Tidbits I Learned From The Latest Trump Rally

IMG_20161013_195654Last night I went to the Trump rally at the US Bank Arena with my wife. She is a passionate Trump supporter and was afraid we would not get a good seat if we did not get there a hour and a half early. I rolled my eyes and acquiesced to her request. I was surprised with some of tidbits I observed.

Tidbits

  1. At 6 pm there had to be at least 7,000 people in their seats. I hate to admit it but my wife was right.
  2. The lower half of the arena seating was full and the upper part of the arena seating was about half full. Since the arena’s capacity is 17,000 I am guessing that when you count the people on the floor of the arena that at least 17,000 people showed up for the rally.
  3. A lot of women were at the rally. The row I was seated on was entirely women except for a young boy and me. I am guessing that something like 40% of the crowd were women. Considering Mr. Trump’s comments on the video tape the number of women who showed up was pretty amazing.
  4. I messaged my son in Europe that we were at a Trump rally. He said, “Really? What do you think of the leaked recording?” I replied, “Unacceptable but not a threat to national security”.
  5. Every age group was equally represented.
  6. Very few people of color were there.
  7. The crowd was loud. At least the three women seated directly behind me were very loud. I think they accidentally bopped me on the head with their signs several times. I felt like I was at a basketball game or a rock concert.
  8. Mr. Trump gave a polished stump speech and looked like a man who is very comfortable with the role he is playing. As an example he hung around the stage for several minutes after his speech soaking up the atmosphere. When my wife and I got home that evening we compared Mr. Trump to an actor who is living the part of a Presidential candidate while Ms. Clinton appears to be an actress stiffly reading memorized lines.

My Two Policy Questions For Both Presidential Candidates

Two weeks ago I posted my top question for both Presidential candidates so I decided to expand on that question and post my second question.

If we have a recession in your first term, what will you as President do differently with economic policies than was done in 2008?

The reason for this question is that the economy is weak and the chance for a recession is increasing.

  •  Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan said in June that the chance of a recession in the next twelve months is between 36% and 60%.
  • The 1% GDP growth for the first two quarters of 2016 is sufficiently weak that a slight miss can easily drive the GDP negative and unemployment up.
  • Health Services Grew Almost 12 Times Faster Than Non-Health GDP.  Since 2015 the increase in health care spending has resulted in flat retail sales. This health care driven economy is different than the consumer driven economy we have experience with. The health care driven economy has very narrow benefits to the overall economy compared to the consumer driven economy. Based on the GDP numbers over the last year and a half, it looks like we can have either a health care driven economy or a consumer driven economy but not both.
  • I think after 8 years of zero interest rates the wealth given to the banks did not trickle down to the American people.

The crucial distinction between a recession in 2008 and 2017 is that there are few if any policy options left.

  • With interest rates between 0% or 0.25% there is almost no benefit from lowering rates.
  • Weakening the dollar to increase exports is a risky policy, too. It could cause capital flight and increased interest rates.
  • It has been a Chinese goal to replace the dollar with the SDR as the reserve currency. To achieve that objective China will trade in a portion of its dollar debt for SDR based debt. This will probably cause increased interest rates.
  • Can the Federal Reserve continue to expand its balance sheet in a rising interest rate environment without international repercussions?
  • Can we learn anything about potential policies addressing a 2017 recession from Mr. Trump’s casino problems in Atlantic City?

My second question is what will you as President do differently concerning health care policies than was done in the Affordable Care Act?

The reason for this question is that if the ACA cannot continue in its present form so how do we address a sustainable reform?

  • The health exchanges of the Affordable Care Act are probably in a death spiral.
  • President Obama, Mr. Gruber, and other Affordable Care Act supporters have a trust problem with the middle class. The lies they told the middle class about the Affordable Care Act may be forgiven but they are not forgotten. Lying has consequences.
  • We have two separate health care problems, a spending problem on high cost chronic care customers and an insurance problem with the healthy customers.
  • The big idea for the Affordable Care Act was to dump high cost chronic care patients on the smallest health insurance market. A smarter idea would be move to high cost chronic care patients to either Medicaid or Medicare and let the health exchange work like a free market for healthy customers. If society has a moral obligation to provide affordable health care to high cost patients than it makes sense to spread these costs across a much broader base. Making a small group of healthy customers pay society’s cost for the high cost patients is the recipe for a death spiral.
  • We have an extremely complex way of subsidizing health insurance.. The Affordable Care Act prepays health insurance subsidies to insurance companies for low income people and uses the IRS to check compliance. If we are concerned about making a more efficient health care system than a simple re-design would avoid the money spent by the IRS on compliance.
  • As a person who started work in 1976 I have always had the option of affordable health insurance. As a recently as 2011 health insurance cost me $311 a month. By 2016 my grandfathered plan had increased 76% over my 2011 premium of $311 to $547. This increase is much greater than the increase in inflation and is an extravagant increase for a person who has not filed an insurance in over 16 years. The situation in the exchanges is unfortunately much worse. The lowest cost 2016 bronze plan would cost me $1,025 a month. This is 87% higher than my 2016 grandfathered plan and far higher than the 8.05% the IRS had declared as affordable.  Despite being the perfect insurance customer I can no longer find affordable health insurance. In 2017 I will go without health insurance.
  • According to a study from the Mercatus Center the states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act have seen enrollment higher than expected and the cost of individual enrollees has been more expensive than projected.

Vice Presidential Debate Word Cloud

Since I did the hard work of figuring out how to create a word cloud of the first presidential debate I decided to use my new found knowledge on the Vice Presidential debate. Once again I used the transcript from the Washington Post and I broke it into three documents, kaine.txt, pence.txt, and quijano.txt. This time I not only cleaned up the data for text mining but consolidated terms. As an example Senator and Senator Kaine became Kaine. I did not consolidate terms in the Quijano word cloud. You can see in the word cloud that she referred to Senator Kaine primarily as Senator and Govenor Pence as Govenor. The interesting tidbits that I see in the word clouds are:

  • The dominant words were “american” and “people”.
  • The word, “jobs”, did not appear in any cloud and the word, “economy”, just barely made the overall list.
  • Governor Pence’s word cloud looks like it is a little more issue oriented than Senator Kaine’s word cloud. He talked a lot about “american” and “people”.

Overall

Kaine, Pence, and Quijano Combined Word Cloud

Kaine, Pence, and Quijano Combined Word Cloud

Kaine

Kaine Word Cloud

Kaine Word Cloud

Pence

Pence Word Cloud

Pence Word Cloud

Quijano

Quijano Word Cloud

Quijano Word Cloud

Wordclouds For The First Presidential Debate

I was inspired by the post, Analyzing the first Presidential Debate, to take a stab at creating some word clouds of the first presidential debate. Using the same transcript from the Washington Post and I broke it into three documents, clinton.txt, holt.txt, and trump.txt. After cleaning up the data for text mining I came up with these word clouds. The interesting tidbits that I see in the word clouds are:

  • The dominant words were “think” and “people”.
  • The word, “economy”, did not appear in any cloud and the word, “jobs”, just barely made the overall list.
  • The only issue word for Ms. Clinton was “donald”.
  • “Country” was a bigger issue word for Mr. Trump than “clinton”.

Overall

Clinton, Holt, and Trump

Clinton, Holt, and Trump Combined Word Cloud

Clinton

Clinton Word Cloud

Clinton Word Cloud

Trump

Trump Word Cloud

Trump Word Cloud

Holt

Holt Word Cloud

Holt Word Cloud

My Favorite #ObamaPseudonyms

I'm With Her LogoOn Friday we found out that President Obama not only knew that Hillary Clinton was using a private email server, he actually communicated with her on it using a fake e-mail address. This is too funny to pass up. Everyone is taking turns guessing which pseudonym he used. Greg Gutfeld chipped in with IamReallyAKenyan on The Five.  Jim Treacher volunteered BarryAwesomePresident and Carlos Danger in his post, Let’s Play: Guess Obama’s Email Pseudonym! My favorite e-mail pseudonyms are:

Is Measles A Better Analogy Than #SkittlesWelcome For Our Syrian Refugee Problem?

Donald Trump skittles tweet

Donald Trump skittles tweet

Although I like the creativity of Mr. Trump’s skittle analogy I think how we respond to the threat of measles gives a better grasp of common sense solutions to vetting Syrian refugees. Mr. Nowrasteh over at Cato makes a good point in discussing this analogy that of the approximately 3.25 million refugees from 1975 to the end of 2015 only 20 of the refugees intended to do harm and only three of those 20 were actually fatal. He goes on to conclude that based on these statistics he would accept the refugees. The problem I have with his conclusion is that if he has a child, he is probably responding to the measles threat completely differently. Despite the recent notoriety over a measles outbreak associated with Disneyland, we are averaging about 1 death every 12 years. Despite measles being a lesser threat than terrorism most people in the United States are following Benjamin Franklin’s advice of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and immunizing their children from measles. Based on the CDC statistics the immunization policy seems to be working. So I wonder why we have such a problem with an ounce of prevention in vetting Syrian refugees.

Importing The 2016 Presidential Debate Schedule

Today I did not find a fast and easy way to import the 2016 Presidential debate schedule into my calendar. So I spent a couple extra minutes and created one. To add the schedule to your calendar:

  1. Download this CSV file, 2016-presidential-debates.
  2. Go to your calendar and import it. Google Calendar imports this file without problems so I suspect other calendars should import it without too much of a hassle, too. Click this link for further information about Importing Events Into Google Calendar.

Cliff Notes To Please Stop Helping Us By Jason Riley

After writing the post about the backlash over Virginia Tech’s disinvitation of Jason Riley, I thought I should probably read the book and see what the fuss was about. I found it at the public library. It was an easy read with lots of footnotes. Much of what he wrote confirms the impressions I have from interacting with black people while volunteering at Habitat for Humanity. I thought that what Mr. Riley had to say was important enough that I should write some cliff notes of the book for my personal reference. Here are the parts of the book that I found most significant.

Introduction

  1. What if there are limits to what government can do beyond removing barriers to freedom? What if the best that we can hope for from our elected officials are policies that promote equal opportunity? What if public-policy makers risk creating more barriers to progress when the goal is the ever-elusive “equality as a result”? At what point does helping start hurting?
  2. Black social and economic problems are less about politics than they are are about culture.
  3. Upward mobility depends on work ethic and family.
  4. Frederick Douglass: “And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!”

Chapter 1 – Black Man In The White House

  1. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic category. — Tavis Smiley
  2. The political left, which has long embraced identity politics, encourages racial and ethnic loyalty.
  3. The black left continues to view Booker T. Washington not as a pragmatist, but as someone who naively accommodated white racism.
  4. The 1965 Voter Rights Act morphs into quota system.
  5. The black underclass continues to face many challenges, but they have to do with values and habits.

Chapter 2 – Culture Matters

  1. Though income is the primary indicator, the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelming a black problem. — Washington Time 2012
  2. The reality was that if you were a bookish black kid who placed shared sensibilities above share skin color, you probably had a lot of white friends.
  3. The achievement gap begins in elementary school and widens in higher grades. By the end of high school the typical black student is several years behind his white peers in reading and math.
  4. Ogbu and his team of researchers concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. Black kids readily admitted that they did not work as hard as white students.
  5. Another nonwhite group that has thrived academically despite supposedly biased teaching methods is Asians.

Chapter 3 –  The Enemy Within

  1. The New Jim Crow thesis, the drug war was created with the express purpose of re-segregating society.
  2. In 1980 blacks comprised about one-eighth of the population but were half of all those arrested for murder, rape, and robbery, according to FBI data. It has not changed much since then.
  3. “High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination”, wrote William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans — and of African American control of city governments.

Chapter 4 –  Mandating Unemployment

  1. “There is no evil that has inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism”, continues Trumka. “And it’s something that we in the labor movement have a very, very special responsibility to challenge.”
  2. In 2008 economists David Neumark and William Wascher published a book that said, “Our overall sense of the literature is that the preponderance of evidence supports the view that minimum wages reduce the employment of low-wage workers… Moreover, when researchers focus on the least-skilled groups that are most likely to be directly affected by minimum wage increases, the evidence of dis-employment effects seems especially strong.”

Chapter 5 –  Educational Freedom

  1. On average, black fourth and eighth graders perform two full grade levels behind of their white peers.
  2. Since 1970 the public school workforce has roughly doubled and has far outpaced student enrollment.
  3. Charter Schools — Geoffrey Canada — Within a few years the students— almost all black and Hispanic kids from low-income families—were outperforming not only their peers in traditional schools but also white students in posh suburbs.
  4. Of these, 11 find that choice improves student outcomes—six that all students benefit and five that some benefit and some are not affected(1). No empirical study found a negative impact.

Chapter 6 –  Affirmative Discrimination

  1. “The net affect of the preferential treatment, which is preferential in intention more so than in results, is that those blacks who are disadvantaged have fallen further behind under these policies,” Sowell declared. “Affirmative action has typically benefited people who were already well off and made them better off.”
  2. SOWELL: It’s fascinating… I see this happening on all sorts of issues, from Federal Reserve policies on across the board. You’ll say, “Here’s this wonderful program and it will do wonderful things, and the burden of proof is on others to show that it will not do those things.” And no matter how long it’s been going on,it’s never been long enough. It if failed, there just wasn’t enough commitment, the budget wasn’t big enough. It should have a larger staff, wider powers. But there is never any sense of a burden of proof on you to say—when you’ve made this change that has caused such furor in this country, and has gotten people at each other’s throats, including people who have been allies in the past, such as blacks and Jews—there is never any sense of a need for you to advance the empirical evidence to support what you’ve been doing.
  3. Blacks as a group, and poor blacks in particular, have performed better in the absence of government schemes like affirmative action.

Chapter 7 –  Conclusion

  1. “My sadness is that we are probably today more race- and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school.” — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

When Will The IRS Revoke The Tax Exemption Status Of The Clinton Foundation?

Last year I took a look at the Clinton Foundation Form 990 when the allegations of corruption first started to swirl. As a former treasurer for a Habitat for Humanity affiliate I know my way around the Form 990. At that time I thought when you compare the Clinton Foundation to the standards set by Samaritan’s Purse, Salvation Army, or Habit for Humanity, the foundation looked more incompetent than corrupt. Considering how incompetent they appeared you had to wonder why anyone would give money to this charity.

This year we heard allegations of “pay for play” so I am not surprised that the FBI and the IRS are investigating the Foundation.  “Pay for play” is an insidious political practice which has no place in charities. Although this practice may not be criminal there is bipartisan support do designate that “pay for play” as a political activity that should not be allowed by any 501(c)(3)  organizations. Considering the public perception that the IRS is corrupt and political, this is probably a good time for them to get out in front of this issue and yank the 501(c)(3) designation for the Clinton Foundation. This action would not be as severe as indicting the Democratic Presidential candidate in an election year but it would be a grim reminder to charities considering this practice that we are still a nation of laws. Every moment they waste reminds the public that there is one standard for the Clinton family and another one for the rest of America.