politics

Entry level jobs won’t accept you unless you have experience? How weird is that!

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Finding a job in the U.S. has been hampered by a series of roadblocks. For years job ads asked for everything and anything that could be imagined whether a person could really do it or not. After the Great Recession, to save money, companies were sometimes merging job roles to give to a single person what three people did in the past. Later, during the covid era, there was a requirement for people to take an experimental shot of mRNA. We all saw cancel culture and race-based hiring during the Biden Era. Now we have another roadblock: the scarcity of genuine entry level jobs. Modern entry level jobs often require degrees and years of experience.

In previous times, an entry level job had a lower salary but also came with some training. A friendly face would help the new guy learn the job so that they could make a contribution as soon as they learned how to do what was needed. In the past, sometimes a person would tire of one job and in order to get a change of profession, they would learn how to do another different job. Or maybe their old job wasn’t needed anymore so they learned a new set of skills to propel them into a new career. General skills were a useful base that could be expanded into some new profession with a little retraining. You could find work in a new job where you would be retrained. You didn’t have to go back to the university and start over.

That friendly face of a helpful trainer is conspicuously absent today. If you search entry level jobs, most of the jobs that come up require years of experience doing the advertised job’s work. That makes it seem that there aren’t really any entry level jobs. New guys aren’t going to be trained and if you need training, you’re not welcome to apply. If you do apply, and you don’t have previous expert experience, you will not be considered.

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People aren’t welcome to learn on the job and trainers won’t materialize to train the new guy and that means that you may not be able learn a new profession from another person at all. Going back to school is not economically affordable right now for a lot of people because of tuition inflation. Or if you are older, your return on investment for retraining may be doubtful which might suggest that re-education as a training option is ill advised. Should you remain stuck wherever you are because no one will retrain you? If your job goes away, do you have to find another similar job and what if you can’t find one? Even when you have some professional experience elsewhere and a good education, you aren’t welcome to change careers because there’s no budget to retrain you. And there’s no intention to train you.

For all of human history, people have learned from other people how to do a job. A worker hasn’t always kept the same job for a whole lifetime. People could grow by gradually expanding their skillset as they learned how to do new things. And an employment market that refuses to train new people is strange…an anomaly. It seems aggressively anti-labor and anti-human. Why is this happening?

One reason might be because the economy is shrinking instead of growing.

In a growing economy, there is demand for new workers. Every new worker might find a job because new jobs are opening all the time. But in a shrinking economy when a worker leaves, sometimes there’s no demand to re-fill the job space they once occupied. A new worker can’t fill a position that’s permanently closed after someone leaves. A shrinking economy is also less agile and new workers aren’t welcome. If a worker leaves, they are not there to train a replacement and no one else has time in the shrinking workplace to train a new guy. The position will either close or it can be filled with another experienced worker a lot like the guy that just left…not really entry level.

Yet people need to earn a living. High taxes and inflation keep nibling away at people’s resources. Nowadays, it’s heartbreaking to imagine that robots and AI are expected to replace people in the already shrinking job market. And somehow, someone writing policies and planning for the future thinks that that’s a great idea. I don’t think so.

I am hearing that there’s a sudden demand and need for bluecollar workers in practical kinds of jobs. An apprenticeship might be more like the old entry level job. But most whitecollar workers have been told for years that bluecollar work is dirty and low paying and represents a social step down. Why would they see this work as more acceptable now than before? An apprenticeship is an investment that doesn’t require the same indebtedness as a university education but most people aren’t so flexible as wanting to try out a new social position.

And so the world for the worker seems to be fracturing into something that is broken, can’t grow and can’t change. How strange. It feels like another workplace embargo like we saw during the Covid-era. Covid shots aren’t required for employment today, but previous experience is. If you want a job you have to do the same kind of job that you did before or go into bluecollar work.

For some of us, that means that the economy is closed to us. Older workers are expected to keep working until they are at least 67. But older workers probably are reluctant or unable to start over in bluecollar work. There’s also a lot of age discrimination. Some people don’t want to or can’t return to a previous profession because their old kind of work has disappeared.

Will some of us have to find a way to contribute economically without having a boss or by doing some sort of job that hasn’t even existed before? We may be on the cutting edge of reinvention. Because if people aren’t being retrained for new opportunities, they will have to make their own opportunities. Good luck to people who find themselves in that situation.

Since the University System is in all kinds of trouble with politics taking over where open mindedness once was, it may be time to allow people to learn on their own and test into new positions. Training materials might be made widely available at a low cost so that everyone who is willing can learn new things online or by buying a training manual without paying a huge amount. Then by passing an entry exam they could obtain new employment in a new field. The world of work might seem more friendly then because people could do something to determine a better outcome for themselves.

It seems like the emphasis on tech has led to overspecialisation in job ads and high costs for university tuition have made specialization unaffordable for people who want to retrain. Programming robots to replace people is a poor solution to this problem. It’s indicative of an imbalanced economy that is unfriendly to workers. I hope it gets better.

It’s ok for Christians to pray for their enemy.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been here on Earth since 1964. My interest in politics happened before I entered elementary school. Vietnam War images on the nightly news form some of my earliest memories and they made me worry. I didn’t like warfare violence. I noticed that it hurt people in Vietnam and that it hurt our soldiers. I wondered how to stop the war. I felt sympathy for both sides in that war.

I didn’t really believe the rationalizations about the Vietnam War. Later I learned that the Gulf of Tonkin conflict was faked and that’s what got us into that war. Faked justifications for war actions have happened again since the Gulf of Tonkin. I was glad when the Vietnam War ended. The aftermath of the war continued unfortuneately with damaged soldiers returning home and damaged Vietnamese people trying to rebuild their lives in the U.S. or trying to continue and rebuild in Vietnam.

Other wars happened in other places and they carried on with new violence. In some ways it’s like the Roman or Greek God of War visited many nations after Vietnam. War fever seems important at first and then purposeless later.

Violence is hard to stop. By the time that people are engaging in violence, they are usually committed to doing it. Most people don’t like violence but after becoming adapted to doing violence it can be hard for them to stop. Motivating a return to peace happens when a person is free to find something better to do with their life energy. Having something else to do is important.

A few days ago, Charlie Kirk was gunned down when he was addressing an assembly of interested people who wanted to hear what he had to say. That was about 12 years after Mr. Kirk started going to college campuses and talking to students. He would set up a card table and talk with anyone who came along. He said he was trying to recruit young conservative students. He defined Conservatism as an effort to protect social goods and pass those social goods on to the next generation. He thought that having a home and a family are social goods that are objectively good according to Aristotelian philosophy. He used early Founding documents from the colonies (later states) and Biblical texts to undergird many of his political arguments. Even though he didn’t get a university degree, Mr. Kirk studied primary source materials for his arguments. In an era of heavy-duty 24-hour propaganda, using primary source material instead of quoting second-hand opinions allowed Mr. Kirk to get to the heart of issues better than almost anyone else. Charlie Kirk is the only modern person I have heard outside of a church say that Biblical texts are important and valuable both philosophically and politically. He was talking and listening to strangers like no one bothers to do anymore.

I never had a chance to talk to him and I wish I had. I heard about Mr. Kirk (who was about 30 years younger than me) when he first started going to universities to talk with people. I admired his bravery and openness. I just never had a chance to talk to him.

I know that people want to politicize his murder. Don’t do that. Charlie was reaching out to a generation of people in the US that has been under growing economic pressure. Generation Z, born from 1997-2012, was his biggest fangroup. I think that this generation has struggled the most as compared to earlier generations, from both economic poverty and from a poverty of people ready to talk and listen to them. Talking and listening is a great way to embrace confused and economically struggling people. It helps prevent violence.

I think shooting a speaker in an auditorium, shooting Charlie Kirk, is a crime, is an act of cowardice, an act of desperation, and a futile action that has wasted Mr. Kirk’s grand generosity as a communicator. I think to myself that after killing this good man, the shooter will now be confronted with Mr. Kirk’s philosophies and Mr. Kirk’s life’s legacy on a daily basis. This is probably the opposite of what the shooter intended. By murdering Mr. Kirk, the shooter has inextricably tied his own fate to that of someone he wanted to silence forever. I didn’t hear about Charlie Kirk recently until his death. Lots of Kirk video has been released. I have watched all of the footage that I can find.

When I consider the possibility of why the shooter chose violence, I can’t help but wonder if voting frauds in the US have caused this unexpected side effect. A side effect of desperate violence. A desire to act out as a form of terror communication. I also wonder if economic struggle and uncertainty have led some people to wander into violent activism as a way to escape other kinds of uncertainty.

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In any case, I hope that this moment in history will help us to appreciate Charlie Kirk’s grandly generous communication gesture. I can’t imagine that he was correct in everything he said or believed anymore than anyone else is. Emotions of many kinds accompany this loss of a valuable person who was making a difference in our nation’s politics. Praying for us all would be an appropriate Christian gesture. Even among other faiths, such a generous spirit deserves admiration.

Also, remember Charlie Kirk’s family in your prayers and include them in the soft center of your heart.

Neoliberal economy performs poorly.

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The idea of government picking winners and losers (under accelerationist policy) isn’t a good way to run an economy. Because when the government picks losers there are fewer winners. Also, no one is wise enough to decide who should lose. In a market economy, the market decides winners and losers based on profits and losses. When the government tries to replace the market, based on what consumers want, need and can afford, with government influence exchanges, you end up with all kinds of wasted potential. Because influence testing isn’t as good as market mechanisms. When you get carried away with picking losers and then add cancel culture for political reasons, you start eliminating whole swaths of potential economic contributors.

How did accelerationist policy come about? It has been through buying influence in government. People with more money buy influence. When influence is for sale in our government, it increases the number of factions that vie for power. In the neoliberal era, big money access has spawned some big winners that are always buying influence for a surer win, but it has led to a lot more losers than we would have had.

When you go looking for a job right now, there are a lot of websites that advertise phony positions which aren’t really available. Also, the jobs are advertised from the perspective of employers not employees. In fact from the employees’ perspective phoney job ads are really terrible and they persist because it makes employers look more prosperous than they really are. That’s very discouraging to job seekers and it makes online job ads into unattractive time wasters. I keep hearing that there are a lot of jobs that need to be filled and also that American job seekers are discouraged more now than ever. As AI screens out applicants, people who don’t get a call-back begin to wonder how they would ever know what to do to get hired.

Neoliberals like making everything into a profit-center. They want globalization and financialization. They want organizations to be dominant over individuals. They want unrestricted global capital flows and they like warfare. They like economism where everything has an economic motivator. They like big monopolies and big government and smaller-always-less-important individuals and families. They hate religious motivations and ethical behaviors. They don’t like restrictions on big power.

To make our society better, I think it helps to see neoliberalism’s shortcomings. We need strong families because the family is a great place to nurture children and grow them into society’s doers. We need ethics in society and the family is a great place to teach the difference between right and wrong. We need to be motivated by our caring hearts and our connections to each other. We need rule of law to apply equally to all: even the most powerful. Neoliberals don’t support what we need and in fact work to undermine it.

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The neoliberal economy creates too many losers. It’s a wreck. Taxes keep going up but economic activity is down. We have numerous unfilled jobs. We have failing universities where credentials serve money interests instead of the public good. Prosperity overall is waning as the rate of economic exchanges slows and fraud increases. Investors owning real estate has led to monopoly price influence raising the prices of houses. Bigger hospitals and medicare and medicaid have led to price increases in healthcare. Government and corporate grants in our universities have led to research conclusions that are up for sale from climate change to covid drugs. Crime on our streets has grown as homeless and unemployable people become renegades and people in city government try to make political dividends out of desperation.

In a better economy, economics doesn’t overshadow our lives in the way the neoliberals are trying to do. Our healthcare has been taken over by greedy profiteers who want people to be sick. Our neoliberal money making goals don’t allow doctors to cure disease anymore the way that they should. Everyone needs a place to live that’s affordable and investors in our real estate markets keep raising prices beyond what any one person or family can afford. We need affordable food but inflation in food is making it too expensive for many to eat properly.

The neoliberal economy is a disaster that will continue to fail as long as capital is emphasized over wealth, rule of law spares the powerful and influence money is more important than markets. Neoliberalism is power for power’s sake. Unlimited partnerships between government and corporations leads to failure.

Prosecute but stop the rhetorical disection.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

This week there’s lots of buzz online about people who fabricated intelligence to prove that Mr. Trump was a Russian asset in order to damage his political opportunities. This hoax can be lumped into the category of unprosecuted happenings from the last decade or longer. Many Americans are waiting to see if prosecutions will happen this time in this one category. We’re pretty tired of rehashed old news without judicious outcomes.

I have become convinced over many years now that our politics are not above board. Whatever a politician says and whatever the news coverage is about politics, it’s all false. There’s no humor and no interest left in politics because there’s no honesty. Humor makes fun of honest appraisals and interest can’t be generated without honest assessments. Without honesty, the stakes and the facts are fake and there’s no reason to listen to any of it anymore.

I would like to refocus on something entirely different. I would like all my and likewise all of our collective energy to go into making good things happen for me and likewise for all of us in the United States. Because it’s been a while since that was part of our experience.

For years, government statistics continually lie about the number of unemployed people by ignoring the longterm unemployed. Government statistics in 2015 had rosy assessments about future jobs that never came about but little acknowledgement about that failure. When less than 27% of degree holders can find a job related to their training, investing in a university education has become a waste of money and time.

If the Secret Government Agencies, like the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security etc. have all grown out of bounds, if they are doing things that are illegal and therefore criminal, then is anything that they are trying to do worth doing at all? Probably not. Can anyone measure power by the amount of damage that can be inflicted on the other side of whatever group so consistently that there’s no room for real prosperity building?

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Isn’t government power supposed to be on the side of prosperity instead of destruction? Because it hasn’t been for a long time now. It looks like our government is full of bad guys doing stupid bad things.

I’m glad that some of the election shenanigans will be addressed. However, I will only pay attention very briefly when the people perpetrating various forms of deception and treason are in jail. Then I will merrily ignore those jailbirds completely while I try to rebuild my life by making good things happen that these political people have been doing their best to prevent me from doing.

When the government wastes our resources doing bad things instead of good things, good things don’t get done because they are crowded out by all that nonsense. Please no more political news stories on broadcast media. Just set up a website that describes charges leveled, fines levied and jail terms meted out for guilty verdicts.

Instead of talking about politics, let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about jobs. There’s been a labor blockade here in the U.S. for decades. It’s time for that to end. Internet job ads are supposedly 85% fake. Maybe that should be illegal. Hire everyone and train them. Hire old people who have a rich life experience but who can’t collect pensions until they are 67 years old. Hire young people who need experience and training. Hire people to do what needs doing. Pay them.

Stop using social media to make people crazy and disagreeable. Social media has been providing different information to different groups in order to foment discord and increase site traffic. That should be illegal. Stop that. I’m all for the first amendment but it’s not ok to constantly try to set the world on fire.

Let’s move on towards a new prosperity. Don’t make people take sides anymore. Help people work together for a better America.

The Feds ignore popular opinion and attack Iran.

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Lately, whenever I write anything about American politics, I am aware that our government is ignoring my opinion. No matter what eloquence or reason I bring to my writing, no one in government is listening even when their ears should be burning. That makes it hard for me to feel motivated to write about politics. I do not want more war. Many Americans have expressed this. In my case, I don’t want people here or elsewhere to feel helpless to stop wartime violence and many of us feel this today.

One of the more persuasive arguments that I heard regarding Iranian conflict was about leaving Tehran alone. This argument was about water scarcity in that region. President Trump had started warning Iranians to leave Tehran. Telling people to leave a water available area for a water unavailable area in order to save themselves from a military attack is a heartless thing to do. Water scarcity made evacuation into an unviable proposition. Perhaps President Trump decided to attempt a bomb obliteration of Iran’s nuclear enrichment factories as an alternative to attacks against a populated city. Is there some compassion in that choice?

In any case, Israel’s preemptive strikes against Iran weren’t legal according to global treaties that oversee warfare declarations. And the U.S. jumping in is also, I suspect, not quite allowed by global rules of engagement, much less the rules stated in our Constitution.  

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If war determination can be imagined as a scale that weighs the worth of diplomacy vs. violence, it seems that our leaders feel a need to press down hard on the
side of violence instead of diplomacy. Why is that? Why can’t our leaders use diplomacy anymore? Have they been too long planning for war so that they can’t bear to avoid dropping those bombs?

I feel frustrated today. I hope that war in Iran will shrink instead of grow. But I also hope that rules will matter in government once again as they should. The Constitution matters. Diplomacy is an important tool to prevent violence. Secret meetings full of power hungry men may always choose war engagement but this choice should be moderated by rules of engagement and diplomacy that diminish violence.

Even if you’re sure you can beat the other guy in a war contest, it is better to avoid wartime engagement. Your opponent may not be as weak as you imagine. You can lose. And war engagement only in the case of having a just cause limits the waste of resources that can easily be catastrophically wasted in unnecessary wartime struggle. Don’t we all have better investments to make in our society?

ADDENDUM: 27th June 2025

I’ve recently heard that our recent bombing of the nuclear sites in Iran was a long term plan, 15 years in the making. The bombs used were specifically desiged for their use to bomb those hardened nuclear facilities. And bombing was meant to prevent an expansion of violence from the Middle East into a nuclear catastrophe. It was well considered, planned for a long time, and may have succeeded in reducing the length of war exchange between Israel and Iraq. What’s next? Is it too optimistic to hope for peace in the Middle East?

Can we salvage anything?

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Let’s say a big storm comes into town and a tornado sweeps away a whole block of houses. People will rebuild because, we hope, they have insurance to do so. Some insurance policies have loopholes that cover wind damage but not flood damage. Some of policies will have large deductibles. But even if the whole house is lost, usually it will be rebuilt even if not all the costs of the rebuild are covered. Also, people have jobs and a way to begin again by slowly paying off the costs of a catastrophe over time. That’s often true even without insurance.

Bad governance is worse than a tornado. Why? Because all the strengths that a person would bring to build up their life are diminished by taxes, regulations, and policies that undermine an individual’s chance to get ahead during life’s many challenges. The economy itself is harmed by overgrowth of government which takes money out of the economy and uses it for political influence. We have seen that government charges seem to multiply and never end.

A person’s life and their ability to work is finite. Government these days is a constant attack on people’s vitality. It’s not like a tornado that shows up and wrecks things all of a sudden. Instead, it’s a constant drain. What are we getting for those government taxes? I see a government that refuses to account for its spending, refuses to stop spending when the treasury comes up empty…so spending nonexistent money into deficit, a government that is taking tax money and passing it around to NGO’s as a way of defrauding Americans, a well published group of government fraudsters parading their frauds in an unstopping brag of what evil they can do and never be stopped by the common man.

Just look at how things have gone since 2008. The government subsidized failing banks after real estate derivatives caused insolvency. That cash write-off was supposed to save the economy. But prosperity has never returned. A small group benefitted from the 2008 Great Recession. But the new policies that saved the banking sector led to an interruption in the rule of law for bad bankers. That failure of law has proceeded and worsened since then. Derivatives themselves were experimental and even though they have multiplied everyone’s problems, they have widened consequences which has seemed beneficial to the smaller number of people that should have been harmed by the derivatives losses. In any case, derivatives probably are illegal under the Constitution because they lead to money creation. We should stop derivatives trading.

Rule of law fails continue. More negative consequence results from that. Now lawfare in the courts seeks to interrupt any kind of repair to malgovernance. People in government positions continue making one bad decision after another. How do we salvage a mismanaged economy that continues to be mismanaged? Why is the government trying to manage the economy at all? Markets are supposed to do that. What happened to those? Those went away when the government started interfering by promoting some interests over others.

Human beings have never been perfect. We sometimes want to do crazy things. We sometimes want other people to do crazy things with us. Because of that, we need limited government where the government can’t mandate a bunch of crazy. When the nation started, there was a national dedication to limited government power. That was a better way. Limited governance power can get more accomplished along a safer and wiser course than unlimited power which under fascism leads to more bickering and more malinvestements that destroy resources and diminish our national strength.

Public private partnership is a kind of fascism. It is powerful people in positions of power over the less powerful. Rule of law governance is law applied equally to all. Under fascism, powerful people seek to be above the law. This is wrong. Or the law can weaponized to attack political competitors…lawfare. We should stop our fascism. End the partnership between government and corporations. Public private partnerships should end. Government should not decide economic winners and losers.

We need a return to representative voting where real votes aren’t manipulated through digital means. We should return to paper ballots and manual ballot processing. President Trump has signed an executive order to do this, but I’m seeing little change. Electronic voting persists despite its clear threat and past damage to legitimate voting.

We need to repeal bad laws. We need to avoid new laws being written by AI. The flood of bad laws we’ve been experiencing with thousand page legislation bills signed into law by a body of Congress that doesn’t read what it signs should end. Ridiculous legislation should end and we should return to necessary and proper standards.

The idea that government can do anything and the only road to prosperity is through government partnership, government programs, government interference in everyone’s life isn’t working out for America. We should end this overreach.

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Rebuilding American jobs now requires tarriffs.

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All the way back to the earliest period in American history, we used tarriffs to protect infant American industries. It is an old idea but an idea whose time has come again.

The practice of the United States to charge no tarriffs on other nations that do charge us tarriffs for our products pushes against American labor and acts as a subsidy that pays American corporations to hire cheaper labor abroad.

This helped in the earlier part of the neoliberal period to offset some of the risk courted by those who went abroad for cheaper labor resources. During the entire neoliberal period free trade has been a longterm goal. When other nations charged tarriffs on American products we promoted free trade by not charging a reciprocal trade tax and many of our U.S. corporations outsourced their production lines. This reduced the labor marketplace in the U.S.

That no tarriff policy allowed corporations to hire workers abroad, obtain supplies for supply lines located abroad, hire foreign workers and bring the finished product back to the U.S. as a cheaper product to sell to American consumers. Why is it time to change now?

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Economies all around the world grew when American and European companies hired and paid foreign laborers. It wasn’t great for already developed economies but it was fantastic for underdeveloped ones. However, after vast economic growth in far away places, labor prices have gone up everywhere. The reason that China sited manufacturers moved to Vietnam was because China labor became more costly because the Chinese economy grew and inflation made the Chinese laborer more costly than before. The idea that labor abroad would always remain cheap was a fallacy.

Now it’s time to charge reciprocal tarriffs again because the United States can’t afford to subsidize outsourcing labor outside of the United States. We need to promote American jobs and bring manufacturing home again. By charging a tarriff, the U.S. encourages corporations to hire American workers. Why do we need manufacturing at home?

There are many reasons to bring our labor home, for example we would have better national security with products we need to run our economy closer to home, better economic performance when laborers at home have more money to spend on American goods, better quality of those goods that are found closer to home with regulatory oversight. American products were once known as robust, easy to repair and easy to supply. Those advantages have been missing from outsourced supply lines lately. It’s time to bring those advantages back.

What about disadvantages? Higher pricing will happen but it is easier for Americans to cope with that when there are more jobs and more homebased opportunities.

People who benefitted by charging a tarriff on American products and who fear reciprocal tarriffs complain that they deserve to continue to be free riders like under the old system where they could tax us and we did not respond in kind. But all such advantages are temporary as they can now see.

Economies are large and complex and flexible. Feedback from new tarriffs will take a while to take effect. Slowly, American industry should recover from it’s long malaise. Investment in new manufacturing will cost something and will have to be paid for. American workers eventually will grow in number as homegrown industries once again employ them to make the things that we all need.

ADDENDUM: April 10th, 2025

It appears now that President Trump’s tarriff stance has changed and moderated. He has relaxed tarriffs for all nations except for China.

Also, his rhetoric regarding tarriffs is somewhat different from what he is doing. It now appears that the straight tarriff description is completely inadequate to describe Trump’s tarriff charges which are mostly aimed at restoring a trade imbalances after years of unbalanced trade. The United States has imported more than it exports for decades.

Nevertheless, the recent tarriff negotiations are aimed at providing new reasons for manufacturing to be relocated from abroad back to the United States where more jobs are desperately needed.

After globalization advanced, it became more difficult to sort out trade imbalances. American companies partially owned a lot of companies performing value added manufacturing in foreign locations but selling finished product at home.

If American companies could avoid tarriff declarations by owning companies manufacturing product abroad and then transferring finished product in-house without a declaration, then how could a straight tarriff policy address that imbalanced trade outcome?

Once banking went international and manufacturing went international, sorting out trade imbalances became perhaps somewhat of an intractable problem.

Hence very strange rhetoric. It’s somewhat hard to see what needs to be done to restore employment at home. The idea of tarriff as a policy to establish fair trade and restore American employment is a place to start but perhaps not a place to finish.

Neoliberals see Americans as their giant vending machine.

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Addiction is nothing to joke about and being addicted to an infinite flow of money isn’t a funny problem. I saw a Joe Rogan Show clip today where Elon Musk refused to reveal all that he knows about all the ways our neoliberal government has been using America as a giant vending machine. There have been so many ways to steal non-existent money and put Americans on the hook for it. The U.S. went to a fiat monetary system during the Nixon Administration. We continued to pile up debt and Congress avoided restraining spending with a real budget. Omnibus spending bills became commonplace and now inflation is the result.

Without a budget, there’s no accountability for spending. DOGE has been revealing all kinds of spending shenanigans but Mr. Musk said that if he undermined all the grift pathways, by revealing them and shutting them all down, someone would surely think it is time to end Mr. Musk’s life. He has become unnerved by the things that he now knows from the DOGE investigations. Or at least that’s what it looked like and sounded like in the podcast.

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Some of those government and NGO spenders must have thought that they would never stop spending other people’s money and ruining other people’s chances. They wanted to do it for as long as the country had a leg to stand on. So ordinary people who go bankrupt because of huge medical costs should just realize that they made mistakes in their life….not that government policies have increased the cost of healthcare. When a young person can’t buy a house or pay for an education, that young person should think that they made mistakes and they shouldn’t believe that the government’s use of the country’s treasury as a resource of infinite spending and debt has ultimately been disastrous for them.

There are many other examples. Homelessness is a pretty serious penalty for ordinary people to face because the government followed disasterous outsourcing-of-labor policies encouraging corporations to move abroad. Neoliberals just wanted to couple economics (soft power) and politics (hard power) into an unbeatable one-two-punch motivator to get the world to shape itself into something that big bureaucrats wanted. And that something would bring new opportunties to the bureaucrats themselves. Just like an infinite vending machine should.

I wrote in my book, Political Catsup with Economy Fries, which I published in 2015, that putting politics and economics together the way the neoliberals are doing doesn’t create prosperity. It can game the system for insiders but it destroys markets by undermining market feedback mechanisms of profit and loss and brings corruption into politics. So here we are.

I am sorry, Mr. Musk, that the jockeys of infinite spending are mad at you. I think that you were right to delegate the DOGE work to a lot of other people. Perhaps you could start training and multiplying the number of helpers you have to stop the use of America as an infinite vending machine. America has never been able to infinitely sustain so much waste and abuse as we have seen these last twenty years.

Hoping for better outcomes and forecasts.

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What a mess the economy has become and is. I was right to be worried about what the fake election result in 2020 would lead to. Now with an end to the Biden Administration, it’s the perfect time to hope for better. Are there any easy fixes?

According to Trump’s transition team, we can improve American health by revealing and reducing ties between scientific research and big pharma and RFKJr. will see to that. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to make government more efficient by cutting where they can cut out unneccessary government jobs and roles. President Trump himself cut more than 1000 regulations during his first term and according to him, businesses across America thanked him for that, so I’m guessing he will do more of that. President Trump will be deporting a lot of criminal immigrants with criminal records from their home countries and perhaps many other migrants. Our economy’s wages will not be reduced for the long-term as much with fewer illegal immigrants. Dr. Oz says that our current healthcare system is unsustainable and I wonder if Dr. Oz (despite his ties to Oprah Winfrey who supported the would-be Harris administration) would be willing to pitch in to help RFKJr. do even more to make healthcare less about sick care and more about health. Tulsi Gabbard got my support years ago as soon as she suggested Congress could cut the number of pages allowed in legislation to ten maximum. She’s going to be in charge of reordering the Intelligence community which has been doing so many stupid things. Trump’s whole cabinet is forming early with plans to reduce corruption in the military, in healthcare, in our bureaucracy.

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Not to worry (unneccessarily?), but I’m not seeing the level of social unrest that was promised by the media post-election 2024. There were a lot of predictions that no-matter-who-won, blood would flow. Instead there seems to be a new optimism. Of course, with the way people get information now, it could be that something out of sight still threatens us all. I hope that whatever may still lurk and mutter deprecations in the darkness will retreat to the farthest dark corners and lurk there without causing anymore trouble. There’s trouble enough with the economy and too much debt-debt-debt. How can we possibly clear it all away after so many expensive profligacies?

Don’t worry right now. We still have a short wait. In the meantime, there’s still leaves to rake, gutters to clean, snow soon to shovel, turkeys to bake, trees to trim, packages to wrap, gifts to mail or make or buy. Whatever happens, there’s still ordinary life to call us forward to make efforts on behalf of those we love and care about. The new administration starts in January if there is no more drama during the innauguration.

The American nation started with tariffs that were meant to protect infant industry from established European industries. Now, President Trump wants to initiate a new tariff policy. This is against one of the main principles of globalization. If he does tax imports, and inflation continues, everything will get a lot more expensive, I think for a period of time as Americans set up manufacturing here. Right now, almost everything that you buy comes from far away. Changing that will alter almost every offering on the market, from food to clothing to furniture, to craft supplies, to print art to almost everything. Making production more local again or at least more U.S. based will be an expensive transition. Stopping economic interventionism, where the government picks economic winners and losers, is harder but Trump’s cabinet appointments are getting started on that by attacking corruption in Washington D.C. which has been costly to Americans. With reduced corruption, less economic interventionism which has favored fascism, and more local economic industry and manufacturing at home, America might have a chance to prosper. Eventually, Americans will have more jobs, and the economy will start humming again.

I’m still worried about the monetary system. There’s talk about changing to digital currencies, which would not have better discipline than fiat currencies (which have been suffering under overprinting and deficit spending). Deficit spending is an important contributer to our inflation. Other financial innovators want to fractionalize ownership. They see this as a way to multiply asset trading markets sort of like tranches of mortgages allowed partial mortgage trading that migrated into housing markets and derivative bets and caused the CDO mortgage backed security crash in 2008. Banks have been secret movers and shakers that seldom are examined for the harms they are causing. Bankers were the first American exception to prosecution for their law-breaking during the 2008 Great Recession. That’s when we lost rule of law in America. Will President Trump do anything about too-big-to-fail banks? Will he be able to reduce banking shenanigans that undermine private ownership? Will Americans ever have fairer banking that pays interest for savings accounts? Will there ever be a ceiling on credit card interest charges? Will American life ever make sense again with a long term plan for prosperity?

Eat an apple.

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It’s apple season. I’m harvesting apples today from my apple trees. I have red delicious and honeycrisp apples and it’s been cool enough that the sugars have concentrated. Seasonal timing is irrevocable and I should pull the apples off the tree so that they can be used before the hard freeze comes. Some apples have worms and I will cut them out of the cores and harvest the rest to preserve as apple butter or to make pies or to serve sliced apples as a side with meals. This is a delicious bounty from trees I planted years ago.

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It’s also election season. I see a lot of ad hominem attacks against either of the major candidates. I don’t care about that.

Some people posit a civil war is in the offing because the United States has become so polarized by algorithms on the internet. Those algorithms feed narrow information to internet readers that polarize their views more and more until everyone is mad at everyone else. But I don’t care about that except as something that is happening in the background.

Polarizing people keeps them from cooperating with each other and that’s too bad but it is a temporary problem. People are social. Eventually they will come together again. The power of algorithms isn’t infinite… or even definite.

I would like the vote to have greater fidelity. I want no more digital computer involvement in vote counting. No mail in ballots either. Vote in person on the day of the election. Why not make election day a holiday? And I want more cooperation to fix problems that we face as a nation. We still live in an economy that has scarcity. That means that we have to conserve resources and that when we spend money on one thing, we can’t also spend it on another.

Avoiding a legitimate accounting of government spending doesn’t lead to infinite money. It just leads to problems like those faced by the people who have been flooded out in Appalachia. They have not been getting all the help they need. Eventually, through the sacrifices of many other people, some of those Appalachian farmers are getting hay for their starving livestock and food and water for the people.

Good people try to help each other to have less suffering.

The days of insider access to government money by government people will eventually end. Financialization, interventionism, or if you prefer accelerationist policy will end. Because this is an economy where scarcity is eventually undeniable. The thieving people gaming the budget to keep a gravy train of money going to insiders will be stopped. They can’t keep gaming the system for themselves forever. Look at history. It will come to an end.

I hope it will end sooner so that good people can join together to fix what’s broken, return to rule of law governance and end corruption in our nation. Don’t we have important things to accomplish here? Planting an apple tree can provide years of fall harvests. We can learn to be a nation with a moral compass that points to a united America that strives for renewed prosperity that is widespread and lasting. Not through guile but through work.