An Update on My Immediate Family Share of the National Debt

The national debt of the federal government of the USA is now about $36.506312 trillion.  There are currently about 341.374 million Americans.  This means that each living American has a debt of $106,939.

My wife and I, plus our 3 daughters, plus our 3 granddaughters combined owe $855,512.  I doubt that my wife and I will live long enough to pay down our share of that sum, so whatever is left will devolve to our daughters and granddaughters.

The federal debt will likely continue to grow, despite the heroic efforts of DOGE.  Congress has not shown much appetite for reducing spending to the level of its current revenues in several decades.  I will be watching for any signs of increased responsibility on Congress's part.

See the historical plot of the Federal debt as a percentage of the USA GDP below:

As of the year 2024, our national debt as a percentage of GDP is about equal to that of 1946 at the end of WWII.  This is serious debt without the justification that the nation had with WWII.  After WWII, the population growth rate of the USA was high for several decades, which made it easier to grow the economy and hence the GDP.  The population growth rate is much lower now.  Congress will have to work harder to restrain spending increases in the near future than it did then if the national debt is to fall as a fraction of GDP.

Higgins, World War II Winner, Closed Shop Rather than Allow Unionization

In reading Larry Schweikart's book America's Victories Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror, I came across a couple of paragraphs on Andrew Jackson Higgins which I found very interesting. Higgins was from Nebraska, but he set up a lumber company in Louisiana, which ultimately failed, but while running it, he had designed some low draft boats for hauling lumber. There was demand for these, so he became a boat builder. He took his designs to the Navy, but they were uninterested. But a Marine Captain, Victor "Brute" Krulak was interested and visited Higgins' boat yard. Over the years, he and other military professionals told Higgins about their ideas, needs, and observations of Japanese and German technologies and Higgins incorporated these ideas and improved on them. In 1934, a study by the Marines concluded that Higgins' boats best fit many of their needs. Still, it was a long struggle to convince the Navy that there was a great need for the small landing vessels that Higgins made.

Schweikart says:

When the U.S. 5th Army landed at Salerno, Italy, in 1943, and General Douglas MacArthurs's men invaded New Guinea, of the fourteen thousand vessels in the Navy, 92 percent were designed by Higgins Industries and almost nine thousand of them were built at the Higgins plants in New Orleans. His plants produced more than twenty thousand vessels during the war, cranking out an astounding seven hundred boats a month.

His boats included PT boats, landing craft infantry, and landing ship tanks. General Dwight D. Eisenhower called Higgins "the man who won the war." Hitler called Higgins the "new Noah" and understood his value.

After the war, as Higgins was transitioning to civilian products, Higgins opposed the unions and supported open shop laws. He wanted to hire veterans, whether they were union members or not. The National Labor Relations Board dropped a ton of bricks on him. In a letter called Give Me Liberty!, Higgins said the Wagner Act was oppressive in its operation. He closed down his company, rather than to submit to union coercion.

The man who won the war had to shut down his beloved company in order to be a Free Man. Andrew Jackson Higgins is a hero worthy of our rememberance!

Veteran's Day

I always work on Veteran's Day and I am always a bit grouchy on Veteran's Day. As an optimist, I do not particularly like myself on Veteran's Day. But it is a rough day.

My father served as a Navy aviator in the Pacific Theater of WWII and then had a 22-year career in the Navy. Growing up, we lived in many communities, so I always thought of myself as an American, not as a Virginian, a Texan, a Rhode Islander, or Jersey kid. Dad went on cruises to the Western Pacific, the Caribbean, and to the Mediterranean Sea. He was the skipper of VA-75, an attack squadron. Dad and his squadron flew 12-hour flights at treetop altitude to fly under radar deep into the USSR. These would have been one-way trips in war: they did not have enough fuel to return. Then he was a student at the Senior Naval War College and then an instructor at the Junior Naval War College. In 1963, he retired and took a job with American Airlines at their maintenance base in Tulsa, OK.

I was always proud of my Dad and of his dedication to American freedoms. He and I were both proud of his service in the Navy and I was happy to do my best to help him in his work by being the man of the house when he was away on a cruise. But my Dad's service was never adequately appreciated by most Americans.

While in graduate school, starting work on my Ph.D. degree in Physics, I received my orders to report for induction into the Army. They were delayed so I could finish the year in which I was enrolled and I reported for duty in June 1970. I would rather have continued my graduate work, but I was healthy and a proud American. I served a bit over 12 months in Vietnam.

I did not think the Vietnam War was enough in America's interest to justify a draft, but I did then and do now believe that the fight we entered into was in the best interests of the South Vietnamese, most of whom did not wish to live under a totalitarian Communist regime. This of course is predicated upon the condition that we stayed the course until the war was won, which pernicious Democrats and socialists refused to do. The way in which Congress abandoned the South Vietnamese is one of the most dishonorable of all American actions in our history.

In February of 1972, I returned to graduate school. There were some people who treated me as though I were a normal graduate student, some who treated me with a measure of extra respect, and there were some who assumed that I was a baby-killer and had perhaps made a practice of raping women. Women students were commonly the most unkind of all. The Physics Department faculty was generally great, even though some opposed the war. But overall, a returning Vietnam veteran was not well-received on campus.

The socialists are at it again in their opposition to the Iraq War. This time, they are trying not to treat the veterans of that war as badly as they did those of Vietnam. I believe they actually embarrassed themselves a bit with respect to their behavior after Vietnam toward veterans. Or maybe they just realized in time that it had not been particularly smart politically. Nonetheless, when your country largely repudiates the reasons for which you fought your war, you will feel unappreciated as a veteran. The socialists like to blame the war on Bush, despite Saddam's making a regular habit of shooting at American aircraft and despite Congress stating that there were 23 reasons for our continuing the war with Iraq. Yes, continuing the war which Saddam had never stopped fighting as he violated the Armistice he had signed over and over again.

I do not know of a war, outside of one or two fought with Indians, that any American veteran should not feel proud of his participation. Certainly the present Iraq War and the Afghanistan War are both efforts our veterans should be proud about. I wish to be among those who thank you for providing security to other Americans and for your efforts to act as honorable Americans under trying conditions. Thank you.

I will be less grouchy on Veterans Day when almost all Americans come to appreciate that freedom is the exception in man's history, while anarchy or tyranny are the commonplace. In order to avoid the horrors of the commonplace, we have to have a clear idea of what our individual rights are and be adamant in defending them. We need to understand our much ignored Constitution and choose to live by it. And we sometimes need to fight for our freedoms, as our veterans have done. The fight is a constant one in the realm of ideas and a not infrequent one in the realm of weapons. American heroes are badly needed in both realms. My hat is off to all of you who are veterans of these conflicts.

Russian Expansionist Efforts

For centuries, Russia has sought to control most of Asia and Eastern Europe. Russia has also sought control of the Black Sea and access to the Indian Ocean. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in many parts of the USSR becoming independent countries. These newly independent states are Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Russia has been trying to regain control of many of these states.

One of the mechanisms for claiming a cause for taking many of them over again was one used by Adolf Hitler prior to and at the start of World War II. Germans had long been spread all over Eastern Europe. Many professionals and many successful businessmen in the cities and major towns of Eastern Europe were of the German nationality. Hitler would claim that the government of one country or another in Eastern Europe was abusing these Germans and then use that as an excuse to threaten to invade the country if he was not given what he wanted. He used this to put pressure on Czechoslovakia to give up the Sudetenland, a large portion of the western part of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia had to give it up when its allies, Great Britain and France, made a deal with Hitler in an infamous conference in Munich. Hitler used the fact that many Germans were in the city of Danzig in Poland to put pressure on Poland. When Poland would not give up Danzig, Hitler, working with Stalin, invaded Poland and WWII started as France and Britain finally declared war on Germany.

When the USSR controlled the former Soviet states which are now independent, it moved many of their people to remote areas such as Siberia and installed many Russians in high positions in desirable areas in those formerly independent countries. Now, there are Russians still in many of the former Soviet states, though they were not native to those areas. One of the Russian tactics to put pressure on these countries now is to claim abuse of the Russians in those countries. This has occurred in each of the Baltic States and to Ukraine, for instance. Russia and Belarus are now in a loose cooperative association, which Putin heads.

The independent state of Georgia, has become an ally of the United States and has contributed troops to the fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The country has a population of 4.6 million and is separated from Russia by the Caucasus Mountains. There are many small ethnic groups in the Caucasian Mountains and some are dissatisfied with the government of Georgia and some are dissatisfied with the Russians. The Russians have given those within the border of Georgia who are dissatisfied Russian passports. There are two regions with many dissatisfied and rebelling people, one with a population of about 50,000 and another with a population of about 200,000. South Ossetia is the smaller region and the Russians have been supporting their efforts to breakaway from Georgia. Here is an article on the issues there and here is one describing the Russian invasion of Georgia.

The Russians have sent in 150 tanks in this invasion of an ally of the United States which has been seeking entry into NATO. The Russians are very opposed to Georgia being an ally of the United States and a member of NATO. As always, the socialist leadership of Russia is eager to learn whatever they can from such fascist socialists as Hitler, who was also eager to learn from Lenin and Stalin. The communists and the fascists have always demonstrated that they have much in common, even when their rivalries for socialist power led them into conflict.

It is wise to remember that American socialists have a long tradition which evolved from an admiration of such socialist leaders as Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and many others. As many of these men were very paternalistic and ruthless leaders, so are many of our American socialists, though they put a smiley face on their socialist agenda most of the time. Nonetheless, they all believe that power grows out of the mouth of a gun and are eager to use those guns to force others to their will. This is the nature of socialism, whether the version holds power over property while leaving nominal ownership in private hands most of the time as in fascism or whether property is owned by the state as in communism. Note that Russia today is a mixture of communism and fascism. The United States is still primarily capitalist, but with a very large measure of fascism, and a smaller measure of communism. The widespread use of income redistribution and heavy hand of regulation is fascism at work, while the U.S. postal system, the U.S. park system, and the public school systems are all instances of communism.

Victor Davis Hanson: The bad war?

Dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq appears to be inducing both the left and parts of the right to reinterpret America's previous wars. The conservative Patrick Buchanan has written Churchill, Hitler and the 'Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World." Wow, what a perspective on WWII! Then there is the view that American and British bombing of German cities in WWII was a war crime, put forth by the leftist Nicholson Baker in Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Just war theory is popular in some circles. Victor Davis Hanson has a well-done commentary on this rewriting of history and this tendency to think that "liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection."

He points out that Buchanan's (and many others) belief that the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI was too harsh, should be viewed in light of how much worse the treaty was that Germany (Prussia) offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War or to the treaty offered to Russia in 1917 when Russia left WWI after its revolution. According to Hanson, it was also milder than the treaty Germany intended to offer a defeated Britain and France should Germany win WWI. It may still be the case that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh in terms of reparation payments, but one can also argue that the penalty for starting a war and losing it needs to be severe to prevent countries from playing at war as though it is a game. Try and try again until you win all the marbles, as in the Hundred Years War. This is rather what Germany did by starting WWII. To prevent this, one can argue, as Hanson does, that the real mistake was not occupying Germany after WWI.

In any case, Hanson claims that these books do not prescribe realistic alternatives, which ought to be a lot easier to do after the fact than it is reasonable to expect it was for Britain and France while fighting for their lives. What kind of world would it have been if we had continued to find ways to keep doing deals with Hitler which were adequate to keep him happy? I expect Hitler would have been happy for a few more years if every time he proposed taking large chunks of other countries, the Allies had said "OK, go right on ahead." After all, he was only asking for areas where Germans lived. They lived in most of the cities and large towns throughout eastern Europe where they were prominent professionals and tradesmen. Hitler could have gone on a long time taking over areas alleged to committed abuses against these Germans, many of whom were German Jews.

Hanson says of America's role, "They and those who sent them into the carnage of World War II knew Americans could do good without having to be perfect. In contrast, the present critics of the Allied cause enjoy the freedom and affluence that our forefathers gave us by fighting World War II while ignoring -- or faulting -- the intelligence and resolve that won it."