A Post Conventions Analysis

In March of 2012 Andy Andrews explained to Mike Huckabee that twice in the last six presidential elections the voting age population (VAP) exceeded the actual number of voters by over 100-million people.  In 2008 the voting age population was 206-million people & the actual number of voters was 131-million people so 75-million people eligible to vote did not vote – & of these 75-million 65-million call themselves Christian believers.  This statistic has not changed much since – there are tens of millions of Christian believers who will not vote in 2020.
 
More recently, in the dramatic 2016 presidential election the voting age population exceeded the actual number of voters by over 113-million & the VAP turnout was 54.7% meaning that almost half the country that was old enough to vote didn't.  See graphic below. 

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Typically a presidential election draws about a 60% turnout meaning that the victor does not receive half of the votes of the people old enough to vote but rather approximately 30%.
 
Off year elections draw a significantly less turnout – Bill de Blasio was originally elected mayor of NYC with 18.72% of the votes of registered voters in a 26% turnout & AOC won her first primary for Congress in a 12.9% turnout election in 2018 receiving less votes than she cost her district in high quality Amazon jobs thereby showing how important it is to know what is going on & to vote.
 
You can see why many people have no respect for people who don't vote – it opens the door for people like de Blasio & AOC to slip in.  Many people also have little respect for those who do vote – they don't understand the issues or concentrate on superfluous issues & that opens the door for people like BO & Pelosi.
 
Blogger Wayne Dupree focused on both of these types of people when he wrote on July 20 – "Let's consider the typical American: They can't balance a checkbook, knows all the Kardashians but not their kid's middle school teachers, can't find Iraq on a map, can't name the past six presidents; thinks the U.S. won the Vietnam war; pays someone to mow her lawns so they can free up time to walk on a treadmill at the gym; spends 20 minutes looking for a parking space & waiting in two lines to pay $4 for a 69 cent cup of coffee just so they can enter her office with a 16 ounce 'symbol of conformity' in their hand.  They can't name their state's senators; they don't know what a mutual fund is, never heard of Douglas MacArthur. They spend more money on hair and nails and man caves than retirement saving and have been brainwashed to think diversity is a strength.  Did I miss anything?"

Well, only that 40% of the population say they could not readily afford an unexpected expense of $400 without selling something or borrowing - this is a $58.74 expense in constant 1970 dollars.  And twelve percent of adults say they would not be able to pay such an expense by any means.  See graphic below for breakdown by generation.

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Further in this financial irresponsibility line - less than half of working Americans over 60 feel their retirement savings are on track to retire any time soon & less than13% had no retirement savings @ all.  Source - Federal Reserve report in 2019.

 
With regard to the above typical American who votes I can only add to Wayne's description that I know someone who votes for the person on the debate stage who wears the nicest tie – whether or not that person is even a candidate.

And of course students of the Constitution know that the Founders were too smart to let the people described above anywhere near the voting booth - the Founders rejected the direct popular vote of the President.  There is no constitutional right for the people to directly vote for the President.

The Electoral College was implemented via the Constitution to select the President.  People do not vote for President, they vote for electors, who assemble in their state capitals on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, to cast their ballots & officially select the next President of the U.S. – December 14 this year.  

The Founders @ the Constitutional Convention were well aware of the human shortcomings described above & wanted to prevent incompetent people or other enemies of America from taking office so they limited the direct popular vote to people of substance & then only to direct voting for Members of the House of Representatives – the representatives who were closest to the voters & therefore would more directly answer to them.

The Founders were extremely careful in writing the Constitution to limit voting eligibility for President only to people appointed by each states' legislature.  The people so chosen (appointed) were known as electors - they cast the actual votes for President.  The states' legislatures' method of choosing electors was by popular vote with the voters in 1789 being property owners - white males & free negroes in five of the thirteen states, to wit, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, & North Carolina.  Source - Mark Levin, Men In Black, page 15.

The idea was that the election was to be made by men (electors) most capable of analyzing the positions of the candidates on the significant issues. It was important to the Founders that the electors had the information & discernment requisite to making a full investigation before casting their vote.

 

The Founders wanted the voters to be people with skin in the game & to keep elections as local as possible.  The original constitutional popular voting power did not extend past voting for Members of the House of Representatives.  Senators were chosen by State Legislatures & the President still is actually chosen by electors who are chosen in a "Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct."

So in essence the only people who originally could vote in America were property owners - white male & free negroes in the states indicated above - they voted for electors who they thought would best study all the presidential candidates & their positions on the issues.  These property owning voters were also the ones who elected Members of the House.

In The Federalist No. 68 Hamilton wrote regarding the guarded way in which the President was to be selected "that if the manner of it be not perfect, it is @ least excellent."

The Founders were well aware of the principle I refer to as Death Of Democracy - they knew as students of history that a democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.

 

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;

From spiritual faith to great courage;

From courage to liberty;

From liberty to abundance;

From abundance to complacency;

From complacency to apathy;

From apathy to dependence;

From dependence back into bondage.

Over the decades the American system of voting eased until today people who receive government checks to pay for a large part of their existence vote & actually cancel out the votes of people who pay the taxes that these people rely on.  Can't express the Death Of Democracy clearer than that.

This is why America is a constitutional republic - not a democracy.  "A republic, madam, if you can keep it" was Benjamin Franklin's reply to Elizabeth Powell's question @ the end of the Constitutional Convention about what sort of government the delegates of the Convention had created on September 17, 1787.  

The political conventions of the past two weeks gave the Democrats (Biden & Harris) & Republicans (Trump & Pence) the chance to showcase what they plan to do if their candidates are elected.  And by "their candidates" I include Democrat governors & mayors who are the ones who have allowed the tyranny, rioting, looting, destruction, & the ruination of innocent lives in their own states & cities under the pretense of peaceful protests.  They have allowed paid out of town professionals & opportunistic looters, after dark, to agitate & really destroy whatever peaceful elements of the protests ever existed - instead of arresting these looters & agitators, finding out who is paying them, & then bringing them all to justice.

The Democrats spent much of their convention blaming President Trump for the deaths & hardships caused by the Wuhan coronavirus but of course they never called it that in deference to the Communist Chinese.  Conspicuous by its absence was any mention whatsoever during the Democrat convention condemning the rioting, burning, & looting in neighborhoods of people they think of as their constituents.  Finally on the next to last day of the Republican convention, nearly a week after his own convention, Biden put out a video criticizing the violence & looting - but only after focus groups started to show defunding the police & supporting, even tacitly, rioting & looting were still political losers in America.  But like the Wuhan coronavirus Biden feels that Trump is responsible for the riots & civil unrest.

And of course Biden is wrong on both the virus & civil unrest counts.  The national government's functions do not include police powers – principally safety & health matters which are the responsibility of the states or cities.  With the exception of banning travel to the United States from places like Communist China, where the Wuhan coronavirus originated, the President has no direct power or authority under the Constitution for health issues including any involvement in the current Covid-19 pandemic.

The Constitution's enumerated powers specifically grant Congress the power to call out the militia (Militia Clause - Article I, Section 8, Clause 15) & the President the authority to command the militia (Commander Of Militia Clause - Article II, Section 2, Clause 1) when needed in the active service to the U.S. Starting in 1792 with the Uniform Militia Act (also known as the Calling Forth Act) Congress delegated to the President the authority to call out the militia & this delegated authority remains today for the President to suppress civil disorders, insurrections, or rebellions when governors do not exercise their authority to call out the National Guard (descendant of the colonial militia) when it is obviously necessary.  An example of presidential primacy in this regard is President Kennedy calling out the National Guard to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962.

In the case of Washington state, Governor Jay Inslee seemed oblivious to the take over by thugs of blocks of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood from June 8 to July 1 in a police free zone that resulted in Carmen Best, the first Black woman Seattle Police Chief, to resign.

Governors & mayors have their own police departments & control of their state National Guards as well as the cooperation of President Trump in providing resources to quell the current violence in short order, if asked.  Absent the action to accomplish this you can only conclude that the violence you see is what the people in the affected areas want & will continue to get.

Biden has said he would shut down the entire economy, if president, if scientists told him that was the best way to fight the virus.  Sounds more like the job of a project coordinator than a project manager & being president is a project management job.  Since he has no authority over the states on this matter, just what would Biden do that Trump has not tried to do if the states ignored him?

The Democrat convention did not focus on the details of any policy agenda.  It certainly did not mention the impracticality of the Green New Deal like grounding airplanes or the astronomical trillion dollar increases in taxes required to fund their programs.  You wouldn't expect them to point out the poor decisions that Biden has made over his 47 year government career or his flip flopping on practicing Catholic matters like abandoning the Hyde Amendment that forbids taxpayer money to fund abortion.

And whether Biden would ban fracking or new fracking permits or ban drilling for oil on federal lands or everywhere it is safe to say that he is no fan of any of this & AOC will be the enforcer to make sure he only gets more vehement regarding eliminating fossil fuels.

Click here to hear Biden's acceptance speech.

The Republican convention highlighted one inspirational speaker after another including Nick Sandmann, the student from Kentucky who had a hateful encounter on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 2019, & Ann Dorn, the widow of retired police officer David Dorn who was killed during a protest of June 2.

Both Trump & Pence called out the Democrats' shift toward socialism & this was met by resistance from readers of this blog - as being too easy on them.  Economics501 wrote that Trump's speech was a missed opportunity to detail the dangers of Democrat Marxism to the electorate & that the speech should have explained that Marxism extends socialism with the gamut of individual freedom restrictions like speech & religion.

Of course I agree with this assessment except it may be too advanced for @ least some of this electorate described hereinbefore - an electorate educated in government schools that are more dangerous to America than al Qaeda ever was.  The portion of the electorate I am referring to thinks socialism refers to some social media they have not yet tried so what in the world will they think Marxism is?

Rudy's speech on the socialism topic wrapped all of this together for the most elementary to understand when he said "He's (Biden) a Trojan horse with Bernie, AOC, Pelosi, Black Lives Matter, & his party's entire left wing just waiting to execute their pro-criminal, anti-police, socialist policies."

EW wrote - "Would have liked to hear him (Trump) say after going through Biden's platform, this is what I will do. His wife, & Ivanka, showed up really well.  Nancy against the debates, doesn't she know that doesnt look good for Biden."

Click here to hear Trump's acceptance speech.

In summary, everyone should think back to last February & see if you were not doing better under Trump than you had under BO/Biden.  Unemployment was 3.5% & Black, Hispanic, Asian, & women unemployment was @ or near record lows.  The gap between Black & white joblessness had dropped to the lowest level ever since these records were first kept in the 1970s.  Wages were rising. 

We don't know when the Covid-19 pandemic will end.  In fact with the CDC changing their recommendations on such basics as wearing masks & not needing to be tested if coming in close contact with confirmed Covid-19 cases if you don't have symptoms or the WHO now declaring that lockdowns are more harmful than helpful we have no confidence that anyone really knows how to combat the Wuhan coronavirus.

What we do know is that if the pandemic passes any time in the next four years that Trump has a proven record to restore our prosperity & no indication that Biden, based on his 47 years in government, can.

Just about as important as the presidential election is the election of senators, governors, & mayors that stand for reelection in 2020.  As detailed above, voting out the type of Democrat governors & mayors who have tolerated the destruction, looting, burning, & killings in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Baltimore, & other cities is the fastest way to return America to normalcy.

A Referendum On Joe Biden

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it along to our children in our bloodstream.  It must be fought for, protected, & handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children & our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."  - President Reagan, March 30, 1961

 

***

 

On the eve of the Democrat National Convention:

 

Hillsdale College writes that "far too many of our nation's schools produce young adults who are ill-prepared to hold jobs, much less inherit the responsibilities of free government.  It's no coincidence then that today our young people don't understand our nation's heritage of liberty, or what is necessary for self-government."

 

Hillsdale reports 1) that 46% of young Americans said they do not agree that America is the greatest country in the world, & 47% said America's future should be driven by socialism over capitalism & 2) that Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) backed candidates in 2017 won 21 of 32 local & state elections in Minnesota, Tennessee, Montana, & Virginia & that DSA claims they have 10,000 new dues paying members since March, 2020.

 

The main problem with Millennials (83 million in U.S. in 2015) & members of Generation Z (nearly 74 million in U.S.) is that they believe, or don't even think, that once America is fundamentally transformed they will still have all of the freedoms they enjoy now plus all of the government handouts that promote plenty of high quality leisure time.  They never ask, or think to ask, who is producing the wealth that makes their vision possible so they don't understand it is not sustainable.  In short, only in a country as free & prosperous as America is it possible for people to take all they have for granted.

 

Equally as wrong as the Millennials & Gen Zees understanding of what life would be like after the fundamental transformation of America are the Trump supporters who don't believe any of the polls showing Trump losing the presidential election.  Any Trump supporter who thinks the polls are fake news can go to the betting windows & put up their money to earn a nice profit because Trump is +165 & Biden is odds on to win the presidency & has been for several weeks with the people who talk with their money.

 

Trump supporters touting re-election certainty don't realize how fragile Trump's 2016 electoral college victory was.  Trump was in immediate danger on election night 2016 of not being able to repeat in 2020 because the three states that put him over the top in the electoral college were won by a combined total of less than 80,000 votes.  WI, MI, & PA had not been won by a Republican in decades & Democrats are working double time to see that does not happen again – even if they lose every other state.

 

Couple the aforementioned reelection fragility with the pandemic mass hysteria, the racial unrest, no MAGA rallies, & the hostile anti-American media attacking Trump 24/7 & it is amazing that his odds for winning the presidency are not even higher.

 

But let's get past this superficial stuff & get to the issues that will really matter to us all for years after the election.

 

Trump's record is one of accomplishment in that he built an economy with his policies that produced record low or near record low unemployment for every group – whites, blacks, women, Asians, & Hispanics – & every one of these groups experienced increased incomes before the Wuhan coronavirus hit & the state & local governments shut down the economy.   We have no reason to believe Trump cannot restore prosperity once the pandemic passes & no reason to believe that Biden can based on his 47 years of bureaucratic politically correct experience in government.  Name one tangible Biden accomplishment in those 47 years?

 

Trump was true to his word in selecting Supreme Court nominees based on the list of originalist jurists provided by Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society.  It is much more important to see Biden's list of Supreme Court nominees than it is to see Trump's income tax returns – we will live with the former for a generation or more while the interest in Trump's income tax returns will fade quickly being of no real consequence for anyone trying to make their own way in the world.

 

The closest we are likely to come to seeing a list indicating the caliber of people Biden is considering regards the Vice Presidency.  The media has been full of people under consideration & Biden has said the VP will be a woman of color – not the best person for the job but limiting the selection to a woman of color.  This is identity politics & political correctness right out of the box that resulted in Kamala Harris being the selection.

 

Biden knows that he has to consolidate the Bernie Sanders socialist voters in order to win, otherwise the Democrat vote will be split & Trump will be reelected - something no Democrat can tolerate the thought of.  Accordingly, Biden & Bernie smoked the peace pipe & formed a Unity Task Force that produced a 110 page document of recommendations that compromised the previous Biden-Bernie policy differences, meaning that Biden moved even further left. 

 

The starting point for the negotiations of the Task Force was AOC's comment – "In any other country, Joe Biden & I would not be in the same party."  AOC was the task force co-chair representing Bernie for the climate change portion of the report.

 

Biden's proposals to date are nothing but more government.

 

Under Trump nearly every American pays less income tax.  Biden would reverse that - including nearly doubling the top capital gains rate, eliminating the stepped up basis of inheritances for capital gains in the death tax laws so that heirs pay capital gains taxes on increases based on the original purchase price of an inherited asset @ almost double the current capital gains rate for taxpayers with incomes of $1 million or more, & raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28% so people would be paying higher taxes both individually & through the corporate tax rate with every transaction they make.

 

Remember that corporations do not pay taxes – only people do whether consumers, shareholders, or employees.  The corporate income tax is embedded in the prices that people pay as certainly as the cost of steel, plastic, rubber, electronics, or services are.  Who thinks we don't pay for any of these components when we buy a car? – they are just more obvious than a hidden, embedded corporate income tax which has to be accounted for or the company will go out of business.

 

A high corporate income tax also costs America jobs – e.g., the Daimler-Chrysler merger in the 1990s was not headquartered in Detroit but rather in Stuttgart simply because the management of the company saw that corporate taxes would have been 50% higher in Detroit than in Stuttgart.

 

All tolled Biden is proposing a record $3.8 trillion over ten years in new taxes compared to Hillary's proposed $1.1 trillion in new taxes in 2016. 

 

And of course Biden plans, & is virtually obligated, to do away with Trump's $10,000 cap on federal deductions for state & local income taxes whereby politicians from high tax states (Democrat controlled states like NY, NJ, & CA) hide the real cost of their state governments meaning that people in low income areas in Alabama & Mississippi picked up part of the high tax states' costs prior to the enactment of the cap.  Since enactment of the tax cut law in 2017, under Trump, high income tax payers in NY, NJ, & CA have paid their share of state & local taxes in full & many do not like it. 

 

Before Trump lowered the corporate income tax rate politicians would say we need to lower the corporate income tax to make our products more competitive.  The above explanations are exactly the competitiveness they were talking about & Biden would reverse this making America less competitive with the rest of the world.

 

Biden also is proposing a 15% minimum corporate income tax for companies that pay less than 15% of their net income in taxes meaning that anything companies did in using the tax breaks Congress created would be clawed back if it lowered their tax bills below 15% of their net income.  This effectively works against industries that Biden supposedly is for like renewable energy, low-income housing, & manufacturing.  So what is he for?

 

In addition, Biden has plans for the Federal Reserve central bank to take the place of Congress in favoring minority communities much like Democrats have used the courts to legislate from the bench in areas they didn't think Congress was focused on.  Another end run around the Constitution.

 

Biden's "Buy American" plan is what he called "the largest investments since World War II of public investments – i.e., government spending paid for by you instead of what you would want to spend your own money on.  Biden's plan calls for spending $400 billion in government purchases of goods & services related to procurement & infrastructure & $300 billion on R&D mostly for clean energy initiatives.

 

In mid-July Biden made a $2 trillion over four year proposal to combat climate change which when added to the more than $7 trillion over ten years in new federal spending he previously proposed just shows that after a while all of the spending turns into a blur of numbers that has no meaning other than it will be paid for by tax increases on corporations & the wealthy – meaning all middle class readers of this blog – & stimulus spending meaning expanding the money supply so that everyone pays via inflation.

 

Biden moves ever left following the direction of AOC & her squad – as Pelosi already has done over the months.

 

In this regard the aforementioned $2 trillion (don't know whether even Biden can spend that much money in just four years) is a climate change down payment.  AOC's Green New Deal is in reality the largest expansion of government since LBJ's Great Society – a previous post detailed the costs @ $93 trillion over ten years.  It not only proposes getting the U.S. off of fossil fuels within nine years, & counting, but also provides universal healthcare, government job & housing guarantees, & a host of impractical ideas like replacing air travel with trains & upgrading & retrofitting every building in America to make them more energy efficient.  In short, it is more about AOC's economic agenda for America & less about eliminating carbon emissions that Biden is stumbling into.

 

In one of his more subtle gaffes Biden told attendees @ a campaign rally in NH in May, 2019 that quickly addressing climate change is even more urgent now than the first time he told us of its urgency over thirty years ago.

 

Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress reports that Biden has been denied communion by the Catholic church (Rev Robert E Morey of Saint Anthony Catholic church in Florence S. C. denied Biden communion much like Kerry had been denied communion in St. Louis, & Andrew Cuomo is denied communion where he lives in the Archdiocese of NY) because of his mixed record on abortion including his abandoning his decades long support of the Hyde Amendment that restricts federal funding for abortion.  Contrast this with Trump being 100% pro-life.

 

In addition – regarding religious matters – Biden pandered to a group of 3,000 Muslim voters on July 20 saying he wished schools in America taught their students more about Islam.  Not a word about having the Bible taught or mentioning the separation of church & state.  The event was the "Million Muslim Votes" summit hosted by Emgage Action, the country's largest Muslim American PAC.

 

In late July Biden released a policy document entitled "The Biden Agenda for Women" in which the document focused on "transgender women" as well as "Black women, Latina women, Native women, Asian American & Pacific Islander women, women with disabilities, & lesbian, bisexual, transgender, & queer women."  The document really is a pandering sop (i.e., a thing given or done as a concession of no great value to appease someone whose main concerns or demands are not being met) to women as if they were waiting for someone like Biden to free them.  The document is patronizing, demeaning, & condescending to women who are better than Biden thinks they are.

 

Biden plays the middle of the road with regard to the Democrat position of defund the police in that he merely does not acknowledge the ever exceeding record murder rates in Chicago & Baltimore or the violence in Seattle or Portland where buildings are being burned & the protesting arsonists are hoping government agents are inside the buildings when they burn.  Biden's lukewarm position will not cut it with AOC who said  "defunding police means defunding police."  But Biden is caught between his past law & order pretenses & calling out the current violence in Portland where innocent people who own buildings & run businesses see their facilities looted & burned.  Biden has done nothing to help quell the rioting & looting & it is only a matter of time before all Democrats literally move AOC's defund the police way – the way the Democrat party has moved to the far socialist/communist left on virtually all issues.    

 

Biden is the first major party leader to endorse the concept of a proposed House bill looking into reparations for Blacks - compensation for slavery & longtime discrimination.

 

In summary, Biden & his fellow Democrats who will control or play a major part in his administration, should he win, have openly proclaimed they seek & plan a fundamental transformation of America – a transformation that will end the free enterprise capitalistic system that produced the prosperity & opportunity that made America flourish, a transformation that will replace the limited government enshrined in our glorious Constitution with a bloated faceless government where the simplest request is handled by highly paid bureaucrats who have no interest in helping, & a transformation where personal responsibility that is so essential to both individual & societal development is replaced with government dependent socialism where no one has any incentive to progress.

 

Is this what anyone wants?

 

Covid-19 Quiz

Below is the subject quiz that shows the importance of protecting the elderly from contracting Covid-19. 

 

Please let me know how you work the problem.  I will post all correct answers or alternatively will send the solution privately to anyone who requests it if no one gets it right. 

 

Covid-19 Quiz

 

Through May 27 it has been estimated that upward of 50% of deaths due to Covid-19 have been people in nursing homes.  Another 30% have been people over 65 not in nursing homes & the other 20% is everyone else.  Source – John Delaney.

 

1)  Given the population in the U.S. of 331,100,000 & the confirmed death rate for the U.S. shown on the graphic below how many people over 65 not living in nursing homes died by May 27 due to Covid-19? 

 

2)  What is the % of total deaths due to Covid-19 in the U.S. population as of May 27?

 

  click on graphic to enlarge