Herding cats
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Tried to watch Bannon this am. I always try. When he gets too far into the weeds, I have to stop. He and some experts on the failed Rube Goldberg machine called the federal budget are horrified at the inability of the slim GOP majority to do anything to reduce the burden of the soaring national debt.
They’re politely panicked by Trump’s continuing fervent advocacy for what he calls ”The Big Beautiful Bill.” Which is, let’s face it, going to be a total disaster on the deficit reduction side. All the War Room talk is whistling past the graveyard with particular attention to grace notes.
Am I panicked? No more than I have been for years now. What Biden did to the nation cannot simply be repealed or washed clean with Executive Orders and inevitably pork-laden acts of Congress. I feel like the only one out here who knew how much patience would be required to remain calm during the many national screwups sure to befall us as the administration does what it can to repair the damage.
I have the advantage of remembering Reagan. He NEVER had a majority in the House of Representatives. Why he placed his biggest bet on supply side economics, using a huge tax cut to jump start growth in the economy so that increasing revenues could minimize the effects of profligate spending. It worked out better than his hysterical critics predicted. Revenues grew substantially. Prosperity returned after the “malaise” of the Carter “share the scarcities” approach to the economy. The Deep State kept growing nonetheless.
The Truth? We’re in even worse shape here at the beginning of Trump 2.0 than we were in Reagan 1.0. There is no Republican majority in the House or the Senate. What we have is a slightly smaller majority of the UniParty that has been spending the nation into oblivion for reasons of personal and electoral gain since time immemorial. So whatever bastard compromise is excreted finally from the bowels of the Congress will not make a dent in the debt crisis. Why is Trump pushing it then?
He wants the tax cuts to give back hope to Americans. His big bet is not Congressional legislation. It’s exploiting a diverse array of opportunities to pump huge new investments into the economy, many from sources no one has tapped before. He is attempting a massive step-change in the global markets designed to correct a longstanding structural roadblock to increased prosperity for everyone.
After World War II, America sought to revive the moribund economies of Europe and other destitute allies. They did this by providing a more-or-less free military umbrella that would enable struggling economies to invest in the ‘butter’ side of the ‘guns and butter’ tradeoff. This umbrella also included an amazingly generous approach to the tariffs imposed by foreign friends to build their own economies without fear of too much competition from the superior productivity of the American industrial machine. This continued as an unexamined tradition for far too long.
Trump is betting he can restore the balance to the betterment of everyone. It’s an enormous gamble, but one that has to be taken because the legislative and judicial branches of the United States have withered into counterproductive fossils of their Constitutional roles In governance. Too big not to fail. Too many lawyers filling the world with costly, suffocating paperwork. Too many bureaucrats who regard government as a personal license to steal and live lazy, self-indulgent lives. Too many educators who were schooled in a system that never gave them a real education in the first place. We have become a nation of white collar dummies running roughshod over the people who do all the real work, which does not involve pushing papers around as much as growing and building and inventing and maintaining things everyone needs to help their children live more fulfilling lives than they did.
That’s Trump’s real gamble. Are there enough brains left in the country to make it America again? The good news is that the structural free ride we gave the rest of the free world was even more damaging to them. They did not use the resources freed up for them by virtue of the U.S. military umbrella to become more inventive, productive, and populous. They pissed it away on social programs that subsidized indolence, grievance mongering, apathy, and nonentity. In short, they’re worse bums than we are. Some tough parenting from the oldest continuous government in the world might cause them to relearn competitiveness. It’s a big ask, to be sure. If we stuck our heads up from the sand for a moment, it would be easy to see how far the Europeans have fallen. The U.K. Is the best of them (BREXIT…?), but they have become a hapless, amoral, atheistic disgrace to their own historical legacy. Restore some balance in global markets and we can still kick their ass in the business world. All the other Euros are worse, clinically insane by any rational or spiritual measure of the ages that built western civilization. Germany remains the schizophrenic nightmare it has always been, forever poised between intellectual brilliance and moral depravity.
Eastern Europeans and Asians have their own problems, notably their inabililty to achieve a level of individuated personal identity founded in moral rather than ethnic bases. They are doomed to continue behaving as clans and tribes and rigid dynasties that prefer collective decisionmaking to individual genius. They win only when the western rivals deliberately handicap themselves by becoming less individual, less conscious.
Islam. Its whole purpose on the world stage has been to remind the Christian world that religions can be an evil as well as a good, and when they become evil are more dangerous than any overeducated physicist.
Does Trump think this way? Probably, though he would phrase it differently since he approaches the big questions from a different context than I do. He know what the big thing is though.
Herding Republicans is like herding cats. It can’t really be done. You can LEAD PEOPLE though. One step at a time. One negotiated agreement at a time. But only if the ones you seek to lead still have the ability to understand the consequences of not agreeing to the next step. The people who are paid to show up by the U.S. government no longer have the wit to see personal consequences for their own selfishness and lassitude. How could they? The system has been designed by people just like them to make all the consequences go away.
Why I’m not paying much attention to the War Room. But it is fun to watch Trump amuse himself in his free time by trying to herd the cats of the DC GOP…
They’re politely panicked by Trump’s continuing fervent advocacy for what he calls ”The Big Beautiful Bill.” Which is, let’s face it, going to be a total disaster on the deficit reduction side. All the War Room talk is whistling past the graveyard with particular attention to grace notes.
Am I panicked? No more than I have been for years now. What Biden did to the nation cannot simply be repealed or washed clean with Executive Orders and inevitably pork-laden acts of Congress. I feel like the only one out here who knew how much patience would be required to remain calm during the many national screwups sure to befall us as the administration does what it can to repair the damage.
I have the advantage of remembering Reagan. He NEVER had a majority in the House of Representatives. Why he placed his biggest bet on supply side economics, using a huge tax cut to jump start growth in the economy so that increasing revenues could minimize the effects of profligate spending. It worked out better than his hysterical critics predicted. Revenues grew substantially. Prosperity returned after the “malaise” of the Carter “share the scarcities” approach to the economy. The Deep State kept growing nonetheless.
The Truth? We’re in even worse shape here at the beginning of Trump 2.0 than we were in Reagan 1.0. There is no Republican majority in the House or the Senate. What we have is a slightly smaller majority of the UniParty that has been spending the nation into oblivion for reasons of personal and electoral gain since time immemorial. So whatever bastard compromise is excreted finally from the bowels of the Congress will not make a dent in the debt crisis. Why is Trump pushing it then?
He wants the tax cuts to give back hope to Americans. His big bet is not Congressional legislation. It’s exploiting a diverse array of opportunities to pump huge new investments into the economy, many from sources no one has tapped before. He is attempting a massive step-change in the global markets designed to correct a longstanding structural roadblock to increased prosperity for everyone.
After World War II, America sought to revive the moribund economies of Europe and other destitute allies. They did this by providing a more-or-less free military umbrella that would enable struggling economies to invest in the ‘butter’ side of the ‘guns and butter’ tradeoff. This umbrella also included an amazingly generous approach to the tariffs imposed by foreign friends to build their own economies without fear of too much competition from the superior productivity of the American industrial machine. This continued as an unexamined tradition for far too long.
Trump is betting he can restore the balance to the betterment of everyone. It’s an enormous gamble, but one that has to be taken because the legislative and judicial branches of the United States have withered into counterproductive fossils of their Constitutional roles In governance. Too big not to fail. Too many lawyers filling the world with costly, suffocating paperwork. Too many bureaucrats who regard government as a personal license to steal and live lazy, self-indulgent lives. Too many educators who were schooled in a system that never gave them a real education in the first place. We have become a nation of white collar dummies running roughshod over the people who do all the real work, which does not involve pushing papers around as much as growing and building and inventing and maintaining things everyone needs to help their children live more fulfilling lives than they did.
That’s Trump’s real gamble. Are there enough brains left in the country to make it America again? The good news is that the structural free ride we gave the rest of the free world was even more damaging to them. They did not use the resources freed up for them by virtue of the U.S. military umbrella to become more inventive, productive, and populous. They pissed it away on social programs that subsidized indolence, grievance mongering, apathy, and nonentity. In short, they’re worse bums than we are. Some tough parenting from the oldest continuous government in the world might cause them to relearn competitiveness. It’s a big ask, to be sure. If we stuck our heads up from the sand for a moment, it would be easy to see how far the Europeans have fallen. The U.K. Is the best of them (BREXIT…?), but they have become a hapless, amoral, atheistic disgrace to their own historical legacy. Restore some balance in global markets and we can still kick their ass in the business world. All the other Euros are worse, clinically insane by any rational or spiritual measure of the ages that built western civilization. Germany remains the schizophrenic nightmare it has always been, forever poised between intellectual brilliance and moral depravity.
Eastern Europeans and Asians have their own problems, notably their inabililty to achieve a level of individuated personal identity founded in moral rather than ethnic bases. They are doomed to continue behaving as clans and tribes and rigid dynasties that prefer collective decisionmaking to individual genius. They win only when the western rivals deliberately handicap themselves by becoming less individual, less conscious.
Islam. Its whole purpose on the world stage has been to remind the Christian world that religions can be an evil as well as a good, and when they become evil are more dangerous than any overeducated physicist.
Does Trump think this way? Probably, though he would phrase it differently since he approaches the big questions from a different context than I do. He know what the big thing is though.
Herding Republicans is like herding cats. It can’t really be done. You can LEAD PEOPLE though. One step at a time. One negotiated agreement at a time. But only if the ones you seek to lead still have the ability to understand the consequences of not agreeing to the next step. The people who are paid to show up by the U.S. government no longer have the wit to see personal consequences for their own selfishness and lassitude. How could they? The system has been designed by people just like them to make all the consequences go away.
Why I’m not paying much attention to the War Room. But it is fun to watch Trump amuse himself in his free time by trying to herd the cats of the DC GOP…
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