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 Originally posted November 17, 2016.
What just happened in America? Down here in Key West, over 40 causeways and 135 miles from Miami, faces are long and shock is the pivotal word of the day as the literary crowd attempts to regroup with the recognition that the hated Donald Trump will now be calling the shots in Washington.
I ask, why the misery? For the most part the answers come swiftly: Trump hates people, women’s rights, the poor, LGBTs, etc. Not a peep about Obama driving the country over the economic cliff or America’s lost AAA-bond rating or the catastrophe that is the Fed or nearly two decades of intervention in a Middle East Muslim world in which America has neither a place nor any national interest or America’s burgeoning budget, trade deficits, and debt or Obamacare (imploding under Americans).
It appears that a wide swathe of the American public cares not a rat’s keister about the basics of a sound economy, sound money, or a foreign policy based on realism and restraint.
Progressive liberalism has dragged America a long way down the path to ruin. The same course has been pursed in Europe, as Debbie and I have found out first hand over the last six years of on-the-ground fact finding. We moved our international research and fact-finding base to Paris and have continued to use our Paris launching spot to meet with international business leaders and sophisticated travelers from around the world. We have reported to you with consistency that the ruling parties all over Europe have lost their grasp, with hardline right groups moving in for the kill. It’s no more business as usual.
Muslim immigration is front and center dividing Europeans. And the anti-Muslim immigration forces are rapidly consolidating their position and gaining ground. England departed the EU largely on this issue. And we have witnessed a firming of hardline positions from Hungary through Slovenia, Austria, Germany and France. In Paris, it’s not unusual to see the military armed with automatic weapons near any corner café or bistro one wishes to visit. And the Eiffel Tower? In October, it was surrounded by barricades, fences, security entrances, bomb sniffing dogs and teams of unpleasant no-joking military guys with guns, it looks like a battle zone. Sound cozy? Well no, and business is in the tank, to be kind.
So why are so many Americans so exercised that the country just elected a most outspoken fellow voicing exactly the same message that has been resonating in Europe for years. To Debbie and me, the election of Mr. Trump was a foregone conclusion. Trump simply got a wet finger in the air and properly concluded that the wind had changed and that his fellow countrymen had had it. We saw the change coming on the ground in Europe. And the change was magnified after many weeks on the road in the eastern United States. We did not need to take America’s pulse on the West Coast or in the heartland because positions are largely engraved in stone. California, Washington and Oregon are examples. We felt the 2016 battle would be won or lost along a stretch of highways and byways from Pennsylvania through North Carolina and Florida.
The national print and electronic media and the bought and paid for polling outfits chose to B.S. Americans that Hillary Clinton, a disgraced liar and national security risk programmed by Middle East oil tyrants and assorted Clinton Foundation rabble, was the likely victor.
Our 20 days of road trips through small towns and the interstates of the Maine to Key West corridor produced a 20-to-0 margin of victory for Trump. Clinton won not one counting of lawn signs. I know, I know. Not very scientific, but zero? And not a single Clinton sign, banner or poster in some of the most progressive liberal strongholds in America! Sure didn’t make one think Clinton.
We concluded that the Electoral College vote could go to Trump if he took Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. And such certainly looked likely by what we witnessed. All of which of course could have simply been our lying eyes, which, of course, would turn out to be not the case.
Today Debbie and I are turning our focus to the emerging Trump governance team with an eye on advising you whether the selections appear to match with the promises Trump made to Americans on the campaign trail.
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You might be feeling optimistic about the stock market now that President Trump is in office. Most of my conversations this week have had an optimistic tone. But what does that mean for stocks? Let’s look at what we know. When President Obama took office during the housing bust, he inherited a stock market that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average plumbing the depths at 7500. It was an ugly time to be sure, but looking back from an investor’s standpoint, the market was at a much more attractive value than it is today. That doesn’t mean the stock market can’t go up from here as Trump gets to work. It most certainly can. But it’s much more expensive today than when Obama took office, plain and simple.
One of legendary investor Warren Buffett’s (politics aside) favorite stock market metrics is market cap to GDP—a measure of the stock market value compared to what the country is actually producing. Again, from this perspective, when Obama came into office it was pretty attractive (lower is better for an investor). And today? It has more than doubled thanks to a weak GDP recovery and soaring stock prices. Even the blind squirrel finds the nut.
So what does this mean to you? You need a little perspective. You need to spend some serious time understanding your situation. No president can understand that better than you. Don’t let optimism outweigh the reality of what your portfolio can handle, in terms of losses, and you will realize the success you deserve.
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 Donald Trump is rolling. Say what you mean and mean what you say is Donald Trump’s mantra. He promised the American people action and a take-no-prisoners, hard line approach for his “America First” policy. And now he is delivering, and fast. The mainline media is going to be howling as progressive/liberal policies, at warp speed, are rendered asunder. Pat Buchanan rolls out the Trump play book:
We are two nations now, two peoples.
Trump’s inaugural was Jacksonian.
He was speaking to and for the forgotten Americans whose hopes he embodies, pledging to be their champion against those who abandon them in pursuit of higher, grander, nobler causes. Declared Trump:
“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed.”
American wages have stagnated as scores of thousands of factories were shut down or shipped abroad. Five of the six wealthiest counties in the U.S. today, measured by median household income, are the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
With America’s political elite sitting behind him, Trump accused them of enriching “foreign industry,” not ours, of subsidizing other countries’ armies but neglecting our own, of defending other nation’s borders while leaving America’s borders unprotected.
Then, in the line that will give his address its name in history, he declared: “From this day forward it’s going to be only America First.”
What Trump was saying in his inaugural is that we will offer our free and independent republic as an example to other nations, but it is not our providential mission to reshape the world in our own image.
“We will reinforce old alliances” that are in our interests, Trump declared. But we are approaching the end of an era where we fought other nations’ wars and paid other nations’ bills.
We will no longer bleed and bankrupt our country for the benefit of others. Henceforth, America will be of, by, and for Americans.
Read more here.
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Progressives are up in arms over a particular phrase President Trump used during his inauguration address. Donald Trump described the high number of killings going on in major U.S. cities, many of which, like Chicago, have been under Democrat leadership for decades, as “American carnage.” The Manhattan Contrarian’s Francis Menton reports that in an editorial the day after the Trump’s speech, The Times wrote that the president “waxed apocalyptic in imagining the prevalence of crime in the nation’s cities.”
“Imagining?” Mr. Menton asks, “How is it possible to use any word other than “carnage” to describe this situation?” From Mr. Menton on his collected statistics on the murder rates in several of America’s murder capitals–“all under solid Democratic Party control for generations:”
These statistics are not difficult to find, and the links are in that post. In a nation where the overall murder rate for the country is about 5 per 100,000, and where the largest city (New York) has an even lower rate of about 4 per 100,000, we find a murder rate of 60 per 100,000 in St. Louis, 44 in Detroit, 50 in Baltimore, 42 in New Orleans, and 30 in Chicago. To put that in some perspective, if New York had a murder rate like that of St. Louis, instead of about 300 murders last year, it would have had about 4500! And in Chicago, if it could lower its murder rate to be near that of New York, then instead of the nearly 800 murders it suffered last year, it would have been more like 100. These are extremely dramatic numbers. And about half or more of the victims are black men.
I’m sorry, but the carnage in many American cities is not a subject on which it is OK to pretend it doesn’t exist because you oppose everything President Trump says and you want to protect the guys on “our team.” It’s not OK because cities like New York and (to a lesser degree) Los Angeles have demonstrated that it is eminently possible to get a murder rate down to well less than 10 per 100,000 despite a population that includes large numbers of blacks and other minority groups. (The murder rate in LA in 2016 was about 7 per 100,000.) If New York and LA can do it, then the other cities like St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans and Chicago have no excuse any more. Why their voters don’t throw out the entrenched (Democratic Party) power structure, I have no idea.
Read more here.
What should the Feds do about the Chicago ‘carnage’?
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On Thursday Senator Rand Paul released a bill called the Obamacare Replacement Act (S. 222). As its name implies, it forms the foundation of a plan to replace Obamacare, and in typical fashion for Senator Paul, it does so with free market reforms and lower taxes. The bill expands the use and size of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), gives individuals the right to pool together for purposes of purchasing insurance, protects Americans with pre-existing conditions, restores pre-Obamacare HIPAA guarantees for Americans with pre-existing conditions and more.
Rand Paul previews Obamacare replacement plan! 01 15 2017
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 Donald Trump can help keep Americans secure by drilling hand pumped wells in every urban and suburban block, as explained here by The American Conservative. (Debbie and I are strong supporters of TAC.)
President Dwight Eisenhower wrote his name in concrete by building the interstate highway system. President Donald Trump has made infrastructure one of his signature issues, perhaps because he too likes to write his name on big projects. If the new administration approaches the need to rebuild America’s infrastructure armed with some innovative ideas, it can do more than pour concrete. It can write President Trump’s name in history.
Our water and power systems, especially the former, need manual backups. Just a few decades ago, they were run without computers. The people who know how to do that are mostly still alive. We need to learn from them how they did it before their knowledge is lost. Then, we need to game major, widespread system disruptions and determine how we cope with them. If President Trump wanted a big program to make Americans secure where they live, he might consider drilling a hand-pumped well for every urban and suburban residential block. That would be the best insurance he could buy us, and would put lots of folks to work as well. [Debbie and I have installed at our home one of the few wells and hand pumps in our neighborhood. One cannot be at the mercy of systems tied into the power grid. My strongest advice is that you join us in “being prepared for the worst.”]
President Hoover has Hoover Dam, FDR has the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Ike has the interstate highway system. Each is a memorial to a president who wanted to do something big. The opportunities are there for President Trump to do the same. Short of building a pyramid, infrastructure offers him the best opportunity to put his name up in lights.
Read more here.
Installed Backup Pitcher Pump/ Hand Pump for My Existing Well Head
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 Explains Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review
, “Arguments to the contrary ignore the Constitution and misstate federal law. … there is no doubt that the executive order temporarily banning entry from specified Muslim-majority countries is both well within President Trump’s constitutional authority and consistent with statutory law.”
But as editors at the WSJ point out, we are in a long war with jihadists that is as much ideological as military. On one hand, the U.S. needs Muslim allies. On the other, “jihadists want to portray America as the enemy of all Muslims.”
Overly broad orders send the wrong signal to millions of Muslims who aren’t jihadists but who might be vulnerable to recruitment if they conclude the U.S. is at war with Islam, rather than with Islamist radicals.
The reaction to the refugee order is also a warning that controversial policy changes can’t merely be dropped on the public like a stun grenade. They need their own extreme internal vetting to make sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need to be sold and explained to the public—again and again.
Mr. Trump is right that the government needs shaking up, but the danger of moving too fast without careful preparation and competent execution is that he is building up formidable political forces in opposition. The danger isn’t so much that any single change could be swept away by bipartisan opposition, but that he will alienate the friends and allies at home and abroad he needs to succeed. Political disruption has its uses but not if it consumes your Presidency in the process.
Read more here.
FULL SPEECH: President Donald Trump NEW Immigration Policy AND Border Wall Details
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You had two excellent op-eds yesterday focusing on public sector union reforms in Wisconsin or Act 10—a great model for every state. The first touched on the decline of union membership in right-to-work states like Wisconsin where, thanks to Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, “Union membership has fallen by 40% or about 136,000 workers in Wisconsin since public unions lost their monopoly bargaining power in 2011,” explains the WSJ. And the other op-ed points out that when states start paying more to teachers who actually improve student learning as opposed to paying them based on how many years they’ve been tenured, a crazy thing happens—students learn more and good teachers get paid more. What’s not to like?
The 2011 Wisconsin law, known as Act 10, limited collective bargaining to base wages while letting school districts negotiate pay with individual teachers based on criteria other than years on the job and education level. Some districts like Green Bay have used the law to reward teacher performance while others such as Racine have adhered to seniority-based salary schedules.
Prior research on Washington, D.C.’s teacher-tenure reforms and merit pay has found that financial incentives improved the performance of highly rated teachers while dismissal threats led to attrition among ineffective ones. Student achievement has risen as a result. Act 10 provides an opportunity to evaluate how changes in contract negotiations affect teaching quality.
Gov. Scott Walker’s 2017 State of the State Address
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