Talk to Reporters? Why bother.

Does it really matter?

I was watching 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi the other night. Other than being disgusted and appalled again at how we can spend millions on our military but decide against using any of it to send help to our Americans in Benghazi, it reminded me of the disdain Democrat leaders have for the common people.

Common people like you and me who deserve better from our leaders. It brought back Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to how the attack happened. Her famous response, “What difference does it make?”.

This is how they view any question from us on accountability, transparency, facts, truth or being asked policy questions. It is a position used to keep Biden in his basement during the 2020 election, shielded from view of his limited capacity even back then.

It was used again when these same power brokers decided he had outlived his usefulness and removed him, installing Kamala as the candidate. Now they are using it to stonewall her having to take unscripted questions from reporters or live interviews.

Witness her holing up for 5 days learning ‘method acting’ to recite here debate ‘lines’. This is hardly a debate in the Lincoln/Douglas tradition. But then again, are we really surprised?

She really should do a press conference just to stop the countdown clocks on the conservative news channels. Even if it is as staged as her ‘interview’. That at least stopped that countdown clock.

What’s she worried about? Reporters are in the American Pravda media. They aren’t going to ask her tough questions. They are the ones who aren’t questioning her nomination without getting a single primary vote.

Who are suddenly writing stories about how wonderful she is. After writing stories for three years on how unpopular she is. I think the republicans are giving her a simple path out on this one. Even if she screwed up the press conference, no undecided voter would see it.

If the President could go into ‘open and unscripted’ press conferences with cue cards (with reporter pictures on them) and with the questions pre-vetted, how is having a press conference with a fawning media going to be a disaster?

She is already famous for her word salad answers of non-answers. She got elected to be both the Attorney General and a Senator from California. She has certainly not gotten smarter or better at speaking off the cuff. It didn’t hurt her in these elections.

She dropped out of the primary and scored the VP position without having to face a voter then. Now she is the Presidential nominee in the same manner. And it hasn’t hurt her polling as the media is yelling with full voice about how she is doing better than Trump.

These same reporters we are counting on to grill Kamala on policy stances allowed the current president to run a campaign from his basement. Without any of these same vetting or grilling processes.

Folks, it is a fool's errand. When she gets in front of them, the bar has been set so low, if she can remember her name, her socialist vice-president's name and her husband’s, they will call her the most clear-minded and brilliant candidate. Since Obama.

The same for the debate. They set the bar so low, just do better than Biden and get out of there articulating no policies. This would be a major victory. They are counting on Trump being unable to resist a personal attack or two. Post debate ink will all be about this and not the lack of substance of their preferred candidate.

If she is truly at 50% in the polls, then it is clear most voters are uninformed, gullible, and indifferent. I personally don’t believe in polls. They are the ultimate tool in voter disenfranchisement. Designed to suppress voter turnout by making folks feel like their vote won’t matter. So why go stand in line to cast a vote when I can spend another hour or two on TikTok? Or binge watching my favorite streamer.

Sadly, in today’s environment, it may not matter. We are constantly told only six states matter and in these states, ~20 deep blue counties (Clark in Nevada, Maricopa and Pima in Arizona, Waukesha, Columbia and Dane in Wisconsin, Fulton, Cobb, Cherokee, Gwinnett and DeKalb in Georgia, Wayne, Oakland, Genesee, Ingham, and Saginaw in Michigan and Chester, Delaware, Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and Allegheny in Pennsylvania) decide the election.

Congratulations if you don’t live in one of these counties. You can go on with life as it exists today. If you are in one of these counties, my apologies. You are about to be inundated with propaganda to sway your vote to Harris. Or to make sure you turn out.

Since these are in urban blue counties they need turnout to be massive to overcome the obvious disdain driving voters to vote against them in a clear majority of the remaining counties in the country. Now you understand why they push so hard for mail in voting. It is much easier to motivate voters to fill in a ballot and mail it than it is to get them to go stand in a line to vote.

Take a look at these images from the county maps of the last few contested elections. The blues have to get deeper blue for Kamala. The first is from 2016 and the second from 2020

(2016 Election county map courtesy of Wikipedia)

(2020 Election county map courtesy of Wikipedia)

The other 44 states (and DC) and the 150 million other votes don’t matter? What this means is these other states rarely see presidential candidates. Why waste your time in a state where the outcome is assured? It just makes sense to not waste time and money.

North Carolina may see a few visits just to be sure. But that’s it. The only reason to visit Texas or California is for enormous crowds of adoring fans for good media shots of popularity for the corresponding candidates.

What is truly missing is the genuine issue. What do these candidates stand for? What I and most of those voters who are actually interested in voting want to know is the candidate who is most likely to affect MY life.

This has to be the goal of the debate. It is perhaps the ONLY time we will ever hear and SEE Kamala actually have to articulate a coherent policy position. Trump and Vance do this multiple times daily.

This, of course, provides the pundits with the opportunity to claim their policies will lower the GDP, start trade wars, set back social issue progress, and so on. The press focuses on what they say.

This is because the other side has put up no policies! They don’t talk about them and their newly published webpage does not list any specifics. Just the usual promises with no ‘how’ this will be accomplished.

How can an American with a functioning brain vote for a candidate and party who refuses to lay out ANY concrete plans for how they would improve or fix the problems they have caused or allowed to speed up in the last three and half years?

The few things they have alluded to, for instance, price controls for the cost of groceries and other items, were quickly ridiculed for their obvious unconstitutionality and lack of understanding of basic economics. Another brilliant idea was taxing unrealized capital gains.

Imagine if you had Nvidia stock, and you had to pay taxes on your gains when the stock was $120. Then the next week it went down to $100. Do you get those taxes back? This kind of suggested plan is idiotic. Even if you can try to reclaim taxes, what an accounting nightmare. Tax returns are already complicated enough.

Even Mark Cuban had to admit if this were implemented it would DESTROY the stock market. And for all of us with 401k’s and other investments, this means it would destroy all of our retirement savings.

Just as raising corporate taxes to 28%. Even Goldman Sachs, a huge Harris supporter, had to also admit this would lower earning by 5 to 10% of the S&P 500 corporations.

Lower earnings equals lower stock prices, less hiring and other negative effects for our economy. This is supposed to save a trillion dollars in deficit over the next decade. Since we add two trillion a year in borrowing, perhaps we could lower the corporate tax and spend less on the government.

What a novel idea. Incidentally, Trump’s plan is to move the corporate tax rate back to 15%. Goldman expects this would raise those same earnings by 5%.  

More money and less tax for a corporation equals money to invest in more jobs HERE in America. We have already seen the result. It happened in the first Trump administration when he lowered corporate taxes and encouraged American companies to reshore jobs back to America.

While there was less tax revenue from corporations paying lower taxes, this was made up for by more workers paying more taxes because more were employed and wages were rising. This is called prosperity.

Unemployment was lower than ever. Including unemployment for blacks and hispanics. The economy was roaring because we were investing in ourselves. Job growth was organic, because business was doing well and growing and hiring here in America. Then COVID happened.

When looking at the results of Bidenomics, you have to take into account an economy growing because of two factors. First was the recovery from COVID. Pent up demand in both spending and hiring halted out of uncertainty and unleashed as we came out of the pandemic. Job gains were mostly a result of recovering what was lost as companies rehired and spun back up to their pre-COVID prosperity.

The second factor was much of the additional growth beyond COVID rebounds was not similar to what happened under Trump, when growth resulted from supply and demand and prosperity.

Rather, it was because the Biden administration continued to expand the money supply. Pumping trillions of additional dollars into the economy to artificially impact GDP. China does this all the time. The results of our episode of Chinese economic sleight of hand is devastating.

Just as folks were getting their feet back under them, we were hit with rapid inflation. Economics 101 tells you if you devalue the currency (by injecting trillions of dollars into the economy unnaturally) you reduce both the buying power of the dollar and increase the cost of goods because there is a scarcity of product available to be purchased with all the additional money artificially appearing.

Another hidden factor is a major part of the job growth numbers resulted from government hires. Those who work in government do not produce a good nor do they provide a service for which customers are paying. They are administrative positions that are strictly a ‘cost’ on society and paid for with taxes. So they do not factor in the GDP at all. Government is a drag on any economic growth.

When you have major growth in government employment, whether at the federal, state or local level, remember this is not the same as opening a bakery or expanding a factory to produce goods for sale.

Every employee hired who does not contribute to the GDP by producing something is a cost that has to be paid for by others who are producing. And those costs must be paid before you can make a profit. Keep this in mind.

A winning debate, town hall or even press conference is one where we hear from candidates what they would do for the specific issues we all face today. Not the wack-a-mole of our current environment where the only goal is to get a sound bite from a candidate they can use against them (like the debate). No one will talk about the substance, only the mistakes.

These issues are, in no particular order:

• Securing the Border. What will they do to enforce the laws? What will they do to stop countries from encouraging and facilitating this migration to the US?

• Sane immigration policies and expedited asylum processing. Deportation of criminals the first time they commit crimes. Force countries to take back their citizen criminals. If we are already three years behind on asylum hearings, why are we still letting more in? Why are we flying 30,000 a month into the heartland? Will this stop? What are we doing for those who do not show up for their hearing? We need answers and policies.

• Reducing Crime. What are their stances on more funding for police and enforcing laws?

• Policies to increase jobs (reducing unemployment and helping the economy). What are they proposing to do to help this? Reshoring industry and jobs we have farmed out to others. Lowering corporate taxes to encourage companies to bring foreign profits back to the US? To build factories and employ our citizens here. How will raising corporate taxes help this? Explain the benefits, when we know this just encourages corporations to instead look to make more money overseas to avoid paying more taxes here.

• Keeping America out of foreign wars. While protecting our interests at home and abroad. Did the other countries ever meet the commitments they made to fully contribute their share to the UN? Are we bearing the brunt of supporting Ukraine and Israel in their fights against terrorist states and invasion? What are others doing to protect themselves, Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel, etc.? How are we helping them protect themselves short of using our tax dollars?

• Making terrorists fear America. So they stop taking hostages and stop attacking us. What are the candidates doing to provide deterrence? To make these countries and terrorist organizations fear doing this in the future? Russia, Hamas, China, North Korea, Iran. All have become emboldened by our lack of deterrence. How do we get this back and make them fear what we will do if they continue to threaten our citizens abroad?

• Accountability. Policies to ensure those in government, in the military, and in corporations are prosecuted for crimes committed at all levels. There seems to be little accountability in government and the military for mistakes and even crimes. Which feeds the next item.

• Transparency. These last few years we have seen stonewalling from the government and military on information the public should have access to in order to fully understand what occurred. From Russian collusion, to COVID, to laptops, J6 trials, lawfare, and border policies. Subpoenas are ignored with impunity, and no one cares. In a fully functioning constitutional republic, the government works for the people. They cannot get away with hiding information about decisions made against those same voters. When they do, it is called totalitarianism. What are the candidates going to do about forcing transparency?

• Social services that matter. Police, fire, hospitals, help for the truly indigent. Not endless handouts without requirements. Nor paying off student loans folks signed up to repay. But really social services that benefit ALL. What are the plans for these? How do we help the homeless get off the street? Not buying them tents or giving them needles or putting them up in five-star hotels in NYC or elementary schools in Denver.

• Fewer taxes. What are our taxes buying us today? $2 trillion a year in deficits leading to 9% inflation is not an effective policy. As a result, we have high mortgage interest and high borrowing and inflation that is slowly falling. Yet it is the taxpayers who have paid the price for these reckless tax and spend policies that got us to this place. What are the candidates proposing to do about spending less and taxing less? If you intend to tax the rich more, please explain how this does not end up being passed on to the guy at the end of the line buying the bacon or tennis shoes or gasoline. The rich never pay more taxes. Just like Exxon never paid a dime of their Valdez ‘punishment’. It gets passed to the consumer. So don’t tell me you will tax the rich. Tell me how Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Gates pay more without just charging me more to make it up? My guess is neither candidate can do this. I can, but that is another blog.

• A balanced budget. I can’t spend what I don’t earn. The government should be held to the same standard. How is the candidate not going to start the 2025 budget at net zero for deficit?

• Stop buying votes. By handouts of my tax dollars. What is the candidate going to do to tell Congress to keep their hands out of the pork barrel and deliver a budget that is not full of handouts to special interest? The only way this stops is for every taxpayer to SEE exactly how their tax dollars are being spent on special interest. And then to give a shit about it.

• Children are their parents’ responsibility until 18. Acknowledge the role of parents in the lives of children under the age of 18. Which candidate is going to recognize the role of the parent as guardian of their children until they are eighteen? This includes medical decisions and protection from activist teachers.

• Education. Which candidate is going to demand teachers teach curriculums designed to help a child flourish? Not fill their adolescent minds with activism. Teaching actual history (not 1619 or Howard Zinn revisionist history). Arm them with the ability to think abstractly and let them choose their activism after they turn 18. Teachers should teach what the community believes is needed for them to succeed. Not the teachers union, but the parents and the potential employers in their future. Pick up a curriculum from 1970, 1950, 1930, 1910 or 1870. Any of these years will be better than what we have today - because they focused on fundamentals that benefit everyone, not just social sciences. Just look at what happened at our top universities to see the results of modern high school curriculums. Spending $100,000s of dollars on supposed ‘top notch’ education to stand around vandalizing property and praising terrorist organizations. Good job NEA. Which candidate thinks this is OK and which believes the job of schools is to set students up with the knowledge to think for themselves as they mature? This is the most important of these as it determines our future direction.

This is only a small list of topics that matter. We should demand our candidates prove to us why they should receive our vote. Starting with our presidential candidates but also our candidates for congress and even locally to the extent we can. Remember, they work for us and affect how our lives are led.

WST4Y