according to the Declaration of Independence.  When he retained some cogency years ago, he claimed the Declaration of Independence was not a part of our laws.  This is expected from Democrats, who do not want our Constitution to have a philosophical basis in political governance.  Without that, the Constitution is more malleable.  Biden stops work in the morning, not having the energy to go on.  Some Democrats will not mind replacing him with Kamala Harris, a decidedly socialist Senators.  However, Sen. Harris could not get very far in her own presidential campaign and dropped out early since she could not perform well in even her home state of California.  President Trump was smarter to begin with and has retained his intelligence and energy.

Biden is an inveterate liar.  Yes, Trump exaggerates.  But Trump has never told a whopper of the size that Biden did when Biden claims over and over that all of the people who died because of the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus were killed by Trump.  They were actually killed by the virus with help from the Chinese Communist Party and some Democratic governors who put sick people in elderly care facilities.  Biden plagiarized a paper in law school.  He claimed he was the best political science student, when he was far from it.  He claimed he was first in his law class when he was not even average.  He claimed that his life was that of Neil Kinnoch, the British Labor Leader in a heavily plagiarized speech Biden gave in his first presidential campaign.

Biden is not a nice man.  He likes to tell his audiences that he is brighter than any of them, though that is often unlikely.  When challenged on an issue, he is inclined to invite a man to meet him behind the gym for a fight.  Or he may just call you a "lying dog-faced pony soldier."  Biden claims he is the Democratic Party.  Apparently all other Democrats do not count.  He has claimed that his mentor in the Senate was Robert Byrd, the segregationist.  Indeed, Delaware was one of the segregationist states sued in Brown v. Board of Education, that ended public school segregation under the Eisenhower administration.  By the way, Gen. Eisenhower pushed hard for the desegregation of the Army during WWII and continued to push it when he was President.  Senator Biden came along too late to play a role in the segregationist policies of Delaware, but he was opposed to busing and was clearly sympathetic with the old segregationist members of the Democratic Party.  Opposition to busing was often justified, but there is today no tolerance for that opposition in the socialist Democratic Party.

Biden runs a family based crime syndicate, which is a bit less sophisticated than that run by the Clintons.  He and his family are paid huge sums of money by evil foreigners, especially oligarchs from Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Chinese Communist Party.  It is wrong to do business with such people and I am quite sure that they have their hooks deep into his depraved soul.  With Russia and China very much opposed to the well-being of the USA, he would be a seriously compromised President.  His past policies with respect to both Russia and China were much too accommodating to them.

The Democratic Party has its power base in the education establishment, the media, the labor unions, and in some ethnic groups that have tended to vote heavily for the Democrats very contrary to their actual rational interest.  Perhaps the most broadly important of these power bases is the control of the education system as a result of a largely government run school and university education system.  Even private schools are heavily controlled by government in their curricula, financing of students, operational requirements beyond teaching, and as a source for grant money.  In at least most government-run schools, the teachers are not professional managers of 20 to 30 students at a time, but merely blue collar workers incapable of management functions and of negotiating their own salaries and working conditions by their choice of socialist labor union representation.  The schools are operated primarily for the purpose of indoctrinating youth to want expanded government as the solution to every problem and for the benefit of the socialist labor union.  Such an education system does not equip students with the knowledge and independent thinking skills they need to become the watchdogs of their individual rights and the opponents of excessive, illegitimate government.  In most cases these students do not receive an adequate education in writing, reading, math, science, history, economics, civics, and philosophy.  Joe Biden strongly supports the limited and twisted education that government and socialist labor unions are willing to provide.  President Trump recognizes such a education as a terrible problem and wants to provide everyone with school choice.

Biden and the Democrats want to kill the Right to Work Laws throughout the nation by federal law.  The very idea that anyone has to allow someone else to represent him in his negotiations with management for the sale of his labor is an abomination.  That he then has to pay union dues to the agent that usurped his right to sell his own labor makes this still worse.  Most Americans, even most in the states without Right to Work, favor Right to Work legislation.  The Democrats favor rules that do not even allow most workers at a business to vote on whether they will be represented by a union or not.  They favor rapid elections that do not allow workers or management in opposition to effectively make their argument.  They support union votes that are not based on secret ballots.  They support union exceptions that allow union thugs to intimate and even beat up workers who do not want to join a union or who oppose union aims.  Trump has no such desire to give labor unions this kind of control over our lives.

Biden wants to have the USA rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, which will have a devastating effect on a booming energy export business for Americans based on the failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  They claim that doing so is based on science, which is a blatant lie.  The global computer models are now in the 6th generation and they have always made wrong predictions and they have not even shown signs of improvement.  The reason is because the physics input into the models is wrong, as I have shown on this blog repeatedly.  But you do not even have to know enough physics to understand my arguments.  All you have to know is that any theory that makes wrong predictions is wrong.  This is a basic principle of the scientific method.  One cannot claim that catastrophic man-made global warming is consensus science when it is not science at all.  In addition, carbon dioxide is a very beneficial plant fertilizer and a 1.5K increase in temperature would cause more good than harm, contrary to the heated claims of the U.N. and others.  Trump has enough sense not to believe in the claims and to see that the Paris Climate Accord will do more harm than good to Americans.

Biden wants to transition the energy sector away from coal, oil, and gas, claiming they are polluting and destructive because they result in carbon dioxide emissions.  He says he will make them net-zero emitters of carbon dioxide in four years, by 2025.  To do that, he has to make their operations vastly more expensive.  In doing so, he is willing to put millions of Americans out of work, cause the cost of energy to skyrocket for both residential and commercial use, cause our transportation costs to go up greatly, force the use of expensive, light frame, short-range vehicles loaded with heavy batteries with short life-times and inconvenient recharging schedules, and force a crash program to build massive farms of wind generators and solar panels which produce unreliable and expensive energy.  The alternative energy developments will rely on government using force to make the costs of coal, oil, and gas become much greater by making them pay to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The wind generators will kill ever greater numbers of birds and bats, require incredible amounts of concrete to anchor them whose production emits massive loads carbon dioxide, and require massive mining projects to obtain the required rare earth elements, copper, iron for steel production, plastic resin for the carbon fiber blades, and lithium for backup storage batteries.  The solar panels will require massive plants to make the photovoltaic materials, many of which are highly toxic, and the mining of much silver and copper.  Oh, and by the way, the Democrats really hate mining and toxic chemicals, so as the required massive production gets underway, they will put on the brakes, leaving us with much less power from coal, oil, and gas and not nearly enough energy to replace their lost production with.

Biden wants to increase our taxes and the burden of taxes on everyone.  Yes, he says he will only increase taxes on those making over $400,000 per year and on businesses.  I suspect that his rationale for saying this is that the Trump tax cut for individuals is going to expire and he is going to see to it that it is not extended.  So, he will not raise your taxes, because the the Democrats already insured that the Trump tax cut for individuals had an expiration date.  So, everyone who paid more taxes prior to the Trump tax cut, will pay more soon again.  Then additional taxes will be piled on people making over $400,000 a year and on corporations.  Many people who pay over $400,000 in taxes do so because their business income is taxed on their personal income tax.  The more money taken by government from businesses, the less money businesses have to expand, improve their productivity, train their employees, hire new employees, pay state and local taxes, pay their employees better, and work to raise our standard of living.  Meanwhile, government will take this money and pay its expanded well-paid bureaucracy, hire contractors with good government connections, force the contractors to use union labor, apply the money to political advantage, and deliver a product of low quality.  Basically, a tax on any of us, is a tax on all of us, except for a favored few who will make out like bandits.  The cost of living will rise with far too little to show for it.  Trump would like to lower our taxes and most definitely to extend the individual tax rate cut.

Consistent with the fearful and the anti-business mentalities that dominate the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and the Democrats want to keep business, the schools, and other functions in which people congregate such as churches shut down until the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus somehow disappears.  They have little regard for how many businesses are destroyed, how many workers become unemployed, how many children and young people fall behind in their education, how religious freedom is curtailed, how many people do not go to doctors when they need to do so, how many people become severely depressed, how many people commit suicide, become alcoholics, or use other harmful drugs.  Their fear, fed by the media and the socialist education system, dominates all.  President Trump understands that most people, excepting some elderly and some people with other medical problems, generally need to return to normal productive activities.

In the name of group identity politics and the designation of some groups as inherently racist, as the Democrats now often claim all white people are, the Democratic Party has readily welcomed demonstrations in the streets, even as they have shut down or tried to shut down almost all other gatherings of Americans.  Going beyond this, they generally tolerated actual violence for a long while, until it became clear that most Americans were repulsed by the violence and the Democrats began to fear the effects of this on their fate in the upcoming 2020 elections.  It has been Trump who has been far more concerned with the effects of the violence on personal security and property destruction, much of which was especially hurting many small business owners, many of whom were in poorer areas of cities.  In every case, such violence and property destruction drive up the costs of business operation, increase prices, and result in less employment in cities where this is very harmful to many inhabitants.

The Democrats and Biden effectively want to cripple the people's ability to defend themselves from the violence that Democrat controlled government does not want to protect them from.  They are strongly determined to constrict or even to squash our 2nd Amendment rights.  Trump stands firm on this constitutional right to have the means to defend oneself and one's family.

Biden is advocating a massive infrastructure expenditure geared to create union jobs.  He wants to pay for more zero-emission mass transit in every American city with 100,000 or more inhabitants.  Even traditional mass transit has always lost money in astounding amounts in American cities.  He wants to build more bicycle paths.  He will have the government build a network of electric vehicle recharging stations, apparently so you can get halfway there and spend a few hours recharging and then get back on the road again.  Somehow or other, he will have us building electric vehicles in this program too.  He is going to spend money on the energy infrastructure itself, which apparently means the government will own the energy infrastructure.  What could go wrong with that?  He is somehow going to upgrade 4 million buildings and weatherize 2 million homes.  He will install more energy efficient windows and appliances.  He is going to build 1.5 million sustainable homes.  He will have a program for environmental justice, whatever that is.  Except, the money to do these things will really come out of your pocket, some way or the other, and mean that you cannot use that money to do what you wanted to do with it.

Biden shows his economic ignorance, or is it willingness to do great harm to many in his pursuit of demagogic influence upon the economically ignorant, in advocating a $15/hour national minimum wage.  There should not be a minimum wage established by any level of government.  That is an interference with everyone's freedom of association and freedom to earn a living.  The fact that one would have difficulty having one job and being the soul worker in a family of four and living on a wage of less than $15/hour is irrelevant.  It is especially young people who are under-educated who need a chance to prove they can be a reliable worker and are willing to learn on the job who need jobs that pay less than what a worker who has a family to support would need to earn.  Minimum wages hurt those who most need to work, but have the lowest skills to offer.  Minimum wage laws are especially loved by labor unions who want to exclude competing workers from the market by using the force of government.  After all, those union workers have to earn more so they can pay a large sum to the labor union bosses, who in turn need to use much of it to buy off the Democrat politicians who give great power to the union bosses.  Yet while minimum wage laws are always harmful, they are especially harmful at the national level.  A minimum wage of $15/hour is less harmful in New York City or San Francisco than it is in Muddy Gap, Wyoming, Magnolia, Mississippi, or Loco Hills, New Mexico.  Of course, Democrats are very happy to destroy these low cost of living small towns.  Trump cares about the rural areas, the small towns, and the low cost of living areas much more than does Biden.

Biden does not believe our legislators need to read a bill before they vote on it.  He was happy to go along with the ObamaCare atrocity that made us buy insurance we did not want or need.  He was went along with the lie that ObamaCare did not have a tax in it, but then it did when the Supreme Court torturously ruled it constitutional because it had a tax in it.  He went along with the lie that you could keep your insurance if you wanted and keep your doctor if you wanted.  Then there was the lie that ObamaCare would save a family of four $2500 a year.  Under ObamaCare health care cost have doubled.  In many areas of the country, there is one and only one plan available, but that is of no concern to the Democrats who rule the cities where that is not true.  It is only Republican rural areas with totally monopoly ObamaCare.

Biden intends to set up a Blue Panel Committee to provide him with cover to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.  Biden and the Democrats believe the courts should be free to set policy, abrogating the constitutional responsibility of the Congress to do that.  Trump, on the other hand has appointed three Supreme Court Justices who recognize the division of powers in the Constitution and know that the function of the federal courts is to see that the rule of the laws of Congress duly instituted is to be enforced in the justice system.  Amy Coney Barrett may be his crowning appointment.

The Obama/Biden administration was the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.  It had the largest government apparatus to corrupt.  It had a bureaucracy that was composed of well over 90% Democrats operating in Washington, DC where any government employee crime had to be tried before a court whose jury was sure to be 95% composed of Democrats, who would never find any Democrat guilty of any crime that was aiding the Democratic Party.  But, Republicans beware the DC justice system.

The Obama/Biden administration supplied drug lords with weapons.  They rewarded Senator John Kerry with the State Department after he used his Senate seat power to threaten drug companies and other companies with harmful legislation if they did not pay him off.  He used insider information to make investments that paid him very well.  Following his time in the State Department, they gave the position to Sen. Hillary Clinton, who used her position to fill the Clinton Foundation with money, much of which was used for family expenses.  The Obama/Biden administration used the IRS to heavily discriminate against Tea Party and limited government organizations that applied for tax exempt status, greatly suppressing their effectiveness in the 2012 election.  No one was ever prosecuted for this, despite one official responsible having had many meetings with Obama, which were surely due to his coordinating the effort.

Under the Obama/Biden administration the NSA very widely spied on Americans, contrary to the law.  The head of the NSA lied to Congress about this.  The administration promulgated the lie that the riot and attack against the American ambassador in Benghazi, Libya was because some guy in America had shown a video on the Internet.  They claimed they could not rescue the Ambassador and the CIA and State Dept. men protecting him, when they really acted with such negligence and indecision that they could not then provide a rescue.  This was a dark moment in U.S. history.

The Obama/Biden administration pursued the most dastardly agendas in U.S. history in trying to prevent the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  They used the FBI, the Director of the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and numerous Democrats in the Department of Justice to frame people in the Trump campaign as collaborators with the Russians.  They lied to the FISA courts in order to spy on the Trump campaign and then on his transition team.  This was far worse than Watergate.  For three years they used Russian collaboration claims to distract the Trump administration and to discredit it in the eyes of many Americans who could not see through the lies of the Democrats and the elderly, obsolete media, academia, and their fellow travelers.  Yet, it was long ago clear that it was Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Obama/Biden administration that were in league with the Russian disinformation apparatus.  It was the Democrats who undermined the federal government in the interest of Russia and very much to the harm of the American people.  When the Russia hoax fell apart, they then created the Ukraine hoax for the impeachment of Trump.  This also fell apart, but served as a huge distraction and to create much disharmony among Americans.

Many libertarians fault Donald Trump for not entering into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, though he has since entered into a number of bilateral trade deals with other nations who were in that proposed trade deal.  Not every trade deal is advantageous.  Others criticize him for ending NAFTA and negotiating a new deal with Mexico and Canada.  The new deal has some advantages for Americans, having fixed some problems with NAFTA.  But there is also some protectionism in the new deal also.  All of this is a mixed bag.  However, the alterations in the China trade agreements really did need to be done.  We were doing too much trade with China and there were many ways in which they were taking advantage of their Most Favored Nation and WTO status, given to them by Obama/Biden.  China is out to control the world and it is using the investments of Capitalists to get in position to hang Capitalists.  It has been stealing our intellectual property and our capital investments in China left and right.  This is a nation that uses slave labor, harvests organs, violates religious freedom, violated the treaty over its governance of Hong Kong, and is expansionist in the South China Sea and in the Himalayan Mountains, having previously invaded Tibet.  China is ruled by very evil people who appear to have Biden in their pocket.  We need to trade much less with this rogue nation.

Biden and Obama were convinced that manufacturing in the U.S. was essentially a matter of business raping Gaia.  They viewed it as environmentally bad.  They were happy to export our manufacturing capability to China.  This was very much to China's advantage militarily and in terms of world economic influence and power.  The pandemic helped to show how absurdly dependent we have become on China's manufacturing and how they are happy to use that to their advantage.

The Democrats like to claim that Trump has hurt us with our allies.  Yet, our ally Germany was pledged to spend 2% of its GDP on defense as a NATO ally.  Instead, Germany had long taken advantage of us by spending only 1.2% of its GDP, giving it an economic advantage.  By November 2019, Germany had increased its defense spending to 1.38% of GDP, after much complaining about pressure from Trump.  By October 2020, German spending was up to 1.57%.  Back in 2014, only three countries in NATO spent as much as 2% of GDP.  By October 2020, ten NATO nations spent at least 2%.  Of course, some of these nations did not like being pressured to meet their pledges.  Trump was quite right in pressuring them to do so.  Obama/Biden had not applied much pressure on this, so the nations of NATO were very accustomed to allowing the U.S. to protect them with little of their help.

One of the most important things Trump has done is to cut back on the excesses of the regulatory bureaucracy, as well as putting pressure on Congress not to give the regulatory agencies more power.  Regulatory compliance is estimated to cost $1.9 trillion a year.  Regulations are primarily directed at businesses and they are especially costly for small businesses.  Big business often supports more regulation to reduce the ability of smaller businesses to challenge them in the marketplace.  Big business can more readily hire experts to put them in compliance and they can often control the agencies that regulate them.  By law, any new regulation costing over $100 million in compliance costs, must have a cost-benefit analysis performed.  The Obama/Biden administration very commonly ignored this law.  When they did do a cost-benefit analysis, they commonly greatly underestimated the cost and over-stated the benefits.  They used regulations and changes in the interpretation of regulations to damage or destroy whole industries.  The coal industry was very much one such example.  Out of work coal miners, railroad and barge workers, and coal-fired power plant workers can thank these heartless souls, Obama and Biden, for the loss of many such jobs.  Yes, natural gas from fracking was going to cause some significant switching from coal to natural gas, but the government had no business putting its heavy foot on the scale on the side of natural gas.

After the election of 2016, manufacturing began to recover in the U.S.  Manufacturers are my laboratory's primary customers and my business increased steadily and strongly after the election until the CCP coronavirus caught up with us.  When manufacturers could not see regulatory and legal stability and faced the world's highest tax rates, as was the case under Obama/Biden, there were many reasons to manufacture in other countries and that is where their efforts went.  Not only did we lose the manufacturing capability, but we began losing the design, technology, and general engineering capability that were tied to the nations where the manufacturing was performed.  As a result, my laboratory was in a depression that lasted from 2009 through 2016. Fortunately, under the Trump presidency, huge increases in work and income followed in 2017 and then in 2018 and 2019.

Frankly, I have run out of time to write about the many reasons why President Trump is vastly superior to Joe Biden as our President.  There is absolutely no contest here in terms of a rational assessment of who will do the better job of protecting the rights of the individual, allowing the market to recover from the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus, and allowing productive people to raise our future standard of living.  The socialist Biden would be a disaster, as is his entire party.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know, but there are no Inquiring Minds on the Left

The Obama/Biden administration was the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, despite the Clinton administration's efforts to be as corrupt as possible.  The Obama/Biden administration used the IRS to prevent hundreds of Tea Party and Limited Government organizations from becoming tax-free institutions to minimize their effectiveness in the 2012 election.  The fact that they got away with this emboldened them to go massively in on interfering with the 2016 election.  The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hired the Brit Christopher Steele to collaborate with the Russians to produce the faked dossier that was used with the extensive collaboration of the Obama/Biden administration to obtain FISA permissions to spy on the Trump campaign.  We now know that Obama, Biden, FBI Head James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the CIA John Brennen, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and numerous Dept. of Justice bureaucrats such as the lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were all involved in the effort to spy on the Trump campaign using a dossier they knew to be fake as their justification.

Claims based on the known fake Steele dossier that Trump was collaborating with Russia were used to offset attention to Hillary Clinton's theft of tens of thousands of government emails, some of which were classified, and which she made readily available to foreign governments by callously putting them on an unsecure server in her home.  Unless Russia, Red China, North Korea, and Iran have only incompetent hacker resources, there is every reason to believe they had access to all of Hillary Clinton's emails dealing with many fascinating State Department activities, which are intertwined with military, intelligence, and commercial national interests of the United States and our allies.  Actually, even our allies may have been hacking into her emails, since they also want more insight into the activities of the State Department and its activities with the military, intelligence, and commercial interests so they can gain an advantage over American in their dealings with us.  By the way, we know that Russia and China have extremely competent hacker resources.

Let me remind you that Nixon was driven from office because a few people broke into the DNC headquarters in the Watergate because they actually believed the DNC was collaborating with Cuba to influence the upcoming election.  They did not break in using a dossier they knew was fake as their justification.  They at least thought they were actually chasing down a national security threat.  Then Nixon tried to cover this up and discovered doing it.  Obama and a host in his administration, including Joe Biden, went a step into corruption beyond what Nixon did by creating a hoax and using it to spy on the Trump campaign and then as a means to claim the illegitimacy of his presidency for about 2.5 years, before slighting altering their claims to then impeach the President.

Now we have a Democratic Party nominee for the presidency in Joe Biden who has amassed a fortune while serving as a public servant in Washington, D.C. for 47 years.  He has a son and other relatives who have made fortunes selling his influence to Russia, oligarchs in Ukraine, and the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China.  The Old Guard Media, the Swamp Rats of Washington, D.C., and the socialist left controlling academia do not want the American people to learn about the many decades of rampant corruption in the Federal Government and more state governments than not.  Their power, influence, easy moral pretense, and income all depend upon being the well-connected special interests who can take advantage of the power to make laws and regulations based on government force and on the vast taxes paid by the great majority of hard-working Americans in the private sector.

If you have an inquiring mind, then you will find this video of Tucker Carlson to be very interesting:

Should Joe Biden become President, we will have many national security problems, since he is certainly a puppet to not only the extreme socialist wing of his party, but he is also in the pockets of Russia and China, and oligarchs in Ukraine. Those are not nice people and they are very happy to hurt the American people.

Changes in the Relative GDPs of the G20 Nations over the Last 25 Years

The American Enterprise Institute has an interesting graphic on the relative GDPs of the G20 nations over the last 25 years.  Who's GDPs increased as a relative percentage of the total GDPs of the G20 nations and who's fell over that time?

Note that the European Union as a whole has a membership in G20, but not being a nation is excluded from the chart above.

What I am interested in is the change in the relative percentage of the GDP of the G20 nations over the past 25 years.  Let us look at the fraction of the 2018 percentage divided by the 1992 percentage beginning with the nations that had the highest percentages 25 years ago:

USA, 30.90/31.96 = 0.9668
Japan, 7.77/19.11 =  0.4066
Germany, 5.86/10.38 = 0.5645
France, 4.12/6.85 = 0.6015
Italy, 3.08/6.43 = 0.4790
United Kingdom, 4.18/5.77 = 0.7244
Canada, 2.63/2.90 = 0.9069
Russia, 2.51/2.25 = 1.1156
China, 19.50/2.09 = 9.3301
Brazil, 3.28/1.96 = 1.6735
Mexico, 1.83/1.78 = 1.0281
South Korea, 2.44/1.71 = 1.4269
Australia, 2.11/1.59 = 1.3270
India, 4.14/1.39 = 2.9784
Argentina, 1.02/1.12 = 0.9107
Turkey, 1.36/0.77 = 1.7662
Saudi Arabia, 1.09/0.67 = 1.6269
South Africa, 0.56/0.66 = 0.8485
Indonesia, 1.62/0.63 = 2.5714

If an underdeveloped nation is not determined to shoot itself in the foot, it can commonly make easy gains on its share of the world's GDP over time.  Similarly, the lesser developed nations of the G20 could easily have done so over the last 25 years.  Some of them have, the most remarkable one being China.  India has had the second greatest GDP surge among the G20 nations.  Third place belongs to Indonesia.  Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Australia, Russia, and Mexico have improved their relative positions in that order from more to less.  The gains of Russia and Mexico are actually very unimpressive.  The losers among the smaller economies of the G20 nations from biggest loser to smaller loser are South Africa and Argentina, though both were at one time relatively leading economies in the world.

Japan and the major nations of the European Union have suffered huge reductions in their significance, while the USA and Canada have seen relatively minor reductions in their relative economic significance.  The least bad performer of the major European Union nations has been the United Kingdom.  France has been the distant second least bad.  The former Axis nations of WWII have done relatively poorly with Germany being only 0.5645 as significant and Italy becoming only 0.4790 as significant.  Japan has many anti-competitive restrictions in its home economy and has a rapidly aging and shrinking population among its problems.

Both Canada and Australia have done far better than the United Kingdom, which I believe has been held back by its membership in the European Union.  If the United Kingdom simply makes a break from all of the European Union's collectivist requirements and bureaucracy, while it will likely do worse for a while as it adjusts to the new reality, it will do much better in the long run.  The United Kingdom should aim to be more like the USA as a dynamic economic power in the world and increase its trade with the USA, Canada, Australia, and India especially.  These are all nations doing comparative well, while France, Germany, and Italy are sinking rapidly.

The EU has smothered itself with many largely irrational safety and quality control policies, which I can see as such from the standpoint of being active in materials analysis and testing.  They are using these policies to suppress goods and services from outside the EU, but the effect is to increase costs and to make local companies lazy and unresponsive in an anti-competitive environment.  In addition, the EU has been following very foolish energy policies and has swallowed the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud hook, line, and sinker, with disastrous economic results.  The inability of the bigger economies of the EU to keep up in economic growth is the result.  The USA, for all of its increased regulations and the many anti-business policies of the Obama regime, has performed much better in comparison.  With Trump decreasing the burden of unreasonable regulations and following rational energy policies, the USA is improving its relative position in the world economy.  We can do even better to the extent that we can arrange truly free trade agreements with nations around the world.

US Postal Service Subsidizes Chinese Package Delivery

Edward Hudgins, Ph.D., Research Director of the Heartland Institute, has written a very interesting article on how the Universal Postal Union (UPU) agreement forces the US Postal Service to subsidize the delivery of small packages sent from China to American addresses.  The USPS lost about $75 million in 2014 due to it having to deliver small packages from China.  It costs less for a Chinese business to send a package thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean to most American addresses than it costs an American business to send a similar package 600 miles to an American address.  This is an unfair trade practice.  The Trump administration tried to get the UPU to change its archaic rules, but the US gets only one vote among 192 nations in the UPU.  The UPU basically shrugged the US off.  The Trump administration has responded with a termination of our membership in one year if the problem is not corrected.

Making America Great and Donald Trump

America is great when the American People are free to exercise their broad and sovereign rights to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, and the pursuit of their own happiness.  There is no greater value than that of enjoying these liberties.  Donald Trump is a materialist who does not seem to have any concept of this.

I do not like Donald Trump.  I do not like how he has practiced business.  He has been a crowing crony capitalist who has used subsidies and eminent domain extensively in his business dealings.  Several of his businesses went bankrupt, though this happened just after he sold them to suckers.  His business ethics has been immoral.  His success has substantially come at the expense of others, not often enough in the form of mutually beneficial trades and too often at the expense of unwilling taxpayers.  The state of New Jersey, both under Corzine and Christie, has poured subsidy monies into the gambling industry in Atlantic City, to Trump's great benefit.  That industry is failing badly and at the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of New Jersey taxpayers.  I do not like the meanness in Donald Trump.  Decent people do not make fun of other people's afflictions.  Now, I am not politically correct, but if you do not like how someone else looks, keep it to yourself.  A man who would be President ought to be a gentleman and one can easily be a gentleman while telling the truth about the many issues that government must deal with and about the tasks it should leave to the private sector.

Trump has been in favor of a universal, government-provided health care system.  That idea is a huge assertion of collective ownership of every individual by the state.  He says he will repeal ObamaCare, but there is no mention of this on his website.

His website says he is interested in the following reforms and provides some information on what he plans to do:

• U.S. - China Trade Reform
• Veterans Administration Reforms
• Tax Reform
• Second Amendment Rights
• Immigration Reform

On U.S. - China trade reforms, what is written is not as bad as the overt trade protectionism Trump advocates on the campaign trail, but it also fails to note that the primary reason the opening of new trade markets around the world has not led to the growth of the American economy is because the American government does not allow American businesses to be competitive.  He notes the importance of corporate tax reductions, but only after implying that bad trade negotiations caused job loses in America.  The job losses in America are due to excessive taxes, paperwork, and regulations that American businesses are hobbled with, thanks to Washington.  Business expenses are very high in America compared to many other countries in the world.  To compete, we need to be free to take full advantage of our design and innovation capabilities, while shedding governmental burdens that provide no or insufficient benefits.  We should be taking advantage of our abundance of inexpensive and reliable energy, not trying to make it more expensive as Obama has done.  We should be taking advantage of our great banking and financial companies, not smothering most of them in disabling requirements under Dodd-Frank so-called reform.  We should not be raising the cost of business with governmental dictates of minimum wages, paid leave benefits, the highest corporate and personal taxes in most of the developed nations, ObamaCare, NLRB rulings favoring forced unionization, and EPA regulations based on exaggerated claims of mercury or catastrophic man-made global warming. 

The Veterans Administration certainly needs reform.  Trump would make a key correction by allowing veterans more treatment in non-Veterans Administration hospitals and doctor offices.  He does not actually note that the many ills of the VA are endemic in government operations and would be propagated to other government attempts to control medical care.

Tax Reform is horribly overdue and the Trump plan is a pretty good one, with the exception that he would exempt single people from paying any income tax if they make less than $25,000 a year and married couples if they make $50,000 or less.  This gives them no skin in the cost of government and I do not think this is a good idea.  They should pay something.  It seemed he was going to outlaw corporation inversions overseas, but upon further reading he is really saying he will make them unnecessary.  He will continue to tax corporation earnings abroad, which I think is bad, but he will give them the credit to paying taxes abroad, so the U.S. tax of 15% will actually only be paid as the difference of the foreign tax and the US 15% should the foreign tax be less than 15%.  That is not bad at all.  His tax reform would allow a great leap of growth in the American economy.

On the Second Amendment:

The Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right that belongs to all law-abiding Americans. The Constitution doesn’t create that right – it ensures that the government can’t take it away. Our Founding Fathers knew, and our Supreme Court has upheld, that the Second Amendment’s purpose is to guarantee our right to defend ourselves and our families. This is about self-defense, plain and simple.

It’s been said that the Second Amendment is America’s first freedom. That’s because the Right to Keep and Bear Arms protects all our other rights. We are the only country in the world that has a Second Amendment. Protecting that freedom is imperative.

That is excellent and is the only place I know of in which Trump has spoken of individual rights and the need to maintain constitutional law.

On Immigration Reform, he is apparently not going to send the Army into Mexico to make them pay for the wall at the southern border.

Mexico must pay for the wall and, until they do, the United States will, among other things: impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages; increase fees on all temporary visas issued to Mexican CEOs and diplomats (and if necessary cancel them); increase fees on all border crossing cards – of which we issue about 1 million to Mexican nationals each year (a major source of visa overstays); increase fees on all NAFTA worker visas from Mexico (another major source of overstays); and increase fees at ports of entry to the United States from Mexico [Tariffs and foreign aid cuts are also options].  We will not be taken advantage of anymore.  

But he is going to try to control immigrants seeking jobs that he claims Americans need.  Companies will have less say in who they hire under his plan. Fewer highly skilled foreign workers will be allowed to immigrate.  This is a short-sighted example of populism.

There are too many other issues he has not given a plan to treat.  I do not have great certitude in his keeping his word either, especially given his history of many changes of mind.  He comes out of a primarily Democrat Socialist New York/New Jersey background and he played those Democrat politicians to the hilt.  Perhaps he was just using them.  He does pride himself as a manipulator.  Is he also manipulating those who vote for him?  Will he turn on those who vote for him now as he has turned on the Democrat Socialists he supported a short while ago, perhaps because they were then useful to his businesses?  Perhaps his voters now are only a useful means for him acquiring great power?  Donald Trump is a vapor.  He has no consistency.  He has no substance that one can perceive in his speeches.  Will his website policy statements also become vapor when he has the power he wants?

But these few plans that are given some substance are better than I had expected.  This is good, because it is looking more and more as though this man may be the next President of the United States of America.  I still have concerns that his temperament is much more suited to that of a dictator than to the presidency of a constitutionally limited government in the U.S.A.  I also suspect that these policy positions are written by advisers who understand much more than Trump does and they may be shoved aside once he is in power. After all, he thinks he is better than anyone else, just as Obama does.  We can expect much more arrogance in the extensive use of power should Trump become President.  And how many months will it take for him as President to subject each and every one of us to is childish name-calling?

King Coal Will Continue to Rule the World

The renewable energy, non-fossil fuel phantom is not about to replace Coal as the King of World Electric Power Generation.  The Western European attempt to replace coal with wind energy and solar power has only proven what was perfectly obvious:  They are unreliable and very expensive.  They are threatening Germany and other nations with severe winter power inadequacies and these are continuing to mount.  Industry is fleeing Germany for less expensive and more reliable electricity power.

The problem is not just that wind and solar power generation plants themselves are unreliable and expensive.  Because these power sources are unreliable, they have to be backed up by natural gas power plants, which can be tuned to higher or lower power outputs relatively rapidly, unlike coal-fired power plants.  The late start and the resistance to the development of shale oil and gas fields by using the well-proven frakking technique has left Europe with only high cost natural gas, much of which is imported from Russia.  The use of coal provides much less expensive and very reliable electric power, but also produces more of the falsely accused CO2 villain.

The European Union has regulations that were designed to reduce CO2 emissions which discouraged coal use altogether and limited natural gas power plants to standby duty, only to be turned on when the wind did not blow or blew too hard.  But, natural gas power plants are too expensive to keep running at less than about 57% of their capacity.  The result is that 60% of European natural gas electric power plants will be closed by 2016.  Power outages will become a frequent occurrence.  It will be miserable for residences and businesses will go out of business or move to other parts of the world.  Many of the big European businesses will continue, at an accelerated pace, to move more manufacturing operations to the US, where power is still more reliable and less expensive in many states despite Obama's best efforts to drive prices sky high.

Idiot European Union regulations or not, Europe will have to build more coal-fired power plants at some point.  According to the World Bank, in 2011 world-wide electric generation plant capacity was just over 22 trillion KWH or 22 billion MWH.  The presently known proposed building plans for coal-fired electric power plants are summarized in the schematic map below.  The 1.4 billion MWH of plants proposed will be a about a 6.4% increase in electric power generation capacity.  The biggest two contributors by far to this increase are China and India.  But, Russia, Turkey, and Vietnam are a distant 3, 4, and 5 by rank.  In Europe, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany are ranked 1, 2, and 3 with their proposed coal power plant increases.  Ukraine and Poland rightly have no qualms about this, but Germany is being driven to it out of necessity.

Given the coal-fired power plant plans of China, India, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, South Africa, and the US, the contribution of Germany would have no significant impact on global warming, even if the failed hypothesis of CO2 emission catastrophe were true.  Obama's madmen and madwomen at the EPA are trying to nix the US building of such power plants and may succeed for awhile.  Eventually, we will learn what Germany is in the process of learning.

China is talking about trying to reduce its coal-fired power plant contribution to its increasing power needs.  However, the projected 2030 electric power plant generation capacity in 2030 is expected to compare with that of 2006 as shown below:

So in 2006, China had a 2.77 trillion KWH capacity and by 2030 it is expected to have an 8.55 trillion KWH capacity.  This is a 3.1 times increase.  Try as China may, the only way that can happen is if the use of coal powered plants greatly increases.  The 2006 coal-fired power plant capacity was 2.19 trillion KWH and it will expand in 2030 to 6.41 trillion KWH.  This is a 2.9 times increase!  The 2030 coal-fired power plant capacity of China will be the equivalent of nearly 30% of the present total world electric power generating capacity.

It is a very good thing that the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming has failed.  The world is not going to be able to avoid the continued and even the increased use of coal.  If it tried, that would be a catastrophe.  The global warming alarmists time is drawing to a close.  King Coal will remain well ensconced on his throne.

Forests Saved by Fossil Fuels and High Farm Productivity

American forests were disappearing between 1850 and 1910 due to the need for wood as fuel and the increases in farmland.  After 1910, the extent of our forests was stable and then they began to expand as crop yields increased dramatically.  High-yield varieties of wheat, rice, and corn were developed.  Fossil fuel use spared the forests from use as fuel.  See Ronald Bailey's article Peak Farmland?, which is largely based on a lecture by Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University in December 2012.

U.S. corn production from 1860 to 2010 increased by a factor of 17.  Corn yields in America are now averaging 180 bushels per acre, while worldwide yields are 82 bushels per acre.  Increasing yields should continue, since non-irrigated yields of about 300 bushels per acre are already being produced with new varieties.

The story of India is instructive.
 In 1960:

• Population = 435 million
• Diet = 2000 calories a day
• Farmland = 398 million acres (slightly more that 2 times the size of Texas), 0.91 acre/capita

In 2010:

• Population =  1.155 billion, increase of 2.66 times
• Diet = 2330 calories a day, or one-sixth more
• Farmland = 420 million acres, or 5.5% more, 0.36 acre/capita

If Indian wheat production had not improved since 1960, an additional 161 acres of farmland would have been needed to produce the same amount of wheat.  Thanks to Indians flocking to the cities since then, Indian forests have actually expanded by 37 million acres.

China in the post-Mao period has a similar history.  The population doubled, GDP increased 45 times, farmland planted in corn doubled, but corn yield was 4.5 times greater per acre.  The corn yield increase kept 297 million acres of land from being used to produce this corn.  Chinese forest land increased from 1990 to 2010 by 30%.

Without crop yield increases from 1960 to 2010, about 7.4 billion more acres of farmland would have been needed worldwide.  This land area is almost twice that of South America or equal to that of the USA, Canada, and China combined.  Fortunately, farmers today are producing almost three times as much food on the amount of land used in 1960 for farming.

Ausubel and colleagues estimate that the world average corn yield in 2060 will be about equal to that of the USA in 2010.  General increases in crop yields will release between 360 and 990 acres of farmland by 2060.  In addition, about 40% of the world's grain is used for livestock.  A biotech company called Modern Meadows wants to use 3D printers and tissue engineering to make meat.  If that idea works, less farmland still will be needed.  The forests are saved.

Obama's Glass House: His Investments Abroad

Obama and Biden like to claim that Bain Capital had the companies it invested in make investments abroad, especially in China or Mexico.  It turns out that they count heavily on the main stream leftist media to protect their glass house from stone throwers.

Thanks to Obama's insistence that the government take a big stake in the bankrupt GM after its restructuring as a government and union owned company, it is fully fair to look at its investments abroad if one is going to cast aspersions on those of Bain Capital abroad.

According to China Daily, GM is expanding its investment in China from its current $1 billion a year to $1.5 billion a year to make a total investment in China's 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) of $7 billion.  GM hopes to increase its sales in China from 2.35 million vehicles in 2010 to 5 million by 2015.  To do this, it is designing and developing new models in China.  GM production plants in China are joint ventures with the Chinese Communist Government.

GM announced in 2011 the investment of $540 million in a plant in Mexico to make engines.  In July of this year, it announced the planned investment of $420 million in two factories to make the Chevrolet Trax and full-sized trucks.

How about Obama's promise to create American jobs of the future in green energy?  This effort was promoted by Section 48C Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credits.  41% of its awards went to foreign-based companies who were awarded an average of $20 million compared to an average of $11 million for U.S.-based companies!  17 of the 25 foreign-based companies receiving Obama awards are or have plans to set up wind or solar manufacturing facilities in low-wage countries.  Those 17 foreign-based companies manufacturing in low-wage countries accounted for $406 million, so a super premium award averaging $23.9 million goes to those manufacturing in low-wage countries.  Six of the U.S.-based companies with awards are also planning to manufacture their products in low-wage countries.

As almost everyone now knows, Obama only picks the loser green energy companies for awards.  As these companies have gone bankrupt, their assets are often picked up on the cheap by foreign investors or companies.

Miasole, a U.S. solar energy company, received $101.8 million in tax credits.  In October 2012, it was sold to China's Hanergy Holding Company for a mere $30 million.

Ener1 was approved for $118.5 million of 48C tax credits in 2009 for its batteries.  Biden toured its plant in Indiana just after Obama announced his plan to have 1 million electric vehicles operating by 2015.  In January 2011, the same month as the Biden tour, Ener1 entered into a joint venture with Wanxiang Electric Vehicle Co. to make lithium-ion batteries for Chinese cars.  Ener1 moved some of its engineers to China along with some of its manufacturing equipment to ramp up the Chinese production.  In 2010, Ener1 lost $165 million.  In January 2012, Ener1 declared bankruptcy.  Its remains were bought by a Russian businessman with close ties to the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who Obama patted on the knee and told he would be more flexible after the election.  Perhaps in addition to giving the Russians what they want on missile defense, he also plans to give them more American green energy businesses nurtured on 48C tax credits.

Smith Electric Vehicles was awarded $32 million of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money.  Its losses since 2009 have been $128 million.  In February 2011, it teamed with Wanxiang Electric Vehicle Co. to make school buses.  Their agreement had Wanxiang make a $25 million equity investment in Smith Electric Vehicles and an investment of $75 million to develop and manufacture school buses and other electric vehicles in China.

Cardinal Fastener received $480,000 from Obama's 48C tax credit program to make fasteners for wind energy generators.  Obama visited their factory in Bedford Heights, Ohio and promised American green energy jobs, as he always does.  Soon afterward, Cardinal Fastener released 12% of its workforce.  In June 2011, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  Germany's Wurth Group acquired it in January 2012 for a mere $3.9 million.

Remembering Obama's not so ready shovel-ready infrastructure projects, some wound up being  managed and supplied by foreign companies.  ABC News highlighted a $400 million bridge renovation project in New York, the new $7.2 billion Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, and a $190 million project in Alaska which were to be managed by foreign firms.  Parts of the San Francisco - Oakland bridge were manufactured in China.  The state of California had to reject some of the federal money so they could keep their Chinese contractor.

Finally, if you want to encourage American companies to invest in plants and facilities abroad and to train workers there rather than in the U.S., leave the developed world's highest corporate tax rate where it is as the trend in the rest of the developed world is to decrease corporation taxes.  You can export even more jobs by raising the long-term capital gains tax from an already high 20.0% to 23.8% as required by ObamaUncaringTax in 2013.  Add a 4.7% tax increase for Medicare to high paid managers so small and medium businesses will be discouraged from expanding operations in the U.S.  Follow this up with another 80,000 pages of new business regulations and add the regulations of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank Too-Big-to-Fail to that.  Then throw in a slew of EPA rulings to take effect after the election, several of which are designed to keep us from using coal for anything, thus driving up our electricity costs and making vital electricity less dependable.  Export American jobs so they can use cheap coal-fired power plants abroad.

To top this all off, the gift for a 10-year veteran of the Obama Veterans Administration is a pen set made in China.

Obama's complaints about Bain Capital foreign investments are a case of incredible hypocrisy.  Obama is a con man, but how he can even dream that this level of hypocrisy will go undetected by Americans is beyond me.  Or maybe not.  He does think we are incredibly, stone-like stupid.  For that reason alone, we should vote him out of office.

GDP and Industrial Output Comparisons by Country

I needed to find out if China was the number 1 manufacturing nation in the world or was it the United States?  This proved a bit more difficult question than I thought it would be.  But the CIA World Factbook had the information needed to determine this and to calculate the actual value of each of the three sectors into which they divide the GDP for the year 2010.  These sectors are Agriculture, Industry, and Services.  The results I found for the 7 nations with the largest GDPs expressed in dollars with purchasing power parity are given in the following table:

 

The answer to my original question is that the value of China's industrial output, which includes mining and construction, is $4.73 trillion, while that for the United States is $3.24 trillion.  China's industrial output is 46% greater than that of the United States.  No other nation comes close to having so much industrial output as China or the United States.  The value of China's agricultural output is also the largest in the world.  In this case, it is 6 times that of the United States.  It is the delivery of services that the U.S. excels in doing.

The per capital GDP for the United States is more than 6 times that of China.  Germany has the second highest per capita GDP on the list and that of the U.S. is 32% higher.  The United Kingdom and Japan both have per capita GDPs very nearly as great as that of Germany.  This group has a per capita GDP more than twice that of Russia, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of China, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of India.

Asian Droughts and Grain Production and Demand

Russian Prime Minister Putin announced that exports of Russian grain have been banned from 15 August through the remainder of the year.  China has imported 1.2 million metric tons of corn this year.  The total Chinese imports of corn from all countries in prior years has been less than 100,000 metric tons a year.  Ukraine has also canceled several contracts to deliver wheat.  Widespread drought in Russia and across the northeastern corn belt of China for the last two years has reduced their supplies.  The growing middle class in China has also developed an appetite for more pork, chicken, milk, and eggs from animals fed on corn, as well as soft drinks that use corn syrup as a sweetener.  China is expected to pass Japan to become the world's second largest economy this year.  Demand for more and better food has been growing in India, Brazil, and Russia as well.

As recently as 2003, China was a large exporter of corn, when it exported 15.2 million metric tons.  One expert believes China will import 5.8 million tons of corn in 2011 and 15 million by 2015.  Russia provided 14.5% of the world's total wheat exports in 2009-2010 according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.  Egypt is the world's largest importer of wheat, buying much of it from Russia in recent years.  Russia exported less than 1 million metric tons of wheat in 2000-2001, but increased that to 17.5 million metric tons in 2009-2010.  The top five wheat exporting nations in the year ending in June 2010 were:

U.S.                    23.6 million metric tons
European Union  21.0
Canada               18.5
Russia                 17.5
Australia              14.0

Wheat prices leaped upward in 2007 and have stayed higher.  The story is similar for corn, oats, barley, grain sorghum, and sugar beets.  Rice prices started going up somewhat earlier, but continued to be higher since 2007.  One of the factors that pushed prices higher in 2007 was the U.S. mandate that required the use of ethanol in gasoline be set at 4.7 billion gallons of ethanol.  This is scheduled to rise to 7.5 billion gallons in 2012.  Meanwhile, the EPA was supposed to rule this month whether the ethanol content in gasoline could be raised to 15%, but now says the tests on engines will not be completed until the end of September.  Should the required gasoline content of ethanol be increased to 15%, there will be a further upward pressure on corn and meat prices.  More wheat and other crops will be displaced as farmers grow more corn.

There is some reason to believe that demand can continue to be met in the grain market.  Average corn yields in the U.S. have doubled in the last 40 years to 165 bushels an acre.  David Fischhoff, V.P. of Technology Strategy and Development at Monsanto Co., thinks corn yield can become nearly 300 bushels an acre by 2030.  If we do that and end the foolish subsidies for ethanol production from corn, it will be much easier for the U.S. to develop a greater and more lucrative export market as the rest of the world eats more meat, eggs, milk, and grains.  Healthy farm product exports would help to ease us out of the recession and produce some of the jobs we have failed to produce for most of this last decade.

U.S. Effective Corporate Tax Highest in OECD

A new study by Duanjie Chen and Jack Mintz, School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, shows that the U.S. effective corporate tax rate on new investments is the highest among all OECD countries.  They studied the effective rate for corporations on new investments, averaging over sub-national rates, such as the U.S. has at state and local levels, and found that only Argentina, Chad, Brazil, India, and Uzbekistan have higher effective corporate tax rates.  Japan, which used to be in a virtual dead heat with the U.S., has slightly reduced its effective corporate tax rate.

Our extremely high effective corporate tax rates on new investments are one of the important reasons why our recovery from the recession is painfully slow and U.S. corporations are still not hiring many people.  Our tax rates are much higher than the average of the G-7 nations, which are Canada (28.0%), the United Kingdom (27.5%), France (34.4%), Germany (24.4%), Italy (27.2%), and Japan (33.5%).  So, only France and Japan have rates nearly as high in the G-7 countries.  The German economy exports heavily and has only a 24.4% corporate tax rate compared to our 35.0% tax rate.  This gives German corporations a big advantage in competing with us for exports.  Sweden used to be the most socialist of the West European countries, but it now has a corporate tax rate of only 19.5%.  Switzerland has a rate of only 16.8% and the Netherlands' rate is only 16.3%.  China charges its corporations only 16.0%!  And why have many U.S. corporations set up companies in Mexico near the border?  Well, not only is labor less expensive there, but the corporate tax rate in Mexico is 15.8%.

Israel's rate is 15.1%.  Hungary is 13.6%, Poland is 13.6%, Czech Republic is 13.4%, Chile is 13.3%, Ireland is 12.3%, the Slovak Republic is 12.2%, Vietnam is 12.2%, Greece is 12.0%, Croatia is 9.8%, Iceland is 9.6%, Obama's birthplace Kenya is 9.1%, Romania is 8.9%, Singapore is 8.8%, Bulgaria is 4.1%, Latvia is 3.8%, Ukraine is 3.7%, and Belgium is -6.5%.  A negative tax rate!  Belgium actually subsidizes its corporations, which I do not recommend!

There should be no corporate income tax rate, except zero.  Most of the rest of the world has substantially reduced their effective corporate tax rates, but not the U.S.  State and local sales and asset-based taxes on capital add about 7% to the U.S. effective tax rate, but only 2% to that rate in other countries.  Our federal statutory rate is 35.0%.  The broad reductions in the statutory rates of other countries in recent years have not been matched in the U.S., which has responded only with a narrow 2005 tax break for "domestic production activities."  In 2009, this shaved about 2% from the U.S. effective rate.  Congress did enact some temporary "bonus" depreciations for certain capital investments, which were not included in the U.S. effective rate calculation due to their temporary nature.

In comparison, the average statutory rate in the European Union dropped 9.6% since 2000.  Canada, our largest trading partner, cut its federal corporate tax rate from 43% to 31% since 2000.  Other taxes were also reduced since then.  In 2012, the average statutory corporate tax rate in Canada is going to be 26.4% and the effective rate will be 19.5%!  The Canadian economy has been growing better than the U.S. economy for some time now as a result.  China has similarly been reducing its corporate taxes.

During the 1980s, the U.S. had more direct investment inflow than outflow.  In the 1990s and 2000s, the outflow of investment exceeded the inflow.  This slows growth and job creation.  As the monthly tables I have been doing on unemployment show, the failure of the U.S. economy to create new jobs, while worse during the current recession, has been going on ever since 2000.  The high effective corporate tax rate is a major contribution to this problem in poor job creation.

Another problem with our taxes on corporations is that we tax the overseas operations of multinational corporations.  In other countries, the multinational corporations can bring profits home from their out-of-country investments without being taxed on them.  Those governments are content to tax that money when it is distributed to the people and when it is spent.

Studies have clearly shown that corporate tax rates above 25% result in tax avoidance behavior that actually reduces government revenues from the taxes.  The only reason for tax rates higher than 25% is the appeal to ignorance and the let's-soak-the-fat-cats mentality.  It is perfectly clear that if we want to create jobs again and continue to have a rising standard of living, we must reduce the effective corporate tax rate.  It is best to reduce the statutory corporate tax rate substantially.  A reduction to no more than 25% is badly needed.

Obama's Change: Growing Government into Bankruptcy

When Obama promised CHANGE he intended to:

• Rid Americans of their individual rights, while laughing at the Constitution as just quaint
• Rid Americans of their health care choices and responsibilities
• Rid private employers of employees
• Make bankrupt Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac agencies of the federal government
• Rid private lenders of all future student loan business
• Rid hard working and productive Americans of much more of their earnings
• Rid the owners of GM and Chrysler of their investments
• Force banks and financial companies to take federal loans whether they need them or not
• End any concept of federal government fiscal responsibility
• Saddle the states with huge increases in already unpayable Medicaid bills
• Enlarge all governments and load them up with even more union employees with high salaries and sky-high benefits
• Bring Social Security to spending more in 2010 than its tax revenue
• Drag innovation in medicine to a painful crawl
• Induce doctors to retire early
• Increase medical costs with new taxes
• Increase taxes on investors so they will have less to invest in America's future
• Increase the size of the IRS
• Saddle employers with more tax and health insurance collection and paperwork duties
• Increased fuel costs due to drilling restrictions and increased ethanol use requirements
• Increased fuel costs due to declaring CO2 a pollutant
• Load tons of federal debt upon our children and grandchildren
• Print and spend money so recklessly that some are advocating a VAT lead weight on business

And these are just some of the changes which he has brought about with about 2.7 years left in office.  He is a very accomplished man in bringing about so many changes in such a short time.  He is a whirlwind of change and these changes are as useful as the change brought on to a small town when a tornado passes through it.  As I warned over and over during the presidential campaign, change is more often destructive than it is good, unless that change is planned and carried through by rational, knowledgeable, and wise people.  When a society is working as well as the American society did, change is best undertaken with much deliberation and consensus.  Change by madmen who scoff at the Constitution and do not read the 1,000 to 2,700 page legislative bills they vote for, will never be good.  Indeed, the tornado-like mass destruction is extremely evident.

Douglas Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), yesterday said:

U.S. fiscal policy is unsustainable, and unsustainable to an extent that it can't be solved through minor changes.  It's a matter of arithmetic.

Numbers from the Treasury Department on the fiscal year 2010 federal budget deficit are staggering (from an e-mail from Grassfire Nation):

• A record $220.9 billion deficit in February alone
• For every dollar in taxes and other revenues the federal government took in, the government SPENT $3.05.
• Five-month deficit total: $651.6 billion, more than 10 percent higher than last year's record.
• The five-month total is larger than any YEAR in American history prior to 2009.
• The FY2010 budget deficit is now projected to be $1.56 trillion AFTER stealing from the Social Security Trust fund.
• The CBO projects that interest payments on the debt will total $916 BILLION annually by the end of the decade.

If the U.S. is paying out $916 billion in interest on the debt each year by 2020, who will be crazy enough to loan the federal government any money?  When Douglas Elmendorf says the U.S. fiscal policy is unsustainable, that is a nice way of saying the U.S. government will be bankrupt.  Do you suppose the Chinese government will put the U.S. government into a conservatorship, as the U.S. government recently did to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac?  The federal government put them under a new agency in Washington, D.C. I suspect the Chinese government agency the American federal government will be put under will be in Peking.  Since Obama likes communism and Marxism so much, do you suppose this was his planned end point for the transformation of America and its People?  Clearly they would not accept communism given the choice outright, but as the means to be rescued from bankruptcy, Obama figures we will have to accept communist rule.  Since he thinks there is no such thing as American Exceptionalism, why not make us all peasants under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party?

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Full Faith and Credit of the USA

Robert Romano posted an interesting article on the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the U.S. debt on 7 April 2010.  Romano is the Senior Editor of the ALG News Bureau.  ALG is Americans for Limited Government, which is an organization doing good work for the cause of American liberty.  I will summarize the most interesting points in his article below.

Congress placed the government secured entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal government conservatorship in 2008 because they were effectively bankrupt.  Congress formed the Federal Housing Finance Agency to manage their sorry financial mess, which Congress had long worked hard to foster.  In June 2008, their combined debt was $6.6 trillion, of which $4.7 trillion was mortgage-backed securities.  Congressman Scott Garrett asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner why this debt taken on by the federal government had not been added to the national debt.  The U.S. debt of $12.6 trillion should really be $19.2 trillion and this would result in the downgrading of U.S. debt due to excessive risk.  There is quite a song and dance going on here while trying to avoid this.

Geithner says this corporate debt is not the same as U.S. Treasuries and should not be considered sovereign debt.  He says, "By statute, all obligations and securities issued by GSEs must include a statement that makes clear that such obligations and securities are not guaranteed by the United States and do not constitute a debt or obligation of the United States."  But, he also says the "Treasury is committed to supporting the GSEs while in conservatorship and to ensuring that the GSEs have sufficient capital to meet their debt obligations and honor their guarantees."  When Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were nationalized, the FHFA director James Lockhart told Congress that "the conservatorship and the access to credit from the U. S. Treasury provide an explicit guarantee to existing and future debt holders of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac."  It seems clear that when Congress nationalized the GSEs, the earlier statute that their obligations were not guaranteed by the federal government, had to be superseded or inherently contradicted.

Foreign investors held $1.5 trillion of the $4.7 trillion in mortgage-backed securities.  In June 2007, the last an accounting by nation was performed, China held $376 billion, Japan $228 billion, Russia $75 billion, Luxembourg held $39 billion, Belgium $33 billion, Britain $28 billion, and Middle Eastern national funds are also big holders.  Many of these nations apparently said they would not buy Treasury bonds to support the U.S. national debt if the government did not rescue them from the bankrupt mortgage-backed securities they held.  The federal government has since bought up $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed toxic security debt.  The Treasury will not say whose toxic securities they bought, but they only dealt with primary dealers who could directly deal with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  When the TARP program was put together, the Treasury was forbidden to purchase the mortgage-backed securities of foreign central banks.  But, it appears likely that Geithner has done just that with paper which is indeed backed by the explicit backing of the United States.  What else could he have paid the primary dealers for the toxic securities with?

This is just me again:  Our real national debt is clearly much greater than the $12.6 trillion figure we are told in a huge lie that it is.  There is still much more hidden debt than just that of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac also.

Obama's Green Jobs in Solar Power

The prices of solar panels are falling quickly, which is good for making the presently very highly expensive solar power less expensive.  However, even with the price drops, it is still very expensive compared to the electricity costs of coal-fired power plants.  U.S. manufacturers of solar panels such as SunPower and First Solar are losing market share to Chinese solar panel makers.  The Chinese panels are not as efficient, but they cost much less.  The main Chinese companies are Suntech Power, Trina Solar, and Yingli Solar.

SunPower's market share has fallen from 22% last year to 17% this year.  Suntech was the biggest winner, increasing its market share from 5% to 12%.  It appears that the only green jobs in solar power Obama is going to produce are manufacturing jobs in China, unless the solar power facilities in the U.S. need lots of maintenance work.  But if they do, that will only make the cost of the generated electricity very expensive and solar power will remain unable to compete with fossil fuel generated electric power.

Obama - American Rights and Interests Submissive

During the Obama presidential campaign, I pointed out that Obama wanted to make American individual rights and the interests of the United States submissive to the dominant role to be played by the United Nations and by international bodies. The Obama presidency has confirmed my understanding with a good number of dastardly deeds. Among these are:

• Patting rogue terrorist-sponsoring nations Iran, Syria, and North Korea on the head while telling them we should be more understanding of their needs, thus encouraging these bully nations to continue acting badly. Only the believed threat of strong forceful retaliation works to stop bullies.
• Stopping the programs to add components to our missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic because the Russians are not pleased by our idea of defending ourselves from their Iranian client and from them.
• Agreeing with the G-20 nations to close down tax havens, increase the regulations of financial markets and institutions, and give more foreign aid. The tired, socialist nations of Europe and the Obama-planned similar condition of the United States need to keep the wealthy from moving themselves or their money to zones where they might have fairer treatment. The American financial system will be controlled by 20 nations and their perceived needs, not by the free market or even the free market as modified by American governments elected by the American people.
• Obama has agreed to enter into new nuclear disarmament talks with Russia, now that he and Medvedev are Comrades locked in Socialist Solidarity. Russia must reduce its warheads since it cannot afford to modernize or maintain them in any case. Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia have formed an alliance aimed at the United States.
  
• He maintains the United States breaks International Law if it does not get permission from the United Nations to defend itself against the use of force by any other nation. This means, that the U.S. cannot defend itself if China, or Russia, or any of several socialist Western European countries does not desire that we should defend ourselves.
• He is more friendly to enemies of freedom and of the United States than he is to our longer term allies and to countries which more nearly share our ideas of personal liberty. See how he has shunned Great Britain, Israel, India, and the government leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  
• Obama says the U.S. caused the global recession and financial crisis. Actually, banks all over the world had too many high-risk loans. This was not at all just a U.S. problem. Iceland, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and China have all been hard hit due to their financial over-extensions, along with many other countries.
  
• Obama declares the U.S. arrogant. Taken together with the item above, this would mean the U.S. owes a great deal of service to the rest of the world. Obama loves to serve. No, actually, he loves to tell you and me that we must serve others.

The United States was long blessed with a belief in the principle that the Federal government existed to serve only as the protector of the American individual's life, his liberty, and his pursuit of happiness. The individual was sovereign and the government existed only to serve the sovereign American individuals. It was understood that the only scale of government compatible with the rights of the individual was a minimal, limited government. Our Constitution carefully described the limited powers of the Federal government and further required that the limited actions it was allowed must be carried out in a manner consistent with the general welfare. It was made clear that the general welfare could only be served by a minimalist government so that individuals would be free to manage their own lives. A more empowered government would quickly become tyrannical.

Obama hates this idea. No, it does not make him a bit uneasy. With every fiber and cell of his body and mind, he hates the idea that the government exists only to serve the self-interest of self-managing individuals. He is determined to crush this principle and anyone who stands up for it. In domestic matters, he ignores the Constitution and he gets others to go along with ignoring it by offering them bribes of power, income, and publicity. In all matters with an international component, he enlists the aid of as many other socialist and/or Muslim and/or other dictatorial regimes as he can in order to accomplish this purpose. At all times, he is completely focused on forcing every individual American to become the servant of the government, which is to be controlled by committed socialist elitists such as himself. Only people such as himself are capable of wisely choosing your values for you and only they are intelligent enough to inform you on how you will achieve the values they have chosen for you.

If you do not achieve any values that mean anything to you, that is just too damn bad. After all, they do not choose to recognize your self-chosen values. You are selfish, while they exist to serve. This makes you unworthy and it makes them gods.

Kidnapping Brides for China

It has long been Chinese policy to limit families to one child. This policy was often looked upon kindly by liberals and socialists who bemoaned the growth of the human population and the strain that put on the environment and on resources. Many of the child-limited families choose to have a boy and abort or somehow lose girls. This leads to the obvious problem that there are ultimately far too few women for the young men who wish to be married. There are similar imbalances in some areas of India, owing more to a choice than a government mandate.

The Hmong people commonly live in small villages in the mountainous areas of Vietnam and Laos. One such area lies on the border with China. Kidnappers are now preying on young Hmong women and hijacking them across the border into China, where they are earning their kidnappers goodly fees as unwilling brides. [The Economist, 14 - 20 March] I suppose we are supposed to mark this up to unintended consequences of well-intended actions. How could anyone have anticipated that a one-child limit would result in a terrible imbalance of boys to girls? How could anyone anticipate that there would be many unhappy young males with nary a bride to be found?

Sometimes it is truly a wonderment that people can be so foolish.